Sitdown Sunday: Boris Johnson's Brexit fantasy

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. How is the UK 10 years after Brexit

Were the ‘sunlit meadows’ Boris Johnson promised voters Brexit would create just a mirage? Journalist Phillip Stephens, writing for The New York Times, thinks so.

(The New York Times, approx 10 mins reading time)

“It was, of course, a fantasy. Mr. Johnson got Brexit through, but as the Conservative pro-European Michael Heseltine has often put it, this is the sovereignty of the man in the desert. The economy has stalled and trade has shrunk. Britain is poorer than it might have been. Its gross domestic product is at least 4 percent — but could be as much as 8 percent — lower, according to independent calculations, while business investment is more than 10 percent lower. It added new frictions to the lives of Britons: new border checks when traveling to E.U. countries, stricter residency rules for living there, fewer opportunities for students to study abroad. Even just using a cellphone while ‘roaming’ often costs more than it used to.”

2. The Pope has learned 6-7

Pope Leo XIV went viral recently after learning the popular internet meme 6-7, and then repeatedly doing it. 

(The New York Times Magazine, approx four mins reading time)

“In recent weeks — following not only his increasingly sentient 6-7s but the publication of ‘Magnificent Humanity,’ a church encyclical that called for A.I. to be ‘disarmed’ — the trend expanded significantly. Soon there were posts about printing out the encyclical and gathering to read it with friends over margaritas; memes about lapsed Catholics or nonbelievers feeling ‘the atheism leaving my body’; memes likening data-center attacks to holy wars. Then it seemed as if anything the pope did that lightly grazed contemporary pop culture would go viral, like a video of Leo in the cockpit of a plane, which spawned screenshots of him smiling like a kid.”

3. The Taliban’s new marriage laws

New Taliban laws are making in even more difficult for women to leave unwanted and abusive marriage. The laws, which also allows children to be married off, mean women now have to pay their husband for their freedom.

(The Guardian, approx seven mins reading time)

“In April 2026, the Taliban leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, issued a new decree on the judicial separation of spouses, setting out 12 grounds on which a marriage can be dissolved. On paper, some appear to give women a path to court. In practice, each path is blocked by the authority of men: the consent of a husband, the discretion of a judge, the testimony of witnesses, or the power of male relatives. Even in cases of abuse or neglect, the decree states that judges and arbiters cannot grant a divorce without the husband’s consent.”

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4. Killer vehicles

The increase in the size of vehicles seems to correspond with the increase in road deaths. The New York Times has looked into how the taller hoods and larger blind zones associated with large vehicles is increasing deaths.

(The New York Times, approx 13 mins reading time)

“Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.”

5. How climate change impacts heatwaves

European countries sweltered under record-breaking temperatures last week. The Conversation looked at the data to recreate the well-recorded British heatwave of 1976, and see how it would not play out in today’s climate.

(The Conversation, approx four mins reading time)

“With continued greenhouse gas emissions, UK summers will become hotter, with more frequent, more intense and longer heatwaves. Met Office climate model projections suggest the UK could begin to experience temperatures of 45°C within the next three decades, with plausible heatwaves hitting 40°C for over a week in a world which is 2.5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels.”

6. How safe is a human colony on Mars?

America has made it clear it plans to go one step further than humankind previously has and land on the moon. This longread questions the reasons behind the obsessions with the red planet, and the risks associated with establishing a colony there.

(Noema magazine, approx 30 mins reading times)

“The reality is that people have been yearning to visit that blob for a long time. Men like Stone, who’d grown up with the Apollo missions, just want to reach it. But many of their fellow travelers covet bigger dreams: to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and in so doing, usher in our interplanetary future. For decades, space evangelists have promoted Martian settlement as an insurance policy, a ‘lifeboat’ should human folly or a planet-killing asteroid bring about Earth’s 6th great extinction event. Some have viewed the ambition in more hazy terms, as a logical next step in our species’ evolutionary impulse to expand into uncharted territories. Others have seemed content to echo the less philosophical sentiments of Jeff Bezos, who said, in 2016: ‘We should, because it’s cool.’”

…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES… 

7. What is the purpose of travel?

This 2016 longread from the New Yorker argues that travel is not the enlightening experience people make it out to be, and is instead, a series of distractions before death. Optimistic stuff.

(The New Yorker, approx 10 mins reading time)

“Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?”

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