Seen and heard: January to March 2025

The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy – enjoyable and informative memoir by an Australian GP, from the time of his diagnosis with multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer) through treatment to full remission. He's a writer as well as a GP - of fiction, drama and poetry, not only medical reminiscences - so this is a pleasure to read: full of imagery and perception. There's a wry sense of humour throughout, which he seems to be blessed to share with his wife and constant companion, and which introduces an ironic detachment into what might otherwise have been either bleak or merely clinical.

Everything Everywhere All At Once – Oscar-winning fantasy film. I liked it in the end (heartwarming and sentimental in the final act, and I’m a sucker for that), but found it very confusing to begin with because of the constant switching of genres. (American immigrant drama? high concept science fiction? techno-thriller? kung fu movie? knockabout comedy?) Of course that’s part of the point; the clue's in the title. And Michelle Yeoh is great, of course, continually switching between different versions of her character.

Elizabeth is Missing – BBC drama, and a very sympathetic and empathetic portrayal of dementia with the late Glenda Jackson in one of her last roles, troubled and disturbed by the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth, which – as we gradually realise – has triggered recollections of the mysterious disappearance of her sister many years ago, when they were both young. The early scenes are especially good, putting you firmly on her side when other people are ignoring her concerns and treating her like an idiot, but so equally are the later scenes as we become aware of the all-too-real failings in her memory and cognitive powers. The payoff finds her both vindicated and culpable: a sweet-sour ending, which seems fitting.

Howl’s Moving Castle – 2004 Studio Ghibli film, based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones. The combination of Japanese animation (from Hayao Miyazaki) and Welsh story produces something quite different from the usual American studio output: an old woman as main character (actually, she's a young woman under an enchantment, but she behaves like an old woman), a young and good-looking wizard, and a powerful anti-war sentiment, with vivid sequences of planes raining down bombs on defenceless cities below – recollections from Miyazaki's own childhood. Perhaps not his greatest film (common opinion accords that honour to My Neighbour Totoro), but it intrigued and touched me, which I suspect is just what Miyazaki intended.

Vera – the final season for everyone's favourite Newcastle detective, and a wonderful send-off too with a pair of quality episodes. Very satisfying it was to see Vera, now retired (instead of taking a promotion into desk-bound seniority) walking her dog along the causeway to Holy Island, and in the follow-up documentary to see Brenda Blethyn as herself: to be reminded of just how different she is from Vera in real life and therefore what a good actor she is.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool – moving portrayal of the real-life romance between the Oscar-winning actor Gloria Grahame and a much younger lad from Liverpool. The story's tensions arise around their age difference, Grahame's scandalous past, and her reluctance to confide to her lover that her cancer has returned and that she is dying. Great performances by Annette Benning and Jamie Bell are what give this film its power.

Lost Echo – interesting but (for me) finally unsatisfying adventure game (despite a good review), in which a scientist-inventor hunts for his girlfriend who has mysteriously gone missing – at least, as he remembers it, because no one else has any recollection of her having existed at all. The usual conspiracy tropes are deployed, though here mixed in with elements of time travel and manufactured memory. It all adds up to a world in which reality is shifting and nothing is secure – which is fair enough, but it does mean the end doesn't provide any kind of closure or conclusion, and I do like stories with an ending: a reason to finish at that point rather than somewhere else.

Resonance – another interesting but (for me) unsatisfying adventure game (again, despite a good review), my difficulties with this being mainly due to the complex control system. There are four controllable characters, and the inventory of each contains memories (both short-term and long-term) as well as objects, which provides just too many different ways one might try to achieve a desired result, even if you know what you're supposed to do. Eventually I gave up and followed a walkthrough, and I wasn't impressed by the story (something about a newly-discovered source of energy which could also be used as a weapon); I didn't really care about the characters or what happened to their world, and when one of them was revealed to be evil and to have been lying all along (how can this happen in a player character, with whom you're supposed to be building up empathy?) I lost patience. There are better games out there.

Operencia – turn-based role-playing game, essentially an old school dungeon crawler but with gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, and a decent story with a middle-European feel (the characters have names like Jóska, pronounced Yoshka) rather than the usual Dungeons and Dragons vibe (basically Americanised Tolkien). I enjoyed this very much, though I did need to go back a couple of chapters at one point (I'd chosen the wrong skills for my characters so they were too weak to overcome the increasingly lethal monsters). What made me abandon it in the end was a particularly nasty trap – a field of moving spikes – which I just didn't have the speed of hand-eye coordination to pass. A pity; I liked the character I created (an oriental hunter called Bao Zhai), and I did want to follow the story through to its conclusion.

Astrid: Murder in Paris – I listed this excellent French TV detective show in a post last year, but I found the latest season (the fourth) a bit disappointing; perhaps the show has passed its peak. We've already learned about the things which terrify Astrid and how she copes with them, and we know about Raphaëlle's chaotic personal life and how she tries to keep Astrid safe so that she can do her crime-solving autistic savant thing, so there's not the same pleasure of discovery. So I went back to Season 1 to enjoy the show from the start.

The Conversation – 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film, with Gene Hackman as a top-ranking surveillance engineer, tasked with covertly recording the conversation between a woman and a man in a city square. I'd been vaguely aware of this film, especially from the point of view of sound design, and I was delighted to discover how well it still works as a slow-burning thriller. The classic features of 1970s cinema – a sense of alienation and a snail-like pace – fit perfectly with the story and with Hackman's isolated, work-focused character. The soundscape, on which his professional intensity encourages you to concentrate, is truly haunting, particularly the conversation itself, which you hear repeatedly until you know it almost as well as Hackman's character does, and still there is something in it which you hear shockingly for the first time towards the end of the film. A true classic.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré – audio book read by Michael Jayston, who played Peter Guillam in the BBC TV dramas, and who does a creditable impression of Alec Guiness when speaking as George Smiley, which is what one wants and expects. The story flicks between London, where Smiley is struggling to revive the reputation of the Circus after its betrayal by double-agent Bill Haydon (the Mole), and the Far East (Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia), where dissolute aristocractic journalist Jerry Westerby (the Hourable Schoolboy of the title) is despatched as part of Smiley's plan to ensnare a mole within Red China. Sad and unhappy, like most of Le Carré's novels, but also powerful and vivid in an unpleasant way, dripping with tawdry 1970s atmosphere and a sense of the British Empire in its final decline.

Old Skies: review

Wadjet Eye have done it again: proved that it's possible to create a really great 2D point-and-click adventure game, if you have a cracking story, characterful dialogue writing and voice acting that is nothing short of stellar. 

I've been waiting to play this game for several years, ever since I saw a video of creator Dave Gilbert talking at AdventureX 2019 about an experimental game he'd produced for a jam. He showed a clip of it, in which a time traveller named Fia - some kind of agent in pursuit of a fugitive - lands in a city street and contacts her remote handler, Nozzo. "What's your status?" he asks. "I've got a splitting headache," she replies. "Didn't the Brass say this was a painless procedure?" She then discovers that her kit bag is missing. "Oh. Um. That's bad," he says. "Yes, Nozzo. That's bad," Fia replies with feeling. "How d'you expect me to find Monty without the tracker?" That was the extent of the clip, just 40 seconds long (from 13:55 to 14:35), but it sold it to me. I liked Fia's resolute but slightly stroppy attitude and her collegially affectionate relationship with Nozzo, and I wanted to see more of her and her adventures. So here she is at last in a full-length game, once again voiced by Sally Beaumont who brought her so vividly to life from a short sketchy script for the game jam.

