Good morning Canada! I always pick the articles for Saturday’s newsletter based on what I like best, but today I’m going to let The Conversation readers choose with their eyeballs.

One thing I love about our content management system is its built-in metrics dashboard, which shows how many times an article was read. I’m plucking the headlines from the eight most-read articles published in English by our international editions since last Saturday, and at the top of the list is a story that touches Canadian soil, given that some of our citizens (it’s unclear how many) have Israeli-Canadian citizenship and have served in the Israel Defense Forces.

At Edith Cowan University in Australia, law professors Shannon Bosch and Joshua Aston write about the legal ramifications for dual citizens who enlist in the IDF and their home countries, which got more than 130,000 reads. The authors surveyed 10 countries, including Canada, and note all are party to treaties requiring them to prevent and punish war crimes, which exposes soldiers to the risk of prosecution at home. Despite RCMP assurances its “structural investigation” into possible Israel-Hamas war crimes does not target “any community or group,” the authors point out some Israeli-Canadian IDF reservists fear they are in the crosshairs.

Justin Dunnavant’s account of his mission to find evidence of a 200-year-old settlement for escaped slaves on St. Croix, the Caribbean island that the Danish West India-Guinea Company bought from France in 1733, was next up with 115,000 reads. The UCLA archeologist and his team used computer modelling, high-resolution mapping and lidar to try to locate Maronberg, where the fugitives known as Maroons hid from their Dutch masters. Physical evidence is elusive, since the refugees built semi-permanent structures on inaccessible land, but the archeologist says they are one step closer to excavating – and honouring – the Maroon legacy.

Then we have a book review of The Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch from Janine Schloss, a PhD candidate at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, which was read 75,000 times. Finch, the son of a Melbourne butcher who converted to Judaism, guided some 10,000 souls – many of them Holocaust survivors – to the other side as director of the city’s Jewish burial society. “As we tread a non-linear path, carefully and mutually laid by [author Katia] Ariel and Finch, readers might feel their own fears and experiences of grief soften and morph, into something more open to the crossing that awaits,” Schloss writes.

A close fourth, with 73,000 reads, was a new Australian study of long COVID, which led Deakin University professors Genevieve Pepin and Danielle Hitch, and Kieva Richards from La Trobe University, to conclude its symptoms are more akin to a stroke or Parkinson’s disease. In their survey of 121 adults who caught COVID-19 between 2020 and 2022, patients reported “worse disability than 98% of the general Australian population” and “86% of those … met the threshold for serious disability.”

At the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, history and peace studies professor Asher Kaufman’s analysis of Israel as a pariah state garnered almost 72,000 reads. The Israeli academic writes that Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence in the face of mounting criticism of the Gaza war is having grave consequences for its citizens, from tourists being harassed in Greece to academics who refuse to collaborate with scholars to surging support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement.

When Canadians think about gun ownership, the U.S. Constitution’s right to bear arms comes to mind, but more than 58,000 readers wanted to know why the number of firearms and licences are growing in Australia after two police officers were shot and killed on Monday. At Griffith University, gun-violence expert and principal research fellow Samara McPhedran says firearm-related homicides, suicides and armed robberies “are low and stable,” but population growth and the government’s hard-line stance on gun ownership may be partly to blame for the proliferation of weapons.

Sticking with murder and mayhem Down Under, mushroom murderess Erin Patterson gets some sympathy from University of Sydney Technology law professor Thalia Anthony, whose article about the inhumanity of keeping Patterson in an isolation cell for 400 days was read 55,000 times. “A principle of modern democracies where the rule of law prevails … is that people are sent to prison as punishment – not for punishment,” Anthony writes.

Sociologist Jeffrey Dixon, who studies job insecurity at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, hit home with his article about why AI will turbocharge American exceptionalism and turn workers’ fears of losing their jobs into reality. His “techno-pessimist” view resonated, accumulating 54,000 reads.

This is all in just six days (because I don’t write this on Saturday at 5 a.m.), and these authors’ contributions will continue to attract readers in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping you give them some well-deserved attention.

Enjoy the long weekend!