Sitdown Sunday: What really happened to the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370?

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. Who will be the big winners at tonight’s Oscars?

The 97th annual Academy Awards are on tonight. Noted film critic Justin Chang has compiled his list of who he thinks will take home an Oscar tonight, and who he thinks should take home an Oscar.

(The New Yorker, approx 20 mins reading time)

“I’m predicting One Battle After Another, for reasons of prudence and personal preference. Whether I’m right or not is immaterial; what’s fascinating and heartening about this particular showdown is how ideally matched the two films are, how right they feel as kindred spirits. Sinners has its roots in Coogler’s original script, but his writing cleverly repurposes familiar horror-genre conventions; One Battle After Another is an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, but one so shaggily inventive as to feel sui generis. Both films are deeply enveloping, ensemble-driven action-thrillers about, among other things, the Sisyphean folly of resistance in a nation run by white supremacists. The films inhabit two separate points on a decades-spanning American historical continuum—Sinners unfolds during the Jim Crow era, One Battle After Another at an indeterminate moment closer to the present day—but they share a steadfast belief in the prevailing power of love, to say nothing of the potential of the next generation of rebels.” 

2. What happens after 18 days without sleep?

Have you ever thought, ‘Maybe I’ll stay awake for 18 days straight to see what happens?’. No, me neither. But apparently several men have tried it out in an effort to break world records. The Telegraph interviewed a young Australian YouTuber who believes he holds the current sleeplessness record - 264 hours and 56 minutes, or a little over 11 days.

(The Telegraph, approx 15 mins reading time)

“‘It’s awful, fucking awful,’ he says. ‘Have you ever pulled an all-nighter and found it physically hurts after a bit? When you get past 30 hours it just hurts. You get a weird feeling in your chest, and get really hungry, really thirsty… Then your stomach shuts down after a while. My brain figured out what to do, but it just got harder.’”

3. White South African refugees

South African local Eve Fairbanks writes for The Guardian about how the US far-right has bought into Donald Trump’s idea that white South Africans are persecuted. Fairbanks says that despite right-wing beliefs, many white people in South Africa actually faced greater persecution under apartheid than they do now.

(The Guardian, approx 18 mins reading time)

“When Trump re-entered the White House in January 2025, his supporters’ fixation on South Africa grew exponentially as he became more willing to put policy behind his rhetoric. He’d tweeted about the victimisation of white South Africans during his first term, but in his second term, Trump issued an unprecedented executive order targeting the country. It cut US foreign assistance and made a startling exception to his general antipathy to immigrants by offering expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, the Dutch-descended white group that helped build the apartheid regime. Last May, he brought the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, to the White House for a kind of kangaroo trial, declaring that he felt there was ‘persecution or genocide going on’. Taking the hint, nearly every big-league conservative influencer in the US invited white South Africans to discuss the issue; sometimes these shows touted Orania as the only safe space left for them. The problem is that the tale peddled about white South Africans’ historical trajectory isn’t true.”

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4. The 764 group

A group of extremists who operate under the name 764 are using online platforms to target vulnerable children and teens and encourage them to commit acts of violence against themselves and others. The group, which was founded by Bradley Cadenhead in 2020 when he was 15, draws inspiration from satanic neo-Nazi movements but has the ultimate aim of destroying society. A former victim of the group, Trinity, has shared her experience, including demands made by a predator for Trinity to sacrifice her dogs and even kill her own mother.

(CBC News, approx 20 mins reading time)

“764 deliberately targets vulnerable children by prowling on popular gaming sites like Minecraft and Roblox, where members lure them into private online chats on Discord and Telegram. Often, these spaces are disguised as safe places for minors with eating disorders or poor self-esteem. Experts say the grooming includes lavishing victims with attention and exposing them to violent content to desensitize them. Victims are then coerced into sending sexually explicit images and to self-harm, including carving their predator’s names into their skin as a sign of devotion. Members of 764 threaten to share the images with family and friends to get their victims to do even worse, like hurting their pets, harming others and even killing themselves, all in an effort to exert control for their own gratification.”

5. The evolution of English

In this smart piece, Colin Gorries explores the change in the use of the English language from the year 1000 to 2026. Using the example of a travel blog, the author shows how each generation would have written the piece. It gets very difficult to read before the year 1500.

(Dead Language Society, approx 19 mins reading time)

“Written English has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years. Spelling was standardised in the mid-1700s, and grammar has barely changed at all. This means that, if you can read Harry Potter (1997–2003), you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is good news to fans of the English novel. What has changed is the voice.”

6. One man’s search for his mother

Antonio Wiley was a teenager when his mother went missing from Detroit. She never returned, but he has spent the majority of his life searching for her. In 2020, 30 years after she left, DNA evidence helped him find her body.

(The New York Times, approx 12 minutes reading time)

“Antonio had not seen her since he was a teenager, when, at age 29, she vanished from their apartment on Detroit’s west side. At first, he could only look for her in the faces of strangers on the street. Later, he searched for clues to her whereabouts in newspaper clippings, in dusty police archives, in interviews with his older relatives. He amassed stacks of notes and documents, but the truth remained out of reach.”

…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…

7. What really happened to the missing Malaysian Airlines flight?

In March 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur. It was meant to land in Beijing, China, but it vanished somewhere over the Indian Ocean. This 2019 long read from The Atlantic explores the possibilities and theories behind what happened to the flight, and the 239 people it was carrying.

(The Atlantic, approx 42 mins reading time)

“The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.”

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