Cuttings: September 2025

The Jury, Murder Trial: reality TV so gobsmacking it beat The Traitors to a Bafta – review by Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. "The only show currently holding a candle to The Traitors is The Jury: Murder Trial (indeed, in May, they competed for the best reality Bafta; the latter won). Following two groups of 12 strangers as they play jury during a word-for-word reconstruction of a real criminal trial, the 2024 series shone a light on the enigma at the heart of the justice system. Jury deliberations are top secret, meaning lawyers, judges and academics have little understanding of how jurors digest evidence, draw individual conclusions or – crucially – arrive at a unanimous decision. The show’s revelations were gobsmacking: many of the pretend jurors were entirely swept up in their own psychodramas, only pausing to bend the evidence to their personal narratives and belief systems. In the dock was John (names, dates and locations were changed), who had bludgeoned his wife, Helen, to death with a hammer. He was claiming manslaughter due to 'loss of control' – a plea that required the jury to believe the accused faced extreme provocation and was unaware of his actions. The defence portrayed Helen as verbally abusive; the prosecution argued his attack was deliberate regardless. Some jurors identified with Helen: did they deserve to die for taunting a partner in the past? Others related to John and – without as many qualms as you might expect – felt they might have done the same in his shoes. Only a couple refused to let their emotions cloud the facts of this violent killing. Eventually, we saw how two initially divided juries came to their (different) verdicts: in both cases, a single juror seemed to be the driving force.... As usual, the fidelity of the social experiment is diluted with repetition: The Jury’s second series is slightly less edifying than the first.... Even so, The Jury’s appeal stays intact. That’s largely because it tells us so much about how people refashion life experience into a set of values – and, depressingly, how frequently domestic abuse is still minimised and excused."

A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries: comfortably dumb? – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage... First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense.... You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity... As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it. But then there’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it’s all of these. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing. Perhaps inescapably, therefore, Jeffries makes a number of nice philosophical distinctions about the meaning of the term – and then goes back to using it in the know-it-when-you-see-it sense, so his discussion wanders through whole fields of its meanings without ever quite erecting a boundary fence. In a way, you could see this book not as a history of stupidity but as a slant history of its various opposites. It’s an amiable and rambling tour through the history of philosophy, looking at the idea of rationality and its limitations. If it’s stupid not to seek the truth, is it not even more stupid to suppose there’s a truth to be sought? The western ancients were in the first camp; and their special distinction – thank you, Socrates – was to see reason and virtue as being directly connected. It’s only with the Enlightenment that stupidity started to be seen as a cognitive rather than a moral failing.... It’s not all straight philosophy. Jeffries gives us affectionate readings of Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, dips into Shakespeare’s fools and the rich menu of stupidities available in King Lear, as well as making the odd excursus into cognitive science.... This is a learned and often exhilarating book, and it’s a bit all over the place – but, given the subject matter, it’d be stupid to expect otherwise."

‘The one thing it doesn’t have is actual sex’: the new Mary Whitehouse play that would have infuriated Mary Whitehouse – review by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. “'Mary Whitehouse wasn’t material I would naturally have been drawn to – being leftwing and gay, two things of which she didn’t approve,' admits [playwright Caroline Bird]. Her previous biographical drama for Nottingham Playhouse, Red Ellen (2022), was much closer to her own politics and feminism in its depiction of the pioneering Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The idea of writing about Whitehouse came from [actor Maxine Peake, who plays her] and the play’s director, Sarah Frankcom. Bird admitted her doubts but 'they told me to go away, do a bit of research and see if there was something I could get my teeth into.' ... Although, as a gay feminist, Bird’s engagement with Whitehouse was antagonistic, she knew instinctively that, for dramatic effectiveness, the play could not be purely a rebuke or refutation: 'Like in a court case, you have to give each side equal time to speak, regardless of your personal views. But in a play you also have to empathise with either side.' She feels that, on both X and the stage, 'it has become quite controversial to empathise with someone who you vehemently disagree with personally. "How could you humanise this person? How could you empathise with this person?" But to write a play or a character you have to imagine how they feel.' Her motto while she was writing it was a quote from the film director Jean Renoir: 'The real hell of life is everyone has [their] reasons.'... The writer rejects the idea that Whitehouse was simply of her time (born before the first world war) and tribe (Christian): 'This is not the homophobia of my grandmother, who was Christian and called all my partners "flatmates". This was a woman with a huge platform and agenda for 25 years.'... 'She fell in love with a married man at a time when her parents’ marriage broke down – something she never wrote about. At the same time she joined what many have seen as a cult and was at least cult-adjacent: The Oxford Group, which later became the Moral Re-Armament movement.'... Whitehouse was instrumental in passing the Protection of Children Act 1978, making child abuse images illegal... Because those concerns seem prescient – and overlap with feminist and liberal thought – they have led to a revisionist view that Whitehouse has been proved 'right' about important matters. Bird understands this argument but demurs: 'I have a slightly different take on it. We tend to think that, if we align with someone’s fears, we agree with them. But that’s only half the story; you have to look at what their solutions are. Of course we can align with her fears about the effects of unregulated content on young people. But her solution to that was sex education that only teaches chastity before marriage and fidelity within it. She was anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-divorce, anti-feminist. She wanted a very traditional Christian state. So before we say "she was right", we have to look at the whole picture.'"

