Top of the weekend to you all. If you need a side order of silly in your life, here’s something to add to your calendar before tucking into this week’s main course.
1. Tesla’s ‘retro-futuristic’ restaurant and charging station
Elon Musk last week opened a Tesla-themed diner in Hollywood. What could possibly go wrong? As many things as you’d expect from a master of “move fast and break things”.
Lois Beckett braved the lengthy queues, encountering tech glitches, unavailable menu items and a small flotilla of tricked-up Cybertrucks.
Sales pitch: The Tesla boss said on an earnings call his diner was “a shiny beacon of hope in an otherwise sort-of bleak urban landscape”. It is located on Santa Monica Boulevard, in a neighbourhood full of high-end art galleries.
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
2. The life of microplastics
If you’re not already furious about having microplastics in your semen/breast milk/unborn baby’s placenta, may I present to you a potential tipping point. This interactive tells the story of how plastic contaminates entire ecosystems – and even the food we eat.
Fun fact: A single washing machine cycle can shed up to 700,000 tiny plastic fragments and threads. A single thread could voyage around the natural world for centuries.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
Further reading: How petrostates and well-funded lobbyists are derailing a deal to cut plastic production.
3. Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on Hollywood’s age problem
Jamie Lee Curtis’s energy fair bursts out of the screen in this interview with Emma Brockes. The conversation is a wild ride highlighted by the 66-year-old’s distaste for plastic surgery and Hollywood’s rejection of her movie-star parents, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, once they’d reached “a certain age”.
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“I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.” – Curtis on why she brought a prop to the Guardian photoshoot.
How long will it take to read: Nine minutes.
4. Eight reasons to be hopeful
Yes, the news cycle is unrelentingly grim, but John D Boswell is here to preach you some optimism. He reckons humans seem “largely blind to the many profound reasons for hope” – mostly because they are accumulating gradually and quietly.
Medical miracles incoming: Says Barney Graham, an immunologist who played a pivotal role in developing mRNA vaccines: “You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years.”
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
5. More sex please, we’re bookish
“Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction,” writes the author Lara Feigel, “and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become.” From Miranda July’s All Fours to the “romantasy” of Sarah J Maas, modern readers cannot get enough of sexually explicit novels – and Fiegel has some theories as to why.
Sally Rooney says: “The erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books.”
How long will it take to read: Five minutes.
In case you missed it: Our interviews with Sally Rooney and Miranda July are worth revisiting.
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