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Mayan pyramid of Kukulcan El Castillo in Chichen Itza, Mexico at Night with Milky Way galaxy. Alamy Stock Photo
7 great reads

Sitdown Sunday: What did the ancient Maya see in the stars?

Settle back in a comfy chair and sit back with some of the week’s best longreads.

IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.

We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.

1. How Germany got hooked on Russian energy

A look at the history behind Germany’s reliance on Russia for oil and gas, and how it now regrets the dependence following the invasion of Ukraine. 

(The Guardian, approx 21 mins reading time)

An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

2. Love Island

As the popular dating show returns to our screens, Anna Peele examines how the carefully produced machine that is Love Island came to be, and how it affects the lives of those who appear on it. 

(Vanity Fair, approx 34 mins reading time)

Aspiring contestants—100,000 people apply each year—know the explicit premise of the series is being judged by viewers who literally vote on whether they like you. They know there will be challenges created by the show’s producers to provoke them. They know they will be isolated from the outside, as the real world is called, and the feeling of insulation will make them occasionally forget that they’re on the most watched show in the U.K. They know things will be strategically withheld from them—according to season six winner Paige Turley’s representative, Flack’s death wasn’t revealed to the cast for more than a week, until the day before the finale. (Jain declined to speak on the matter.) Islanders know the information they’re missing will be crucial to how people view their actions. They also know that when they leave the villa, the most seemingly authentic among them will be unimaginably famous.

3. A disturbing new pattern in mass shootings

Glenn Thrush and Matt Richtel write about how six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were committed by people who were 21 or younger.

(The New York Times, approx 9 mins reading time)

The shootings come against a backdrop of a worsening adolescent mental health crisis, one that predated the pandemic but has been intensified by it. Much of the despair among teenagers and young adults has been inwardly directed, with soaring rates of self-harm and suicide. In that sense, the perpetrators of mass shootings represent an extreme minority of young people, but one that nonetheless exemplifies broader trends of loneliness, hopelessness and the darker side of a culture saturated by social media and violent content.

4. The stargazers

The historic Maya oriented their lives by looking to the skies. Today, their descendants and Western scholars team up to understand their sophisticated astronomy.

(Science, approx 22 mins reading time)

In the past few years, slowly converging lines of evidence have been restoring the clearest picture yet of the stargazing knowledge European colonizers fought so hard to scrub away. Lidar surveys have identified vast ceremonial complexes buried under jungle and dirt, many of which appear to be oriented to astronomical phenomena. Archaeologists have excavated what looks like an astronomers’ workshop and identified images that may depict individual astronomers. Some Western scholars also include today’s Maya as collaborators, not just anthropological informants. They seek insight into the worldview that drove Maya astronomy, to learn not only what the ancient stargazers did, but why.

5. Lisa McGee

The creator of Derry Girls talks about growing up in the city, finding humour during the Troubles and getting the final episode of the hit Channel 4 series right.

(The New Yorker, approx 18 mins reading time)

When McGee was around five or six, a group of men hijacked her father’s truck, and held him up at gunpoint. They released him unharmed. Another time, Ann’s mother ended up in the hospital after a bomb blast. “Stuff was happening, and I had no idea,” McGee said. Ann told me that the I.R.A. once commandeered a nearby house and used it as a lookout for British soldiers. McGee, looking for a friend who lived there, knocked at the house’s door, and her friend’s mother told her to go away. Ann then went to the house demanding an explanation, and was also told to leave. Then Ann’s father, also offended, threatened to go to the house as well. They only found out what was happening later. McGee laughed, thinking about it: “These gunmen just watching these mad people coming to the door!”

6. Who owns Einstein?

This audio long read examines the battle for the publicity rights of the world’s most famous face, Albert Einstein, who has earned far more posthumously than he ever did in his lifetime. The text version can be read here.

(The Guardian, approx 46 mins listening time)

Einstein had been a well-paid man. His $10,000 salary at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – roughly $180,000 in today’s money – was set by the institute to exceed that of any American scientist (“Isn’t that too much?” Einstein queried at the time). But his earnings in life were insignificant compared to his earnings in death. From 2006 to 2017, he featured every year in Forbes’ list of the 10 highest-earning historic figures – “dead celebrities” in the publication’s rather diminishing term – bringing in an average of $12.5m a year in licensing fees for the Hebrew University, which is the top-ranking university in Israel. A conservative estimate puts Einstein’s postmortem earnings for the university to date at $250m.

… AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

As people prepare to celebrate Pride Month, this piece looks at the birth of the Pride movement half a century ago.

(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)

For all its talk of unity, Pride can still divide. To religious and cultural conservatives, Pride parades are nothing less than the public flaunting of deviancy, while many LGBTQ+ people regard today’s corporate-sponsored parades as having sold out the radical, revolutionary demands of the gay liberation movement. Those who were key to the kickstarting of gay liberation – trans people, people of colour and working-class LGBTQ+ people – have gained the least from the mainstreaming of the struggle. For decades a debate has raged between different elements of the community: is Pride supposed to be a protest, or a party?

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