Five Great Reads: the contested history of YMCA, a week without texting, and has the world reached a turning point ?
Top of the weekend to you all. My head is still spinning from this week's news onslaught so I will forgo a pithy prologue and get straight to the selection. Enjoy!
Peter Dutton's voice has been one of the loudest in condemning a spate of antisemitic incidents in Australia's two biggest cities. But Sarah Schwartz, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, writes that the Coalition's concern for Jews 'appears to me to be confected and self-serving'.
Key point: The crux of Schwartz's argument is that using reductive language in support of Jews 'actually makes all of us less safe'.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
As a phone-averse Gen Xer I am very much picking up what Kate McCusker, 27, is putting down: 'Phone calls are an outmoded, laboured form of communication.' But she went ahead with a crazy experiment anyway, spending seven days calling people rather than texting. This is what she learned.
The existential dread of our ringtone: A UK survey found 56% of 18- to 34-year-olds assume a spontaneous call means bad news.
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Further reading: Christopher Walken has revealed he has no mobile phone and has never had a watch (except as an actor in that pivotal Pulp Fiction scene).
It's hard to look at events in the United States, in Gaza, at climate catastrophes everywhere and not contemplate what fresh hell we're currently living through.
David Motadel, a history professor, notes that Joe Biden recently told the UN the world is at another 'inflection point'. And while books have been written about 1917, 1979 and more, Motadel's thesis is that tectonic shifts evolve over decades.
'Major moments in history have had irreversible consequences. Yet, we should be cautious not to obsess too much about the events as such. In fact, the fixation on turning points risks overlooking their deeper causes.' – David Motadel
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
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It's one of the most perplexing subplots of the Donald Trump era: the adoption of Village People's 1978 disco bomb YMCA as a staple of the US president's campaign rallies.
The story of how the song's writer, the 'cop' Victor Willis, and a group calling themselves the Village People performed at Trump's inauguration begins in the late 1970s: at a casting call for a boyband based on gay fantasy characters.
How big was YMCA back in the day: Village People were for a brief period such a hot live prospect that Madonna and Michael Jackson opened for them.
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
At 46, Jo Nemeth had a good job and a partner she loved, but was 'deeply unhappy'. So she quit, gave the last of her money to her 18-year-old daughter, closed her bank account and decided to go cashless – literally.
Now 56 and single, Nemeth doesn't own a home or any property, nor have a generous benefactor or a secret stash of emergency cash. She shares how she has not only survived, but flourished.
What about paying for dental work? Nemeth is not 'anti-cash', and has come up with a workaround – she will set up a GoFundMe campaign to create a dental fund and offer how-to lessons as rewards.
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
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The Guardian
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