Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days
“Daniel Jackson was only 14 when he and a group of friends decided they ‘wanted to do something that was unique’. While most others their age were scrolling TikTok, Jackson and his friends scoured maps, and discovered an unclaimed strip of forest that falls outside the borders of Croatia and Serbia. They thought it would be fun to see if they could make it into a country, and named it Verdis.”
Lucy Knight told the fun story of Jackson’s bold attempts to acquire sovereignty over his country, which have included forming a government, establishing laws and planting a flag. But will he and his 400 hopeful citizens be able to build a new nation now he has been exiled, thanks to a lifetime ban from entering Croatia?
With parents across the world worried about their kids’ access to smartphones and the internet, a new trend for older, less all-encompassing technology is giving an unlikely rebirth to landline phones, board games and, for one parent at least, an entire at-home replica Blockbuster video store, as Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett discovered.
“While ours is a sturdy planet,” wrote Peter Brannen in this chilling extract from his new book, “resilient to all manner of unthinkable insults to which it is regularly subjected, once every 50-100m years, something truly very, very bad happens.”
