Friday Reading S14E04

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things he found on the internet this week. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive Friday Reading via email.

Doctor Who – well one of them – is touring his own music for the first time this spring, and for the Quietus Peter Capaldi names his favourite 13 albums of all time, outing himself as still punk at heart. I interviewed him for the Guardian once.

As a kid in Walthamstow, going to the local greyhound track was a treat, with no idea of the welfare issues behind the scenes. Nick Harland goes to a dog night in Sheffield to find out if the industry can survive much longer into the 21st century.

I blogged about my final trip to Walthamstow’s dogs in July 2008, writing, among other things:

“Just a few years ago the British Greyhound Racing Board declared Walthamstow dogs to be their ‘Racecourse of the Millennium’. It hasn’t even lasted one decade into the new century. The front of the stadium is an art deco landmark, which is listed, and has to be preserved. It appeared on the BBC homepage when I was involved with it, and it was always a comforting sight on a long journey when I was a kid, as it meant that home was just two minutes away.”

Talking of nostalgia for things I remember while growing up or as a teenager …

“The Tunkhannock Pizza Hut was invisible on the national atlas for most of its history, but Bender told me that changed overnight last May, when a post made on a Facebook page called “Just Pennsylvania” touted the restaurant’s majesty. (‘It’s like stepping straight into 1987,’ exclaimed the caption attached to a slideshow of the restaurant’s retro features. ‘No touchscreen kiosks, no sleek redesign, just the classic dine-in Hut experience you thought was gone forever.’)”

Luke Winkie spends the day at a retro Pizza Hut in the US.

Katherine Denkinson and Jim Waterson with a fascinating and disturbing look at who was behind a TikTok account spreading lies about immigration in London, and their seeming bafflement that if it was OK for the algorithm of TikTok, they weren’t doing anything wrong.

“Hooked on the income and in search for a new source of original content, he decided to start filming videos of homes across London while he was hosting viewings. He added an AI-generated voiceover about asylum seekers, rapists, and illegal immigrants then pressed upload. The audience response was instant and enormous, and TikTok’s algorithm responded by pushing it into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Irate Londoners drove up engagement by complaining they couldn’t afford such properties while illegal immigrants were supposedly getting them for free.”

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: badges, badgers and bad decisions.

Guest animal: Ralph, who the quiz master met in a pub in St Albans.

This from the Atavist is the story of three mothers whose children were diagnosed in late adolescence or early adulthood with schizophrenia, and as a parent myself I couldn’t help feel what a hard journey it had been for everybody involved.

“The Film is Fabulous! team are currently in discussions with the families of two deceased former industry professionals about the acquisition of their collections, and the preservation of the rare films. Sadly, both of the households have been left in ‘distressed’ circumstances, and funds from the sale of the collections would help to relieve some of the financial burden being borne at this difficult time.”

You can chip in here.

The First Edition newsletter I wrote just before Christmas interviewing lovely Toby Hadoke about the efforts to preserve old film and missing television episodes is still one of my favourite things I’ve written for the Guardian in recent months.

An amazing gallery of Australian landscapes from the air.

My colleague Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has a new novel coming out, which has the painting of a woman as its central conceit. Here she argues that the art of women painting women nude is a much better reflection of reality than all the glamorous nudes of yore that men used to paint.

Marcus Haraldsson is fascinating here on how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong.

Joe Muggs interviews Gwenno for Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest and it is no wonder she makes such striking music:

“Yeah, so everyone spoke Cornish because my dad spoke Cornish, and then my mum would speak Welsh to us and, you know, we weren’t allowed to watch any English telly. There’s no English radio, nothing – like it was a complete bubble of ‘Anglo-American culture does not exist.’ And obviously I went into Irish Dancing. So everything was sort of looking … it was like the Celtic fringe was the centre. Even though, you know, both of my parents were born in England [laughs]. So it’s not … it’s just ridicu- … it’s kind of insanity, and it’s something that I’ve had to process.”

“In Pokopia, a refreshingly pacific twist on the series, players are dropped into a virtual world where Pokémon are freed from their spherical prisons and happily roam their natural habitats. There’s one minor caveat – you have to create those habitats by hand, building them from what you can find.”

Pokopia is surely going to finally drive me to buy my own Switch, isn’t it? Tom Regan reviews “the calming Pokémon game that ditches battles for gardening”.

Blimey, I downloaded the unwieldy title of *draws breath* Puzzle Bobble™2X/BUST-A-MOVE™2 Arcade Edition & Puzzle Bobble™3/BUST-A-MOVE™3 S-Tribute and I’ve only played it for a couple of minutes so far but ZOMG the nostalgia hit for the 1990s PS1 days was real.

Isobel Van Dyke delves into (one of) the controversies around Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, arguing costume designers don’t owe you historical accuracy.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:

·  Monday briefing: ​The Welsh were Labour’s most loyal voters, but even their support is in doubt

·  Tuesday briefing: Is Keir Starmer in office, but out of staff?

·  Wednesday briefing: Why the debate over working from home says more about inequality than productivity

Friday Reading is a weekly series of recommended reads from the Guardian’s Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things he found on the internet this week. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive Friday Reading via email.