Good morning, happy Friday to those for whom such concepts of time are relevant and welcome to Five Great Reads, your weekday summertime wrap of interest, intrigue and great feature writing, lovingly handpicked by me, Guardian Australia’s pilates and pilaf editor, Alyx Gorman.

If you’re looking for big headlines, you’ve come to the wrong place. Please allow me to divert you to the Morning Mail for a briefing on the day’s big stories, and to our live blog for news as it breaks – yes, that includes rolling Djokovic updates.

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For those already receiving this as an email, sorry I keep banging on about the box, it’s the nature of digital publishing. But on the plus side, you’re about to see a very cute picture as we move into our reads.

1. Do these illusive marsupials have a secret island hideaway?

For decades the mahogany glider has lived a precarious existence, with all known wild gliders living along a fragmented strip of coastal woodland just 120km long, Graham Readfern writes. Now conservationists are hoping a pocket of the tenacious creatures may be found in a second, secret home on nearby Hinchinbrook Island.

Notable quote: Andrew Dennis, who is coordinating a project to save the gliders, says the sneaky little nectar eaters are hard to catch in traps, or on camera. Their only weakness? Raspberry cordial. “We have to spray quite a bit of it around the camera and the cages,” says Dennis.

Very relatable animal description: “The gliders are awkward and vulnerable on the ground.”

How long will it take me to read? About three minutes.

2. How work-worship leads to burnout

In an extract from his new book the End of Burnout, Jonathan Malesic explains why you might be dreading the return to work right now – especially if you love your job.

Notable quote: “The system that gives esteem to engaged employees also creates anxiety only quelled through working more intensively,” Malesic writes. “The cure is also the poison.”

Historical gossip: Have you heard of Max Weber? One of the fundamental figures in sociology, the one who wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism? The bro burned out like a matchstick. Malesic writes: “He spent five years dealing with “nervous exhaustion”. He went through several cycles of intense teaching and research, followed by physical and mental collapse.”

How long will it take me to read? Five minutes.

3. What it’s like to spend four years filming a cow

Oscar winning director Andrea Arnold on her new documentary, Cow, which writer Simon Hattenstone calls “one of the most beautifully crafted and tender portraits of a life you are likely to see”.

Tell me more about the cow? Her name is Luma, and she was chosen for the film because of her feisty personality. “They say the difference between humans and animals is that we can see the past and think about the future,” Arnold says. “But I could see Luma knew what’s coming when she’s pregnant. She got particularly mad when she saw the farmer taking away a calf from another cow.”

4. Intimate images being passed around without consent

It’s there in the name – we think of “revenge porn” as sexual imagery being posted by a vengeful ex. But the problem is far more diffuse, a “collector culture” perpetrated by legions online who gather, upload and archive nude images, with as much detail about the subjects as possible attached.

Notable quote: “Women are prizes to be passed around, shared and traded like a dystopian version of Pokémon,” says Zara Ward, a senior practitioner at the Revenge Porn Helpline. “We often don’t know how these people gained the images in the first place – it could be exes, friends, or hackers ... All we see on the comments is women consistently and aggressively objectified, humiliated and exposed.”

Is that happening here? Yes. Professor Nicola Henry, socio-legal scholar at RMIT, has studied the motives of perpetrators, and found “it’s … commonly related to sexual gratification or impressing online peers.

“For instance,” she says “on some sites, images of wives and girlfriends are shared to get positive feedback from other users.”

How long will it take me to read? Six minutes. But you’ll be haunted for much longer.

5. The ‘time-warp’ of a return to Australia

When Jacqueline Housden came home to Australia mid-pandemic, young family in tow, after 18 years away, she knew it was “going to be an adventure/insane”, but that knowledge didn’t quite prepare her for life back at her parents’ place.

A delightful scene: “Some rules were laid down. Mainly for the kids,” she writes. “There was … a special area the two boys were forbidden to enter, where my dad kept a prized clarinet. It didn’t take us long to break them. The next day, I spied my youngest, crouching silently in the no-go zone, concentrating, his sweaty hands fingering the keys.”

Bonus for those who are too tired to read

We’ll do the reading and you can sit back and listen, with our new literary podcast Book It In. This week Paul Daley chats with YA author Rawah Arja on getting inside the mind of a teenage boy.