Seen and heard: October to December 2025

Strange Horticulture – wonderful game, deservedly celebrated since its release last year. You run a plant shop in a fantasy version of the Lake District (there are witches in the woods, cultists in the towns, rituals at ancient stone circles), and your plants have both herbal and magical properties. The atmosphere veers between gloomy (it is frequently raining) and downright creepy. As customers visit your shop, the gameplay consists of trying to identify the plant they need with the aid of your trusty herbal, of following clues to locate new plants in a map of the landscape, and distilling elixirs from plant combinations. The challenge is nicely balanced – not too easy, but soluble with careful thought – and the characters and storylines grow with each passing simulated day. It's lovely to see a really great game from a British developer, and I have the sequel Strange Antiquities on my wishlist.

Frauds – superior heist drama, elevated by the central performances of two of our greatest actors: Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker. They play old crime-mates Bert and Sam, reunited after many years when Bert is released from a Spanish prison early because she is dying of cancer. She persuades Sam to do one last job, an art theft, and they assemble a rickety team, but it gradually becomes clear that Bert is not telling Sam everything, and it turns out Sam has secrets from Bert too. By the final episode, when against all odds the job actually goes down successfully, we find out that pretty much everybody has been deceiving everybody else in some way. It doesn’t leave a good feeling, because you end up not liking anyone. But a clever tale and a wild ride.

Tenebrae – concert ‘A Prayer for Deliverance’ at Saffron Hall. How good to hear one of our top-rank chamber choirs in superb acoustics. The repertoire is similar to Polymnia’s – nearly half their pieces were ones which we’ve done at some time in the past – but of course they do them better, indeed to perfection. The major work, previously unknown to me, was a Requiem by Howells: not in the same league as the Fauré or the Duruflé, but a decent pocket requiem. Most pleasingly they finished with the William Harris ‘Bring Us O Lord God’, which is the perfect end to a concert meditating on sleep, death and transformation.

Pine: A Story of Loss – meditative adventure game, or possibly a visual novel, about a woodcutter grieving after the death of his young wife. (So “pine” refers both to the trees that he chops and to his state of mind.) A worthy effort to tell an emotionally engaged story, which didn’t quite come off for me. It created its atmospheres powerfully and wordlessly, but the emotional beats didn’t always strike me as true – or perhaps my experience was just different from the woodcutter’s – and one of the mini-games (carving logs into sculptures of his wife) I found technically difficult to operate on my computer set-up, so that instead of being serene and beautiful it was awkward and frustrating. I’m glad to have played it, but it’s not a patch on Last Day of June.

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout (anniversary edition) – updated version of classic surreal and punkish adventure game, about a stroppy teenage girl trying to escape from a mental hospital with the aid of her toy rabbit, whom only she can hear speak. The story and the script are great, and the other inmates of the mental hospital are wonderfully conceived (including a man who wants to be a bee and two boys who have a fantasy that they are conjoined twins). It is, however, very hard and even an optimal solution – let alone roaming around experimenting to discover how to solve the puzzles – requires going back and forth and repeating whole chunks of dialogue. At least that dialogue is sparkling and the voice acting superb, which makes it all worthwhile.

Human – vivid and informative 5-part survey of the current state of pre-history, presented by the wonderful Ella Al-Shamahi. (When she speaks Arabic with one of the anthropologists she’s interviewing, it is SO cool!) Yes, how did the world go from six (at current count) species of humans to just one, our own particular African-descended homo sapiens? More a matter of chance than our arrogance (and earlier accounts of human history) would have us think, and less to do with weapons and warfare (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and more about the technology to create warm clothing, enabling us to survive a cooling climate even more successfully than homo neanderthalensis, which was better adapted to the colder environment of Northern Europe. Moving and humbling.

Empire with David Olugosa – well, this is one way of telling the story of the British Empire: not the way I’d have done it, but (of course) powerful and excellent on its own terms. In the absence of advance information, I expected the three episodes to be chronological, but in fact, they’re thematic: the first on the plantations (initially, sugar in Barbados) and the slave labour which enabled them; the second on Empire-driven migrations (not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but Indians indentured in Africa and convicts sent to Australia); and the third on the end of Empire and the contested histories we're left with today (he has both colonisers and colonised in his family history). Each programme is powerful and excellent in its own terms, but this is hardly a complete history; there should have been other episodes, perhaps making this one of those thirteen-part blockbusters the BBC used to do so well. I wanted to know where Ireland fitted in. And how can you do a series on the British Empire without mentioning China and the Opium Wars at all?

The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier – a nice new edition of short stories by this fantastic writer, who's not so much read these days but jolly well should be, as the quality of her prose is far better than that of, say, Stephen King or Philip K. Dick (as examples of other authors frequently adapted for films). Somehow she manages to be creepy (“a sense of dread” if you’re being posh and literary) without showing any actual horror – except perhaps in ‘The Birds’, which is a really frightening tale. Reading it in 2025, in midst of climate emergency, it struck me as fundamentally about the natural world striking back against the human race, remorselessly, totally, for reasons unexplained and unknown and finally irrelevant. But the story it reminded me of most was Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, because of the ultra-narrow focus on a single family in the midst of global catastrophe, and the concrete detail of how they attempt to secure their home, which to its original readership will have brought back memories of second world war civil defence. Hitchcock’s film, though good in its own way, is really just about people being attacked by birds. 

Tomb Raider (2018) – with Alicia Vikander in the Lara Croft role. She’s a good actor, and it struck me that they’d set out to make the character more credible and less computer-gamey. The film’s plot is ludicrous, of course, and repeats tropes wholesale from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but Lara herself is realistic, if extreme. In her establishing scenes, we see her at a boxing gym and working as a cycle courier in London, displaying the death-defying skills of racing, running and jumping we will see in fantasy settings. Above all, she is vulnerable; when hit, she cries out in pain, and though she’s physically formidable she’s not hard as nails. She brings a light touch and a cheeky tone, especially in her final scene when she visits a gun dealer to equip herself for the first time with a firearm. “In fact, I’ll take two!” she says with a grin, brandishing the guns in the classic Lara Croft pose. Classic!

Cuttings: December 2025

Are we doomed? – article by David Runciman in The London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean … each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.… We have got the relationship between population and climate change all wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, the world seemed to be confronted by the twin threats of overpopulation and ‘global cooling’: a planet drowning in people was apparently also facing a new ice age. We now know both doomsday scenarios were hopelessly misplaced. But because the population kept growing as the planet got warmer it was easy to miss what was happening. Climate change can appear to be a crisis of overproduction linked to overpopulation: more people means more mouths to feed, more industrial activity and more carbon in the atmosphere. It seemed to follow that one way to tackle the climate emergency was to have fewer children. That view is still widely held, especially among well-meaning progressives. [But] we don’t currently need fewer children. We need more.… in the absence of a move towards a stable birth rate there is a real risk that we will divert more and more of our attention and resources to the challenges of ageing societies.… We can already see the way falling birth rates affect national politics and economics. Ageing societies vote differently, consume differently and invest differently from more balanced societies. Older people are less likely to move house. They are more likely to worry about immigration. They tend to save rather than take risks with their money. And as they become more numerous relative to other cohorts, they decide elections…. Failing to look after the needs of the elderly would be a terrible injustice. But precisely because it will be necessary it will also be constraining: it threatens to distract our attention from the other things that matter.… Spears and Geruso offer a range of arguments for having more children… But [they] understate the difficulty of doing something about it. One problem is that the burden of having more children will fall on people who are already holding their societies together. Parents will have to bring up extra children while looking after more elderly relatives…. The politics already look very hard.”

The Proslogion of St Anselm – from the Office of Readings for Friday in the first week of Advent, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his Advent Bulletin for Turvey Abbey. "Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself a little to God and rest for a little in Him."

Met by the Beloved – Meditation (in CAC’s Daily Meditations) by Mirabai Starr, from her Saint John of the Cross: Luminous Darkness. “It is time to enter the desert. You may not take anything with you: not your insulated bottle of cool water, not a knife, not a single raisin. You may not take a sleeping bag. No cell phone or map. Leave the sunscreen behind. Burn. It is time to enter into utter unknowing – and, by unknowing, come to know truly. The mind is an impediment on this journey. The senses are misleading. Leave them on the porch when you slip away in the middle of the night. Be very quiet as you close the door behind you. The members of your household will not understand your quest. They will try to keep you home. Leave. Go now. No one claims this will be an easy journey. Your senses will thirst for the familiar juices that remind them of a time when the Holy One fed them from her own breasts. The intellect will grope around in the dark, panicking. Pay no attention. Walk through the night. Sit very still in the daytime and watch the miracle of your breath as it quietly fills your lungs and empties them again. Spend forty days in the wilderness, and forty nights. Don’t give up. The worst that will happen is that you will die. Die to your fragmented self and be reborn into your divine self. Enter knowing through the needle of unknowing. In silence, finally hear the voice of the Holy One. In surrendering to sheer emptiness, be filled with the Beloved at last.”

