Sitdown Sunday: A four-hour documentary about Elon Musk has premiered - and he wants to sue

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 some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.

1. Musk

A new four-hour documentary on Elon Musk’s life and influence premiered at Venice Film Festival this week – and Musk has already threatened to sue the creator Alex Gibney. Here’s a review.

(The Guardian, approx. four mins reading time)

“Gibney doesn’t get to talk to Musk (or Trump) though in the spirit of Musk’s AI interests, he creates a photorealistic CG avatar who mouths all the things the man himself is reported as saying (a rather contrived visual joke, actually, which the film didn’t need). He speaks to many professional colleagues, and to Musk’s formidably opinionated father Errol Musk who fills us in on Elon’s formative years in the tense world of South Africa in which young Musk was bullied and beaten up.”

2. The dark side of meditation

Meditation has many scientifically proven benefits, but the popular practice can also cause extremely negative effects in some people. 

(The Atlantic, approx. 30 mins reading time)

“Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people—a lot of them, as it turns out—who believe that meditation has harmed them.”

3. The female artists who changed music

Columnist Lisa Whittington-Hill writes about how, in the 80s, artists like Madonna, Grace Jones, Joan Jett, Whitney Houston, and others broke the musical mould for female singers.

(Longreads, approx. 25 mins reading time)

“The soft, soothing sounds of Anne Murray and the over-the-top, emotional ballads of Barbra Streisand had filled our living room and shaped my understanding of female singers. On album covers, they looked poised and polished. In television appearances they stood politely in front of microphones as they sang. Babs and Anne weren’t rolling around on an MTV stage or dancing on a gondola in a music video while wearing spandex pants. It never occurred to me that women could do that. When Madonna descended from that wedding cake and stunned the MTV audience, she also shattered my notions of what a female singer was, what she looked like, and what she could accomplish.”

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4. Eclipse chasers

A writer met up with some of the world’s most hardcore eclipse chasers to watch the solar event in Spain.

(Dispatch, approx. 15 mins reading time)

“Chasers often use erotic language to describe the phases. The first partial phase is like foreplay. Totality is like an orgasm — lasting anywhere between 20 seconds and around seven minutes, its theoretical maximum — and, for the postcoital smokers among us, third contact, marked by the diamond ring, the moment the sun becomes partially visible again, is sometimes referred to as ‘the cigarette moment’.”  

5. Leaving MAGA

A non-profit movement called Leaving MAGA hosts support meetings and meet-ups to help Americans leave the right-wing movement. 

(The Guardian, approx. 10 mins reading time)

“Many Americans, like Messina, have drifted away from Trump in the past decade, but have done so quietly. Leaving MAGA offers an exit ramp from Trump’s rightwing movement that has reshaped the Republican party and platformed political extremism. Launched in 2024, the movement turned non-profit is built on the premise that abandoning the MAGA identity – and the community surrounding it – functions less like changing one’s mind and more like leaving a high-control religious group, fighting a disease or breaking an addiction. It requires not just rejecting a set of beliefs but rebuilding an entire structure of belonging and identity.”

6. Are people in tech sad?

This essay questions whether knowledge workers, people who think for a living, are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their work – and is AI going to be the last straw?

(Noema, approx. 15 mins reading time)

“Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analogue hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of ‘disappearing’ or ‘living on a farm somewhere’ or ‘going off the grid.’ These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst.” 

…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

7. Interviewing Malcolm Macarthur

In this 2023 article from The Guardian, Mark O’Connell interviewed Irish double-murderer Malcolm Macarthur. 

(The Guardian, approx. 25 mins reading time)

“He told me that if I was going to write about him with or without his cooperation, as I had said I would, then I might as well do so with the correct facts in hand. He wanted to clarify certain things about his past, which had been misreported after his arrest and had calcified over the years into an accepted version of his life, and of what he called his ‘criminal episode’. I told him that I was interested, first of all, in his childhood, but that I hoped that we could go through his life more or less sequentially.”