Six great reads: the world’s scariest CEO, gen Z in the workplace, and a lost great console

1. ‘Fear really drives him’: is Alex Karp of Palantir the world’s scariest CEO?

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For the past few decades, Alex Karp has stayed largely under the radar, but a new biography, reveals him to be a complex, thoughtful, often contradictory personality, with a background that explains many of his insecurities. Steve Rose profiled the fitness-obsessed billionaire tech leader whose business is at the heart of many governments, including the US, where its AI-powered data-analysis technology is fuelling the deportations being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Pentagon’s unmanned drone programme, police departments’ (allegedly racist) profiling of potential criminals and much more besides.

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2. ‘I thought the grownups were back in charge!’: John Crace on how Labour shattered his expectations

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A few days after the 2024 UK general election, John Crace wrote that he felt as if the grownups were back in charge and that Britain had regained a basic level of competence, that politics would become business as usual rather than a breathless psychodrama. So what would he write about? It turns out he needn’t have worried.

Ahead of his new book, The Bonfire of the Insanities, our parliamentary sketch writer took stock of the political scene: from Labour’s serial cockups to the Conservatives’ impressive ability to be even less popular.

The Bonfire of the Insanities by John Crace (Guardian Faber Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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3. ‘The English person with a Chinese stomach’: how Fuchsia Dunlop became a Sichuan food hero

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How exactly, asked Leslie T Chang, did a waiguoren – a Cambridge-educated white woman who grew up 5,000 miles away – become accepted as an authority on matters so important to the Chinese? “Amid China’s rapid transition to a modern industrialised nation,” Chang wrote, “traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, to sift through the tradition, and to taste the dishes as if for the first time. Along the way, she has become the voice of a more authentic past.”

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4. ‘Possibly the most prolific sex offender in British history’: the inside story of the Medomsley scandal

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In 2012, when Simon Hattenstone and our late prisons correspondent Eric Allison wrote about the scandal of sexual and physical abuse at Medomsley detention centre in north-east England, it was the first time any of the thousands of victims had told their stories to the UK national press. That story led to Operation Seabrook, followed by Operation Deerness, the latter of which reported back last week, finding that Neville Husband, a prison officer at Medomsley, was “possibly the most prolific sex offender in British history”.

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5. Undisciplined? Entitled? Lazy? Gen Z faces familiar flood of workplace criticism

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Millennials were once derided as lazy, entitled, delusional, narcissistic and unreliable, too: many of the same accusations now levelled at gen Z. But there are marked generational differences between gen Z and its predecessors, reported Jenna Zaza: flexibility, purpose and employees’ wellbeing matter more than overtime and promotions.

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6. Master System at 40: the truth about Sega’s most underrated console

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Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the markets in Japan and the US. But in Europe, a technologically superior rival was making it look like an ancient relic. Guardian video games writer Keith Stuart looked back at the wonders of the Sega Master System, a console that helped introduce a generation to gaming, as well as a swath of classic games and arcade ports.

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