It’s the start of a new week, morning tea, and you have found yourself on Five Great Reads, our summertime wrap of interest and entertainment, lovingly brewed by me, Alyx Gorman, Guardian Australia’s chai, chemises and calisthenics editor.
If you’re after breaking news instead – parliament starts sitting this week, so there’s a lot of it – please head over to our live blog. And if you just want to know what’s happening with Australia’s first olympic curlers, they’re having a very wild ride. Otherwise, let’s get to the reads.
1. Hong Kong’s expat exodus
Between 2019’s protests and the heavy national security laws that followed and souring US-China relations, Hong Kong’s once freewheeling foreign business community is feeling mounting pressures. But, according to a recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce, it’s the territory’s strict Covid rules that have 44% of their members considering an exit.
Notable quote: “Everyone is walking a fine line here, and I’m afraid things aren’t going to get better,” says Prof Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at Tufts University. “Businesses these days feel they need to balance between their political capital and their ‘capital capital’.”
How long will it take me to read? Three minutes
2. On-screen age gaps in the spotlight
In Hollywood films it’s not uncommon to see a leading man paired with a love interest a decade or two his junior, with no acknowledgement of the May-December dynamic in the script. But at Sundance this year, a spate of films deal explicitly with romantic age gaps, and the practice of casting young female actors with older men is beginning to draw ire. Could this spell a reckoning?
Repeatable line: “Men on-screen have a whole life, and women only have a shelf life,” says Nicky Clark, the founder of campaign group Acting Your Age. Clark lobbies for age-appropriate casting and representation for older women on screen. “Since the medium began, women were expected to retire at 40 and not do anything particularly interesting if they were working after that age. And that hasn’t really changed.”
How long will it take me to read? Three minutes
3. The new Neighbours
Yesterday, Amanda Meade wrote that Australia’s longest running soap opera Neighbours is in peril, as the UK’s Channel 5 pulled the plug on the show in Britain. But what is it being replaced with? The answer is “programs about the royals, steam trains and almost anything with Yorkshire in the title”, apparently.
What now? Well, Channel 5 is re-investing its Ramsey Street money in British properties instead.
Such as? All Creatures Great and Small.
Sounds familiar… Well, it’s a reboot of a beloved eighties series, and it is airing here on the ABC. Our critic also described it as “the television equivalent of taking your brain out and dunking it into a bucket of warm tea”.
4. WhatsApp scammers’ parent traps
It is easy for criminals to get their hands on databases of names, phone numbers and dates of birth from the dark web. Increasingly, fraudsters are using these lists in concert with other information available online to impersonate people’s university-aged children.
Why? Because it’s a very plausible way to ask for money.
Notable quote: “When you are being called mum or dad, that is what many people would have in their phonebook,” says Jake Moore, a cybersecurity adviser. “Preying on the heartstrings by saying they have lost their phone – it fits in with what is very likely.”
How long will it take me to read? Two and a half minutes.
5. A middle aged guide to catching waves
Alison Rourke had always dreamed of learning to surf, but she was afraid she had left it too late. Dodging storms and tsunami warnings, four weeks on a board in a seaside town proved those fears wrong.
Notable quote: “As far as I can tell, there’s not really any timeline when learning to surf,” she writes. “If you are prepared to be unceremoniously dumped on a regular basis, things progress.”
How long will it take me to read? Two minutes
