Howard Jacobson’s wonderful Independent article uses a powerful mix of haughtiness, humour and persuasion to react to April’s news that Zac Efron had his shirt ripped off at the MTV Movie Awards.

I think the passage of time has somehow made this article even better – perhaps it is because summer’s approach makes its message more timely. I can’t help but think that the missing comma in the headline is intentional, as a lovely punctuation pun.

Oh, and I should apologise to anyone who was in the same Starbucks as me as I searched the stock photo archive for something to top this post… frankly, I’m surprised Starbucks wifi didn’t block some of those results!

I’m no fan of “networking”. I’ll happily chat with most people, but during designated “networking” time, it becomes awkward and exhausting. Little fills me with quite as much dread on a meeting or conference agenda as “networking”.

This weekend, I’m recommending an article by Andrea Ayres-Deets article from TheNextWeb on the very topic of networking. She calls it an ‘Introvert’s Guide’, which sort of put me off the article, as I was a bit worried that it would be full of dichotomising pseudoscience. The first part of the article does have a bit of that, but the touch was light enough that it didn’t make me close the article at once.

What I liked about this article was not so much the advice it gave, but rather the way Ayres-Deets injects her own experiences into it. I found it very endearing, but also found it easy to relate to. I accept that this might seem a weird reason to recommend an vaguely ‘self-helpish’ article, which is exactly the sort of thing I normally hate. But, hey, I enjoyed it, and you might too.

It’s the Fourth of July, the one day of the year when our American cousins use the date and month in the correct, English, order as a celebration of their independence from Great Britain. And given that Weekend Read day coincides with this auspicious occasion, it seems only appropriate to pick a themed article.

Robicelli’s bakery posted an amusing list of questions about the USA on Medium, aimed mainly (I suspect) at a US audience, but all the more baffling to this UK reader. For example:

If you live in Minnesota or Alaska: did you know there are places where you can live where the elements are not plotting to kill you?

To the people of Kentucky: when I visited, you had smoking sections in all of your gas stations. Do your pumps fuel so slowly that you can’t possibly wait until your car is gassed up before you light up again?

This is an article that’s sure to raise a smile this weekend.

The people in this stock photo are far too happy for their own good, particularly if they’ve been taking part in a brainstorming session. I suspect I would find spending time with this group on a professional basis… insufferable.

My recommended read for this weekend is The myth of the brainstorming session by Mikael Cho. It’s a post I enjoyed, but only in a conflicted way. I agree with most of what it posits, but I dislike it resorting to over-simplified pop psychology to get where it’s going. I’ve chosen to recommend it more because it’s a view point that I don’t think is expressed nearly enough… and also because it’s quite fun.

I’ve an extraordinary recommendation for this weekend: Paul Templer tells The Guardian‘s Chris Broughton about the time he was swallowed by a hippo. Yes, really. It’s just over a year old, but still well worth a read!

Written last Christmas to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the image, Jeffrey Kluger’s TIME article tells the story of one of humanity’s most celebrated images: the Earthrise shot from Apollo 8. As Kluger says,

It’s the picture that was credited with starting the environmental movement, that has been on postage stamps and t-shirts, album covers and coffee mugs, that has been used as a hopeful symbol of global unity at peace rallies and health conferences, on Christmas cards and in works of art.

His story is a great read.

And, in fact, this week’s recommendation is my hundredth in this series. My first recommendation, published in July 2012, also had a space theme. You can browse all of my selections to date on the Weekend Reads page.

Earlier this week, I enjoyed the State Opening of Parliament. I’m not sure why I enjoy it. Perhaps it’s the idea that it’s an (almost) annual ceremony that’s remained (almost) the same throughout my life; perhaps it’s because it’s a vestige of tradition that still have something to say in the modern world; perhaps it’s something else entirely. I actually sat and wondered about this as I watched.

But then I had an unusual experience – a single article changed my view. While I don’t agree with all its poinst, The Economist’s well-argued article points out that the State Opening is a fixed point for which announcements have to be found and made. Having railed against this sort of thing in many other spheres of life (from local government to the Apple product schedule), this article made me realise that this – for all the pageantry – was as insidious as the rest of them.

This article means that I’ll never view that ceremony in quite the same way again.

The Guardian dosen’t make much money from me any more. It’s a long time since I last bought a copy. I used to have it delivered, but when I moved house in 2007, I couldn’t find a local newsagent who delivered, and so I stopped. My main newspaper reading time was over breakfast, so picking up a copy later in the day didn’t really work for me. I used to pay The Guardian for an ad-free version of their website, but they stopped offering that service some years ago now. I paid for their tablet app for a while, but didn’t really get on with it, much preferring The Times app.

I carried on reading The Guardian via the website for a long time after I stopped buying it. But, over time, almost all of the writers I cared to read retired, took redundancy, or moved into management roles in which they rarely write. At the same time, they started giving writers of amusing features by-lines on actual news stories which they seemed woefully under-qualified to cover. They also reduced the pagination by cutting sections I enjoyed, and churned out ever-more frustratingly ill-informed comment pieces. And so, these days, I rarely even read The Guardian.

Oh, and they also pissed me off by cancelling a Guardian Masterclass at the last minute, after I’d paid for non-refundable travel to London. I know these things happen sometimes, but it was frustrating, and I was sorely disappointed at the lack of understanding and compassion on the part of the company.

Despite my frustration with it, and the fact that I rarely even engage with it, I still care for The Guardian, and would still very much like to see it find a profitable and successful place in the world. As a result, I was interested to read Ken Doctor’s discussion of The Guardian‘s new “known” business strategy, published in February over at Newsonomics. It’s a fairly unique approach in the newspaper industry, and I wonder to what extent it can succeed.

Ryanair, despite its recent promises to improve, remains the airline people love to hate. But, as Europe’s most profitable airline, it’s a model that seems to work.

In a brilliantly titled blog post at FlightFox, Grace McClure compares the highly successful Ryanair model with that of US carrier Southwest Airlines. Southwest also sells itself as a budget carrier, but has considerably greater costs and substantially lower profits. The slight tone of outrage that pervades the descriptions of Ryanair’s business model only serves to make this article all the more enjoyable.

It’s a highly recommended Weekend Read.

“Economically, socially and politically, the north of England is becoming another country.” So says The Economist. But can anything be done to prevent the divergence of the nation’s fortunes? This brilliant article gives a sobering analysis of the facts.