Fia works for an organisation called ChronoZen, which sends rich clients on short trips into the past as a sort of temporal tourism. Playing as Fia, your job - with Nozzo's support - is to give them the experience they want (things they want to see, people they want to meet, even - within strict limits - things they want to change), while making sure that no harm comes to them or to the timeline. Of course, this being an adventure game, the missions are never as simple as they sound. In one, the client runs off by himself and Fia has to track him down and find out what he is trying to do, because he clearly has an agenda other than the one he declared to ChronoZen. In another, the person the client has longed to meet, because he was a role model for her, turns out to be a protection-money collector for one of New York’s gangs, so that Fia has her work cut out to prevent them both from being killed. 

It's when Fia gets killed for the first time that you find out about the Emergency Rewind Protocol: if she dies, Nozzo can rewind time by a few seconds, or a few minutes, to give her another chance. This is no pain-free re-spawning, though, as in many an RPG; each time she's revived, Fia winces with agony, and she retains full memory of how she died. Here's where the game really shows its quality: it would have been so easy to reuse the same dialogue each time, but instead Fia's rising irritation with the repeating events and her failure to escape the death loop is reflected in her dialogue options. She starts to anticipate what her antagonist will say, or comes out with something like "Let's skip ahead to the part where you hit me." Not only does this cushion the player against getting bored or irritated, her use of irony to defuse and cope with adversity is expressive of Fia's character. It doesn't prevent her from being killed again, though. ("You know, I'm really fed up with getting shot in the head.")

The puzzles which advance the story are mostly solved through dialogue choices or through use of information gathered from other characters, the environment, or the biographical database to which Fia has access. No implausibly large inventories here; once again, the dependence on conversation, setting and history works to build a rich sense of the characters and the worlds they inhabit. Even when you get stuck on a puzzle, you can have Fia ask Nozzo for advice; he effectively acts as a built-in hint system, but one that deepens immersion in the game rather than breaking it, because giving helpful advice is what his character does, and it never feels like cheating to ask him for help.

As with Wadget Eye’s previous hit Unavowed, the game is divided into chapters, each of which represents a discrete mission with its own story arc. But again as with Unavowed, there is a larger story arc, which emerges gradually over the individual chapters. There are hints about this larger story right from the beginning. Fia, like all ChronoZen agents, is insulated from chrono-shifts, changes to the timeline; when historical reality is changed, through accident or design, she remains unchanged, with memory of the previous reality, and all previous realities. This means that she avoids becoming attached to things which may suddenly disappear. She doesn't have a favourite restaurant or favourite place; they change too much. For the same reason, as we learn during the course of her missions, she doesn't follow sport and knows nothing about art. In an early scene, she tries to pick up a man at a bar, and just as the conversation is starting to go well, there;s a chrono-shift and his disappears from existence. And what does she do, with an unexpectedly free evening? She goes into work, to see if there are any late clients requiring escorting. No matter how good at her job she is, no matter how dedicated, this is shaping up to be a life of personal isolation and non-commitment.

Without being heavy or overly serious - and there are some very funny moments in this game - Old Skies packs an emotional punch, prompting thoughts about meaning and purpose and the nature of a life well-lived. The questions confronting Fia are an amplification of the questions which confront every one of us, once we become aware of the inescapable change and impermanence of things. How can one leave one's mark on the world if everything is prone to erasure from existence? What. if anything, is it worth caring about, if it can be taken away from one in an instant? Does what we do really matter?

Having played the game through to its thrilling conclusion, I'm not sure whether Fia's story has a happy ending or a sad ending. Perhaps that doesn't matter. I'm very glad to have known her and gone through it all with her. And now it's over, I'm feeling bereft and lost. So sorry, Dave, but for me the countdown starts now. I'm waiting for your next hit game!

Buy Old Skies for PC on GOG or on Steam.

Cuttings: April 2025

Social media is awash with ‘heteropessimism’. Do young women really think so poorly of men? – article by Rachel Connolly in The Guardian. "As a millennial woman with a phone, I have felt bombarded by social media content expressing [heteropessimist] sentiment for a while, and it seems to be reaching a crescendo. In a recent thoughtful piece for the New York Times, Marie Solis analysed the growing popularity of heteropessimist declarations from relatively young women since 2019, when the term was coined, through to a fresh spike coinciding with Trump’s second election win. 'In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps,' she wrote, along with female celebrities declaring vows of celibacy or identifying as 'self-partnered' (the state of being happy and fulfilled alone)... I have found the strident 'boysober' and 'self-partnered' iterations of this trend cheering. The shrugging passivity of heteropessimism always struck me as mystifying. What do women, in the 2020s, need relationships with men for?... In the absence of a mass movement of women actually doing this, though, I’m not convinced that heterosexual relationships really are so irredeemably unsatisfying. Online communication is inherently performative. It is not a metric of how people truly feel, but more what they think they will be rewarded for saying. Heteropessimism mirrors other forms of progressive discourse over the past decade, which have placed a high premium on declaring self-awareness about participating in oppressive systems – capitalism, say – and describing their problematic elements without necessarily doing anything about them."

My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois? – article by Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian. "I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole. And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get more insufferably bourgeois than that. At the same time, I am pushing 40 and living with my mum because I can’t afford to rent anything larger than a broom cupboard, so I feel as though I am in class limbo – fitting in with everyone and no one at the same time.... In 2011, the BBC ... teamed up with the sociologist Prof Mike Savage and a group of his colleagues at the London School of Economics to try to bring the idea of class into the 21st century [proposing] seven classes: the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, the traditional working class, emergent service workers and the precariat. I fed the BBC’s online survey my details, including salary, housing situation and interests. My result: precariat. The lowest on the totem pole. Then I did the test again. This time, I fessed up to going to the gym, listening to classical music and enjoying the theatre, as well as playing video games and watching football. I experienced rapid social mobility, ending up as an emergent service worker – and even more confused. Looking back, my confusion and sense of being in limbo arose from ignorance and misunderstanding. My view of a working-class person was someone who wore overalls and worked with their hands; I saw the middle classes as home‑owning office workers in business attire. Academia confuses the issue even more with its obsession with stratification. But [film maker Ken Loach] has helped me clear some of the fog in my mind. Our society is like a commuter train. There are a few very well-off people in the front, with their own seats, tables and ample legroom; everyone else is stuffed into the carriages behind them. Some passengers are lucky enough to get a seat, but most are on their feet and cramped together, attempting to disappear from the agony via headphones and screens, trying to remember why they put themselves through this every day. Every year, the standard carriages get more and more crammed. Meanwhile, first class has fewer passengers and is roomier than ever. At what point do the rest of us get fed up with playing sardines and take up the rest of the train? I don’t know, but noticing your fellow passengers would be a good start. Then we may realise that we are all in this together."

Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded. This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.... Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean."

The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? – article by Sam Freedman in The Guardian. "One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their worldview. But that hasn’t stopped Musk... The barges used by SpaceX to land their booster rockets are all named after spaceships from the Culture books. Musk’s entire career stems from trying to replicate sci-fi novels. His desire to colonise Mars was sparked by the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov (another staunch leftwinger).... Musk isn’t alone in his enthusiasms. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed his company and sunk $100bn in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a word that first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash... If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem.... The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were growing up, was Cyberpunk... As historian Richard Hofstadter noted in his famous 1964 essay, the 'paranoid style' has been a feature of rightwing American politics for a long time – but The Matrix has given it a new vocabulary and imagery. The red pill Neo takes, choosing to escape his simulation and see reality, was repurposed by the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, an associate of JD Vance, as the guiding metaphor for the 'alt-right'. That the transgender Wachowski sisters, who directed the film, had in mind a metaphor for their own oppression is bitterly ironic.... Thiel often names companies he backs after Lord of the Rings artefacts.... Palantir, is a global data analytics and software company, a major supplier to the NHS and a defence contractor for numerous governments. It’s named after the powerful seeing stone used by both Saruman and Sauron in their attempts to control the world. Thiel is clearly a Lord of the Rings obsessive – the problem is, it’s not entirely clear which side he wanted to win."

