Guardian Australia’s weekend wrap of essential reads from the past seven days, selected by Emma Elsworthy. Get this in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for Five Great Reads here.
Good morning. Here are some pieces to warm your heart or entertain your brain as winter makes itself comfortable around us. I’m Emma Elsworthy and I’ll be filling in for Imogen Dewey for the month ahead.
1. Four crash courses in dance, from Cuban salsa to the Melbourne shuffle
For many of us, the abandon we felt dancing as children evaporated incredibly quickly once we hit our mortifying teen years. But how hard can it be to learn some steps as an adult? Witness the exceptionally funny and “poorly prepared” Dee Jefferson as she takes four dance classes in one weekend, as part of Melbourne’s Rising festival. Guided by some poignant advice from a friend – “be kind to yourself when it feels awkward on your body, coz it’s gonna” and “the more you relax and let loose the more right it will look” – Jefferson’s mortification turns into euphoria. “After the class I feel as though I’m floating,” Jefferson writes. “I message everyone I know; this feeling I am experiencing, I discover, is known as ‘endorphins’.”
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes.
Further reading: Check out Guardian Australia’s glowing review of Palestinian pop star Saint Levant.
2. Delving into northern Spain’s caves – and our own history
“The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira,” writes Stephen Phelan. Or so we’ve heard. Only a handful of scholars are allowed into the ancient Spanish cave used as a creative space by “troglodytic numbskulls” about 34,000 years ago. Pablo Picasso is among those said to have visited before it closed to the public, who declared: “After Altamira, all is decadence.” This long read about northern Spain’s caves is a fascinating time machine back to the Palaeolithic era, a prehistory so mysterious that what we know is really only equivalent to a “few scattered pages”.
How long will it take to read: 20 minutes.
Further reading: Closer to home, delve inside the highest human-occupied ice age site found in Australia in this story from 2025.
3. Obama’s latest legacy: near-windowless tower over Chicago
Barack Obama has long identified as a Trekkie, and the proof now towers 70 metres over south-side Chicago. The $850m presidential library’s mostly windowless granite walls resemble “a menacing sci-fi headquarters”, writes Oliver Wainwright, with some comparing it to a Star Trek-esque Klingon prison. Actually, architect Billie Tsien says, it is supposed to be reminiscent of “four hands coming together”. Text also adorns Obamalisk, with the phrase “YOU ARE AMERICA” dissolving into an illegible sea of letters. “I don’t know why it’s in Latin,” one confused local resident told Wainwright, who added, “the lorem ipsum vibes are real”. A sign of the Trumpian times? “If it is a beacon of hope, it seems to be one that has been fortified at all costs against the present regime, a defensive bunker to protect its fragile values from siege.”
How long will it take to read: 10 minutes.
Further reading: The darker side of a presidential legacy is explored in The Guardian view on Trump’s omnipresence: commanding attention like a king.
4. ‘Hallucinating inside a Scandinavian kindergarten’
Showrooms are a useful way to see homewares in situ, but there is something haunting about the neat, still life commercialism, bereft of the warmth and humanness of a lived-in home. Would spending the night in a property kitted out entirely by Ikea feel any different? When Ikea offered the “ultimate designer staycation” for “less than the price of two servings of Ikea meatballs”, Caitlin Cassidy jumped at the idea. She counted five clocks, 12 identical copies of the Swedish memoir Musikens Betydelse For Flickor, and one bottle of what appeared to be champagne but turned out to be a pear drink. Come for the uncanny valley (“I am not a mannequin, I am a human being”), but stay for the inevitable spiral (“The brick is hard against my knuckles. Investigating further, the facade I am living in an all-Ikea universe crumbles”).
How long will it take to read: 7 minutes.
Further reading: For more home inspiration, check out Australia’s best apartment designs for 2026 and be wary of AI recommending a subfloor on rotting stumps.
5. Cuba’s first indie magazine and everything that happened next
Abraham Jiménez Enoa and his colleague were plotting a coup against their own boss. They worked for a Havana magazine where reporters shared a computer while the publisher had a multi-room office with sea views. Instead, using public wifi with no office or money, Jiménez Enoa did something the communist government, with its totalitarian control over the fourth estate, forbid: he started his own title. He worked mostly from a park near his house and, with the US and Cuba making up again, couldn’t have asked for “a better moment to launch”. Then one day, an unknown caller, some silent henchman and “Fidel Castro’s monster” turned Jiménez Enoa’s life upside down. It’s a must-read story about speaking truth to power in a country muzzled by its own regime. Ergonomics be damned: “Sometimes, though, the tree dropped little brown fruits, inedible berries that stained everything and drove me into the glaring sun. If I had to, I’d work standing, sweating in shorts and sandals.”
How long will it take to read: 15 minutes.
Further reading (well, watching): With relations iced over under Trump – including new sanctions on the Cuban president – what would happen if the US invaded Cuba?
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