Six great reads: €1 Italian houses, how to make small talk and the truth about Tesla

The Guardian

12-07-2025

'Israel's war in Gaza,' wrote Moustafa Bayoumi for Guardian US's weekend featured essay, 'is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.'
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Elon Musk is obsessive about the design of his supercars, right down to the disappearing door handles. But a series of shocking incidents – from drivers trapped in burning vehicles to dramatic stops on the highway – have led to questions about the safety of the brand. Why, asked Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden, won't Tesla give any answers?
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If you could move anywhere, where would it be? It's a question that gestures toward a life in some stage of calcification – the could implying constraint, limitations, the presumption that one simply cannot, in fact, up and move. The €1 house programme serves as the doorway for just this sort of yearning for something new. Hate your job? Want to move but can't afford a house? Worried about where you'll retire, or how you'll even manage to retire at all? If you have the right passport and enough money, you can find somewhere else to live. Why not make that place Italy?
Last summer, Lauren Markham and her husband stuffed an inordinate amount of belongings into a preposterous number of bags and flew with their 11-month-old to Italy for an adventure in pursuit of the possibility of a new life. Did they find one?
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Decades ago, a generation of UK schoolchildren unwittingly took part in an initiative aimed at boosting reading skills – with lasting consequences. Emma Loffhagen's mum was one of them. 'Throughout my life,' she wrote, 'my mum has always been a big reader. She was in three or four book clubs at the same time. She'd devour whatever texts my siblings and I were studying in school, handwrite notes for our lunchboxes and write in her diary every night. Our fridge door was a revolving display of word-of-the-day flashcards. Despite this, she also was and remains, by some margin, the worst speller I have met.'
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Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew that her father, Michael, wasn't like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life. But, wrote Anita Chaudhuri, the well-known scientist was also a fantasist. When his daughter Joanne began digging into his past for a memoir, new lies kept emerging ...
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The cliche about small talk is that everybody hates it. The misapprehension is that it has to be small. In fact, conversational interactions are objectively good, wrote Zoe Williams, in this handy guide to ice-breaking, which includes pointers for chatting at weddings, when you're on your own at a party and when you're a plus-one.
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