‘Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!’: how video game adaptations became prestige TV – article by Duncan Barrett in The Guardian. "The Last of Us, [now starting its second season, is] a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the [recent] wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre. According to executive producer Carolyn Strauss, .... showrunner Craig Mazin pitched it to her as a story about love: 'He said to me: "This is a show about the good and the bad of what love compels you to do.'... For Mazin, the bold narrative choices of the original games were a large part of their appeal thanks largely to the instincts of creative director Neil Druckmann, with whom he shares a credit on the series.... 'We had lunch and I talked about how much I loved the game and what I thought it was really about, underneath the hood of zombies and fungus and fighting,' he says. 'He’s very protective of it, as well he should be. And at that time, video game adaptations didn’t have a good track record.' That’s putting it mildly. In the past, efforts to drag game characters kicking and screaming into the real world have resulted in some serious stinkers.... But it turns out even the ropiest adaptations have their defenders. 'Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!' laughs Gabriel Luna, who plays Joel’s brother Tommy in the series. 'It’s a good movie!'... [However,] the wacky adventures of Bob Hoskins’ New York plumber are a world away from The Last of Us. Season one received near universal praise, scooping up dozens of awards. The source material certainly helps. Take, for example, The Last of Us Part II which the latest season of the HBO adaptation is based on. For me, one of the most powerful moments playing it came when I, as Ellie, was exploring Joel’s house and I found a photograph of his dead daughter, Sarah, on a chest of drawers. The level of 'interaction' is limited to picking up the photo and taking a closer look, just as it might be in real life, and it has no real bearing on the action of the game. But a tiny moment like that can be unbearably powerful. 'You’re going through a series of sequences that the game designers have very carefully crafted to give you a particular experience,' says [Peter Howell, lecturer in computer games design at the University of Portsmouth]. 'Exactly as a director would do in a TV series.'"

It’s not too late to stop Trump and the tech broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now – article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving 'broligarchy' – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics.... What happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I’ve been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it’s also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it’s why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves. What I can’t stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on.... We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week’s talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don’t know where I’d be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that’s falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess."

Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry: the battle to reform English spelling – review by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian. "The idea of the ghoti [pronounced 'fish'] is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries.... In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak. English is a mess, Henry explains, thanks to its complicated parentage, which involves the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. William Caxton, England’s first printer, also deserves some of the blame: his standardisation of spellings in 1476 meant he 'froze our orthography during a time of linguistic flux. Our spellings today are therefore anchored to a pronunciation spoken sometime between Chaucer and Shakespeare, back when we voiced the S in aisle, the G in gnarl, and the K in knife.' Spelling reformers had their work cut out for them, then.... Not everyone failed: Noah Webster’s American dictionary successfully excised letters he thought were extraneous, such as the 'u's in 'colour' and 'honour'... Texting has, of course, made simplifications such as U for 'you' and 'thru' for 'through' more common. Some complain about this as further evidence of the 'deterioration' of language; I have at times been one of them. But Henry’s book gave me a new perspective, cheering for the simplification crowd."

No, you’re not fine just the way you are: time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Moral Ambition. "Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options. Category I jobs: Not that ambitious, not that idealistic. Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads or managing colleagues who don’t need managing.... There’s also a class of not-so-useful jobs. A class of influencers and marketeers, lobbyists and managers, consultants and corporate lawyers – all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine... For some in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s an escape hatch: becoming financially independent. Countless self-help books lay out how to get rich with minimal effort, so you can get out as soon as possible, then kick back and relax.... Category II jobs: Ambitious, but not all that idealistic. ... These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, a fat salary, a corner office or other perks.... Take consultants. These talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today. If you’re among the top in your field, you can afford to go skiing regularly or buy that beach house you always dreamed of. But is that really all you want out of life?... Category III jobs: Idealistic, but not all that ambitious.... You see it in young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and preferably part-time. Sometimes it seems 'ambition' has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good.... In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw.... The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action. But here’s the thing: awareness alone won’t help a soul. It’s at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal. Category IV jobs: Idealistic and ambitious. ... Let me introduce one of my personal heroes, the British author and activist Thomas Clarkson.... In 1787, Clarkson became one of the 12 founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Ten of the others were entrepreneurs. Go through their archives today and you’ll find to-do lists, action plans. While the French abolitionist movement was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was run by merchants and businessmen.... I’ve spent years researching the Clarksons of our time: activists and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and innovators, all bursting with moral ambition. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They don’t just think, 'Someone should do something about that' but take action themselves.... So ask yourself the question: what’s the 'great honour and glory' of your life? What do you hope one day to look back on? 'A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,' writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'but about being worthy of respect.' Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good."

A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right – article by Harry Shukman in The Guardian, adapted from his Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. "Hope Not Hate focuses on monitoring, researching and campaigning against the far right. I contacted their research team in late 2022 to discuss working together. ... I was already spending time undercover in extremist circles. This was a chance to do it more safely, with more guidance.... Going undercover is an extreme strategy, and people may wonder if it was justified.... Leaders in the far right conceal their true nature to present a more acceptable version to potential voters, donors and sometimes their own members. One prominent eugenicist who works in Westminster admitted this tactic after I’d befriended him. 'Everyone puts on the mask,' he said. Only by spending prolonged periods of time with them, winning their trust and being deemed safe is it possible to see those moments when that mask slips and the truth peeks out from underneath. If the far right are using subterfuge to gain ground in politics, then it makes sense to turn their tactics back on them. All this matters right now. The far right is edging towards the mainstream....The Scandza Forum is one of the biggest intellectual far-right gatherings in Europe. [Its conference in Tallinn, Estonia] began with a lecture by a racist Danish academic called Helmuth Nyborg, [according to whom] immigrants of low intelligence are coming to Europe and having lots of babies, threatening intelligent, low-fertility Europeans.... By the end of the Tallinn conference, I realised that ...the race science movement is not composed of fringe weirdos. It is well funded, sophisticated and influential. The penny began to drop while the conference guests were drunkenly milling around after dinner. I heard an English accent and ... introduced myself [to] Matthew Frost, a former private school teacher. Frost described the operation he was running. It’s called Aporia, he said, an online magazine that publishes stories about 'HBD'. HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes and socioeconomic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental ones. HBD, another term for race science, underpins eugenics, the idea that desirable traits can and should be bred.... Incredibly, Frost said he had received a large amount of money from an American investor, someone who made his fortune in the tech world. He wouldn’t tell me who. It would take months to find out."

Where to start with Terry Pratchett – article by Marc Burrows in The Guardian. The entry point. "Most of Pratchett’s books work as entry points. He always wrote with new readers in mind, offering a gentle handhold into his world. But a good choice would be Feet of Clay – a proper police procedural with a great mystery and thoughtful reflections on prejudice, class and the very nature of personhood. And it’s funny, but that’s a given when it comes to Pratchett." The one that will cheer you up. "Witches Abroad, a 1991 Discworld novel about three witches on an epic quest to make sure a poor servant girl doesn’t marry a prince. On the way there are parodies of The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and Hans Christian Andersen stories. Pratchett writes older women beautifully: Nanny Ogg might be one of the finest comic sidekicks in literature." The masterpiece. "Pratchett’s 2002 book Night Watch was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, and rightly so. It’s his angriest and most profound novel – a kind of mashup of Les Misérables and The Terminator via the Peterloo massacre and the battle of Cable Street. It’s about justice, trauma, and how doing the right thing is exhausting, relentless work." The one you'll learn from. "In the author’s 1998 novel, Carpe Jugulum, a family of vampires invade the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, allowing Pratchett to have endless fun with the tropes of gothic fiction. There’s a much darker core to this one, though. It’s a story about who we are and about right and wrong." The one that will make you laugh out loud. "A slightly obscure pick, but I loved the 1999 spin-off Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. The recipes themselves are largely irrelevant. The real gold is Nanny’s etiquette advice; this is some of the best comic character writing Pratchett ever did." The one that deserves more attention. "The Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind; Johnny and the Dead; and Johnny and the Bomb.... Often overshadowed by Discworld, these young adult books are smart, warm, and full of big ideas handled lightly." The one that will make you cry. "The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry’s final novel, published just months after his death in 2015. It’s his farewell to Discworld and its characters. There’s a death scene I still struggle to read. It’s graceful, brave and completely unshowy."

Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future – article by Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a 'low-IQ individual' is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being 'high-IQ' is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right.... It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright. One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy .... From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or 'neo-reaction', he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.... IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor ... who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were 'lower IQ' compared with those in the Democratic party.... All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called 'living with inequality'. Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ... The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well."

Old Skies – review by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu on Adventure Game Hotspot. "100%. Old Skies takes the well-worn concept of time travel and shoots it back through history to make it fresh again. It’s a beautiful, wonderfully written and acted tale both epic and personal, with enough time-bending conundrums to keep even the most jaded adventure gamer guessing. Pros. Epic centuries-spanning story that feels both grandiose and deeply personal. Superb cast of characters brought to life with phenomenal voice acting. Stunning art direction and attention to detail in every era visited. Ingenious puzzle design revolving around your death(s) and collecting information rather than relying on typical item-based brain teasers. Beautiful musical score masterfully captures the feel of each historical period. Cons. No way to rewind your own reality (yet) to play it again for the first time."

Cuttings: March 2025

Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home: the wonder of the wireless revolution – review by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. "Rubens, a BBC producer for more than 35 years, is keen for her book to show how radio affected people’s lives – 'the shift in household habits, the awakenings of new tastes, the alterations and adaptations of attitudes'. Evidence for this was minimal before she discovered the work of two pioneering audience researchers, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, whose 1938 explorations into radio’s effects on working-class people in Barton Hill, near Bristol, was published, and quickly overlooked, in the week Britain declared war on Germany. In a box in the Bodleian Library, Rubens found the pamphlet and Gill’s original notepads, full of rare examples of early feedback. These included radio’s effects on a man who was once drunk and abusive ..., a Welsh grocer obsessed with the news ... and a husband who tunes the radio to foreign-language stations when he leaves for work, so his wife can’t understand it, then disconnects it completely when he goes away for a conference. 'She’s left him now,' trills the interviewee on this subject. Rubens’s findings may have been the book’s impetus, but other stories around the development of radio put flesh on these bones.... The finest testimony, however, comes from a 1928 letter to the BBC from a 'clerk in a provincial city'. His life is 'a tram-ride to the office, lunch in a tea-shop or saloon bar, a tram-ride home' and he can’t spend much money, 'because you’ve got your holidays to think of'. But, he adds: 'Please don’t think I’m complaining. I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It’s a real magic carpet.' Almost 100 years later, despite our world being so very different to his, radio, at its best, continues to be."

Researchers fool university markers with AI-generated exam papers – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university’s markers – who were not told about the project – flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students. The authors said their findings showed that AI processors such as ChatGPT were now passing the 'Turing test' – named after the computing pioneer Alan Turing – of being able to pass undetected by experienced judges. Billed as 'the largest and most robust blind study of its kind' to investigate if human educators could detect AI-generated responses, the authors warned that it had major implications for how universities assess students."

It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "The first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart. Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project.... Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they’d keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn’t how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable.... Rather cheeringly, however, it seems ... gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way. Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and 'digital detox' events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection."

Finishing a book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The writer. [Picture shows him hard at work.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The agent: 'It's great! I have a few notes.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The editor: 'It's great! I have a few suggestions.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The readers: 'It's great! We need a sequel!' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.]"

‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth – interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "One of the things he has been thinking about recently is his responsibilities as a writer. 'I’ve become quite wary of the power to provoke emotions in readers... And most of my writing life, that’s how I justified my job. I would say that you won’t learn much about history from me; go to a historian. However, a novelist can provide the emotional dimension; we offer some sort of emotional truth that is not there in nonfiction, however scrupulously well researched and documented.' But over the last few years, he’s become increasingly worried that stirring up strong emotional responses has a far darker dimension, as we see in the way that political movements are able to harness citizens by appealing to their instincts rather than to evidence. 'In the post-truth Trump era, there’s this relentless attack on accredited news media. It’s not just Trump: it’s a general atmosphere that whatever the evidence, if you don’t like it, you can just claim some alternative emotional truth for yourself....' That can only be intensified, he believes, by the increasing power of AI. 'AI will become very good at manipulating emotions. I think we’re on the verge of that. At the moment we’re just thinking of AI crunching data or something. But very soon, AI will be able to figure out how you create certain kinds of emotions in people – anger, sadness, laughter.'... So in a post-truth society aided by AI and algorithms, is it enough for fiction to pack an emotional punch? 'If I was deploying that kind of gift for the service of a politician or for a large corporation that wanted to sell pharmaceuticals, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was commendable, you’d be highly suspicious of it. But if I’m doing it in the service of telling a story, that is considered to be something really valuable,' he says. 'It’s something that increasingly makes me feel uneasy, because I haven’t been praised for my incredible style, or because in my fiction I exposed great injustices in the world. I’ve usually been praised for producing stuff that makes people cry.' He laughs. 'They gave me a Nobel prize for it.'"

Opening our eyes to the science of sleep, in 1971 – archival exploration by Genevieve Fox in The Guardian. "'Sleep is like love. If you have it, you take it for granted,’ reports Wendy Cooper in the Observer Magazine on 24 January 1971.... In special sleep laboratories throughout the world, the ‘secrets of the strange phenomenon of sleep are being properly investigated for the first time,’ enthuses Cooper. They are armed with a new wonder machine: the electro-encephalograph (EEG), which detects the minute electrical changes taking place in the brain, amplifying and recording them.... The real excitement starts, says Cooper, when ‘the eyes make rapid jerky coordinated movements… This indicates a special form of sleep known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep; the brainwaves at these times resemble waking brainwaves and the body parallels this with a storm of activity’. Irregular heart-rate, increased oxygen intake, reduced muscle tone, It’s all preparation for action in the sleeper’s ‘personal world of dreams’, dreams that are vivid, ‘emotional, self-involved and often bizarre adventures’. This association between REM sleep and active dreaming is ‘perhaps the most exciting discovery so far made in sleep research’ – for ‘it makes possible the scientific study of dreams’."

The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: are we really getting sicker? – review by Mark Honigsbaum in The Guardian. "As medicine has become more sophisticated and we have developed more sensitive tests and treatments, so more and more people have acquired diagnostic labels. As Suzanne O’Sullivan, who has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, argues in The Age of Diagnosis, this can be a good thing if the diagnosis leads to greater understanding and improved treatments, but not if the diagnosis is not as definitive as we think and risks medicalising people without long-term benefits to their health. For example, as many as half a million people in Australia are reported to have Lyme disease, even though the Lyme-carrying ticks are not present in Australia. Worldwide, the condition has an estimated 85% overdiagnosis rate. Or consider autism. Fifty years ago, autism was said to affect four in 10,000 people. Today, the worldwide prevalence is one in 100 and in the UK diagnoses of autism increased 787% between 1998 and 2018. Similarly, the proportion of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, a term first coined in 1987 to describe fidgety children who had trouble concentrating, doubled in boys and tripled in girls between 2000 and 2018 and today the diagnosis is also increasingly being applied to adults. But what if these reported increases do not reflect an actual increase in the prevalence of these conditions but are examples of 'diagnosis creep'? As O’Sullivan writes: 'It could be that borderline medical problems are becoming ironclad diagnoses and that normal differences are being pathologised… In other words: we are not getting sicker – we are attributing more to sickness.'”

