Five Great Reads: the lawnmower man, the ‘wood-wide web’, and memoir of an open marriage
Top of the weekend to you all. If you think you’ve had a tough week, spare a thought for the feuding pop stars and beefing rappers hustling hard for that internet clout.
Maybe they just need some acai to help them chill out …
1. The second coming of a ‘superfood’
Why are the cool kids (and a few adults) lining up 50 deep every night at the mall near me for a soft-serve dessert? Acai is back, baby, and the Amazonian berry’s rebirth as a towering sweet is spreading through Australian cities after kicking off in Sydney’s west in 2022.
Stroll past any outlet dishing out the so-called superfood and it’s obvious acai’s newfound popularity is as much about the social occasion as the taste. “I’m Egyptian Australian; we don’t drink alcohol,” says Ahmed Wassel, the owner of Melbourne’s Drp Bar. “It’s much more traditional to have late-night gatherings over dessert.”
Ah-sigh-ee: Is how acai is pronounced, in case like me you slept on the brunch-focused hype first time round.
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
2. Trees talk to each other – or do they?
The wood-wide web sounds like a pun in search of an idea, like the one Suzanne Simard helped develop in a 1997 article for Nature – that trees share resources with each other via fungi. She’s since argued the forest is “like the internet”, with trees transmitting messages to each other through the fungal links.
Others have picked up Simard’s ideas and run with them. She claims they even inspired James Cameron’s Avatar. But a growing band of scientists, including one who co-authored the original Nature article, are dismissing the idea as bunkum.
The most “sentient” plant? Proponents extol the virtues of the South American boquila vine, which hides from the critters that feed on it by matching the shape, size and colour of its leaves to those of its neighbours.
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes.
3. The Sydney gardener with millions of followers
Ever watched a time-lapse video of a bloke tidying up a paved driveway? Neither. But about 125 million people have watched Nathan Stafford do just that on TikTok.
“Oddly beautiful and satisfying in their simplicity” is how Jordyn Beazley describes Stafford’s videos, which also include him mowing battlers’ lawns for free. Click-chaser or good samaritan? Says Stafford to Beazley: “I just want to give back.”
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“I’ve come from the other side of the fence, so I know what this is all about. I relate to these people, and I know that they’re struggling.” – Nathan Stafford, lawnmower man
How long will it take to read: Three minutes.
4. Sleep No More and the ‘immersive experience’ scam
Escape rooms, axe-throwing, Van Gogh’s Starry Night reimagined as a walk-through screensaver: Steven Phillips-Horst reckons Manhattan’s “immersive theatre” experience Sleep No More is to blame for all of that and more.
After 13 years, the wildly popular modern dance interpretation of Macbeth is set to sign off. So Phillips-Horst strapped on his plague mask for a final walk through.
Opening salvo: “The ‘immersive experience’ is one of the defining scams of our young century, in which the content-hungry and reality-starved will pay good money to take selfies in a ball pit, or pretend to be locked in a room by an MFA candidate in a top hat.”
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
5. Breaking the golden rule of an open marriage
Molly Roden Winter’s now husband said something prophetic to her early in their relationship: “You’ll want to sleep with someone else at some point.”
It wasn’t until more than a decade later that she stormed out of the marital home, leaving a late-home-from-work father with his two sleeping sons, and met Matt (not his real name) at a nearby bar. That meeting proved the genesis for Roden Winter’s open marriage, in which she and her husband embarked on myriad affairs bound by one major rule: don’t fall in love.
The new golden rule: “If one of us has feelings about something the other is doing,” Roden Winter says, “we have to work through it together.”
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
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