‘A mini Battle of Cable Street’: the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Stirchley is a modest kind of [south Birmingham suburb], sandwiched between better known (and better off) areas such as Bournville and Moseley, but there is plenty of evidence here of the lively community spirit that last year resulted in the area being named the best place to live in the Midlands.... Scratch just below the surface, however, and there are signs of something much less harmonious going on.... On at least four occasions since September, members of a Birmingham-based group called Raise The Colours (RTC), wearing branded hard hats and hi-vis vests and using a cherrypicker, have hung hundreds of Saint George and union flags from Stirchley’s lamp-posts, as part of a widespread campaign they say is intended to 'fill the skyline with unity and patriotism'. On each occasion a group of local residents, objecting to what they describe as territory-marking as part of an anti-immigrant movement, have taken the flags down, but say they have been subject to harassment and intimidation when they have tried to protest.... Flag-flying has faded from the political agenda in England since the febrile summer months, when tensions over migration and an emboldening of the far right were accompanied by a wave of flags being erected in streets across the country, with the vocal approval of some residents and despite the often silenced objections of others. But in many communities, including some where flags are no longer so visible, this has remained a fraught and highly divisive issue, even if strikingly few politicians are willing to speak about it. In the absence of political leadership, some neighbourhood groups say it has been left to them to push back against an organised and well funded movement that, while certainly galvanising support among many individuals, has been driven and encouraged by figures with links to the far right.... Anne, 66, from Walkley in Sheffield, said the disputes over flags near her home have felt like 'a mini Battle of Cable Street'” – referencing the 1936 clashes in London’s East End when neighbours united to resist a march by fascists. Walkley has been the scene of angry standoffs between a group identifying itself on Facebook as Reform Sheffield East, which erected many flags in the area, and a group of local residents who did not want them. 'We really do feel that it is designed to intimidate, and it is intimidating,' said Anne, who has lived in the neighbourhood for more than 20 years. 'A lot of us feel – and I think the evidence bears this out – that when these flags start going up, people then feel emboldened to say the sort of things that they haven’t felt able to say for 30 years.'... 'We know what these flags are[,' said Andrew Scarsdale, spokesperson for a group called Sheffield Communities against Racism and Fascism (Scarf). ']This is not like flags coming out for the football. This has been a deliberately toxified symbol. Everyone knows what it means, including the people who put the flags up.' A YouGov poll last month found the majority of ethnic minority adults now see the Saint George flag as a racist symbol."

‘I don’t take no for an answer’: how a small group of women changed the law on deepfake porn – article by Anna Moore in The Guardian. "For Jodie [* not her real name], watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory.... Her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it – her best friend [– and] identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police.... Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of 'sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature' and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years. At that time, there were no laws against deepfake intimate image abuse, although experts had been raising the alarm since 2016.... More than two years passed before she felt ready to campaign for change, starting by telling her story on BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 in April 2024. ... Says Jodie, who works in financial services. 'I gradually realised the significance of there being no law which held him accountable for the deepfake abuse – and I wanted change.' Within little more than a year, she had it. The Data (Use and Access) Act, which received royal assent in June, has made the creation of a deepfake intimate image without consent a criminal offence and also criminalised requesting others to create the deepfake image – as her best friend had when he posted images of Jodie on forums. Both now carry a custodial sentence of up to six months, as well as an unlimited fine. It’s a huge victory won fast in a space where progress has been mind-bendingly slow. However, this isn’t the story of a new government determined to tackle an ever-evolving crime. It was fought for and pushed through by a small group of victims and experts who formed a WhatsApp group called Heroes...."

Young people have faced ‘violent indifference’ for decades, Lisa Nandy says – article by Pippa Crerar in The Guardian. "Young people have faced 'violent indifference' from the political establishment for decades, leaving them struggling to navigate a changing world, the culture secretary said as she announced the first national youth strategy in 15 years.... 'At the root of all of this is self-worth … They matter. They haven’t felt that they matter for a very long time, and that, in turn, makes them very vulnerable, whether it’s to gangs exploiting them to run drugs across county lines or it’s these online influencers who are preying on them.' Nandy said: 'There too many people in this country who feel that government is something that exists to stop them from living the lives they want to live, not enabling them to live the lives that they want to live. That’s very acute amongst young people.'”

I used to report from the West Bank. Twenty years after my last visit, I was shocked by how much worse it is today – article by Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian. "I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.... The most serious change since my last visit to the region is the expansion of Israeli settlements. There are 3.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including 435,000 in East Jerusalem. The number of Israeli settlers has jumped from 400,000 at the time of the second intifada to more than 700,000 now. But those figures do not convey the extent of the encroachment of the settlements, their suffocating impact, occupying more hilltops overlooking cities, towns and villages and even setting up in the middle of them, behind walls and barbed wire, often only yards from Palestinian homes, and protected by Israeli soldiers.... With a shortage of options from within, many Palestinians see the international community as their best hope, believing a turning point has been reached because of worldwide outrage over the destruction of Gaza. At the Birzeit conference, Saleh Hijazi, a policy coordinator for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, said more pressure had to be put on Israel by ending military ties, enforcing arrest warrants against Israelis accused of war crimes, divestment from complicit companies and expelling Israel from international bodies such as the UN, Fifa and the Olympics.... Such campaigns might work in the long run, as they did in South Africa. But in the short or medium term they will not change the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, caught between a Palestinian Authority that cannot protect them and Israel, with its military clampdown and its out-of-control settlers. While the body count in the West Bank was higher during the second intifada, life was absolutely worse now in every other way, said Budour Hassan, a legal researcher at Amnesty International. Hassan, who is from Nazareth, said: 'Even back then there was hope, maybe. Now the people seem completely desperate. They feel completely abandoned.'”

The volunteers putting their bodies between Israel settlers and a Palestinian village – article by Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum in The Guardian. "Every morning, teenage Israeli settlers drive a herd of goats from their outpost in the hills down into the valley towards the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja. The local men, women and children retreat inside their huts and tents. Any hint of resistance from a Palestinian is likely to bring in the Israeli army or the border police, confiscation of property and disappearance into the maw of 'administrative' detention without trial, for months or years. Instead, a small group of volunteers step forward each morning to face the descending settlers whose stated aim is to overrun and trample the village with their livestock, and drive Palestinians out. On this particular Saturday, the defenders of Ras Ein al-Auja are four Israeli Jews, a Hungarian and an American, who make a screen around Palestinian homes to shoo away the encroaching animals....It is a tense battle of wits. Chess, but played with goats. Just when the face-off is at its peak, the settlers in the outpost half a kilometre uphill unleash a surprise move – driving a herd of about 50 camels down towards the other end of the village, like a cavalry charge ordered by some unseen hilltop Napoleon, forcing the defenders to split up to confront the new threat.... On the day of the camel charge, a man with a light brown uniform and assault rifle slung around his shoulder arrived at the scene in a white pickup truck and walked alongside the goatherd boys in a show of support. Israeli activists identified the newcomer as Gabriel Kalish, the local security coordinator from Me’vo’ot Yericho, about 9km farther down the Jordan valley. Kalish refused to give an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that he happened to be passing by. However he added: 'This land belongs to the Jews.' Activists have photographed him many times, in a variety of different uniforms, at the site of settler incursions on Palestinian villages.... Since the beginning of the Gaza war, and the radical acceleration of an Israeli land grab across the West Bank, the 700 local people have largely been confined to the village, a string of huts, tents and animal shelters along a creek running east from a spring towards the River Jordan. They have cut down their flocks and bought feed for them, but refused so far to give up Ras Ein al-Auja altogether. 'It was very quiet here before. You could graze your flock east, west, north, south and there was no problem,' Naef Ja’alin, one of the villagers, said. 'The settlers started harassing us years ago, when we were grazing our flock, but that was some distance from the village. But since 7 October [2023], they have come closer and closer, to the point that today nobody takes their herd outside the village.' He said his son slept in his shoes so he is ready to run if the family is attacked at night."

Infighting, broken promises and insisting on the national anthem: what seven months of Reform UK in charge actually looks like – article by Helen Pidd in The Guardian. "Reform won Lancashire on a remarkably flimsy policy platform. Though many candidates spent much of their time posting anti-immigration rhetoric on social media, they were vague about what they would actually change as councillors, perhaps because many of them didn’t understand what a county council can and can’t do. They promised to 'cut bloated salaries' – notably the £236,960 paid to the council’s chief executive – as well as 'woke spending'. They pledged to freeze council tax and fix 'all' potholes. They said no to four-day weeks ...and vowed to reintroduce weekly bin collections, something out of the council’s control. Some of the new councillors seem to have totally different priorities from the party’s leadership. I get chatting to Ellie Close, councillor for Leyland South. She says that more than anything else, she wants to speed up diagnoses for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).... I say that’s interesting, given Farage’s views on the 'overdiagnoses' of Send which he said was 'creating a class of victims'. She looks shocked and asks me to repeat it. 'I’m not really sure what to say to that,' she says, 'because I’ve got personal experience with it. I think it’s something that we need to currently look at.' It’s clear that following Reform in Lancashire is going to be an interesting ride.... Things start to get crunchy for Reform in Lancashire when they launch a consultation on closing five local authority old people’s homes and day centres and moving residents into the private sector. The buildings are dilapidated, they’re not fit for purpose and they’ll cost millions to fix, is essentially the argument.... The idea immediately provokes controversy and a flurry of bad press, largely thanks to a 92-year-old resident of one of the homes earmarked for closure, who becomes the face and voice of the campaign to keep them open.... For all their talk about fighting the 'woke blob' and bringing common sense back to British politics, it is how Reform handle these human battles that will ultimately decide whether voters judge Farage fit to move into Downing Street. They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them? Sitting at the back of the meeting with a big St George’s flag is Phil Price, whose 93-year-old mother lives in [one of the homes marked for closure].... He believes [the Reform cabinet member in charge of adult social care] does stand to benefit from the care home closures.... 'I’m a paid-up member of Reform and I’m disgusted with him... I wrote to Nigel Farage, because I thought they were going to come and change everything. And all they’re doing is coming in and tearing people’s lives apart.' I put it to him that Reform did make clear they were going to make cuts in Lancashire, to save money and eliminate 'waste': 'If there are parents who have paid into the system all their lives, worked hard for this country, if they’re waste, then we might as well just give up,' he says. I ask him why he voted Reform. 'I thought it was going to change Great Britain for the good. You know, to stop all the boats and everything coming in, and to be fair to the people who’ve paid into the system, who’ve lived here all their lives. All politicians, they’re all in it for themselves, I think. I was really excited about them and now I’m disillusioned.'”

‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act – article by Susanna Rustin in The Guardian. "[Celia Brayfield] started aged 19, as an assistant to Shirley Conran – then women’s editor of the Observer. When Conran moved to the Daily Mail, Brayfield went, too. 'The Daily Mail was a very sexist organisation,' she told me. 'I can’t tell you how awful women’s pages were, except for Mary Stott’s at the Guardian. All the news of the women’s movement in America was flooding across the Atlantic, but editors were profoundly uninterested. I always thought you couldn’t mention anything to do with equality before the fifth paragraph. You were radicalised by your workplace.' Brayfield found her own way of reporting on developments in the women’s liberation movement (WLM), as the resurgent feminism of those years was known. She would set up interviews with the movement’s big hitters and then, when editors rejected them, offer them to the underground press instead. A piece on the radical feminist author Kate Millett was published by Frendz magazine, which Rosie Boycott co-edited before launching the women’s movement journal Spare Rib. Along with Conran, Brayfield also joined Women in Media, a pressure group set up in 1970 to challenge sexism in the industry and beyond. Its activities have been largely forgotten, and many of those involved have died. But it played a key role in the campaign to outlaw sex discrimination and enforce equal pay – as well as lobbying bosses for equal opportunities at work. One policy that especially riled them, and became a focus, was the broadcasters’ refusal to let women read the news. The public would find this 'unnatural', the BBC executive Robin Scott told the Daily Mirror in 1972. 'There’s always bad news about and it’s much easier for a man to deal with that.' Fifty years on, such brazen sexism appears comically old-fashioned. But the women’s libbers who confronted it have also often been the butt of jokes. While achievements such as equal pay and the establishment of women’s refuges are recognised, the movement that fought for them has uncertain status. Second-wave feminists, as this generation is known, have been derided as man-hating harridans but also as entitled princesses – with their unrealistic demand for 24-hour nurseries and insufficiently intersectional politics. Their suffragette grandmothers, by contrast, are held up as courageous heroines."

The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore: do we finally know what causes schizophrenia? – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "Bullmore, a professor of psychiatry, [points to] a bogus divide between the body and the mind. He calls this the 'original schism', bequeathed to us by Descartes, and before him Saint Paul. It falsely suggests that our thoughts and any psychological distress we experience exist in a separate domain, detached from the flesh. Diseases are either 'organic' (like cholera or Alzheimer’s) or 'functional' (like depression or schizophrenia), emerging mysteriously from an entirely healthy body. Practically speaking, this schism cleaves psychiatry from the rest of medicine, meaning the physical health of patients with mental illness is often badly neglected. But it also sets up a division within psychiatry itself, between what has been referred to glibly as the 'mindless' tribe, which believes biology explains everything, and the 'brainless' one, which ignores neuroscience and looks for answers in a person’s upbringing and way of relating to the world.... But science does march on, and in the last four decades there has been loads of it, which Bullmore charts from his vantage point first at the Maudsley in London, where the tribes clustered in different parts of the canteen, and then at the University of Cambridge. One of his touchstones is Susan Sontag’s essay Illness As Metaphor, which showed how any 'intractable and capricious' disease becomes a container for morbid fantasies until such time as we have a better explanation. Now we know that TB is a bacterial infection of the lungs, we don’t tend to think that sensitive poets are naturally more prone to it, as we once did. Schizophrenia may finally be on the cusp of that transformation – something truly momentous, given the puzzle this strange and brutal disease has posed for so long. As Bullmore carefully explains, advances in scanning, maths, genomics and immunology have piled up to give us a clearer understanding of the illness. It is probably caused by the abnormal development of brain networks in childhood and adolescence; this, the evidence suggests, happens under the influence of immune dysfunction, and the cause of that is variation in a broad range of genes, interacting in particular ways with the environment. Triggers can include infections, abuse, social stress or drug use. The emerging picture marries biology and experience in a way that was always inevitable, since they are not really divided at all. The task for the next generation is to translate the science into better outcomes in the real world. Given what we now know, prevention, including better health and social services for mothers and young children, should play a major role."

Capitalism by Sven Beckert: an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the 'treasure of the world' and 'envy of kings'. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as 'the mountain that eats men'. The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium.... The word 'capitalism' originated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists 'socialism', 'communism' and 'anarchism', but the system was much older. 'Capitalism is a process,' Beckert writes, 'not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end'. He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150. This vibrant trade hub between Asia and the Middle East, in what is now Yemen, was one of several 'islands of capital' which formed a 'capitalist archipelago'. Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance, its 'strikingly modern' residents were in the vanguard of a global insurgency.... What they needed was the state’s collaboration. This developed during the 'Great Connecting' between 1450 and 1650, when the discovery of the Americas (named after a slave-owning merchant) finally enabled European traders to challenge Asia and the Middle East while making themselves indispensable. In the era of 'war capitalism', new trade routes and territorial seizures triggered conflict, which trade then financed. Colonialism established capitalism’s 'connected diversity'... If Adam Smith was wrong to see capitalism as human nature manifest, then Beckert overcorrects by presenting it as anti-human: a “rogue artificial intelligence”, an invasive species, an alien force, a supernatural hunger. It is insatiable and unkillable. Beckert calls his book an 'actor-centred history' about a phenomenon 'made by people', but it is ultimately a kind of horror story about a monster that eats men."

Converts by Melanie McDonagh: roads to Rome – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene. But there was a whole host of poets, artists and public intellectuals less known to us today, whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay. In this thoughtful though brisk book, Melanie McDonagh, a columnist for The Tablet, gives us 16 case histories of Britons who went 'Poping' during the scariest decades of the 20th century. At a time when reason and decency appeared to have been chased out by political extremism and global warfare, it was only natural to long for something solid.... Contrary to lurid Protestant fantasies, Catholic priests were not on the hunt for celebrity scalps to 'lure' into their incense-fugged, whiskey-sodden clutches. Again and again, McDonagh’s converts report being taken aback by the way in which their approaches to Brompton Oratory or Chelsea’s Farm Street Church were met with a cool equanimity and slightly humiliating lack of interest.... The aesthetic pleasures of Roman Catholicism also turned out to be largely illusory. Unless attending one of the smart London churches, converts had to get used to worshipping in ugly modern buildings alongside largely working-class congregations.... If you wanted magnificent buildings, glorious hymns, beautiful vernacular liturgy and the sort of clergyman whom you could invite to your club then you would be better off staying with the Established Church. Then there was the inevitable censure. When Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie tartly declared that 'only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics' she was voicing a general prejudice. Also commonplace were charges of moral turpitude (it didn’t help that Wilde, Bosie Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley and many other 1890s decadents had converted). To become a Catholic was to invite suspicion that you were mad, secretly gay or spying for a foreign power. Despite these penalties, few converts seem to have regretted their decision although, as McDonagh points out, it is hard to know for certain."

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are 'AI slop' – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found. The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop. ... The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop.... Bandar Apna Dost, the most-viewed channel in the study, is based in India and now has 2.4bn views. It features the adventures of an anthropomorphic rhesus monkey and a muscular character modelled off the Incredible Hulk who fights demons and travels on a helicopter made of tomatoes. Kapwing estimated that the channel could make as much as $4.25m.... Pouty Frenchie, based in Singapore, has 2bn views and appears to target children. It chronicles the adventures of a French bulldog – driving to a candy forest, eating crystal sushi – many of them set to a soundtrack of children’s laughter. Kapwing estimates it makes nearly $4m a year.... Meanwhile, The AI World, based in Pakistan, contains AI-generated shorts of catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, with titles like Poor People, Poor Family, and Flood Kitchen. Many of these videos are set to a soundtrack called Relaxing Rain, Thunder & Lightning Ambience for Sleep. The channel itself has 1.3bn views.... For some, it’s a living. And while new, attention-grabbing ideas – such as exploding pressure cookers – constantly emerge, when it comes to AI slop, human creativity matters far less than the algorithms that distribute the content on Meta and YouTube. 'These websites are huge A/B testing machines just by their nature,' said [Max Read, a journalist who has written extensively on AI slop.] 'Almost anything that you can think of, you could already find on Facebook. So the question is, how do you find the things that are kind of doing well, and then how do you scale that? How do you make 10 of them?'”

From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "In 2024, [AI slop] began to achieve peak cultural moments. Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats. In 2025, the flood continued, growing more uncanny and more explicitly copyright-violating. This spring saw the advent of Ghiblification – that is, a trend in which users from Nayib Bukele to the White House rendered images, including of deportations, in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.... Other AI slop moments followed: a spate of videos of AI-generated obese people participating in the Olympics, pressure cookers exploding, more cats. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the military junta in Burkina Faso, became the centrepiece of an AI slop cult featuring videos of Justin Bieber singing on the streets of Ouagadougou. In some ways, AI slop has improved. Gone – mostly – are the days of six-fingered hands and missing limbs that characterised the output of early image generators. In some ways, though, AI slop has hardly changed at all. It is still uncanny and contextless, still aimed directly at the amygdala, still chasing virality by virtue of having the lowest barriers to entry imaginable: no plot, no exposition, surreal imagery and cats, cats, cats."

Stop thinking – Substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli that trigger stronger responses than the original stimuli they’re based on.... The classic example comes from Tinbergen’s experiments with birds. He found that birds would preferentially incubate artificially enlarged eggs or eggs with more vivid markings over their own natural eggs, even though the artificial ones were impractically large. Similarly, baby birds would beg more vigorously for food from fake parent beaks that were larger and more colorful than real ones.... We humans love supernormal stimuli. Think roller coasters. Spicy food. Tear-jerker movies. Public hangings. Pornography. Doomscrolling. – And, most impactful at this exact moment: LLM AIs.... What ChatGPT and the other AIs are doing is hijacking this instinct by performing as a conversational partner who has immediate availability, infinite patience, broad knowledge, whom we can access without the social cost of appearing ignorant, and whose responses are tailored to engage to our specific view of the world. Talking to an LLM entails no social risk, judgment, or interpersonal complexity, yet yields the pleasurable sensation of ideas 'clicking' without the friction of genuine disagreement. Every single one of these qualities is a pressure point vulnerable to supernormal stimulation.... I’m not here to throw LLMs under the bus. Remember, verstand [understanding] is incredibly useful and important. Hegel’s faculty of understanding is what gets us through 99% of our day. Having a tool that can help you do that is worth its weight in gold. It’s the other 1% that really matters, though. This where the Trolley Problems of your real life loom in a world of unexpected problems... That 1% is also where truly new ideas come from... an LLM is not going to help you recognize or generate a thought that is entirely new, since as I said, its ‘thinking’ process relies entirely on the existing connections between ideas. ... When you’re using an AI, picture yourself as a poor hapless bird sitting on a really big, super-speckled ball that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t a real egg. Your real eggs are there, scattered about you – unfinished ideas you can’t even name yet, much less ask some entity about; people who intrigue you but who you don’t know how to approach; movements and religious ideas that have struck a chord in you, but that you don’t know how to engage with. Raise your eyes, and you’ll apprehend a world of liminal things – undefined, unnamed, awaiting your particular mind and experience to render them real for others. Only you can name what’s really fresh in the world. Try moving to a different egg. It may not seem as rewarding at first. But unlike that big shiny one, it might one day hatch."

