Hello and welcome to Five Great Reads, a weekday summertime wrap of excellent stories, plucked out by me, Alyx Gorman, lifestyle editor of Guardian Australia.
If you’re after breaking news, you won’t find it here (head over to our live blog for that) and if you’re already thinking about lunch, why not give Felicity Cloake’s chana masala a crack. If you’re using tinned chickpeas, it’ll be ready just in time. Now, on to the reads.
1. Gangsters, traffickers and thieves: Oregon’s illegal pot farms
Marijuana has been legal to grow in the US state of Oregon since 2015. So, why are massive, illegal grow operations booming?
The characters:
“For a bespectacled middle-aged conservationist, Christopher Hall is surprisingly reckless,” Felisa Rogers writes.
With a team of just three detectives, Josephine county sheriff Dave Daniel doesn’t have the staffing power to properly tackle the problem. “Have you ever seen the movie Animal House?” he asks. “Kevin Bacon is in his little … uniform and he’s got his hands in the air and he says, ‘Remain calm, all is well,’ and then completely gets mowed over by the crowd? That’s me.”
Cedar Grey and his wife, Madrone, own a legal farm, and he has been growing cannabis in the area since 1998. “I mean it’s really, really strange for me to be calling for a huge law enforcement or military crackdown on growing marijuana because for so long I just wanted it to be free for people to grow,” Cedar says. “But what’s happening here has to stop.”
How long will it take me to read? About five minutes.
2. When to go to the hospital for Covid-19
With healthcare systems under pressure from Australia’s soaring Covid numbers, it can be difficult to know when to seek help. Here, doctors share the symptoms to look out for.
Helpful suggestion: “Now is a good time to prepare a Covid-safe plan should you or a household member get Covid and be isolating for a period of time,” says Dr Karen Price, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. “This would include having ready access to the guidelines as well as isolation needs, food, fluids, pets and medications.”
3. The case for an impulse buy
Wandering the streets of Paris, crippled by self-loathing and negative thoughts, the novelist Sarah Moss found reprieve in the form of a silver dragonfly bracelet.
Notable quote: “I wasn’t sure it would work,” Moss writes of her day off in the city. “I knew myself perfectly capable of walking the streets hour after hour telling myself that any competent person would be enjoying museums and shops and cafes and what kind of privileged neurotic steals a day from her work and her family and then doesn’t even have the guts to buy a croissant … ”
How long will it take me to read? About three minutes
4. Get the snip, save the world
Meet the young men getting vasectomies for environmental reasons.
Is this really a thing? “Nick Demediuk [is] an Australian GP and one of the world’s most prolific vasectomy clinicians,” writes Simon Usborne. While “most of his patients are fathers over the age of 35 … the doctor, who has completed more than 40,000 procedures since 1981, now estimates that about 200 of the 4,000 patients his clinic sees each year are younger men without kids. About 130 of them say they are doing it for the planet.”
Isn’t it a bit extreme? From a medical standpoint, it’s actually a pretty low-key procedure. “The operation … is now typically bloodless; there is no scalpel involved. … The process takes 15 minutes and is more than 99% effective.” Also: “Vasectomies address the gender imbalance that still accompanies the choice and practice of birth control. They come with less risk than more invasive and less reliable methods of female contraception.”
How long will it take me to read? About six minutes.
5. A goodbye at the beach
In the final part (for now) of our summer series A Day at the Beach, we meet Feather – a Byron Bay legend – who tells us about the day she scattered her husband’s ashes.
Notable quote: “He always said he’d come back as a sea eagle and I always look up when I’m at the beach. They are so often above me and I think, ‘There he is, he’s there.’”
How long will it take me to read? Only a minute, but then you can go back and read the rest of the series, from a shark attack survivor, to an awkward teen hook-up, a major rave, a lightning strike and even a free swim around Lord Howe Island.
And while I have you …
I’d love to hear from you about how this newsletter is going. What would you like to see more of? What you like to see less of? And would you be interested in reading it beyond the summer? You can send your thoughts and feedback to australia.lifestyle@theguardian.com or hit me up on Twitter.
