Top of the weekend to you all. If it’s Olympic heroes you’re interested in, may I present the two breakout stars of Paris: the South Korean shooter with “main character energy” and the Italian gymnast who’s in bed with Big Parma.
This week’s reads of a more substantial nature below. Enjoy.
1. Why Hartnett swapped Hollywood for Hampshire
Oppenheimer had been running for at least an hour before I squinted at the screen and asked my wife: “Is that Josh Hartnett?” He also popped up in a Black Mirror episode last year and has a role in M Night Shyamalan’s latest, but has mostly been conspicuous by his absence since Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor.
Turns out Hartnett has been quietly working away for the past two decades, and the decision to step away from heart-throb roles was a conscious one. “It was a weird time,” Hartnett says of leaving LA. “And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”
Work isn’t everything: Hartnett spends half the year at home with his family in a UK village. “In a way, less is happening,” he says. “But more of the important stuff is happening.”
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
Further reading: Comeback queen Joan Chen on getting a second chance at 63.
2. Blind reporter’s viral Trump shooting interview
The world comes at you pretty fast, and it feels like more than 20 days since the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But let’s step back in time to one of the viral moments of its aftermath: a Trump fan, wearing a red wig and clutching a can of beer, giving an eyewitness account of the shooter calmly climbing into position.
The interview subject cut such a striking figure I hadn’t noticed that the interviewer, the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue, is legally blind. The Beeb’s chief North America political correspondent shares his backstory.
Notable quote: Says O’Donoghue of Greg Smith, the Trump fan whose barely believable description of events eventually stacked up: “I wonder, if I could see, whether I would have given him the time of day … because he did look a bit odd.”
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: a 2021 interview with the ABC’s Nas Campanella, who broke similar ground in Australia
3. Simon Tisdall on Israel’s latest provocations
The Observer’s foreign affairs commentator offers his usual clinical dissection of the Middle East crisis, this time pegged on Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and its reported killing of a senior Hezbollah commander.
As Tisdall sees it, these incidents will accelerate the Middle East’s downward spiral into destruction – and Benjamin Netanyahu, the chief architect of Israel’s continuing genocidal campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, may soon find himself in assassins’ crosshairs.
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“Netanyahu, whose answer to almost every problem is extreme violence, boasted the bombing [of a port in Yemen] ‘makes it clear to our enemies that there is no place that the long arm of the state of Israel will not reach’. That sounded very much like a declaration of war on the entire region. Yet it’s a war Israel can not ultimately win.” – Simon Tisdall
How long will it take to read: Two minutes.
4. Inside the wild world of furry fandom
Furries – a community of people who like to craft and embody stylised animal personas – are as misunderstood as any subculture that has sprung from the internet to IRL. Existing at the apex of nerd and queer culture, they have of late earned the ire of US rightwingers after schoolchildren had allegedly started “identifying” as animals.
Nicky Woolf has investigated an earlier assault on the community – in 2014, a furry convention was the target of America’s second-largest chemical weapon terrorist attack. She describes her own surreal experience at a convention as “something you usually have to lick rare Amazonian frogs to achieve”.
Creating a ‘fursona’: Like the avatars we create on social media or video games, furries are like an alternative ego for people in the lifestyle – a “kind of an idealised version of who they are”, says one sociology professor.
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
5. ‘One of the most disgusting meals I’ve ever eaten’
Chefs of the world, take heart: artificial intelligence might be coming for all our jobs, but you are apparently safe for now. So says Ralph Jones, who was so impressed by the prolific Teresa J Blair – not a person but an AI, who churned out four cookbooks in the first fortnight of December 2023 – that he decided to put the recipes to the test.
He discovered language miracles such as “h&ful cori&der”, gibberish instructions, and “betrayal” in his children’s eyes from across the dinner table.
AI on AI: The robots don’t stop at writing the cookbooks. The two reviews of Blair’s books on Amazon are AI-generated – and identical.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
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