The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: do no harm – review by Adam Rutherford in The Guardian. "Thirty years a doctor, 25 a neurologist, [O'Sullivan's] excellent books occupy a space once dominated by Oliver Sacks, where individual tales of disease and distress reveal broader truths about science, medicine and people.... She describes a trinity of 'overs'. Overdiagnosis, where a medical problem is treated when treatment might not be needed; overmedicalisation, where non-medical behaviours are turned into the business of doctors; and underlying both, overdetection: we are ever better at identifying signals of disease, sometimes earlier than necessary, when those indicators may not end up presaging the disease itself. For example, some studies have shown that early screening programmes for cancers may result in arduous treatment when cancer itself was not inevitable. Alongside balanced analysis of the epidemiological data on prostate and breast cancer, O’Sullivan examines the growth in behavioural conditions such as autism and ADHD. The tone is not sneering or dismissive, as debunkings of bad science so often can be. O’Sullivan is instead full of compassion, care and grace.... O’Sullivan is brave to take this subject on, and she hits the target. I have little tolerance for tedious old men droning on about how 'in our day, you just got on with things', or 'now everyone’s got autism/ADHD', or worst of all that young people today are delicate snowflakes, medicalising everything and blaming everyone else. Apart from anything, this sentiment has been expressed by every older generation for thousands of years. So how do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from rightwing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."

They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed – article by J Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. "Ziz’s writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the 'rationalists'. The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology and the big questions of our time. Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all. They debate with earnest and deadly seriousness, and their preferred arena of intellectual combat is dense blogposts, often with footnotes.... Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead. From there, the story grew stranger. Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord. A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, transgender. But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.... How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead? What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having 'dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer' – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death? The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come."

Universality by Natasha Brown: clever satire of identity politics – review by Jo Hamya in The Guardian. "The first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses [a gold bar] to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining 'microsociety' on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic.... Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with 'multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend'. A perfect symbol, in short, of 'the excessive fruits of late capitalism'.... [But] after the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters’ perspectives. We learn to read carefully.... [After her previous novel Assembly,] Brown is having more fun within the constraints of our current sociopolitical discourse. Universality is less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core question: nothing about the language in it is neutral. Pronouncements on 'wokeism', on meritocracy, on race and culture wars fall from characters’ mouths like bombs. Thanks to the novel’s ingenious structure, the more you hear them, the more you realise how inhibiting they are, and how soul-crushingly tiring it is to spend your one precious life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and utterly useless system: a realisation only one character profits from, though dangerously so. It’ll be interesting to watch Brown navigate her publicity run in an era of tech bros heralding a very particular mode of free speech. If Assembly was a meditation on the linguistic construction of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identity, then the final two chapters of Universality successfully consolidate this new novel as an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths."

Unearthed notebooks shed light on [Michael Faraday, the] Victorian genius who inspired Einstein – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "The little-known notebooks of the Victorian scientist Michael Faraday have been unearthed from the archive of the Royal Institution and are to be digitised and made permanently accessible online for the first time. The notebooks include Faraday’s handwritten notes on a series of lectures given by the electrochemical pioneer Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in 1812.... The notebooks shed light on the workings of Faraday’s mind and reveal he made intricate drawings to visualise the scientific experiments and principles he was learning about at the lectures. 'He’s taking the time to make his own publication and grounding what’s being taught to him in his own understanding,' said [Charlotte New, head of heritage for the Royal Institution]. 'He’s heavily illustrating his notes to understand the principle that’s been taught to him.' He even wrote an index for each notebook, she said, just for his own use and personal research.... A curated selection of key pages from the notebooks will be launched online for the first time on the Royal Institution website on 24 March, to mark 200 years since Faraday founded the annual Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Inspired by Davy’s talks to pursue a career in science, Faraday established these lectures in 1825 in the hope of encouraging others in the same way.... Eventually, every page of Faraday’s notebooks will be digitised and made searchable online."

The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic - article from 2013 in Slate, referenced in 'The big idea: do we worry too much about misinformation?' by by Adam Kucharski in The Guardian. "Wednesday [30 October 2013] marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. 'Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,' narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program.... That’s the story you already know—it’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories.... There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.... A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case. Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. 'To what program are you listening?' the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio 'play' or 'the Orson Welles program,' or something similar indicating CBS. None said a 'news broadcast,' according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising. Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show."

What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers, from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more – article by James Bailey in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Meaning of Life: Letters from Extraordinary People and their Answer to Life’s Biggest Question. "I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932. I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers.... What follows is a small selection of the responses... Hilary Mantel: 'I’ve had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: “meaning” and “purpose”. I don’t think they’re the same. I’m not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.' ... Michael Frayn: 'Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your anthology of views on the meaning of life. It’s not something I can respond to, I’m afraid, because it’s not clear to me how “life” can have a “meaning” in any ordinary sense of either word. It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut. Once we’ve got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a “meaning”, we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up.'... Kathryn Mannix (palliative care consultant): 'Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That’s what I’ve learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it’s shown me that it isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.'... Susan Pollack (Holocaust survivor): 'I am a camp survivor from Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. I was totally dehumanised, fearful, distrustful, lost to contemplate the future, all alone, unable to comprehend the values for a life in a modern civilisation.... The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was the discovery that kindness and goodwill had also survived. When the British soldier lifted me up from the mud hole – seeing a twitch in my body – he gently placed me in one of the small ambulances. From that experience, miraculous goodwill is one of the guiding lights to this day. I often think of that moment and ask, “What part of that goodness with your heart do you take from that soldier?”'... Oliver Burkeman: 'I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we’re seeking isn’t a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive. There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are “why I’m here” – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who’ve found liberation in something I have written.... What’s changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That’s all – but, then again, I think that is everything.'"

The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley: how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. "In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures ...on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, 'English clocks' and 'British explorers', written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project ... except that, 'at every level except for the texts', this was 'an entirely central European endeavour'. Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson. This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain’s cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children’s literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre ... created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray."

AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End – text of lecture by Stephen Fry for King's College London's Digital Futures Institute, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ll take you back fifteen or so years to a time when I found myself being ... asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called.... What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. ... I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. 'Local and global rivalries will dissolve,' I said. 'Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely,' I cried, 'Twitter and Facebook and this new world of "social media" will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity.' Two years later as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria rose against their dictators, the Arab Spring bloomed. How right I had been. How clever and percipient I was. But… Just a year or so on and that blissful dawn had turned into the darkest of nights. Libya leapt out of the frying pan of Gaddafi into the fire of anarchy and chaos, Egypt into a military coup, Yemen into brutal civil war, Syria into a bloodbath. Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all.... Welcome to today.... Hilariously enough, just like the French Revolution, the Twitter revolution also ended with a little Napoleon seizing power and crowning himself Emperor, a little NapolElon I should say."