‘Of course he abused pupils’: ex-Dulwich teacher speaks out about Farage racism claims – article by Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. "It was 1981 and Nigel Farage was turning 17. He was already a figure of some controversy, as would become a lifelong habit, among the younger pupils and staff at Dulwich college in south-east London. 'I remember it was either in a particular English lesson or a particular form period that his name came up,' said Chloë Deakin, then a young English teacher, of a discussion with a class of 11- and 12-year-olds. 'There was something about bullying, and he was being referred to, quite specifically, as a bully. And I thought: "Who is this boy?"' Deakin conferred with colleagues in the staff room who corroborated accounts of harassment of fellow pupils and of Farage’s apparent fascination with the far right, including claims that he had been 'goose-stepping' on combined cadet force marches.... Despite the chatter in the playground and staffroom, Farage was put on a draft list of prefects by the headteacher... 'So when I heard that Farage’s name was on the finalised prefect list, I was appalled and that was why I wrote independently to [the headteacher], because I felt strongly about it – I still do,' Deakin recalled. Deakin’s letter of June 1981, first revealed by the Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick in a report in 2013, is uncompromising. She has never spoken before of this episode with the letter – written after Farage’s 17th birthday – emerging only as a result of her having given a copy of it to a senior teacher at the time, as was the practice at the school. She wrote: 'You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a "fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect" invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room...' The letter concluded: 'You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.'... Deakin, now 74,... was not personally acquainted with Farage and did not see or hear his alleged racism and antisemitism, she said. But her memories of boys’ complaints of bullying, the subsequent testimony of the staff, the contemporaneous letter – written by her decades before Farage gained public prominence – and the sheer weight of credible allegations in recent weeks should leave no room for doubt for the public, she said. 'Of course Farage directly abused pupils,' Deakin said. 'His was the only name I recall boys mentioning to me.'”

I knew all about the NHS’s challenges and flaws. But then as a patient, I saw the love and the magic – article by Anne Perkins in The Guardian. "The NHS sits at the heart of politics and for most of my career in journalism, and charting the crises, the numbers, the arguments, the possibilities and the costs was a staple of my work. You can write all that, you can read about all that, but it can feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when, like me, you pitch up as someone who arrives as an emergency, with a condition that might require major surgery and at least a week of post-operative hospital care – or might just go away of its own accord.... At its heart is the sense of a shared destination. It’s like getting on a bus, maybe not the sleekest model and definitely overloaded, but we’re all on the journey together. Everyone who’s seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Everyone. You don’t lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star facilities you might be enjoying if only you had more dosh, because it’s odds on that if it’s an emergency, that person too is just behind the curtain hanging limply to your right....If you haven’t experienced it, it is hard to explain the effect of witnessing this level not only of professionalism and patience, but of love. There are studies that show that for all the criticism and brickbats aimed at the NHS, those who use it most are the most positive about it. When you’re there and watch, you understand.... If we’re here, we’re in the same boat. We are in some way hurt, or we are supporting someone who is hurt, or maybe we’re making good on earlier kindness. It’s not magic. Everyone is still themselves, but softer. Warmer. Maybe even happier. Where else in our angry and atomised nation does this happen?"

Number of people who say Britons must be born in UK is rising, study shows – article by Eleni Courea in The Guardian. "Although a majority of the public still believe being British is rooted in shared values, a growing proportion see it as a product of ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry, according to analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and shared with the Guardian. About one-third of people (36%) thought a person must be born in Britain to be truly British, up from one in five (19%) in 2023, a YouGov poll carried out this month for the thinktank found. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK held the most extreme views of any party backers, with 71% saying that having British ancestry was a prerequisite for someone to be truly British, and 59% saying they believed the nation was an ethnic, not a civic, community. Strikingly, the findings suggest a significant proportion of Farage’s supporters believe being white is an important national characteristic, and that Britain has become too ethnically diverse. More than a third (37%) of Reform UK voters said they would be prouder of Britain if there were fewer people from minority ethnic backgrounds in a decade’s time, and 10% said it was important to have white skin to be a good British citizen."

Cuttings: November 2025

David Olusoga is the new face of BBC history, but as a boy he was driven out of his home by racists – article in Radio Times, 2016. "David Olusoga was one of very few non-white people on the Newcastle council estate where he grew up. His Nigerian father had met his white British mum at the city’s university in the1960s, and when they separated David joined his mum. 'I’m a Geordie Nigerian,' he says of his ancestry. But in his case the famous Geordie warmth turned out to be more myth than reality. 'The National Front attacked the house repeatedly with stones and broke all the windows and we were living under police protection,' he says now. 'I was 14.' Olusoga and his mum were eventually forced out of their home by the racists. He remembers returning to the house and seeing it boarded up. 'On the white door someone had painted a swastika and the words "NF won.’' Given such violence and provocation, it’s a wonder that Olusoga thrived. But he did. And his great love was history, though he could never understand why black faces were largely invisible in Britain’s story. When he flicked through the pages of the Ladybird book of Roman Britain he would see only white faces and he naturally assumed that the conquering Romans were as white as his neighbours and classmates. It was the same story when he turned on the television – black people were largely invisible, their stories untold. 'I got into history because I wanted to make sense of the forces that have affected my life,' he says. 'I’m from that generation who would look at Trevor McDonald on television – his gravitas and authority – and see hope and potential.'"

Social media is just TV now, and we can’t stop changing the channel – article by John Naughton in his Observer column. "Last August, ... Meta filed a document that made a startling claim: that it cannot be regarded as a social media monopoly, because it is not really a social media company. How come? Meta argues that if 'social' means time spent checking in with friends and family, then very little of that now occurs on its platforms. Today, the company reports, only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time involves consuming content from friends. The majority of time on both apps is spent watching short-form videos that are 'unconnected' – not from friends or followed accounts – but recommended by AI-powered algorithms developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise. Meta is clearly deploying these statistics as legal strategy, but they nonetheless capture a profound shift in our media ecology. The Financial Times’s data analyst John Burn-Murdoch has tracked users’ stated reasons for using social media over two decades. His data reveal that 'social media has become less about social networking and more about replacing or supplementing big-screen TV time with a smaller-screen medium that serves the same functions'. The two dominant reasons people cite now are 'to follow celebrities' and 'to fill spare time'.... So it looks like a seismic shift is under way, triggered by TikTok and the panicked responses from Meta, YouTube, and Spotify. Text-to-video AI now threatens to accelerate this transformation into a media landscape governed by a single mantra: 'short video is the answer – now what was the question?' In a perceptive recent blog post entitled Everything is Television, the writer and podcaster Derek Thompson argues that all forms of digital media are converging towards the same end state: continuous streams of short-form video content. He believes that we’re seeing a fundamental shift in how we consume information and interact with media and that this will have significant social and political consequences in the long run."

In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy. That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false. It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth' – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model. When the multibillionaire switched on Grokipedia on Tuesday, he said it was 'better than Wikipedia', or 'Wokepedia' as his supporters call it, reflecting a view that the dominant online encyclopedia often reflects leftwing talking points.... Evans, however, was discovering that Musk’s use of AI to weigh and check facts was suffering a ... problem. 'Chatroom contributions are given equal status with serious academic work,' Evans, an expert on the Third Reich, told the Guardian, after being invited to test out Grokipedia. 'AI just hoovers up everything.'”

Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once 'she takes all our money'.... Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now. I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming 'socially acceptable to be racist' again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms.... Something seems to have happened to us as we hit the midlife crisis years. Gen Xers are now old enough to start worrying that the world is changing and leaving us behind: that if we get made redundant we might not get hired again, that our marriages may not survive the shock of the kids leaving home, that our views are out of date and someone is out to get us for them, that people are laughing at us behind our backs.... It’s gen Xers, not grumpy pensioners or teenage boys beguiled by rightwing influencers, who are powering the populist insurgency now. Only 19% of British fiftysomethings voted Reform UK at the last general election but a third of those aged between 50 and 64 would do so now, according to YouGov, which is a staggeringly fast turnaround for the 'Cool Britannia' generation that put Tony Blair in Downing Street – and key to the party’s move from fringe to mainstream."

‘They’re not wolves, they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers – interview by Walter Marsh in The Guardian, on the publication of Mullen's book Running Amok. "The Bristol-born [Paul E.] Mullen had always dabbled in forensic work, but [a mass shooting] at Aramoana [New Zealand, where he was living,] piqued his curiosity. He would soon pivot to become a full-time forensic psychiatrist, specialising in some of the gravest acts known to society, from stalking and child sexual abuse to mass killings.... In April 1996 news broke of an even deadlier attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By then Mullen was in Australia, working as professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University. He received a call summoning him to Royal Hobart hospital where this latest perpetrator – whose name Mullen refuses to use – had been taken alive hours earlier after shooting 55 people, killing 35.,,, While the Port Arthur killer angrily rejected Mullen’s suggestion his actions might have been inspired by another high-profile attack a month earlier in Dunblane, Scotland, Mullen says he soon started to talk about other massacres. 'So he did know quite a lot about these previous killers,' Mullen reflects. 'And this is typical.'... The following decades would see Mullen interview many men in a similar position to the perpetrators of Aramoana and Port Arthur, as he became a leading authority in what are often referred to as 'lone-actor mass killers'. But despite the implication of solitude, the man in that Hobart hospital ward revealed what would become a common thread in all of Mullen’s dealings with lone mass killers: they are rarely acting in isolation.... 'It was the Texas university tower massacre [in 1966] that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,' Mullen reflects. 'And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].' Like the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors... 'They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,' Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. '"People mistreated me"; "I was cheated"; "they’re not fair"; "no one likes me". All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back. The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.'"

