Top of the weekend to you all. If the footy fans among you are singing the post-season blues, you can at least be thankful you’re not forking out $2,000 for a cab ride. And if the cat people among you are wondering why you like cats? Read on.
1. Katie Price on survival, surgery and severe PTSD
Katie Price is bankrupt, thrice-divorced – including from Australia’s own Peter Andre – and in 2021 suffered a complete breakdown. Even in print, when she speaks it’s a struggle to keep up. And she has a lot to say: about Russell Brand, Hugh Hefner and the perils of young women having surgery done.
Notable quote: “Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh my God, Kate, what have you done?’ But, you know what, I don’t have any filler in my face, only my lips.”
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
Further reading: Cosmetic “tweakments” are growing ever more popular worldwide, but how safe are they?
2. What makes someone a cat person?
Sirin Kale and I have something in common: we’re cat people (as regular readers of my fortnightly missives may have gleaned). What draws people like us to these cantankerous, fiercely independent (unless hungry) little purring machines? Sirin investigates.
Personality traits of cat lovers: Neurotic and open to experiences, according to one study. Or as the director of Kedi, a documentary about the street cats of Istanbul, discovered, one quality stood out: “Their capacity for philosophical thought and introspection.”
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
Further reading: Competitive, warm and conservative: what exactly makes someone a dog person?
3. Surviving Jimmy Savile
When Susan, a trainee optician, reported her assault by Jimmy Savile in the TV presenter’s home in 1972 to Leeds police they “just laughed, said ‘you were lucky’” – “lucky” that it hadn’t been more serious.
Susan appears as herself in The Reckoning – the BBC’s controversial four-part drama about Savile – recalling her experience at the hands of the notorious sexual abuser. The door locked behind her. The filthy tracksuits on the floor. And the interview recorded afterwards, as if nothing had happened.
“He was creepy, just the most disgusting human being I’ve ever met.”
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: Guardian writer Mark Lawson’s timeline of how Savile’s atrocities were uncovered.
4. A front-row seat for Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall
If you don’t know Michael Lewis’s name, you’ll know some of the books he’s authored. The Blind Side. Moneyball. The Big Short.
Samanth Subramanian writes in this week’s long read that Lewis is “the most prestigious narrator of American life”. But while shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Lewis found his customary powers of perceptiveness blindsided.
The Lewis book we’ll never see: George Soros was so unhappy a Lewis magazine profile portrayed him as a financier rather than an intellectual that he refused to cooperate on a planned biography.
How long will it take to read: 14 minutes.
5. Hope amid the ‘gobsmackingly bananas’ heat
Average global temperatures in September were not just the hottest ever, but 0.5C above the previous record for the month. As one climate scientist put it: “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”.
Pretty grim, right? Yes, but there is hope. Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor, Adam Morton, writes that we have the technology to avert disaster – and the clean energy tech that can cut emissions is rolling out at a record pace.
The caveat: “For the clean tech to have the impact that’s required, the approval and development of new fossil fuels needs to stop.” Your move, Albanese government.
How long will it take to read: Two minutes.
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