The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: haunting accounts of horrific medical abuse – review by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. "William Sargant, ... one of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry,... firmly believed that a broken brain was no different to any other damaged organ or limb, and best fixed with aggressive physical treatment. Not for him the namby-pamby chitchat of Freud’s 'sofa merchants' and their spurious talking cures. Rather, psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia could all be cured with excessive doses of drugs and electricity, or, if they failed, with surgical lobotomy. Sargant’s patients were sequestered away behind locked doors on the top floor of the hospital. The most infamous part of his ward was a six-bedded area known as the Sleep Room. Here, the patients, nearly all of whom were female, were drugged into long-term stupors, being roused from their beds only to be fed, washed or given innumerable doses of ECT. A typical 'narcosis' treatment comprised three months of near-total unconsciousness, after which time the patient had often been reduced to a 'walking zombie' with permanent memory loss. The Sleep Room is peppered with haunting first-hand accounts of horrific treatment at the hands of William Sargant. The actor Celia Imrie, for example, ... was admitted under Sargant’s care because she was close to death from anorexia nervosa. She recounts being forced to drink such large doses of chlorpromazine – the first antipsychotic - that she dribbled, shook uncontrollably and found her hair in clumps on her pillow. She was injected daily with enough insulin to make her drowsy, weak, sweaty and near comatose. She remembers other women around her having huge rubber plugs jammed between their teeth before the high-voltage electricity of ECT was sent through their temples, and their bodies 'shuddered and jerked' with the 'scent of burning hair and flesh'. Sometimes a patient would reappear on the ward with their head thickly bandaged, scarcely able to walk after being lobotomised. Amid the moans, screams and stale stench of sleep, Imrie recalls the nurses reporting her own resistance to the drugs to Sargant, to which he ominously responded: 'every dog has his breaking point. To say that these stories are difficult to read is an understatement. Even as someone who learned, as a medical student, about the unspeakable mid-century vogue for lobotomy – permanently subduing patients by gouging out parts of their frontal lobes – some of the accounts made my skin crawl. It is to Stock’s great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage, allowing several patients to tell their stories at length in their own, unedited words."

Cuttings: February 2025

The PKD [Philip K. Dick] Dystopia – article by Henry Farrell on Programmable Mutter website, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure.... In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s....In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them.... Factories pump out fake Americana in The Man in the High Castle (1962), mirroring the problem of living in a world that is not, in fact, the real one. Entrepreneurs build increasingly human-like androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reasoning that if they do not, then their competitors will. Figuring out what is real and what is not is not easy. Scientific tools such as the famous Voight-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie based loosely on it) do not work very well, leaving us with little more than hope in some mystical force—the I Ching, God in a spray can, a Martian water-witch—to guide us back toward the real. We live in Dick’s world—but with little hope of divine intervention or invasion.”

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem – interview with Ted Chiang by Julien Crockett, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Q: Why is science fiction the best vehicle for you to explore ideas? A: The ideas that most interest me just lean in a science-fictional direction. I certainly think that contemporary mimetic fiction is capable of investigating philosophical questions, but the philosophical questions that I find myself drawn to require more speculative scenarios. In fact, when philosophers pose thought experiments, the scenarios they describe often have a science-fictional feel; they need a significant departure from reality to highlight the issue they’re getting at.... Q: What role does science play in your stories? Or, asked another way, what are the different roles played by science and magic in fiction? A: Some people think of science as a body of facts, and the facts that science has collected are important to our modern way of life. But you can also think about science as a process, as a way of understanding the universe. You can write fiction that is consistent with the specific body of facts we have, or you can write fiction that reflects the scientific worldview, even if it is not consistent with that body of facts. For example, take a story where there is faster-than-light travel. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, but the story can otherwise reflect the general worldview of science: the idea that the universe is an extremely complicated machine, and through careful observation, we can deduce the principles by which this machine works and then apply what we’ve learned to develop technology based on those principles.... By contrast, magic implies a different understanding of how the universe works. Magic is hard to define.... I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t. These are two very different ways of understanding how the universe works, and fiction can engage in either one. Science needs to adhere to the scientific worldview, but fiction is not an engineering project. The author can choose whichever one is better suited to their goals.”

The Prophet-Mystic – Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation by Mirabai Starr, extracted from her article ‘Inconsolable: The Path of the Prophet-Mystic’, ONEING 12, no. 2, The Path of the Prophet (2024): 49–50. “The key to living as a prophet-mystic [that is, a prophet and a mystic] is showing up for what is, no matter how heartbreaking or laborious, how fraught with seemingly intractable conflict and how tempting it might be to meditate or pray our way out of the pain. Contemplative practices train us to befriend reality, to become intimate with all things by offering them our complete attention. In this way, the prophet and the mystic occupy the same broken-open space. The nexus is grief. The mystic has tasted the grace of direct experience of the sacred and then seemingly lost the connection. She feels the pain of separation from the divine and longs for union. The prophet has perceived the brokenness of the world and is incapable of unseeing it. He feels the pain of injustice and cannot help but protest. But the mystic cannot jump to union without spending time in the emptiness of longing. The prophet must sit in helplessness before stepping up and speaking out.”

Television’s magic moments – article by Joe Moran in The Guardian, based on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. “Those bits of television that are collectively recalled as landmark moments are often less significant than we think. The 1953 coronation did not transform us all into viewers in a single avalanche: it just gave the inevitable triumph of TV an obliging shove. Kenneth Tynan was not the first person to use the F-word on television: that was either Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although no one could understand him because he was drunk) or the man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the river Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's teatime magazine programme, Roundabout, that his job was ‘f****** boring’. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, far from being the highwater mark of television's golden age, was not even the highest‑rated show of the 1970s, being roundly beaten by less fondly recalled programmes such as Miss World 1970 and a 1971 edition of The Benny Hill Show. The key moments in the history of our television watching are often surprising, and some of them only seem momentous in retrospect. (1) Gilbert Harding on What's My Line?... (2) The launch of Telstar... (3) The rise of daytime TV... (4) The 1990 World Cup semi-final... (5) The final of Pop Idol.”

How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell – interview by Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “AG: The political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that we’ve had artificial intelligences before in the form of markets and states. A market is just a big information-processing, decision-making device. So, in a funny way, anytime I see that something costs $4.99 and I pay it, I’m giving up a kind of autonomy to the force of the market, right? I’m not acting as I would if I had lived in a foraging culture, for example. We have these large-scale information-processing devices, and markets and states and bureaucracies are really good examples of this, where we give up individual decision-making. Legal systems are like that too. I’m not deciding whether I’m going to cross the street; the traffic light is telling me whether I should cross.… MM: This reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s paperclip apocalypse where a superintelligent AI system behaves in a psychopathic way: it’s given a goal and doesn’t care about the consequences of its actions as long as it is able to achieve that goal. Ted Chiang wrote a piece where he argued that we already have entities that act like that now: they’re called corporations and their goal is maximize shareholder value. I think that’s why Silicon Valley people often worry about what AI is going to do. Corporations maximizing shareholder value is the metaphor they’re using to think about AI systems.”

‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall – article by Shane Hickey in The Guardian. “O2 rolled out ‘AI granny’ Daisy for a short period to show what could be done with artificial intelligence to counter the scourge of scammers who have become so ubiquitous.… In one call O2 released, a scammer tries to take control of her computer after telling her it is riddled with viruses. He is kept on the line while she looks for her glasses and bumbles about trying to turn the machine on and find the Internet Explorer icon.… When [another] scammer tries to get her to download the Google Play Store, she replies: ‘Dear, did you say pastry? I’m not really on the right page.’ She then complains that her screen has gone blank, saying it has ‘gone black like the night sky.’… [The AI system] has been trained on real scam calls, said Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel. ‘It knows exactly the tactics to look out for, exactly the type of information to give to keep the scammers online and waste time,’ he said.… Over a few weeks, Daisy wasted each fraudster’s time for up to 40 minutes when they could otherwise have been scamming real people.”