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms – article by Eric Reinhart in The Guardian. "Policymakers and aligned business interests promise AI will solve physician burnout, lower healthcare costs and expand access. Entrepreneurs tout it as the great equalizer, bringing high-quality care to people excluded from existing systems. Hospital and physician leaders such as Dr Eric Topol have hailed AI as the means by which humanity will finally be restored to clinical practice; according to this widely embraced argument, it will liberate doctors from documentation drudgery and allow them to finally turn away from their computer screens and look patients in the eye. Meanwhile, patients are already making use of AI chatbots as supplements to – or substitutes for – doctors in what many see as a democratization of medical knowledge. The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.... What makes AI so compelling is not simply faith in technology but the way it suggests we can improve medicine by leapfrogging the difficult work of structural change to confront disease-causing inequality, corporate interests and oligarchic power.... This faith in AI also reflects a misunderstanding of care itself, a misunderstanding decades in the making in the service of an idea now treated as an unquestionable good: evidence-based medicine (EBM). Emerging in the 1990s with the unassailable goal of improving care, EBM challenged practices based on habit and tradition by insisting decisions be grounded in rigorous research, ideally randomized controlled trials.... The gains were real: effective therapies spread faster, outdated ones were abandoned, and an ethic of scientific accountability took hold. But as the model transformed medicine, it narrowed the scope of clinical encounters. The messy, relational and interpretive dimensions of care – the ways physicians listen, intuit and elicit what patients may not initially say – were increasingly seen as secondary to standardized protocols. Doctors came to treat not singular people but data points. Under pressure for efficiency, EBM ossified into an ideology: “best practices” became whatever could be measured, tabulated and reimbursed. The complexity of patients’ lives was crowded out by metrics, checkboxes and algorithms. What began as a corrective to medicine’s biases paved the way for a new myopia: the conviction that medicine can and should be reduced to numbers.... As philosophers from Socrates to Søren Kierkegaard and feminist theorists like Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto have long argued, care is not only a clinical task but an ethical and political practice. It is, in the deepest sense, a practice of disalienation – of recovering our sense of ourselves as singular beings in community with one another in which individual difference is valued rather than erased. That is why care has transformative power beyond health. To be truly listened to – to be recognized not as a case but as a person – can change not just how one experiences illness, but how one experiences oneself and the world. It can foster the capacity to care for others across differences, to resist hatred and violence, to build the fragile social ties upon which democracy depends."

‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children –article by Lucy Knight in The Guardian. “The Secret of Me, a new documentary by British film-maker Grace Hughes-Hallett, … follows the life of Jim Ambrose, who was born in Louisiana in 1976.… Ambrose had genitals that, as he puts it in the film, ‘fall outside of an arbitrary acceptable norm‘. Doctors decided to operate on him as an infant, removing his testes and constructing a vagina. His parents were then advised to raise him as a daughter, and keep quiet about what had happened. He was told that he would need to take hormones when he was a teenager, and had further surgery to make his sexual organs appear more ‘female‘ as a young adult. But explanations were few and far between, and it was only when Ambrose sought out intersex groups that he was able to fully understand what had happened to him…. The Secret of Me draws a direct link between the harmful way Ambrose was treated and the work of psychologist John Money, whose theories about gender informed medical guidance about children born with atypical genitalia. In the 1960s, Money studied a pair of Canadian twin boys, originally called Bruce and Brian Reimer. Bruce was left without a penis after a botched circumcision, and the academic encouraged the boys’ parents to raise him as a girl, Brenda. Money studied both children as they grew, with his research claiming the experiment was a total success. Brenda, according to him, was a stereotypical and happy little girl, showing that a child’s gender could be moulded by the adults raising them. In fact, there were clear signs that Brenda was never happy as a girl, which Money simply left out of his papers. As an adult, he began living as a man, changing his name again, this time to David. The brothers were left traumatised by Money’s research (which involved having them inspect each other’s genitals as children and ‘rehearse‘ sexual acts) and their story has an incredibly sad end – both Brian and David killed themselves in their 30s. Money’s work was eventually debunked – but its impact on medical treatment for children born with ambiguous genitalia was felt for years…. Holly Greenberry-Pullen, 47, a Lib Dem councillor and the only openly intersex candidate in the 2024 general election, points out that the information that someone is given to guide their decision about surgery is just as important as their age.… In 2011 Greenberry-Pullen helped to found the charity Intersex UK. ’If there is no life-saving, essential medical urgency and factual diagnosis that means you have to perform an irreversible surgery, then you don’t do it,’ she says. ’Wes Streeting [the health secretary] needs to invite me and colleagues into Westminster to sit around the table and to talk about human rights and the right to bodily autonomy and medical policy on how intersex bodies are treated.”

Do you feel lucky? Why acknowledging our own good fortune would make the world a better place – article by Julian Richer in The Guardian. “I believe that many of us – especially those who consider ourselves successful – underestimate the role that luck has played in our lives…. I have had the incredible luck of being born in the UK, in a peaceful period of history. I was blessed with an able body and mind, and had a good upbringing, and an incredibly exclusive education. I had the freedom to take advantage of opportunities, to start my own business and pursue my ambitions. In that sense my early years were a heck of a lot easier than many people’s. And I was also extremely fortunate that my particular talents were highly valued and rewarded in the marketplace, which enabled me to become wealthy. How about you? Maybe you were born in a period when house prices were low, or when university education was free? You may not have had all of these things, but imagine for a second that you had none of them. Imagine that you came into this world facing barriers to your progress at every stage. Your parents unemployed, or needing care from you, or working ridiculous hours in insecure jobs. Your neighbourhood wracked by deprivation, despair, pollution and crime, with precious few opportunities to move up or out. Your plans to buy a house or start a business impossible because of lack of capital, or access to it…. Dismantling the myth that we live in a meritocracy is one of the most urgent changes needed in public life today.… Acknowledging the role that luck has played in our lives would be a great starting point, helping to smooth the path for our political leaders to take bolder action to tackle socioeconomic inequality. If more business leaders recognised how luck has helped them, it might also encourage them to act (for example by improving pay and conditions for low-paid or insecure workers).“

What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ – article by Deepak Varuvel Dennison in The Guardian. "For many people, GenAI is emerging as the primary way to learn about the world. A large-scale study published in September 2025, analysing how people have been using ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022, revealed that around half the queries were for practical guidance, or to seek information. These systems may appear neutral, but they are far from it. The most popular models privilege dominant ways of knowing (typically western and institutional) while marginalising alternatives, especially those encoded in oral traditions, embodied practice and languages considered 'low-resource' in the computing world, such as Hindi or Swahili. By amplifying these hierarchies, GenAI risks contributing to the erasure of systems of understanding that have evolved over centuries, disconnecting future generations from vast bodies of insight and wisdom that were never encoded yet remain essential, human ways of knowing. What’s at stake, then, isn’t just representation: it’s the resilience and diversity of knowledge itself.... To illustrate the kinds of knowledge missing, let’s consider one example: our understanding of local ecologies. An environmentalist friend once told me something that has stayed with me – a community’s connection with its ecology can be seen through the detailed and specific names it has for local plants. Because plant species are often regionally specific or ecologically unique, knowledge of these plants becomes equally localised. When a language becomes marginalised, the plant knowledge embedded within it often disappears as well. While writing this essay, I spoke to various people about the language gaps in GenAI – among them Dharan Ashok, chief architect at Thannal, an organisation dedicated to reviving natural building techniques in India.... Amid concerns over unsustainable and carbon-intensive construction, Dharan is actively working to recover the lost art of producing biopolymers from local plants. He noted that the greatest challenge lies in the fact that this knowledge is largely undocumented and has been passed down orally through native languages. It is often held by just a few elders, and when they pass away, it is lost. Dharan recounted an experience of missing the chance to learn how to make a specific type of limestone-based brick when the last artisan with that knowledge died."

The BBC is under threat like never before. This is how to save it – article by Pat Younge in The Guardian. "The BBC is our most effective defence against the dangers of global media power concentrated in the hands of a few private individuals, but we have very few obstacles to prevent a populist or authoritarian government from undermining it. This is a moment of peril that demands a new approach to governance and funding that secures the BBC’s future. We at the British Broadcasting Challenge have set out a number of proposals for achieving this. First, the government must grant the BBC a permanent charter that establishes it in perpetuity and enshrines its core principles of independence, public service and universality.... Second, it should create a new BBC governance board whose members – crucially – should be appointed by an independent body, and be responsible for regulating the BBC’s editorial performance and setting its strategic direction.... Third, the government must recommit to the fundamental principle of BBC universality. That means geographical universality, ensuring BBC services are free at the point of use throughout the UK, and universality of content, providing quality programmes across the board that reflect the lives of nations and regions throughout the country.... Fourth, the BBC must have a proper funding settlement that recognises the 30% cut in funding imposed over the past 15 years.... We need a more open, confident and responsive BBC, liberated from the nervousness engendered by years of bullying, that genuinely listens to its viewers and listeners and finds new ways of engaging with audiences. We can achieve this through a new governance system that recognises the BBC’s worldwide reputation for independence, and insulates it from the kind of partisan political meddling that has created the current furore; and through a reformed universal funding system that takes account of people’s ability to pay."

Is Your Website AI-Friendly? The 8-Point Checklist for Keeping AI Visitors Happy – website post by Andy Crestodina, referenced in Louise Harnby and Denise Cowle 'The Editing Podcast'. "Your website isn’t just for human visitors anymore. AI is already visiting your website.... Checklist for AI-friendly websites: 1. Add detailed descriptions of everything you offer. (AI visitors can't tell what you do.) 2. Confirm that all messages in images are also text. (AI visitors can't see inside your images.) 3. Confirm that all messages in videos are also text. (AI visitors don't watch your videos.) 4. Create an 'AI disclosure' training page. (AI cant get it all in one place.) 5. Create comparison pages. (AI can't tell how you compare.) 6. Confirm all copy is visible without Javascript. (AI can't see all of your content.) 7. Create custom report to track AI traffic. (Google Analytics isn't tracking traffic from AI sources separately.) 8. Update your contact form to track AI referrals. (Your contact form isn't updated for AI.)"

