1. The people of regional Australia are the losers as Nationals try to take each other out
“The country has endured an agonising drought, which is being fuelled by climate change, and yet many Nationals seem themselves as spruikers for the mining interests that hasten the global climate catastrophe, and then they wonder why their constituents are alienated and angry. Perhaps the incomprehension is the disorientation that ensues from repeatedly punching yourself in the head?”
2. Feely lousy: how getting iso-nits was a surprisingly positive experience
“I was 16 the last time I had nits. My then 13-year-old stepbrother had picked them up and lovingly shared them with the rest of the family. The smell of the head lice formula left me as dizzy as did the indignity of being a teenage girl with head lice. I’ve heard that 90s nostalgia is big right now so I suppose getting nits was fairly well timed.”
3. Ahmaud Arbery: anger mounts over killing of black jogger caught on video
“It should just have been another ordinary run for the 25-year-old Arbery back in February. But a series of events unfolded that ended in his brutal killing at the hands of two white men, which has caused anger across America and especially among black Americans and campaigners for social justice.”
4. ‘I had no choice’: the desperate Nigerian women who sell their babies
“After Ebere gave birth to a boy, the man she’d been living with sold the baby to a married couple. He gave the young girl 70,000 naira (about £140). Ebere returned to her family, telling them she had been kidnapped by traffickers who took her to a remote village and forced her to work as a domestic slave before freeing her.”
5. Juninho, Ravanelli, Emerson … Middlesbrough’s exotic past reborn
“A couple of years earlier Juninho’s mother had felt equivalent excitement about her introduction to Middlesbrough. She was so taken with the exoticism of Marks & Spencer that club officials were asked to house her son next door to its Aladdin’s cave of shopping possibilities. They explained, gently, that North Yorkshire’s villages might be more suitable.”
6. I’ve never seen ... Doctor Zhivago
“Star-crossed lovers shivering under furs in an epic romance against a backdrop of Russian revolution? I anticipate the political sweep of Reds combined with the romantic tragedy of The English Patient. I won’t even mind if it’s a bit slushy. What can possibly go wrong?”
7. My favourite game: Panini pest Zoltan Peter comes unstuck against USSR
“Before the internet ruined the World Cup there was wonder in ignorance. You could look forward to discovering great players and teams about whom you knew next to nothing. In 1986 my brother and I hoped the tournament would be all about some Hungarian called Zoltan Peter. Our reason was bad.”
8. VE Day: Churchill feared De Gaulle would declare victory early
“Winston Churchill believed a disgruntled general Charles de Gaulle intended to pre-empt the allies’ announcement of victory in Europe by 24 hours but felt unable to pressure him to change his plans, according to British war cabinet documents released free online by the National Archives.”
9. Zero-waste warriors: meet the people whose household rubbish fits in a jam jar
“Watching an incinerator for half an hour shocked me and made me want to take action. The scale is so shocking and you realise how tiny we are compared to the amount of waste we create. I don’t want to contribute to that wastefulness and it has made me want to take action.”
10. Florian Schneider: the enigma whose codes broke open pop music
“Few people could have claimed to have exerted as much musical influence while remaining so enigmatic. Given Kraftwerk’s pivotal impact on everything from synthpop to hip-hop to house and techno, it’s very difficult indeed to imagine what modern music would sound like had they, and specifically the five albums they released between 1974 and 1981, not existed.”
How we create the antidote
Every day we measure not only how many people click on individual stories but also how long they spend reading them. This list is created by comparing the attention time with the length of each article, to come up with a ranking for the stories people read most deeply.