‘He spent thousands’: how a bank team tries to rescue scam victims – article by Anna Tims in The Guardian. “A widowed pensioner is on the end of the phone and he’s flustered. He’s expecting his girlfriend to move in with him next month. He has never met her, but he has photos of a young blonde woman and weeks of texts pledging her devotion. On an industrial estate in Bootle on Merseyside, Clare is trying to deflate his dreams. She is a call handler on Santander’s Break the Spell team, which is part of the high street bank’s fraud prevention department. It is her job to convince the man that his girlfriend is actually a scammer who has defrauded him of his savings…. The 23 staff on the Break the Spell team deal with customers who have been so thoroughly taken in by a scam that they refuse to accept they are being defrauded. Most of them have been bamboozled into paying their savings into fake investment schemes or the pockets of criminal gangs who woo them online and promise romance. They are referred to Break the Spell by the bank’s fraud contact centre once ordinary interventions fail to persuade them that their transactions are suspect, and it is up to the team to win their trust and save them from themselves. It can take months.”

After 50 years, can’t we shut down this cult of Margaret Thatcher? Just look at the mess she made of Britain – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. “This week marks the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s election as leader of her party. I started counting but lost track of the myriad actors who have played her, some of the greatest of our time…. The problem is that good writers and good actors will produce a human drama of depth, subtlety and intelligence in a character, if flawed, an audience must feel for.… The inevitable result is that even astute and politically savvy writers such as James Graham end up whitewashing what Thatcher and her politics actually did to Britain. This 50-year marker comes at a melancholy time when her actions are rebounding on the country with a vengeance. Polls show the policies she was most famed for are those most voters now bitterly regret. Let’s look at her legacy. The one that most upends her claims to a grocer’s daughter’s thrift is her squandering of North Sea oil proceeds that came onstream just as she arrived in No 10…. She inherited a country moving markedly towards economic equality, but her 1980s policies caused top pay and wealth to soar, while the bottom deciles fell back. Inequality has stayed at that high level ever since…. Other parties envied her popular sale of council homes to tenants at knock-down prices as a stroke of political genius to propel her property-owning democracy. Now with 2m council homes sold, many owned by landlords charging astronomical rents, home ownership in England has fallen from 71% at its peak to 65%, moving further from reach of young renters, with the country trapped in a housing crisis.… Who now would celebrate her privatisations of water, energy, Britoil and a host of public goods at well below market price? A total of £5bn in water debts was written off, with natural monopolies never constrained by weak regulators. Railways were privatised by her successor, following her creed. All this failure on an epic scale has taken decades and serial bankruptcies to acknowledge.… The poll tax that brought her down was not an aberration, but sprang from a profound belief in flat taxes, as she cut top tax rates. That idea of equal taxes she had wisely kept in check until then. Most of these things inevitably slide away from plays and films. There’s a risk they will slip from national memory… Lest we forget, the things she did are doing us immeasurable harm right now. She is not history and certainly not entertainment. She is the unfortunate lived present.”

‘All people could do was hope the nerds would fix it’: the global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on – article by Tom Faber in The Guardian. “Y2K went down in history as a millennial damp squib… To this day experts disagree over why nothing happened: did the world’s IT professionals unite to successfully avert an impending disaster? Or was it all a pointless panic and a colossal waste of money? And given that we live today in a society more reliant on complex technology than ever before, could something like this happen again?… Much of the messaging came from the government-­funded groups Taskforce 2000 and Action 2000. Robin Guenier, previously chief executive of the government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, led the former and was a prominent voice warning of the dangers. At the start, he says, it was tough to get people interested… The remediation work was not sexy. Guenier called the job of scouring raw code for dates that might be problematic an ‘exceptionally boring and unglamorous undertaking’ that involved repeated rounds of testing, because changing code could cause issues elsewhere in the system. It was an enormous job.… By late 1999, most UK organisations felt their systems were prepared. But the global media had other ideas and revelled in fantasies of apocalyptic doomsday scenarios. Articles in Time Magazine and Vanity Fair painted a picture of a Y2K midnight moment, when planes would fall out of the sky, people’s savings would be wiped out in the blink of a cursor, home appliances would explode and nuclear reactors would go into meltdown. It didn’t matter that few experts expected problems of this severity. In the words of Anthony Finkelstein, then a professor of software systems engineering at University College London, for many journalists at the time, the Y2K doomsday story was ‘simply too good to check’…. That’s not to say nothing went wrong…. There were many small failures around the world, mainly due to a lack of preventive action, but most were quickly remedied: police breathalysers in Hong Kong, traffic lights in Jamaica, slot machines in Delaware. Some issues were more serious: 10,000 HSBC card machines in the UK stopped working for three days. Bedfordshire social services were unable to find anyone in their care aged older than 100. The monitoring equipment in a Japanese nuclear power plant briefly shut down, though it caused no risk to the public. Some medical equipment failed, including a few dialysis machines in Egypt and equipment to measure bone marrow in South Korea. Most seriously, 154 women in South Yorkshire and the east Midlands were given incorrect test results regarding their risk level for giving birth to a child with Down’s syndrome, because the system had calculated their ages incorrectly. This directly resulted in two pregnancies being terminated, while four babies were born with Down’s to mothers who had been incorrectly told they were at low risk.… Though these were significant issues, there was no series of cascading faults leading to infrastructural collapse as the doomsayers had warned.… Almost overnight, the tenor of media coverage changed. The bug became a punchline…. The idea that Y2K was a hoax began to take hold in both the media and public memory. People wondered if they’d been wrong to trust the experts. Some historians believe this change of perspective was a reaction to the hyperbolic warnings in the press, which had painted a far more cataclysmic picture than experts actually anticipated, coupled with the fact that some opportunists did exploit Y2K fears to turn a quick buck.… ‘People assumed it was all a big scam’ [says Martyn Thomas, who ran Y2K remediation efforts internationally for Deloitte]. ‘If you insure your house against it burning down and it doesn’t burn down, you’ve wasted your money, haven’t you?’”

English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life – article by Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian. “Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel…. Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to tread a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Führer’s aims. A stage adaptation was even censored, shorn of all its ’Heil Hitlers’. The novel tells the story of a German family struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement. Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised… Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an ‘electrifying masterpiece’.”

I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office – article by Mark Smith in The Guardian. “I am a former diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)…. In August 2024, I resigned over the UK government’s refusal to halt arms sales to Israel amid the bombardment of Gaza.… My time at the FCDO exposed how ministers can manipulate legal frameworks to shield ‘friendly’ nations from accountability…. The UK’s legal framework is clear: arms sales must cease if there is a “clear risk” that weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law. Civil servants are bound by a strict code of impartiality, requiring us to produce neutral, evidence-based advice. Any attempt to alter or manipulate this advice for political convenience is not just unethical – it is unlawful. However, during my tenure, I witnessed senior officials under intense pressure from ministers to skew the legal assessment. Reports were repeatedly returned to me with instructions to ’rebalance’ the findings – to downplay evidence of civilian harm and emphasise diplomatic efforts, regardless of the facts. I was often summoned for verbal instructions – a tactic deliberately employed to avoid creating a written record that could be subject to freedom of information requests or legal scrutiny. In one instance, a senior official bluntly told me, ‘This looks really bad,’ before urging me to ‘Make it look less stark.’ My protests were ignored. Significant edits were made to my reports, shifting the focus away from credible evidence of war crimes to paint a misleading picture of ‘progress’ by foreign governments. This was not an isolated case – it was part of a systemic effort to suppress inconvenient truths… Rather than confronting the illegality, officials resorted to delaying tactics – extending reporting deadlines and demanding additional information that was unnecessary. This ‘wait for more evidence’ approach created a loophole, allowing arms sales to continue while the government feigned compliance. I raised my concerns repeatedly, only to be overruled.… When I raised questions with the FCDO about the legal basis for our arms sales to Israel, I was met with hostility and stonewalling. Emails went unanswered. I was warned not to put my concerns in writing. Lawyers and senior officials besieged me with defensive instructions to ‘stick to the lines’ and delete correspondence. It became clear that no one was willing to address the fundamental question: how could continued arms sales to Israel possibly be legal?… The situation in Gaza could not be more acute. The UK’s closest ally now proposes the mass expulsion of 2.1 million people from Gaza and the demolition of one of the most densely populated civilian areas on Earth – this is ethnic cleansing. I call on my former colleagues – those who still believe in the values of integrity and justice – to refuse to be complicit. Do not rubber-stamp reports that whitewash crimes against humanity. This is not self-defence – it is collective punishment. It is genocide. The time for silence is over. Do not allow ministers to trade human lives for political expediency. The time for accountability is now.”