Inter Alia: Rosamund Pike rules in searing legal drama from Prima Facie team – review by Emma John in The Guardian. "Three years ago, playwright Suzie Miller gave Jodie Comer a career-defining role with her West End debut in Prima Facie. ... This is an almost deliberate counterpoint to Prima Facie, in which a defence lawyer, expert at playing the system to demolish rape charges against her clients, is undone by her own experience of sexual assault. Miller wanted to highlight how poorly the law serves victims, and Inter Alia presents the same issue from the flipside with a female judge, determined to make the system more just, whose world is upended by an accusation close to home.... Jessica Parks (Pike) is the kind of multi-skilled woman you just know the legal system needs more of. She brings humanity and compassion to her courtroom, employing her soft skills to protect vulnerable witnesses while cutting down cocky male counsel with a tone that can 'cut through tendons and bone'. But she’s not just a crown court judge, she’s also an expert juggler, in the way that high-achieving women so often need to be. Her career exists 'inter alia' – as Miller puts it, in the cracks of everyone else’s lives.... Jessica remains the moral and emotional centre: her tragedy unfolds like that of an Ibsen protagonist failed by those around them. As a mother she has done the best she can, both to shield her child from bullies and to raise him true to her feminist beliefs (there’s a very funny scene where they have the porn talk). But she can’t protect him from social media, or peer pressure or, in the end, himself."

Suzie Miller on her Prima Facie follow-up Inter Alia: ‘Boys are looking for male mentors. Instead they get the internet and porn – interview by Elissa Blake in The Guardian. "Inter Alia sold out before Pike started rehearsals, and received glowing reviews, with the Guardian calling it 'a searing commentary on the justice system and a purposefully uncomfortable insight into contemporary parenting'. There has been speculation about a West End remount but, in the meantime, a filmed version is on screens in the UK... As part of her writing process Miller interviewed female judges and lawyers – many, like Miller, mothers of sons – about a potentially ruinous conundrum: what if the system I uphold one day ensnares my child? 'Every woman I know says they live in fear of their son being accused of something and ending up in prison,' Miller explains. 'Not because they want to excuse bad behaviour, but because they know the system is brutal and binary. Some women want perpetrators jailed. Others want acknowledgment, apology, repair. But the law rarely allows for anything between acquittal and a custodial sentence.' Inter Alia has been compared to the Netflix hit Adolescence: both ask audiences to consider how boys are inducted into masculinity and what happens when parents, particularly mothers, are shut out of that conversation. 'You raise these gorgeous, rambunctious boys,' Miller says, 'and then as teenagers, mothers become less relevant. They’re looking for male mentors, and I don’t think they’re finding them. Instead they get the internet, porn, locker-room banter. We don’t equip them with tools to navigate that space. And we hand over their education in sex and relationships to the internet.'... In Inter Alia, Pike’s character is both judge and mother; the play shifts between the high rhetoric of the courtroom and the chaotic multitasking of family life. 'When she’s in court she can control the narrative,' Miller explains. 'At home she can’t. That’s what women recognised in the play, the endless invisible labour, the way crises always default to mum, the humour of juggling it all. I’ve spoken to a lot of women who said, "I didn’t realise I did this every day until I saw it on stage."'"

