Good morning. Today’s selection of highlights from around the Guardian kicks off with a piece my colleague describes as “life-affirming stuff”.
There’s plenty else here to save in your tabs. But the (evergreen) message I am taking into the weekend: we can all stand to be more like Alan Rickman.
1. ‘Now there’s somebody that would dance the tango’
I kept thinking I had got to the nicest part of this star-studded collection of tributes and stories, 10 years on from the English actor’s death – then I’d read the next one. Apparently he always insisted on shouting dinner: “I’ve got two words to say to you: Harry. Potter.”
He’d sneak terminally ill kids and their families on to set – and stay in character, knowing the children were there to meet Severus Snape. Richard Curtis wanted him instead of Hugh Grant for Four Weddings and a Funeral. Everyone wanted him around.
A beloved, “unusually loyal” man, “nice and courteous and political”, who loved a good time, had meticulous standards and who, in Brian Cox’s words, “had this way of making people feel easy”.
Sigourney Weaver breaks my heart: “At Mike Nichols’ memorial in November 2015, he came up to me with his wife, Rima. I threw my arms around him and said: ‘Hey, we’re going to do another Galaxy Quest!’ He looked at me quietly and said: ‘We’ll see.’ I said: ‘What do you mean? It’s gonna be so much fun.’ He squeezed my shoulders, looked down and said very gently: ‘We’ll see.’”
I’m crying, you’re crying, Sigourney Weaver’s definitely crying. But happy tears, kind of.
How long will it take to read: 15 minutes
2. A doctor returns to Gaza
A different kind of devastation here, from Dr Ahmed Muhanna, one of Gaza’s most senior anaesthesiologists and emergency care consultants. After 665 days in an Israeli prison, as Hoda Osman and Annie Kelly report, he arrived home to find the places he had longed for had been obliterated.
The scale of the destruction he saw as he was driven to his hospital, the al-Awda, “made my skin crawl … my chest tightened and my tears began to flow”.
Three months later, he and his colleagues in a systematically shattered healthcare system face an onslaught of disease and an ongoing battle against preventable deaths.
“Such pain and sorrow”: 75 of Muhanna’s colleagues at al-Awda were killed while he was detained, he says. According to the NGO Healthcare Workers Watch, 1,200 Palestinian healthcare workers have been killed and 384 detained by Israel’s military since 7 October 2023.
How long will it take to read: a few minutes
Further reading: a beautiful story of hope and rebellion from last week in Gaza, about a family garden planted amid the falling bombs.
3. The ‘king of the midnight movie’
The Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky is famous for his psychedelic work. At 96, he says he has lived 100 different lives, dying and being reborn. “I am happy about this,” he tells Xan Brooks in this mesmerising interview. “It is fantastic to live.”
“People say that I’m the world’s last crazy artist,” he says. “But I am not mad. I am only trying to save my soul.”
***
“Soon I will die, that is the law of this planet. Maybe other planets as well … I am ready to die and I will go with happiness, with a great orgasm.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky
How long will it take to read: eight minutes – including a walk through some of his films.
4. Is the US going to invade Greenland?
Maybe by the time you’re reading this, it already has. At the time of writing, however, it remains a surreal possibility. Before Thursday’s talks in Washington (TL;DR: Trump still wants to take over; Denmark says that’s “absolutely not necessary”), Miranda Bryant asked locals in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, how they’re feeling.
One woman points out that Greenland already has the generational trauma of Danish colonisation: “Are we going to have another one?”
“If the soldiers are coming here, then what will they do?” her mother wants to know.
How long will it take to read: about six minutes
Further reading: We’ve got a wealth of coverage on the situation. You could start with this breakdown of just how far Europe might go to protect Greenland if push came to shove. Or this piece on the man who gave Trump the idea. Or look at yet another example of the White House blithely posting its way through diplomatic mayhem.
5. ‘An infinitude of living plants and animals being themselves’
For readers raised on a diet of European and English classics, the writer Robert Dessaix suggests, Australia’s landscape can feel “as alien to you as the moon”.
“I wasn’t against gum-trees or ‘the wide brown land’ as such,” he writes, “but longed for something else entirely.” Then one Sunday afternoon, he and his partner, Peter, stumbled across a bush block for sale in the Tasmanian hills and bought it on the spot.
“Among the blue gums, blue-tongue lizards and dianellas, everything changed for ever … What I looked out on from our veranda was alive in a way Europe now never is and never will be again.”
A point to consider: “We make all important decisions on the spot,” Dessaix writes. “It’s the trivial decisions that drag on for years.”
How long will it take to read: a couple of minutes
Further reading: a recommendation from our sports editor that also flips the script – about Australia becoming “a land of counter-envy” for English cricket fans craving a more affectionate, public-minded version of the sport.
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