Six great reads: the world’s biggest YouTube star, a missing twin and a way to understand polarisation

1. ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast (centre, in grey jumper) giving away a car during a promotional tour for his confectionary brand in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel has 400 million subscribers. In this profile Mark O’Connell tries to grasp the scale of Donaldson’s role in modern popular culture:

“I don’t intend to make a case here that you should start appreciatively watching Donaldson’s videos. I don’t intend to make a case for MrBeast as art – although I reserve the right to talk about it as though it were. I’m not even going to try to convince you that these videos are even necessarily good, whatever that might mean. But I do feel quite strongly that Donaldson is some type of genius – a prodigy of a form that, as degraded as it is, deserves to be taken seriously as one of the signature artefacts of our time.”

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2. I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty

White nationalists attend a ‘White Lives Matter’ rally on 28 October 2017 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Anthropologist Anand Pandian has spent much of the last decade travelling across the United States trying to make sense of why is it so polarised. In this fascinating essay he explored what he learned about what it takes to connect across difference.

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3. ‘These are not numbers – they are people’: what ex-communist Slovenia can teach the world about child poverty

The first day of primary school in Ljubljana, Slovenia Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy

Our Euro visions series shares big ideas on how to make life better from across Europe. This week Zoe Williams was in Slovenia, where the former communist state has the lowest levels of child poverty in the continent. What, she asked, could other richer states like the UK – where child poverty is a huge issue – learn from the Slovenes? 

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4. ‘Mom, am I the missing twin?’: the story of two babies separated by the Chinese state – and their emotional reunion

Esther (on right) and Shuangjie Photograph: Liu Hongbing

US couple Marsha and Al adopted a baby girl from China because they thought she had been abandoned. Years later they read about a girl whose sister had been illegally snatched by the authorities. Was everything they’d been told about their daughter a lie, asked Barbara Demick in this thrilling extract from her new book.

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5. ‘Empathy is a kind of strength’: Jacinda Ardern on kind leadership, public rage and life in Trump’s America

Jacinda Ardern announcing her resignation in January 2023. Photograph: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images

Young, progressive and relatable, the former prime minister of New Zealand tried to do politics differently. But six years into power, she dramatically resigned. In an exclusive interview with Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, she explained why.

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6. ‘We were like brothers, but we scrapped’: the chaos and pranks that shaped The Goonies – by its cast and crew

(left to right) Jeff Cohen, Anne Ramsey (in background), Ke Huy Quan, Corey Feldman and Sean Astin in The Goonies. Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

Forty years on, Richard Donner’s adventure movie continues to delight audiences – and its heroes and villains. In this oral history its stars, including Sean Astin and Joe Pantoliano told Ann Lee about working with Spielberg and and being pranked by director Richard Donner.

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