Five Great Reads: Ant kings, Lady Diana’s brother and the Trump effect in Australian politics

Hello, I hope this email finds you well. Here are my highlights from the Guardian this week. Settle in for a lazy morning or evening of reading (use the time you’d usually spend on cooking, and just throw together one of these one-pot meals later).

1. ‘It is possible to be both a scourge and a marvel’

Remember 1998, when in the space of a few sweet months, we were given both Antz and A Bug’s Life? (There’s at least one Reddit thread devoted to the minutiae of this rivalry – I don’t know how much time you have on your hands.)

Anyway, John Whitfield has gone long on what ant societies can teach us – and why we should resist the temptation to draw easy parallels from ants to humans (or, I guess, have them voiced by Woody Allen).

***

“We contain multitudes.” – Ants

“Global ant societies are not simply echoes of human struggles for power. They are something new in the world, existing at a scale we can measure but struggle to grasp,’ he writes. “There is a science fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today … Its characters are strange; its scales hard to conceive.”

20 quadrillion is a big number: There are roughly 200,000 times more ants on earth than the 100bn stars in the Milky Way.

How long will it take to read: eight and a half minutes.

2. Make Australia afraid again

Donald Trump seems, drearily, ever more relevant to Australian politics. Maybe you caught the Republican candidate’s criticisms of Kevin Rudd earlier this week. Maybe you read about the South Australian Liberal, who, in the words of his colleagues, “turned Trumpian”. Or maybe you saw the extract from Lech Blaine’s Quarterly Essay, which asks what it might take to make Peter Dutton PM.

Australia’s Trump moment? As the Liberal party shifts to the right, Blaine argues, John Howard’s “broad church” approach is less and less tenable (Liberal MP Bridget Archer tells him she now sees it as “One Nation lite”). So, a new strategy: “To reframe Labor’s centrist agenda as a betrayal of the Australian way of life. Dutton’s raison d’être? Make Australia afraid again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.”

Blaine has a knack for unsnarling the gossip and potted histories on all sides. Insiders talk to him with what seems like their guard down. Voters on the street throw cold water on all the fuss from outside the bubble. And we get a merciless but multifaceted view on the man very actively changing the tenor of Australia’s political processes.

How long will it take to read: four-ish minutes – a cheater’s guide if you’re too stretched for time for the whole QE, or enough to whet your appetite.

3. Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse

This week, Charles Spencer spoke to Tim Adams about his decision to write about his traumatic childhood. During a miserable five years, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, was physically and sexually abused at a Northamptonshire prep school.

Reactions to his book formed a Manichean split: on one hand, emails from fellow survivors praising his courage; on the other, “the default prurience of the tabloid press” – and, as bleakly, his branding by some as a traitor to his class. He and Adams talk about it all at considered depth, and with a calm, reflective dignity.

Advice from Billy Connolly: at the close of the interview, Adams recalls a conversation with the comedian on similar themes. “It’s not called emotional baggage for nothing,” Connolly had told him. “It means you can put it down if you want to.”

“I totally agree with that,” Spencer tells Adams here. “I do feel I might put it down now.”

How long will it take to read: a bit under eight minutes.

4. Time to learn properly about Frantz Fanon

“Everyone sees what they want to see in Frantz Fanon,” writes Edo Konrad. “The anti-colonial icon is endlessly quoted by leftists tweeting about Black Lives Matter or Palestine. He is the father of ongoing efforts to ‘decolonise psychiatry’. He has even been invoked by the far-right conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, the father of the ‘great replacement theory’, to support his calls for depopulating Europe of non-white immigrant ‘occupiers’.”

Since 7 October, Konrad continues, Fanon’s legacy is subject to more fascination than ever, as “a cascade of statements and thinkpieces” try to work out how his theories might or might not apply to the Hamas attacks in light of the ongoing occupation of Palestine.

Considering the complexities: Adam Shatz, author of a new biography, describes Fanon as a man “at odds with himself” – but one whose analysis of a “world cut in two” was prescient. “[He] was someone who understood the way in which the postcolonial order would reproduce, on a global stage, some of the conflicts of colonialism itself.”

How long will it take to read: four minutes.

5. Looking for the real Hamas

And on the subject of Hamas … Joshua Leifer’s long read highlights how the way that Palestinian, Israeli and US political activists understand the organisation “will determine what kind of agreement can be reached to end the current war, and what the future of Gaza will look like”.

His explanation of the group’s history in the region, and the various currents within it frames a central, urgent question: “Whether [Hamas] is primarily a nationalist group with an Islamist character, which could be a constructive player in a meaningful peace process, or whether it is a more radical, fundamentalist group, whose hostility to Israel is so unwavering that it can only play the role of violent opposition.”

Where is it all going? “The death and destruction on such a massive scale appear to signal a shift in paradigm, the emergence of a new phase,” writes Leifer. “But part of what makes Israel’s prosecution of the current war so chilling is that, after killing more than 30,000 Palestinians, and after 1,200 Israelis were killed by Hamas on 7 October, the basic political framework of Israel/Palestine may, the day after the war, remain the same as it was on 6 October.”

How long will it take to read: 13 minutes – and you can find more of our coverage of the crisis here.

A reasonably heavy edition of the newsletter today. Have a lovely weekend. Send us an email. Rewatch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As autumn keeps stop-starting in steamy Sydney, you’ll find me contemplating the Suffolk medieval cycle trail and wistfully Googling flights.

Sign up

If you would like to receive these Five Great Reads to your email inbox every weekend, sign up here. And check out our weekly culture and lifestyle newsletter, Saved for Later, our twice-daily breaking news updates and all other Australian newsletters here.