Ariel Levy’s remarkable and deeply moving article in the New Yorker about travelling in Mongolia while pregnant received such (deserved) widespread acclaim when it was first published that featuring it as a Weekend Read seemed a little pointless. But reading it again today, it retains every bit of the emotional power it had the first time I read it. It’s highly recommended, but have tissues at hand.

I do love a Weekend Read that challenges conventional wisdom, and this post from Eric Nelson’s blog, How To Think Like Your Agent, does exactly that. He argues – in a fairly convincing manner – that the widespread adoption of ebooks has changed almost nothing about the publishing industry. I especially like his final sentence:

I like having another way to buy books, but that’s all it is: Another way to buy books.

It’s a relatively short post, and well worth reading this weekend.

On New Year’s Eve, when I first came across this Full Fact post, I was in the midst of creating the images for the CMO’s annual report. So, then, the humour was a little on the dark side for me at the time, and I resolved not to feature in next year’s edition.

On reflection, though, the collection of spectacularly poor infographics is worth a look, as is the featured XKCD cartoon. So it’s my recommended read for this weekend.

Death isn’t the cheeriest of topics for a Weekend Read, but the mathematical puzzle posed by Brian Skinner on the NPR blog is genuinely intriguing, and has lovely illustrations to boot. I won’t spoil your reading experience by revealing the dangling question Skinner ends on – I’ll simply observe that I’ve no idea what the answer might be.

I take a multivitamin on a daily basis. I do this despite knowing that the evidence shows that it’s unlikely to do me any good, though I’m healthily sceptical of the evidence that suggests it’s actively harmful (I think that this effect might reasonably be explained by confounders). I suppose my own behaviour is more of a habit than anything.

With that in mind, I was delighted to come across an article discussing this very topic in The Atlantic, written by none other than Professor Paul Offit, a well-respected paediatrician. In fact, as it turns out, the article is an extract from his book. In the extract, he gives a little of the history of the vitamin supplement history, and sets out the research evidence on the topic. But, more than that, he tells a truly engaging story, and leads one through it almost by hand. It’s a really great read!

My choice for this weekend’s read is a hilarious short piece by Jason Gilbert on Medium, mocking Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling”. It’s really quite brilliant.

My recommended read for this weekend is entirely self-centred: please go and read the brand new surveillance volume of the Chief Medical Officer’s Annual Report 2012. It’s got some great stuff in there.

On Sunday, I read a great interview with Apple’s master of design Jony Ive in The Sunday Times. As I read it, I thought that I’d have loved to share it as my weekend read, and was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to since The Sunday Times is behind a paywall. Hurray, then, for TIME, who have reprinted John Arlidge’s great interview on their funky new website. It’s well worth a read.

My recommended read for this weekend comes from The Guardian, which makes its content all the more surprising. In an extract from his book, Rolf Dobelli argues that people should stop reading, listening to, and watching the news. He says it’s bad for you. He issues a very telling challenge:

Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you.

I think he might have a point; but I see that as reflecting the lamentable state of the news media, rather than a criticism of news itself. Either way, it’s an interesting read.

My recommended read for this weekend is a great (free) Kindle Single interview with Barack Obama by David Blum. It’s not the world’s longest interview, and nor are there any stunning revelations within it, but it was an interesting read nonetheless. Obama links his personal history to his Presidential decisions in a way that was interesting to me – though cynics might just say I’m naive!

The picture at the top of this post is Obama’s official portrait from his first Presidential term, used under the terms of its Creative Commons licence.