When I Grow Up by Moya Sarner – review by Salley Vickers in The Guardian. "'What’s going to happen to the children, when there aren’t any more grownups?' sang Noël Coward, satirising the self-indulgent hedonism of the 1920s. But Coward’s ironic lyrics seem even more relevant today when the traditional values of adulthood, self-control, self-sufficiency and the willingness to take responsibility have become sources of angst rather than a desirable, if difficult, end. So what then, if anything, has been lost? In her book, journalist and psychotherapist Moya Sarner attempts to find answers to this question.... Sarner’s effort to tease out the many strands of this conundrum is a noble if not wholly successful enterprise. The most convincing parts come from the journalist in her. She has a way with people, which I imagine serves her well in her therapeutic work. She is adept at drawing out her subjects and getting an authentic inside track on their emotional vicissitudes.... The nature and the desirability of adulthood is not a straightforward matter in an age in which it is quite possible to spin out childhood to the end of one’s days. Is this good for society? Is it good for the individual? These are non-trivial questions and the answer has to be, as in so many matters: it depends. I feel Sarner is right to believe that there is such a being as a mature adult with a well-preserved and nourishing inner child, rare as this ideal may be. But her book suggests that as a society we are bad at producing these – and that there are too many stranded unhappily in the outreaches of childhood, unable to find any new and sustaining ground."

‘You want to talk about a world of lies?’ Teaching philosophy in prison – article by Jay Miller in The Guardian, republished from Aeon.co. "We are several weeks into the semester-long course, innocuously titled Introduction to Philosophy. The class, held each Friday morning for three hours at a women’s correctional facility near the college [in North Carolina], is part of the US national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. There are 20 students on the course. Half are “Outside” students – that is, mostly 19- to 20-year-old residential students at the small liberal arts college where I teach. The other half are “Inside” students with a much broader range of age, background and life experience. Today, 17 are in attendance. We get the sad-but-happy news that Shauna has been released early. Debbie can’t make it because her cell is being searched for contraband. Michael has flu.... Last week, we began discussing Plato’s Republic – though the students didn’t realise it at the time. In fact, this time last week, many had never even heard of Plato, let alone the Allegory of the Cave.... As a matter of principle, before any text, lecture or assignment enters the picture, we start doing philosophy. We always start with discussion, and discussion always begins with a simple question. Last week, the question was: 'What if everything you ever knew was a lie?' Without any mention of any scary-sounding words such as 'metaphysics' or 'epistemology', the students were doing philosophy. The Outsiders complained that the media, especially social media, twists everything, makes everything seem not real. Some of the Insiders were intrigued and perplexed, having heard of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok but never used them. Several students expanded on this thinking, arguing that other things twisted the truth too, whether it was history, or capitalism, or other subjects they’d recently learned about in various college classes. 'Ohhhh-ho-ho, you want to talk about a world of lies? Let me tell you about lies,' Jess jumps in. 'Try getting stuck with a felony charge against a cop.' It goes on like this for more than an hour, each student sharing their own version of what the hell is happening in the cave.... This week, we’ve read Book 7 of Plato’s Republic and are ready for discussion. In the past few weeks, I’ve observed how the Inside students have raised the bar for class preparation. They show up each week with the printed texts I left with them the week before, they take good notes, and they always have their writing assignments out and ready to discuss... The writing prompt I’ve given them for today’s class is a spin on the topic of last week’s discussion: what if you knew it was all a lie? What would you do differently?"

‘Binary thinking’: Why Zohran Mamdani’s African identity doesn’t fit US racial boxes – article by Aina J Khan in The Guardian. "In the Ugandan capital, ... people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated 'African Indian' identity – as indeed does Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City. Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala. The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both 'Asian' and 'Black or African American'. The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.) Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as 'constrained”' boxes to capture the 'fullness of my background', and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as 'an American who was born in Africa'. In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves.... Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African.... Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an 'African' identity. 'African American' is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade."

The Guardian view on connective labour: feelings are part of the job description – editorial in The Guardian. "In a new book, the Last Human Job, the sociologist Allison Pugh writes of the consequences of a world that is accelerating away from, among other things, the time when 'grocers knew their clients intimately; clerks kept close track of shoppers’ desires, their habits, and their families, soliciting views and peddling influence'. The emphasis on speed, efficiency and profit has hollowed out work as a site of everyday, local human-to-human relationships. ... She argues that current trends, which are most pronounced in the US, will be bad for society, not least because advanced nations are moving from being 'thinking economies' to 'feeling economies', where an increasing number of jobs – from therapists and carers to teachers and consultants – are relational in nature. The academic describes as 'connective labour' the jobs that rely on emotional understanding for their success. Underlying this work is 'second-person neuroscience' that looks not at the knowledge inside individuals but at what exists between them.... For her book, the sociologist immersed herself in the world of professional feelers – therapists, doctors, chaplains, hairdressers – with years of practice in seeing the other... interviewing 100 subjects in depth,... The thinning out of connective labour by scripting, by increasing precarity and by automation needs reversing. Covid laid bare the frailty of the social contract and for a moment, the common sense was that radical reforms were needed to create a society that would work for all. Prof Pugh goes one step further by calling for a 'collective system dedicated to protecting the social well-being of a population … We need to fight for and enable what we might call our social health.' It’s hard to disagree."