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side. The degree of increased division – known as 'affective polarisation' – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.... 'The change in their feed was barely perceptible, yet they reported a significant difference in how they felt about other people,' [said] Tiziano Piccardi, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University computer science department and co-author of the research.... 'What’s exciting about these results is that there is something that the platforms can do to reduce polarisation... It’s a new approach they could take in designing their algorithms.'”

‘We used a beachball as an alien!’ John Carpenter on his gloriously shonky sci-fi comedy Dark Star – interviews by Chris Broughton. John Carpenter, writer and director. "In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted to make a science fiction movie inspired by Dr Strangelove and 2001. We had no money but we did have enormous ambition. Dan co-wrote it, and he was also its production designer and editor, and he acted in the movie, playing Sergeant Pinback. We started off with some money from my parents, shooting on 16mm. It was a very long process of shooting a scene, then pausing to raise money to shoot the next.... By the summer of 1972 we had 45 minutes of footage, and we shopped it around and got the money to make it into a full-length feature film. We went looking for a distributor and Jack Harris, who’d produced The Blob, took it on. He was looking for a space movie, but there were certain things he wanted included – a bunch of cliches, such as a meteor storm.... The extra footage shot to make it feature-length included the scenes with the alien. By that point, we were full into comedy. We’d been using a beachball to represent a planet – it had a couple of bathroom plungers stuck to the bottom – and one day I saw it being carried by a crew member. I thought it looked so ridiculous that we should try something similar for the alien!" Brian Narelle, played Lieutenant Doolittle. "Filming was supposed to take a month but ended up happening at intervals over three years. The first scene we shot was in a closet in a student building – I don’t think the spaceship’s control room set had been finished.... Doolittle’s character – and the entire film – is summarised by one line: 'Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just find me something I can blow up.' Right now, that’s an attitude that feels even more disturbing. Doolittle’s lack of success when trying to persuade the bomb not to explode is also not a monument to our chances of victory over AI. The film has things to say about today that it couldn’t say in 1974."

On Living in an Atomic Age – essay by C.S. Lewis, first published 1948, quoted by Eliezer Yudkowsky in 'If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies', referenced by Jasmine Sun in 'AI friends too cheap to meter'. “'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.'... If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs."

Cuttings: October 2025

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners – article by Maggie Harrison Dupré on Futurism, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “As AI bots like ChatGPT become inextricably tangled with people’s private and public lives, it’s causing unpredictable new crises. One of these collision points is in romantic relationships…: one person in a couple becomes fixated on ChatGPT or another bot — for some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom — and ends up tearing the partnership down as the AI makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions. To learn what these AI breakups and divorces look like, we talked to more than a dozen people who say that AI chatbots played a key role in the dissolution of their long-term relationships and marriages. … Spouses relayed bizarre stories about finding themselves flooded with pages upon pages of ChatGPT-generated psychobabble, or watching their partners become distant and cold — and in some cases, frighteningly angry — as they retreated into an AI-generated narrative of their relationship. Several even reported that their spouses suddenly accused them of abusive behavior following long, pseudo-therapeutic interactions with ChatGPT, allegations they vehemently deny…. Many mental health experts are warning against using large language model-powered (LLM) chatbots for therapy or mental health support, citing the unreliability of the tech and its widely-documented propensity for sycophancy — in other words, its penchant for remaining agreeable and obsequious to the user, regardless of whether the user’s inputs are accurate or even based in reality. We took our reporting to Dr. Anna Lembke, professor and medical director of addiction medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine… She expressed concern for this emerging dynamic among couples, saying that in some cases it’s likely to be resulting in ‘maladaptive interpersonal behaviors, egged on by a technology that is designed to optimize for empathy and validation to the exclusion of any other kind of feedback.… Empathy and validation are important components of any kind of mental health treatment or mental health intervention, but it can’t stop with empathy and validation… You can’t just continually tell somebody you know who’s looking for emotional support that their way is the right way, and their worldview is the only correct worldview.‘”

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry: a brilliant meditation on mortality – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022.... It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring.... Partly, this book works its magic through the adamantine detail and quiet lyricism with which it recounts a particular, unrepeatable life.... Mostly, though, what makes this book gem-like is that it succeeds in conveying the reality of death as this monumental, mythic thing that coexists surreally with the mundane world of council bin collections and neighbours hanging out their washing. Death, once it has decided to capture us, descends with the inevitability of gravity.... Along the way, the book becomes about something else – the care gifted by strangers who arrive miraculously, via form filling and phone calls, and then vanish for ever.... As a young, aspiring writer, Perry yearned for dramatic, painful experiences to give her something to write about. She wanted, she says, 'to hoard rubies and lose them, and spill ink into the loss'. But here she has written beautifully and compellingly about the life of an unexceptional man, and an experience that is coming to all of us – and shown that there is no such thing as an ordinary life, or an ordinary death."

A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0 – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "[The] social model of stupidity – [as described by Arendt and] crystallised in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey – has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis. Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasised that their primary function was to organise a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires and expectations. The 'stupid' person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the 'smart' person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes. In the early 21st century, similar arguments have been made for 'big data'...: that they will happily render the theories, judgments and explanations of human beings – with all their biases and errors – redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nanodetails, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition.... Thus when people look to the bond markets to rescue us from stupidity, they are not expecting the return of 'common sense', but merely that certain behaviours and policies will receive lower scores than others. Similarly, large language models, which promise so much today, do not offer judgment, let alone intelligence, but unrivalled pattern-processing power, based on a vast corpus of precedents.... The transition of human activities on to surveillance platforms means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators.... In a fully platform-based world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviours and patterns; meaning, intention and explanation become irrelevant. One of the most incisive accounts of this tendency in contemporary US politics comes from political scientists Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in their analysis of the 'new conspiracism'.... The new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and 'conspiracy entrepreneurs'. Outlandish and pointless fantasies, such as the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared and repeated. Engagement – and revenue – is all.... Trump and his administration are undoubtedly stupid. They don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand the precedents or facts involved and lack any curiosity about consequences, human and non-human.... But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall ... expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism."

Do you know about shitposting? It’s cheap humour, rage bait, and now, it seems, US government policy – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "[The] combination of cheap humour and rage bait is the province of the shitpost, a genre of low-effort social media content designed to amuse insiders and annoy outsiders. Like so much of internet culture, shitposting was pioneered on the message board 4chan – but Donald Trump is a natural. On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, he tweeted: 'I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.' The shitpost forces a choice: undermine public decorum by laughing along, or get offended, outing yourself as a hater and a loser. ... Unencumbered by the establishment strategists who urged decorum during his first administration, Trump has elevated shitposting to a national strategy in his second term. [In September], the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a video of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents hauling civilians into unmarked vans, cut to the opening credits of the Pokémon television series. As the theme song’s refrain has it: 'Gotta Catch ’Em All'. On 4chan, home to the small but significant crossover of anime fans and the extreme right, posters debated whether the video was 'based' (internet slang meaning authentically cool and irreverent) or 'cringe' (shamefully straining for the approval the 'based' attain with ease). But the real target audience was liberals outraged not only by state violence but by its shameless public celebration. If the right dominates meme culture, it is less because the 'left can’t meme' than because it is far easier to 'own the libs' who remain committed to rational political discourse. Where liberals seek earnest debate, the shitpost offers a polemic without a point, an opportunity to indulge in cruelty."

Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? – article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. "It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once.... In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification.... Stage 1: good to users. Amazon ... used [its] fortune to subsidise many goods, selling them below cost. It also subsidised shipping and offered a no-questions-asked, postage-paid returns policy. This offer tempted millions of users to pile on to the platform. Once they were there, Prime membership went a long way to locking them in. ... Stage 2: abusing users, good to business. Amazon was initially very good to ... business customers. It paid full price for their goods, then sold them below cost to its customers.... Then, once those merchants were locked in, Amazon put the screws on them. Amazon brags about this technique, which it calls 'the flywheel'. It brings in users with low prices and a large selection. This attracts merchants who are eager to sell to those users. The merchants’ dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts – and around and around the flywheel spins.... Stage 3: a giant pile of shit. Amazon has a myriad of tactics at its disposal for shifting value from business customers to itself... It uses its overview of merchants’ sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants’ contracting factories, to cream off its merchants’ bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a 'service' in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings. All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants’ goods."

The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes: wild times with young Tennyson – review by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. "Alfred Tennyson was a divided soul.... In this illuminating book, Richard Holmes has chosen to focus on the lesser known of the poet’s personae.... What gives his book its exceptional energy ... is the powerful undertow of threatened belief and existential anxiety tugging the reader down into the 'boundless deep' of the title, where 19th-century thinkers wrestled with terrible thoughts. In 2008, Holmes published The Age of Wonder, a group biography charting the way that Romantic poets responded to the discoveries of their scientific contemporaries such as Humphry Davy, William Herschel and Joseph Banks. That book was full of exuberant hopes. This one, set a generation later, is its darker, sadder sequel....If the history of life on Earth had begun millions of years before the appearance of the human race, then how to believe that the world had been made for humanity’s benefit and enjoyment? 'It is inconceivable,' wrote Tennyson, 'that the whole Universe was merely created for us, who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.'... These conundrums were repressed. It was hard to confront them in public without being accused of blasphemy, or in private without seeming to give way to despair. ... [Holmes] takes seriously the pain of those living through the crisis of faith, and writes about it with such sympathy that even his most secular-minded modern readers feel the shock of finding oneself alone and unloved in a God-forsaken universe."

‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? – article by Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. "From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere.... But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.... Research into how generative AI affects child development is in its early stages, though it builds upon studies looking at less sophisticated forms of AI, such as digital voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Multiple studies have found that young children’s social interactions with AI tools differ subtly from those with humans, with children aged three to six appearing 'less active' in conversations with smart speakers. This finding suggests that children perceive AI agents as existing somewhere in the middle of the divide between animate and inanimate entities, according to Ying Xu, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Understanding whether an object is a living being or an artefact is an important cognitive development that helps a child gauge how much trust to place in the object, and what kind of relationship to form with it... Children begin to make this distinction in infancy and usually develop a sophisticated understanding of it by age nine or 10. But while children have always imbued inanimate objects such as teddy bears and dolls with imagined personalities and capacities, at some level they know that the magic is coming from their own minds. 'A very important indicator of a child anthropomorphizing AI is that they believe AI is having agency,' Xu said. 'If they believe that AI has agency, they might understand it as the AI wanting to talk to them or choosing to talk to them. They feel that the AI is responding to their messages, and especially emotional disclosures, in ways that are similar to how a human responds. That creates a risk that they actually believe they are building some sort of authentic relationship.'”

Sunder Katwala on race, patriotism and flag-waving: ‘The far right is vocal and angry because it is shrinking’ – interview with Steve Rose in The Guardian. "On the train to meet Sunder Katwala in Dartford, Kent, you pass streets with bright new Saint George’s flags on every lamp-post.... It’s the week after hundreds of thousands of people attended a flag-waving rally in central London led by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, rounding off a summer of protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, and portentous warnings that Britain is a 'tinderbox' or even a 'powder keg' about to ignite. This is England in 2025. In Dartford’s pedestrianised town centre, though, it’s a different picture. People of all skin colours peacefully go about their business on a sunny afternoon. A busker is strumming next to the sculpture of local heroes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. And crisscrossing the streets overhead are miles of Saint George’s flag bunting.... The bunting has been up since Saint George’s Day, [Katwala] explains. There was a big parade here in April, with local schoolchildren and brass bands. Then it stayed up for VE Day, then the England women’s victorious Euros football tournament this summer, which Katwala cheered on with his daughters, in an England shirt.... This is also England in 2025....If there are two versions of British identity pulling in different directions at the moment, then Katwala is one of the people trying to bring them together.... He laid out his philosophy on British identity in last year’s book, How to Be a Patriot, and his organisation British Future is geared toward finding common ground and constructive solutions when it comes to race and immigration.... The child of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse, born and raised in Britain, Katwala literally has skin in the game – as a product of and advocate for multiculturalism, but also as someone who’s been no stranger to the worst of British racism, not only back in the 1970s and 80s but also, regrettably, in the present day. 'I experienced much, much more racism on a daily basis this year, and in the last three years, than I did 30 years ago,' he says.... It would be easy to read [the recent rally] as 'far-right politics gone mainstream', but the picture is more complex than that. 'Three-quarters of those people wouldn’t think they were on a far-right rally,' he says. 'On the whole, in the long run, [the far right] is becoming more vocal, more angry and more dangerous because it is shrinking, but it definitely doesn’t think it is shrinking.' That makes it all the more concerning that such a large crowd can be drawn to such an event by other factors, such as general discontent over their economic circumstances. 'It’s a very effective strategy for the far right, to blur and try to dissolve all of the boundaries.'.. In surveys, more than half of Britons now see immigration as a concern – the highest level in a decade – but when you break it down into specific types of migrant, the numbers start to change, Katwala explains. Ask about foreign-born nurses and doctors in the NHS, for example, and almost nobody says they are not glad they are here. Then there’s a category of 'good people who work hard' – Polish plumbers, say, of whom most Britons also broadly approve. And 'there’s almost always a refugee you’re in favour of,' he says, such as Ukrainians fleeing the war, or Hongkongers leaving China. That leaves asylum-seekers arriving by boat across the Channel, who dominate the immigration conversation but make up only a small number of the total."

Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies – article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. "The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, was built in Britain to revolutionise codebreaking during the second world war – a mind-boggling feat of creative innovation – but Turing wasn’t in the country at the time. Neither was it conceived by the mostly private school and Oxbridge-educated boffins at Bletchley Park. Rather, the machine Park staff called Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers, a cockney bricklayer’s son who for decades was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from acknowledging his achievement. Now, with his 120th birthday approaching and a Tommy Flowers Foundation established to right this historical wrong, he is finally getting some of his due ... Working in his lab at [the Post Office’s Dollis Hill Research Station in north London], visiting Bletchley as needed, Flowers improved [Cambridge mathematician Max Newman's] design for [a machine to break the Germans' post-Enigma 'Tunny' code] and oversaw its manufacture, but still considered it a poor machine. In response, in February 1943, he stunned the boffins with a plan for a fully electronic digital machine that would use thermionic valves as switches to generate and process the zeroes and ones used for binary calculation.... [Valves] had a reputation for constantly failing. Yet, having pioneered their use in automatic telephone exchanges, Flowers knew that if left switched on they were highly reliable. The idea of using valves as switches in a digital system was so new and radical that Flowers may have been the only person in Britain capable of seeing it – and of knowing they would be millions of times faster than the traditional electromechanical switches Newman used: he had already used them to build a prototype digital memory unit for the Post Office, a truly astonishing first. Nonetheless, Flowers later characterised the response he got at BP as 'incredulity'. Nothing like the machine he proposed, using 1,600 valves to perform digital calculations, had ever been contemplated."

Here’s what you need to know about Starmer’s illiberal protest curbs: they would have killed the Labour party at birth – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine a movement arising in this country that seeks to overthrow established power. Imagine that it begins with a series of rebellions, in Scotland and south Wales perhaps, that shut down workplaces, confront police and soldiers (sometimes peaceably, sometimes with crude weapons), set up roadblocks and lay siege to the places where fellow protesters are imprisoned and government officials are meeting. Imagine that this movement goes on to smash or disable machinery across the country. Imagine that it organises a general strike, nixing much of the UK’s economic activity for three months. Imagine that it keeps protesting in the same places by the same means, gradually eroding the resistance of the state. Keir Starmer’s Labour government would doubtless do everything in its power not just to stop these individual actions but to prohibit the movement. What am I describing? The origins and development of the Labour party. The Labour party arose from a long wave of protests by workers against capital, calling for workers’ rights and for sweeping democratic reforms. These protests and their organisers came to be known as the labour movement. Its early actions included the radical war in Scotland, the Merthyr and Newport risings in south Wales, the Swing riots in England and the General Strike of 1842. No such protests would have meant no such movement. No such movement would have meant no such party. Yet somehow, the party that arose from protest has formed, in terms of our rights to free expression and democratic challenge, the most illiberal government the UK has suffered since the second word war. This Labour government would have banned the labour movement."

A prophetic 1934 novel has found a surprising second life: it holds lessons for us all – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. See also 'English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life'. "Forgotten for decades, Sally Carson’s Bavaria-set Crooked Cross was republished in April by Persephone Books, which specialises in reviving neglected works. Since then, it has been a surprise hit, a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand. Crooked Cross begins in December 1932, and ends at midsummer the following year. The setting is the little, fictional Bavarian town of Kranach, a picture-postcard place in the foothills of the Alps. Its focus is the Kluger family – a modest, middle-class clan of kindly, loving parents and three grown-up children, Helmy, Lexa and Erich – who are gathering to celebrate Christmas with their cousins and Lexa’s fiance, Moritz. Everything is warm and delightful and full of promise: the tree with its glass baubles and candles, the tissue-wrapped presents, the carols, the roasted goose. Everything is gorgeously decorated, 'even' – one reads with a shudder that is deepened by a 21st-century knowledge of where [it] was all headed – 'Helmy’s picture of Hitler which stood on the piano'. One of the remarkable things about this book is its immediacy. It was written in the moment, and published quickly. The six-month period that it covers was one of momentous political change: Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis gained an effective majority in the Reichstag, Dachau was opened, and Jews were barred from public-service jobs. At the start of the novel, the characters greet each other with a cheery Grüss Gott; by the end, Herr Kluger is heil Hitler-ing acquaintances in the street and the local church bells have been altered so that they chime with the notes of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. Also by the end of this short six months, the loving, close circle of the Kluger family has fallen apart. The attentive reader will have noted, even within the first few pages, for example, that Lexa’s fiance Moritz Weissman, a good Roman Catholic emerging from Christmas mass, also happens to have a Jewish surname. Reading this novel, armed with the hindsight that Carson herself lacked, is a remarkable experience, at times painful.... What is so impressive about Carson is, despite the fact she had no idea where Hitlerism would end, the novel has an unshakeable moral core. There is no equivocation. What is being done in Germany to Jews, to communists, is plainly horrific, according to the novel’s worldview. Carson wrote – already in 1933 – of the grim stories emerging from Dachau: 'People had a way of suddenly disappearing, no trial, no explanation'; 'prisoners were half-starved, bullied, inhumanly treated'.... Crooked Cross gets no closer to Hitler than that photograph on the piano. All the politics happen at a distance, in the background, and are understood only as their effects filter down to the Klugers and their little town.... The Kluger family, like millions of families across Germany, is deeply marked by the great war, and shaped by economic collapse. The boys have never found meaningful work. Helmy is unemployed, and Erich has an unsatisfying job as a ski instructor. Carson shows us how extremism, when it takes hold, provides these young men with purpose, work, a narrative, hope and clearly defined roles. It also provides them with a set of people – leftwingers and Jews – to hate, to blame, to punish and, quite quickly, to beat and to kill. Carson’s iron sense of right and wrong runs in harness with her empathy. There is nothing inherently terrible about these young men who turn on other young men and turn violently on those who, months ago, were their friends. But they choose what they choose. The resonances with today are impossible to overlook. Would that we all had Carson’s insight and her moral clarity."

Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Around two years ago, [MIT research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna] began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how ... the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving? With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there. The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. 'Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,' Kosmyna says. 'That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.'... Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a 'stupidogenic society', a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?... As humans, we’re very good at what experts call cognitive offloading', namely using our physical environment to reduce our mental load, and this in turn helps us achieve more complex cognitive tasks.... The complication is, if technology is truly making us cleverer – turning us into efficient, information-processing machines – why do we spend so much time feeling dumb?.. One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk."

