Turning sewage into ‘blue gold'; rejecting the manosphere; and a chat with Orwell's son

The Guardian

21-03-2025

Good morning, and happy Saturday. Fair bit going on, no? Put it on my tombstone.
Here are some thought-provoking reads from around the Guardian this week, some of which you may have missed in the general torrent of news.
Settle in for a read – and tell us what you think at [e-mail]
This week, Israel's prime minister ordered the bombing of Gaza during Ramadan, killing hundreds of Palestinians and ending a shaky two-month ceasefire. It was, writes Aluf Benn – editor-in-chief of Israel's left-leaning newspaper, Haaretz – devastating but not unexpected, amid the country's 'slide to autocracy'.
The goal: 'Netanyahu wants to fight Hamas all the way to ethnic cleansing and is willing to sacrifice the hostages along the way. And he wants to purge the country's establishment of his traditional rivals … keeping the right wing in power for ever.'
The Trump effect: Benn describes the US president's recent proposal to relocate the population of Gaza and redevelop the rubble 'almost as divine intervention to the Israeli far right'. 'What was traditionally viewed as an extremist, marginalised idea has now become US policy.'
Watching on: Benn suggests the coming weeks will reveal 'if Israel is edging closer to the abyss of war criminality in depopulated Gaza and de facto dictatorship in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or whether the Netanyahu stampede can be slowed down.'
How long will it take to read: three minutes.
Jess Hill's new Quarterly Essay asks what on earth we can do about gendered violence. In this very sobering extract, the investigative journalist and educator looks at the escalating culture of misogyny in classrooms.
Why classrooms? 'In the commonly used violence prevention metaphor, the 'river of prevention', schools are perhaps the most prized piece of 'dry land',' Hill explains. 'A captive audience, young minds at their most malleable – this is where violence can be stopped before it starts.'
She tempers this hopeful vision quite quickly – 'the real world, unfortunately, is a bummer'. But it's not all bad news: teachers say the latest generation of boys and young men are 'already way more switched on'.
How long will it take to read: five minutes.
Further viewing: I really want/also can't bear to watch new Netflix series Adolescence, a show about teenage knife crime that becomes 'a poignant study of the nightmarish influence of the so-called manosphere' – and described by one critic as powerful enough TV to save lives.
French writer and philosopher Didier Eribon's mother was 'a bâtarde, an unloved, illegitimate child, abandoned by her mother'. By 14, she was cleaning middle-class houses; later, she moved from cleaning lady to factory worker.
She was 'the victim of a violent and unjust social order', who 'had always felt herself the subject of scorn', he writes. 'How, then, is it possible that she would allow herself to express at every possible moment her hatred of other stigmatised people?'
'Even when my mother was trying to convince me that she was not racist, she was being racist.' – Didier Eribon
Over many years and hundreds of conversations, her 'obsessive racism' became the 'background noise' of their relationship – but as she grew older, it reared its head in ways he could no longer ignore.
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This arresting excerpt from Eribon's new book goes beyond one fractured relationship, or even several. Through his mother's calcifying beliefs, Eribon traces a generation's collapse of 'class consciousness' and worker solidarity – and a growing, ambient hatred of all things 'left'.
How long will it take to read: 11 minutes.
Nine months after three-week-old Richard Blair was adopted, his adoptive mother, Eileen, died suddenly, leaving him with his new father, Eric – AKA George Orwell.
Sitting down with Simon Hattenstone, Blair reflects on the devotion, and many paradoxes, of the man who shaped his life: writer, womaniser, and tea tyrant.
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes.
Further reading: Blair is … not so hot on Australian Anna Funder's recent and very celebrated literary take on his family, which suggests Orwell 'wrote his wife out of his story' – but read what she had to say about the project.
In the 1960s, Switzerland had some of the dirtiest water in Europe. As Phoebe Weston writes, it was 'blighted by mats of algae, mountains of foam, scum, and dead fish floating on the surface'. You could get sick if you swallowed it (seems understandable), and swimming was banned in some rivers on health grounds. Now, they're some of the cleanest on the continent.
How did they fix it? In short, a 'complex network of sewage plants'. Switzerland is now a world leader in filtering micropollutants (for depressing details on those, see the story), using a special treatment system that 'works like your stomach'.
This, from a country that once let raw sewage and industrial wastewater flow directly into its water. Your move, Sydney.
How long will it take to read: a few minutes.
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