Weekend reads: 11 of the best international premium pieces

At 55, Brad Pitt says he's reached a point where he sees his father in every performance he gives. Photo / Micaiah Carter, The New York Times

Welcome to the weekend. Much of New Zealand was hit by wild weather this week as wind and rain lashed parts of the country. The measles outbreak has seen as many as 30 people per day in Auckland infected with the disease. And the KiwiBuild saga continued as Labour announced a "reset" of their housing policy.

Internationally Brexit and the chaos in Britain's Parliament has dominated much of the headlines, as has Hurrican Dorian which has caused devastation in the Bahamas and the US.

In amongst all this was a wealth of other excellent journalism. Here's a selection of some other pieces from our premium international syndicators you may have missed.

Brad Pitt on fame: 'I became a hermit and bonged myself into oblivion'

Brad Pitt has been the centre of the world's attention since his 1991 breakout role in Thelma & Louise.

From them on everything he did then was scrutinised: His hits, his misses, his hair, his body and especially his romances. His life, he told me, wasn't simply "the lottery it appeared from the outside." It got to the point that he could no longer tell his own feelings and wants apart from the ones impressed upon him by others.

"In the '90s, all that attention really threw me," Pitt said. "It was really uncomfortable for me, the cacophony of expectations and judgments. I really became a bit of a hermit and just bonged myself into oblivion."

Pitt opens up to New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan about his future onscreen, masculinity and getting sober.

"The ultimate place for my style of acting, as I understand it, is to get to a place of just absolute truth," Pitt says. Photo / Micaiah Carter, The New York Times

Hanging out with humans makes this NZ bird bad at its job

Humans can be a terrible influence on birds. Crows that live near us end up with high cholesterol, sparrows screech to be heard over oil pumps, and instead of migrating, some storks now just eat trash.

At times, our habits and behaviours are contagious enough to change whole ecosystems.

The New York Times reports the NZ native wood hen has become terrible at a key task after spending too much time with humans.

Weka have no trouble swallowing big seeds, but some stick close to areas of human activity, limiting the range of seed dispersal they're responsible for. Photo / Greg Bowker

Trump's Twitter war on spelling

At a time when nerves are stretched to the point of snapping and every political issue seems to verge on the apocalyptic — climate change; immigration; gun violence; race relations; what the president said or claimed to say or did not say about China — it might seem needlessly picayune to dwell on the writing style of the occupant of the White House.

But for people who care about the English language and how best to use it, Trump's continual flouting of even basic writing conventions is a serious matter indeed.

The New York Times looks at how while the president's supporters don't mind his linguistic slips, but lexicographers and grammarians worry about the permanent effect on language.

Who could forget "covfefe"? Photo / AP

Comment: A humbled Boris Johnson has lost control of Brexit

Rarely has a UK prime minister's strategy imploded so rapidly, and so spectacularly. In two days, Boris Johnson has become the first premier since the Earl of Rosebery in 1894 to lose his first parliament vote, and seen MPs back a bill to force him to take a course he has categorically ruled out.

The Financial Times looks at how the UK Government's bullying tactics pushed MPs to reassert parliamentary sovereignty.

Like his predecessor Theresa May, Boris Johnson hemmed himself in with his own red lines. Photo / AP

A very German idea of freedom: Nude ping-pong, nude sledding, nude anything

The first time Michael Adamski saw his mother-in-law naked it was awkward.

But it wasn't as awkward as seeing his boss naked.

Adamski, a police officer in Berlin who investigates organised crime, first started going to a nudist camp at a lake outside Berlin after he met his wife, whose family owned a cabin there.

One weekend, when he had just about gotten used to stripping in front of his in-laws, he bumped into the highest-ranking colonel in his precinct — who promptly challenged him to a game of table tennis.

They have been on first-name terms ever since.

Germans love to get naked. They have been getting naked in public for over 100 years, when early naturists rebelled against the grime of industrialisation and then the mass slaughter of World War I.

New York Times reporter Katrin Bennhold joins the nudists to see what all the fuss is about.

Nudists at a lake in Germany. Photo / Lena Mucha, The New York Times

The mysterious vaping illness that's 'becoming an epidemic'

An 18-year-old showed up in an emergency room, gasping for breath, vomiting and dizzy. When a doctor asked if the teenager had been vaping, he said no.

The patient's older brother, a police officer, was suspicious. He rummaged through the youth's room and found hidden vials of marijuana for vaping.

Dr. Melodi Pirzada, who who treated the young man said "luckily, he survived."

Pirzada is one of the many physicians across the US treating patients with mysterious and life-threatening, vaping-related illnesses. The outbreak is "becoming an epidemic," she said. "Something is very wrong."

The New York TImes looks at how a surge of severe lung ailments has baffled doctors and public health experts.

An X-ray of a patient with a vaping habit, showing lung damage - densities or whitish cloud-like areas typically associated with some pneumonias. Photo / Intermountain Healthcare via New York Times

Friends is turning 25. Here's why we can't stop watching it

Once upon a time, we made do with less television. Now, we romanticise our internet-borne so-called golden age and carp about the galactic girth of the streaming era. Somebody even lent the girth a fretful name: "peak TV" — the "money can't buy happiness" of screen life.

In retrospect, less television has come to imply lesser — by volume, by value, by verisimilitude. But what was Friends lesser than? There are 236 episodes of it, merely one fewer than a combined tally of Game of Thrones, House of Cards, and Orange Is the New Black. Most of those episodes are perfect as tidy comedies. Maybe it's hard to think of Friends as perfect, let alone as great, because it looked easy.

Twenty-five years on, The New York Times looks how how with one of the best casts in TV history, Friends makes excellent comedy look easy.

Friends was easy TV at an elite level. Photo / Supplied

His cat's death left him heartbroken. So he cloned it

Garlic was dead, and there was nothing Huang Yu could do. So on a cold winter day, he buried his cat's body in a park close to his home.

Hours later, still heartbroken, the 22-year-old businessman recalled an article he had read on dog cloning in China. What if someday he could bring Garlic back to life?

China's first duplicate cat marks the country's emergence in gene research and its entry in a potentially lucrative and unregulated market for cloning pets.

The New York Times reports.

Garlic, born on July 21, 2019, the first cat cloned by Sinogene. Photo / Yan Cong, New York Times

Comment: Recessions have become rarer and more scary

The world has seldom been worse-equipped to fight a recession. Yet it has never had fewer recessions to fight. That makes the next global downturn difficult to imagine but it will most likely be a traumatic and unlooked-for event, more like the sudden outbreak of a new disease than the annual onset of flu.

The Financial Times looks at how a hard to predict financial crisis is the most probably source of the next downturn.

The world has seldom been worse-equipped to fight a recession. Photo / 123

Study shows drunk people are better at creative problem-solving

Professor Andrew Jarosz of Mississippi State University and colleagues served vodka-cranberry cocktails to 20 male subjects until their blood alcohol levels neared legal intoxication and then gave each a series of word association problems to solve.

Not only did those who imbibed give more correct answers than a sober control group performing the same task, but they also arrived at solutions more quickly.

Harvard Business Review looks at how drunk people are better at creative problem-solving.

A university professor gave workers cocktails to test their problem-solving abilities. Photo / Getty Images

Lucy Boynton on cultivating confidence and dating her co-star

Lucy Boynton has been acting since she was 12, but it was her role in the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody at 24 that changed her career. Now she's channelling her inner diva in a hotly anticipated Netflix series.

Louis Wise of The Times meets a woman on a mission.

Lucy Boynton arrives at the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards. Photo / AP