The Revolutionists by Jason Burke: from hijackings to holy war – review by Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. "In the 70s, ... commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history. Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, writes with amused detachment, sketching militants less as ideologues than oddballs.... If ideology sometimes recedes from these pages, it is because many of Burke’s antiheroes were functionally illiterate when it came to theory. What counted was the excitement of the escapade, not the utopia it was meant to bring about. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an interpretative thread running through the disparate material: the failure of the left, Burke argues, left a vacuum that was swiftly filled by Islamism. At the beginning of the period, the prototypical radical was Leila Khaled, the Palestinian 'Grenade Girl' who hijacked a TWA flight in 1969, offering cigarettes and sweets to her captives while denouncing the US as Israel’s armourer. No lives were lost; prisoners were exchanged. By the end, it had become the pious jihadi, unbending and undeterred by the prospect of bodies piling up. Where leftist hijackers wanted publicity for Palestine, among other causes, Islamist suicide bombers embraced the annihilation of infidels. This was less the radicalisation of Islam than it was the Islamisation of radicalism. The fear that tropical communism – revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, Ethiopia and Sudan – struck into Middle Eastern capitals ensured that oasis communism was nipped in the bud. Islamism, meanwhile, was accommodated as a counterweight to socialism by the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom bankrolled Islamist terror."

Posh, proud and impossible to ignore: the incredible life of Annabel Goldsmith – article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "If the sitting Marquess of Londonderry died tomorrow, and in so doing bestowed a ladyhood on his 15-year-old granddaughter, would you ever know?... Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who died at home on Saturday at 91, lived through an era, by contrast, in which aristocracy and wealth were extremely public.... At the end of the 1940s, when she was 15, she became a lady when her grandfather died, and, believe me, everyone knew about it. When she had her coming-out ball in the 1950s, a young Queen Elizabeth attended, since the whole point was to be presented to the queen – it was social death for a debutante if she wasn’t. In the 1960s, she lent her name to Annabel’s, the nightclub set up by her first husband, Mark Birley, for poshos in London’s Berkeley Square.... Well into the 1970s, the aristocracy still had great cachet, and Annabel’s, the club, drew in a remarkable international A-list – Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Teddy Kennedy, David Hockney, Muhammad Ali. It’s not a given that anyone went there because they wanted to hang out with Princess Margaret and Prince Charles (as was). But certainly today, if you were, say, the singer Gracie Abrams, touching down in Heathrow and asking an underling where was the coolest place to hang out, they would not say, 'So-and-so’s is cool because Prince William goes there.' And non-royal blue bloods wouldn’t even have the name recognition to be considered and then rejected.... The structure of wealth has changed and globalised over the past century in ways we can discuss another day, but the distribution of land in the UK, from which a lot of the wealth and power can be inferred, has not altered as much as you’d think.... What is different is the cultural footprint. The display-case living of the postwar gentry and aristocracy relied on the kind of formulas celebrities have today: dates in the calendar; events that included everyone who was anyone; places from which the unwashed were certainly excluded, but that they were implicitly invited to observe.... Annabel Goldsmith lived through the last of that visibility. And while her death is not the moment to wonder what combination of class self-consciousness and outside scrutiny caused the aristocracy to go underground, it should be noted that, while it was still very much overground, she was the face and spirit of the whole scene."

The crimewave sweeping Britain? Illegal houses in multiple occupation – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Our crime scene is a redbrick townhouse built in the last years of Victoria – tall, battered but undeniably handsome.... Now look closer. Outside our house is a jumble of bags and trolleys and suitcases, while, despite the late-October chill, the front door is wide open. Knock at the very first room, and you meet our victim. Eunice Osei is a proud, reserved woman, but give her time and she will say: 'I’ve not been treated fairly.' Then she’ll cry. The crime is her room, a tiny hutch crammed with a kitchenette, toilet, bed and flimsy chipboard furniture. Clothes, kitchen utensils and suitcases are stacked so high against the grimy windows that light struggles to enter. We are swathed in murk, with nowhere to sit and hardly anywhere to stand. For three years, this holding pen has been her home. By a combination of ingenuity and greed, a family home has been broken down into 11 such cells. It’s become a house in multiple occupation, or HMO... Who’s the criminal: her landlord? Yes – literally. Andreas Stavrou Antoniades bought this house in 1990. How much he paid isn’t recorded by the Land Registry, but going by the local market then it wouldn’t have been much over £100,000. Just over 10 years later, he applied to split it into an HMO. When Haringey council refused, he just bulldozed the law. Without an HMO licence, he rented the rooms illegally.... But how did Eunice end up renting from this villain? Haringey council placed her there.... In one part of Haringey civic centre, officers chased a serial lawbreaker through the courts; in another, they sent him business, most of which will be paid for by the public, through universal credit.... The crime against Eunice is of making her life almost unlivable. What makes it so characteristic of modern Britain is how far the guilt spreads. Yes, there’s private-sector villainy, but there’s also public-sector complicity, by a council into its second decade of austerity. Then there are the courts, whose punishments are little more than 'the cost of doing business'. There is Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy and the failure to build enough social and affordable housing, nodded through again by housing secretary Steve Reed... Even the best achievement of this government, the renters’ protections that gain royal assent next week, will be somewhat blunted by the lack of new money to enforce the new law."

Smart money: family offers £180,000 a year for tutor to get one-year-old into Eton – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "A wealthy family near London is 'searching for a tutor to provide a comprehensive British cultural environment' for their infant, according to an advertisement published by Tutors International... To earn £180,000 [a year], the 'extraordinary' tutor is expected to fulfil a long list of eccentric and class-based criteria: a received pronunciation English accent; 'reasonable' music theory; an understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby, polo and rowing; the ability to foster hand-eye coordination and good manners; familiarity with early years education including Montessori and Reggio Emilia pedagogies; and first aid training.... The ideal candidate will have attended 'the best schools and universities in England' and 'have been raised in a socially appropriate background … educated and polished, with excellent manners and personal values'.... 'In time, the family hope their son will be accepted at a top-flight school such as Eton, St Paul’s, Westminster or Harrow. It is important that [the] boy’s education, even at the early years stage, starts to prepare him for this kind of life.. ...'He should be exposed to a wide range of quintessentially British experiences to help hone his habits, outlooks, tastes and sporting preferences.'"

‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron? - interview by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, [Wikipedia] stands out: a huge, collective endeavour based on voluntarism and cooperation, with an underlying vision that’s unapologetically utopian – to build 'a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge'.... Wales’s new book, The Seven Rules of Trust, is an attempt to distil the secrets of its success. They include things such as having a strong, clear, positive purpose (the slogan 'Wikipedia is an encyclopedia' is a surprisingly powerful reminder that keeps editors honest); assuming good faith and being courteous; refraining from taking sides and being radically transparent. It’s a no-nonsense 'lessons learned' book that might otherwise find itself occupying shelf space next to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO (subtitle: The 33 Laws of Business and Life) – but Wikipedia’s ubiquity, and the way it has dramatically bucked the trend of online toxicity – make it potentially far more significant.... Seven Rules is particularly strong on the importance of not taking sides, arguing that if people believe an institution isn’t neutral, trust evaporates. Crucially, that happens even if it’s biased in your favour. Wales cites work by Cory Clark at the University of Pennsylvania that looked at how people responded to political stands taken by all sorts of organisations, from newspapers to dental clinics to sports leagues. 'When people thought a group was politicised against their own political position, they trusted the group less. No surprise there. But when people thought the group had taken sides and was politically aligned with them … they still trusted them less.'... At the same time, neutrality and civility has its limits, doesn’t it? I mention a clever op-ed by Larry David that made this point, called My Dinner With Adolf, in which the comedian imagines breaking bread with the worst man in history. He ends with the line: 'I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.' What does Wales think about the risk that, in giving a fair hearing to all sides, you can fail in the moral duty to call out real wickedness? 'So I think we can make a distinction here between what I ought to do, what you ought to do, versus what an encyclopedia ought to do,' he says.... 'The Hitler entry doesn’t have to be a rant against Hitler. You just write down what he did, and it’s a damning indictment right there … you don’t need to add "PS, he’s a horrible person". You just say: "These are the facts, draw your own conclusions."' ... This separation of fact and sentiment seems pretty unusual nowadays. It’s no great mystery why: in the book, Wales talks about 'an entire class of "content creators" who have effectively been trained by social media algorithms to play up outrage, fear, and hate at every opportunity'. Part of the reason this has happened is because of the lack of guiding principles among web 2.0’s major players. 'Unlike Wikipedia, social media platforms have no purpose beyond selling eyeballs to advertisers, so there was nothing steering the development of norms toward civility and constructive conversation.'"

Say it, don't show it – Substack post by Neal Stephenson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “For the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows: ‘“Up with you,“ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.‘ If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head. You might actually have to stop reading for a few moments to let that film develop and play out. And while you’re doing that you might savor the arch and clearly self-aware phrasing that Dickens is using here, which unto itself is a way of poking fun at Mr. Pickwick and his social circle. A common bit of advice given to people who want to become writers is ‘show it, don’t say it.‘ Applied to the above scenario it would probably balloon the description to multiple pages. … And at the end, it wouldn’t actually be that funny. Not funny enough to be worth spilling that much ink. It would end up on the cutting room floor. As written, though, it works and it’s funny as hell, precisely because Dickens is just saying what happened, albeit in deliberately over-elaborate prose. He says it quickly and lets the reader play the scene out in their head. The only catch is that you, the reader, do actually have to get the joke. Dickens, or any other writer of the ‘say it‘ school (Jane Austen comes to mind) is implicitly asking the reader to know more and to do more during the act of reading this kind of prose. It’s almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.”

It’s the Internet, Stupid – post by Francis Fukuyama on Persuasion website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes: 1. Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies. 2. Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status. 3. Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts. 4. The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump. 5. The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure. 6. Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left’s cultural agenda. 7. Failures of leadership of the progressive Left. 8. Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion. 9. Social media and the internet.… I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.… The current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes…. This is what leads me to think that Cause #9, the rise of the internet and social media, is the one factor that stands above the others as the chief explanation of our current problems. … Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously ‘truth‘ was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information…. There is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious.”