The Big Idea: how do our brains know what’s real? – article by Adam Zeman in The Guardian, based on his book The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination. “The idea, from psychology, that prediction is integral to perception, and by evidence from neuroscience that our experience depends absolutely on the work of our sugar- and oxygen-hungry brains[, suggests that] perception is far more dependent on prior knowledge – painstakingly created internal models of the world – than we usually take it to be. The contemporary expert Anil Seth puts it nicely: ‘We tend to think of perception as occurring outside-in, but it mostly occurs inside-out.’… If perception is a kind of true hallucination, a potential problem looms: how can we distinguish what we imagine from what we perceive?… Some rules of thumb are helpful – high levels of vividness and detail, effortlessness and consistency with context suggest that we’re looking at the real world – but not always. Daydreams can be effortless and vivid; hunting for a destination in thick fog can be effortful and the resulting experience indistinct. Somehow, though, the brain weighs up the odds, and generally gets the right answer. How does it achieve this? Research in AI provides some interesting clues. In ‘generative adversarial’ models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the ‘generative’ bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the ‘adversary’ does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model. The generative model constantly ups its game to masquerade as the real McCoy; the adversary keeps honing its connoisseurship to distinguish the authentic from the fake. Something similar happens in the brain. The ‘adversary’ in the human brain, charged with reality checking, keeps watch from our huge frontal lobes: Area 10, in particular, at the tip of the frontal cortex, becomes active in tasks requiring us to decide whether items were seen or imagined. It is smaller and less active in people with psychosis than in healthy people, especially so in people with psychosis who hallucinate.”

What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’ – article by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian. “In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis.… In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, [he] explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms. ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “[N-word, N-word, N-word]”. By 1968 you can’t say “[N-word]” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.’ … Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it. Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life. Don’t believe me? … When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a ‘DEI hire’ within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?… DEI is the new N-word.… In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now ‘worse than the N-word’ and has become ‘the worst slur in American history’. The term ‘DEI hire’, he explains, ‘is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.’ Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI. DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.”

Lights … camera … attraction! The 32 most romantic moments in cinema – article by staff writers in The Guardian. “The gazebo confession in The Sound of Music…. Bad timing in Casablanca…. The photograph at the end of Titanic…. Awkward listening in Before Sunrise…. A damp proposal in Pride and Prejudice…. The press conference in Roman Holiday…. A last-gasp declaration in A Matter of Life and Death…. The kiss of life in The Matrix…. The first meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…. The start of Up…. A healing touch in WALL-E… The poppyfield kiss in A Room with a View… Cycling in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…. Buns and lung disease in Brief Encounter.”

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: a cathartic savaging of western hypocrisy over Gaza – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Organised as a series of linked essays, One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming. The ugliness El Akkad describes is real and seems inescapable, too. Much of it is the unspeakable stuff nobody admits to but is clear to anyone who reads or observes: that once we’re safe, our empathy is often performative; that it’s more expedient to be against evil after it’s over; that western countries preach justice and democracy, but act to protect wealth and power. He balks at the morality of both the right, who with ‘deranged honesty’ sign missiles, and the left, whose ‘progressivism often ends at the lawn sign’. … As an Iranian who spent my first eight years dodging Saddam Hussein’s American bombs, then arrived in America to be treated like a savage, this book speaks to me. I’ve heard these arguments before, but never so articulately expressed. History always seems to start when westerners are harmed, ‘not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people.’ Like El Akkad, I despise Hamas and the authoritarian governments who use Islam to crush women, minorities and peaceful Muslims. But I can’t stomach the lie that the west is a civilised party here, after centuries of looting. El Akkad’s most compelling argument takes aim at ‘a fiction of moral convenience’, as he calls it: ‘While the terrible thing is happening –­ while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilisation.’ Later the children of the aggressors, with all that stolen wealth and privilege firmly in their hands, hungry now for cultural capital, can celebrate the old resistance and claim outrage and solidarity in hindsight.”

One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: Gaza and the sound of silence – review by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian. “Its title is a distillation of a tweet he posted in October 2023, three weeks into the bombardment of Gaza. It has since been viewed over 10m times: ‘One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.’… His first book was a novel; 2017’s American War is a dystopian imagining of a future civil war in the deep south waged against a backdrop of climate disaster. It was heralded by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shape our world. In this, his first nonfiction book, his narrative voice is measured and quietly engrossing in its articulation of what he sees as almost unspeakable, certainly ethically indefensible.… He is … acutely alert to the contradictions and compromises that modern journalism often entails, in particular the insistence that ‘the journalist cannot be an activist, but must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality’. He points out that, on the contrary, ‘journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavours there is. A journalist is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege … A journalist is supposed to agitate against silence.’ Which brings us to Gaza, the nexus of his moral argument. There, given Israel’s exclusion of western journalists, the task of ‘agitating against the silence’ has been redefined by Palestinian journalists – and ordinary citizens with smartphones – who have done just that at great risk. They, alongside the few foreign medics who have managed to gain entry to the killing zone, have described the deadly attacks on hospitals, schools, suburban neighbourhoods and flimsy tents housing terrified refugees displaced from their own land…. Gaza, he concludes, has killed something in us all: the victims, the perpetrators, the western leaders who have enabled the slaughter, the cheerleaders and the helpless onlookers. It has created what he calls ‘a severance’, not just between those who speak out and those who remain silent or collude in the carnage, but with the very idea that such an ideal as ‘western values’ actually exists. Or ever truly did.”

‘This moment is medieval’: Jackson Katz on misogyny, the manosphere, and why men must oppose Trumpism – interview by Ammar Kalia in The Guardian. “Katz has written a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, which outlines the ways that men can and should involve themselves in the fight against gender-based violence. He believes it may be the first time a major commercial publisher has released a book about men’s violence against women that has been written by a man…. Attempting to change the culture from within became a tenet of Katz’s work with Real Men and, later, with his Mentors in Violence Prevention programme. Enlisting role models from professional sports and the military, Katz began running workshops and training programmes to encourage changes in behaviour from the top down in male-dominated organisations.… Gaining the ability and confidence to interrupt sexist behaviour from men is the main purpose of Katz’s book. Written in a conversational, largely jargon-free tone, it is intended as a practical toolkit for men to think about ways in which they can challenge difficult behaviour, with each chapter ending with a section on ‘how you can make a difference’ that outlines lines of argument and conversation…. One method that Katz has helped pioneer in his career is the bystander approach – initially employed as a tactic against school bullying, where peers are encouraged to step in and support the bullied child, rather than leaving the onus of responsibility solely on their shoulders. Katz began running workshop scenarios where men would think through their ethical obligations when faced with sexist or potentially abusive behaviour by one of their group. ‘Men would walk in with their arms folded, saying they didn’t need to be there because they weren’t abusers, so I would say: “You don’t abuse girls or women, but what are you doing to help others who are abusing them?”’ Katz says.”