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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
A group of young Americans are steering clear of social media in favour of human connection. After writing about their club two years ago, Alex Vadukul returns to see if they’ve stuck to their guns.
(The New York Times, approx 11 mins reading time)
The club also publishes a newsletter, available only in print, called The Luddite Dispatch. An article in the first issue, headlined “Recent Luddite Wins,” highlighted a recommendation by the United States surgeon general Vivek Murthy that social media platforms should carry warning labels to inform users that they are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.” “For our next issue, I’m planning to travel to France to this town outside Paris, Seine-Port, that’s trying to ban smartphones,” Ms. Lane said. “I want to see if it’s working and if something like that could exist in America. I hope to interview the mayor.”
While Ms. Lane had started a branch of the Luddite Club at Oberlin, Ms. Watling, 19, reported that she was having some difficulty getting hers off the ground at Temple, where she is majoring in sociology. “Sometimes I think I sound a little crazy to Philly people,” she said. “Because I’m always like, ‘I’m alive. You’re alive. It’s beautiful. That’s why we shouldn’t be consuming life through technology.’”
Jon Lee Anderson writes about the life and death of Mazen al-Hamada, who spent years telling Western officials what he endured while imprisoned in Syria.
(The New Yorker, approx 41 mins reading time)
Few other Syrians who made it out of the country dared to speak of their experiences; most feared that their relatives back home would also be arrested. Hamada, less cautious, spent six years telling the world what happened inside Assad’s network of political prisons. Then, in 2020, he returned to Damascus, for reasons that his loved ones are still debating. Within hours of his arrival, he was detained, and vanished into the same prisons he had spoken of abroad.
Author Katherine Rundell on the importance of books for children.
(The London Review of Books, approx 26 mins reading time)
C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics.
Global demand for ornamental succulents has led to an increase in poaching of the ‘green diamonds’ across South Africa’s Northern Cape.
(Financial Times, approx 25 mins reading time)
In the three years to 2023, more than 1.5 million succulents were ripped from South African soil, which is home to one-third of all known species. Forty-five per cent of them are now on the brink of extinction. So great is the concern about traffickers hunting down conos that scientists have stopped a centuries-old tradition of naming newly discovered species after their locations. (Because poachers also glean information from media coverage, this story purposefully omits details about specific locations and prices.) The environmental destruction is not limited to the conos, said Ismail Ebrahim, a project manager overseeing endangered wildflowers at South Africa’s National Biodiversity Institute. “These are very dry, arid regions and these systems are very complex and very fragile because of the interdependency between species. You don’t know how much else you will lose because that one species is gone.”
In this book extract, Chris Hayes writes about how the rise of attention as the most valuable resource has changed politics – and how Donald Trump has fully utilised it.
(The Guardian, approx 20 mins reading time)
The internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that for too long had been controlled by far too narrow (too white, too male, too affluent) a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to a more serious, thoughtful era. The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for.
As for the guy with the megaphone prattling on about the cheese cubes? Well, rather than take that one guy’s megaphone away, we just gave everyone at the party their own megaphone. And guess what: that didn’t much improve things! Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans. The effect is so disorienting that after a long period of scrolling through social media you’re likely to feel a profound sense of vertigo. Not only that: the people screaming the loudest still get the most attention. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the most desperate, keening need for attention in perhaps the entire history of the United States, rose to power.
China’s AI startup is causing a stir in Silicon Valley. Zeyi Yang writes about who’s behind the tech that some say is better than OpenAI models, and why they’re giving it away for free.
(WIRED, approx 7 mins reading time)
“Unlike many Chinese AI firms that rely heavily on access to advanced hardware, DeepSeek has focused on maximizing software-driven resource optimization,” explains Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, who studies Chinese innovations. “DeepSeek has embraced open source methods, pooling collective expertise and fostering collaborative innovation. This approach not only mitigates resource constraints but also accelerates the development of cutting-edge technologies, setting DeepSeek apart from more insular competitors.”
How one man spent 34 years in prison after setting fire to a pair of church curtains.
(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)
“You won’t believe what’s happened to me today. It’s been terrible,” he said, beginning a convoluted story about how he was on short-term release when someone stole his bag and then he got lost. But he soon gave up on it and admitted he was on the run: “I’ve had enough. The Home Office keeps knocking me back. I’m 50, and they’re never going to let me out.” At that point, David had been in prison for 23 years for starting a fire in a church. Absconding from day release was his latest rebellion against a system that would end up keeping him in prison for twice as long as the average time served for murder. On the face of it, his was not such a terrible crime: the church, in a village near Oxford, where he set a pair of curtains alight, was empty, the fire was quickly put out, no one was hurt and he wasn’t convicted of any subsequent crimes. And yet David spent half his life in jail.
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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