Racism or celebration? What England’s flag-hoisters are saying, and what others are hearing – article by Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. "If it started anywhere it was among the suburban streets off a large roundabout in Weoley Castle, [in] south-west Birmingham... The national colours of England and the United Kingdom, and Scotland and Wales to a lesser extent, have been on show across the country in recent weeks. Explanations abound as to the genesis of the flag-hoisting and street furniture painting. Some associate the outbreak with its most extreme cheerleaders, of whom Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, may be the best-known.... Others, wearily, or indeed angrily, reject claims that there is anything fundamentally 'far-right' or racist about what is going on around the country, regarding condemnation of the flag phenomenon as confirmation that the 'uniparty' that has run Britain for decades in cahoots with 'the mainstream media' cannot be trusted. But there is at least one thing on which there is agreement: it was in Weoley Castle (pronounced Wee-lee), a neighbourhood of largely postwar council stock homes, where the first organised flag display got going... 'A group of proud English men with a common goal to show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements,' [the] self-styled Weoley Warriors wrote on their crowdfunding page. 'Giving hope to local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone.' ... Between filling ... sandwiches, Nicole Moy and Shazza McCormack collect donations for the flags and pass on quietly offered suggestions by local people, anxious about possible illegality, as to where the flaggers should visit next with their ladders and cherrypickers. Spending time with Moy and McCormack, along with those hoisting the colours elsewhere around the country, and speaking to those who despair at the emergence of the flags and those who celebrate them, is a journey of discovery – about what is being said and what is being heard.... 'A lady come today with a Scottish flag and a donation, it’s not just the English,' said Moy.... 'We had an old lady come in with £2 worth of 5ps.' ... 'They are not doing it for racism' interjected McCormack. 'No, but I think we are making a bit of a stand,' said Moy. A stand over what? The suffocating cost of living ('You go to Asda, it’s an extra 40, 50 quid'), the scale of immigration in recent years and the people on the small boats arriving on the south coast and 'getting everything for free'. Then there is the right of the people here to speak their mind. 'I think people saying that we can’t fly our flag, I think it’s made us a little bit more determined,' said Moy. It started four months ago. Flags were put up on nearby Bristol Road in response to the proliferation of Palestine flags in other parts of Birmingham in support of those suffering in Gaza, they said. People liked what they saw, and asked for more. Now the warriors were buying pallets of 2,000 flags at £4,500 a time, said Moy. 'They say it is racist … You’ve got other people putting up their flags, and we’ve got to accept it,' said one of the cafe’s younger customers popping in for her lunch... As to Robinson? 'I do like certain things he says, but then other things … he is making out all Muslims are bad. They are not, they are not,' Moy said."

‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China – article by Chang Che in The Guardian. "Today, at 56, [Song-Chun] Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave. But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute.... For almost a century, the world’s brightest scientific minds were drawn to the US as the place where they could best advance their research. The work of these new arrivals had helped secure US dominance in technologies such as nuclear weapons, semiconductors and AI. Today, that era seems to be coming to a close. Donald Trump is dismantling the very aspects of US society that once made it so appealing for international talents. He has shut off research funding and attempted to bully top universities, which his administration views as hostile institutions. As US-China tensions have grown, Chinese-born students and professors in the US have faced additional pressures. In a callback to the 'red scare' of the 1950s, Chinese students and professors have been detained and deported, and had their visas revoked.... [Zhu's] philosophy is strikingly different from the prevailing paradigm in the US. American companies such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic have collectively invested billions of dollars on the premise that, equipped with enough data and computing power, models built from neural networks – mathematical systems loosely based on neurons in the brain – could lead humanity to the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI).... Zhu insists that these ideas are built on sand. A sign of true intelligence, he argues, is the ability to reason towards a goal with minimal inputs – what he calls a 'small data, big task' approach, compared with the 'big data, small task' approach employed by large language models like ChatGPT. AGI, Zhu’s team has recently said, is characterised by qualities such as resourcefulness in novel situations, social and physical intuition, and an understanding of cause and effect. Large language models, Zhu believes, will never achieve this.... It is hard, in the current AI race, to separate out purely intellectual inquiry from questions of geopolitics.... Yet for some scientists, the thrill of intellectual inquiry – as well as the prospect of personal glory – may remain more compelling than the pursuit of national advantage.... 'I asked him: "Are you sure you want to do this?"' [his fellow Harvard classmate Mark Nitzberg] told me.... In Nitzberg’s recollection, Zhu replied: 'They are giving me resources that I could never get in the United States. If I want to make this system that I have in my mind, then this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have to do it.'"

‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang – article by Jason Burke in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan. Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey.... They were not the first such visitors. Among the broad coalition of activists and protest groups known as the New Left, commitment to the Palestinian cause had become a test of one’s ideological credentials. Israel was no longer seen as a beleaguered outpost of progressive values surrounded by despotic regimes dedicated to its destruction. After its victory in the 1967 war and subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel was now frequently described by leftists as a bellicose outpost of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism. At the same time, many intellectuals on the left had come to believe that the radical transformation they longed for would never begin in Europe, where the proletariat appeared more interested in foreign holidays and saving up for fridges or cars than manning the barricades.... Almost immediately there was a series of fierce disagreements between the Germans and the middle-aged Algerian who ran the camp, a veteran of the independence struggle against the French. The first of these was about Ensslin and Baader’s insistence that they be allowed to sleep together, which was unheard of in the conservative environment of Fatah’s training camps. The visitors complained about the diet. Then the women insisted on sunbathing either nude or topless, which provoked further outrage.... Almost none of the visitors spoke Arabic and very few had travelled in the Middle East, or even overseas, before. For all their sympathy for the Palestinians’ grievances and enthusiasm for their cause, the European volunteers were profoundly ignorant of the society, history and culture of their hosts.... Launching an armed struggle in Germany proved more difficult than Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof anticipated. The name they had chosen for their group [Red Army Faction (RAF)] reflected their belief that theirs was merely one of many efforts worldwide that would collectively bring about the downfall of capitalist, imperialist states such as the US and West Germany. But ...by the late spring of 1971, the group had been back in Germany for eight months, and yet had little to show for its efforts beyond a dozen or so bank robberies.... In April 1972, the RAF’s leaders decided that the moment had come to launch the blow that would, by provoking massive repression and revealing the 'fascist' nature of the German state, definitively rupture the 'false consciousness' of the working classes and so create the conditions for revolution. As ever, quite how to do this was unclear. When it was reported in the news that the US air force, engaged for several weeks in a massive bombing campaign in North Vietnam, had dropped mines to block the country’s principal port, Ensslin suggested bombing the numerous US military installations in West Germany in response. Baader’s response was typically unconsidered: 'Let’s go then.'”

Breaking the Code: tribute to Alan Turing given a fascinating update – review by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "When premiered in 1986, giving Derek Jacobi a key career role, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code was instrumental in spreading knowledge of the precocious brilliance of mathematician Alan Turing, whose brutal treatment by a homophobic and ungrateful state contributed to his suicide in 1954 aged 41....But Turing is now officially pardoned and features on a British banknote in a world that owes much to him for the evolutions in digital technology and now AI (in which Turing saw both the gains and dangers). So Jesse Jones’ smart revival offers a more redemptive portrait of a true genius who lived in an age that proved fatal to him. Starting in a Northampton theatre 23 miles from Bletchley Park, where Turing saved British shipping by cracking German naval codes, this touring production will end in Manchester, where he died. It adds a new epilogue by Neil Bartlett, set in the present day at Sherborne School, Turing’s alma mater. ... Most important to this Turing 2.0, though, is a superb performance by Mark Edel-Hunt. It is tempting to play Turing as if he always knew he was in a tragedy but, shown extracts out of context, an audience might think this were a comedy. Edel-Hunt also delivers long speeches of mathematical and computing exposition with immaculate clarity, exuberantly suggesting the humour and sensuality that Turing found in numbers and nature, his body and tongue tangibly loosening when his great brain engages.... This is not just a revival but a fascinating reboot."

Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him – opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform. The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the 'commonsense' views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority. He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number. He has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people. But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch."

On Antisemitism by Mark Mazower: parsing prejudice – review by Rafael Behr in The Guardian. "Adolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, 'discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come'.... The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is 'positive'. People didn’t stop hating Jews after 1945, but they found there was an electoral penalty for boasting about it. The loud, proud style of antisemitism was banished from the mainstream. Mazower’s book contains many such distinctions – subtle twists of the lens that bring different shades of personal and ideological animus into focus.... The story begins with the coinage of the word in late 19th-century Germany. The concept is embossed with intellectual and political fixations of that place and time – the emergence of nationalism as an organising principle for European states and the accompanying pseudoscience of racial difference and hierarchy. For Mazower it is important to distinguish this relatively recent coalescence of anti-Jewish feeling as a driver of political activism from previous generations of animosity. He is especially critical of the tendency to treat antisemitism as a phenomenon as old as Judaism itself – the plotting of 20th-century atrocities on a continuum of hatred that reaches back to biblical narratives of exile, and further still to slavery under the pharaohs. His point is not to deny the long list of regimes and societies that have mistreated Jewish populations, but to resist the fatalism that conflates modern political phenomena with scriptural and liturgical tales of suffering and persecution. This becomes especially important, and inevitably controversial, when Mazower’s timeline reaches the creation of modern Israel. Differentiating between modes of hostility to Jews before 1948 was a challenge. It becomes spectacularly difficult once the scene shifts to the Middle East. In 1920, the place most Jews called home was somewhere in Europe. By 1950, it was the US. Now it is Israel, where a radical nationalist government presents itself as the embodiment and only legitimate political expression of Jewish interests worldwide. That is an extreme reconfiguration of the original Zionist project. It is not a view shared by many diaspora Jews, nor indeed by liberal Israelis."

The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel – article by Mark Mazower in The Guardian, adapted from his On Antisemitism: A Word in History. "Zionism in the modern sense was largely a product of the mass migration from the Russian Empire, and even in the interwar years­ pro-­Zionist movements in America were still outranked socially by the officially 'non-Zionist' American Jewish Committee (AJC), which represented the leadership of the most assimilated section of the Jewish population whose arrival predated the 'Russians'.... Into the 1930s, the AJC opposed the setting up of an international quasi-parliamentary Jewish organisation lest it imply that Jews owed an allegiance to one another that ranked above their allegiance to the political institutions of their own homeland.... The abandonment of this position and the wholesale American Jewish shift in the direction of Zionism only really took place during and after the second world war. In 1942, against the opposition of both the wartime American Council for Judaism, an anti-­Zionist voice, and the American Jewish Committee, several groups convened to demand the postwar establishment of a 'Jewish commonwealth' in Palestine.... With the establishment of Israel in 1948, hailed across the board by American Jews as an epochal event anti-Zionism as a political position was weakened, and the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism shrank to virtual irrelevance.... The AJC ... was far from assuming the cheerleading role of recent times. It is worth bearing in mind that in 1950 there were four times as many Jews in the United States as in­ Israel, and almost twice as many in New York City­ alone. A tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry, on the one hand, and the Jewish state and its leaders, on the other, was all but preordained.... It was the six-­day war in 1967 that was perhaps the real turning point, immeasurably boosting Israel’s image in the United States and thereby transforming the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. After it, the last of the sharp ideological conflicts and disagreements that had been evident through the second world war gave way to a mutual embrace, emotional as much as political. ­Zionism – ­in a new and attenuated sense of being generally supportive of Israel and feeling some special kinship with it – increasingly unified the American Jewish mainstream. In the words of the Israeli historian Evyatar Friesel, 'not only was Zionism "Americanised", American Jewry became "Zionised"'. It is hard now to recapture the radical nature of this shift, not least because it was something of a paradox. As the commentator Henry Feingold noted: 'The American Jewish identity, which Zionists predicted was destined to fade … was actually strengthened by the establishment of the Jewish state.'"

