Six great reads: Doge explained, ‘alpine divorce’ and the secret lives of body doubles

1. What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government

Illustration: Anais Mims/Guardian Design

Elon Musk’s office featured a gaming rig complete with an oversized curved screen, and the Doge website had a leaderboard for tallying cuts in real time. But beneath the jokes and cosplay lay a serious conviction. If the state was just a database, then inefficiency came from bad data: undocumented foreigners, ghost employees, even “vampires” collecting social security. These were bugs in the codebase, irregularities to be traced, quarantined and purged. Musk had revamped and retrained Twitter into X. To him, the US state was just another system – a glitchy dataset to be scrubbed and optimised.

In this gripping Long Read, Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian told the story of how Musk and his team of teenage coders, steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, set out to defeat what they saw as the enemy of the US: its people.

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2. The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism

Illustration: Rude: thisisrude.com

Things change. They change for the better because we make them change, or for the worse because we don’t show up or lose the battle. But if you forget the sheer profundity of the changes of the last several decades, you can mourn what the right is trying to do to pretty much everything from the climate to women’s rights without seeing that what they’re really trying to do is change things back, to return to their version of the good old days that for a lot of us were the bad old days.

In this searing essay, Rebecca Solnit looks at the phenomenon of people declaring the death of the women’s movement, pointing to the “failure” of #MeToo or the Epstein files. But, she wrote, we mustn’t ignore the vast progress made over the past few decades.

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3. And the winner is ... all of us? How the Oscars have changed for the better

Photograph: Richard Harbaugh/The Academy/Shutterstock

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4. Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails. What’s behind ‘alpine divorce’?

Illustration: Kimberly Elliott/The Guardian

On social media, women describe alpine divorce as going on a hike, climb or other outdoor adventure with a male partner, only to be abandoned or left behind – perhaps he went too fast and neglected to wait, or a fight on the trail resulted in him storming off. Breakups have quickly followed. Alaina Demopoulos explored this curious phenomenon.

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5. The secret lives of six body doubles: ‘They wanted Julia Roberts to have curvier legs’

Shelley Michelle (left) and Richard Gere’s body double, seen next to Richard Gere and Julia Roberts Composite: Courtesy of Shelley Michelle

From Michael B Jordan’s extraordinary performance as twins in Sinners to working with young kids in Harry Potter, body doubles are an essential part of film-making. Following Jordan’s best actor win at the Oscars, Lucy Knight spoke to his “twin” Percy Bell as well as those who have stood in as, for instance, Julia Roberts’s legs and Rachel Weisz’s hair.

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6. My sisters and I had the same parents but were raised apart. It taught me there’s more to siblings than meets the eye

Catherine Carr (right) with her older sister Bex and younger sister CJ in the Netherlands. Photograph: Courtesy of Catherine Carr

After Catherine Carr’s parents split up, she and her older sister lived with their dad while her youngest sister stayed with their mum. It became an experiment in nature v nurture – and had a profound effect on their relationships.

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