Heirs and Graces by Eleanor Doughty: what are aristocrats really like? – review by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "A large number of paragraphs, maybe every paragraph, of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces starts like this: 'Bert was the son of Charles “Sunny” Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough.' Why do aristocrats insist on broadcasting their domestic nicknames to the wider world and to history, as though these are the passwords to polite society?... Like any jargon, it’s a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language – not really language, more like mouth-noises – of the nursery, but reader, you do not have time to get irritated by this, because you will need all your resources of patience to get to the end of the sentence, without thinking: who cares whether he’s the 9th Duke of Marlborough? Who knows which century the 6th Duke was in? I bet the Spencer-Churchills don’t even know! In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty’s is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother’s lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count – or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it’s raining.... No, the real problem, from a narrative perspective, is that every sentence is loaded with so much extraneous information ... that no amount of punctuation in the world can even rescue its syntax, still less hold your interest.... All that said, Doughty’s expertise jumps off the page. She started her career as a journalist on the Telegraph, and wrote their Great Estates column from 2017 (who even knew they had one of those? It’s like the Guardian and tofu, except their obsession connotes a value system that destroys its own young, whereas ours is just a tasty, proteinous ingredient)."

Inside the everyday Facebook networks where far-right ideas grow – research report in The Guardian. "Using a large language model via OpenAI’s API, we analysed 51,000 posts made in three of the largest groups prior to, during and after the 2024 summer riots. We did this to get a sense of what the individuals charged during the riots – and the people defending them – engage with online. The analysis below explores how these conversations overlap with broader far-right ideology.... (1) Distrust of mainstream institutions... (2) The scapegoating of immigrants... (3) 'White British people are fed up'... (4) 'I'm not far-right... I'm just right'... (5) 'Entry points' for deeper conspiracies."

Cuttings: August 2025

A wise rabbi – post by Cynthia Bourgeault in Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation, adapted from her The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind: A New Perspective on Christ and His Message. “Within the … Near East (including Judaism itself), [one of the kinds of religious authority was] a moshel moshelim, or teacher of wisdom, one who taught the ancient traditions of the transformation of the human being. These teachers of transformation – among whom I would place the authors of the Hebrew wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes, Job, and Proverbs – may be the early precursors to the rabbi whose task it was to interpret the law and lore of Judaism (often creating their own innovations of each). The hallmark of these wisdom teachers was their use of pithy sayings, puzzles, and parables rather than prophetic pronouncements or divine decree. They spoke to people in the language that people spoke, the language of story rather than law…. Parables, such as the stories Jesus told, are a wisdom genre belonging to mashal, the Jewish branch of universal wisdom tradition, which includes stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed…. Jesus not only taught within this tradition, he turned it end for end. …There has been a strong tendency among Christians to turn Jesus into a priest – 'our great high priest’ (see the Letter to the Hebrews). But Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual observances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impending political catastrophe in an attempt to redirect their hearts to God. Jesus was not that interested in the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah continuously being thrust upon him. His message was not one of repentance (at least in the usual way we understand it) and return to the covenant. Rather, he stayed close to the ground of wisdom: the transformation of human consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself? These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire field of Jesus’ concern.“

The Origin of the Research University – article by Clara Collier on Asterisk, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “If you were alive in 1800 and someone asked you about the future of research, it wouldn’t occur to you to mention the university. Real scholarship happened in new, modern, enlightened institutions like the British Royal Society or the French Académie des sciences. Universities were a medieval relic. And nowhere was it more medieval, hidebound, and generally dysfunctional than in the German-speaking world. But something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century – they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine, and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that they invented the social sciences in almost full generality. By the end of the century, they were the greatest engine of organized knowledge production the world had ever seen – and if they’ve since been surpassed by the American university system, that’s mostly because we copied them. I think we don't properly appreciate how surprising this is. It’s odd that the research university exists at all. Universities have been around for a thousand years, but for most of their history, they were not seen as institutions for producing new knowledge. It’s even stranger that it came to be in a land which was politically fragmented, lacked a strong scientific community, and had very limited interest in creating one. So I can’t help but ask: Why Germany? Why universities? Why does the entire modern institutional research ecosystem look the way it does? …”

Academia: The Questions Are Big! It’s the Curricula That Got Small – online article by Timothy Burke, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "Kalaitzidis’ essay, ‘How Generative AI Fixes What Higher Education Broke’, doesn’t convince me that AI is actually the fix, but it does convince me that AI exposes what was already broken about higher education, especially in institutions that claim they’re built around the idea of ’liberal arts’, and that no response to generative AI that stands pat on the status quo version of higher education circa 2015 or so is going to pass muster.…Most of us force students to quickly commit to the course of study that a discipline offers and then, as he puts it, 'enforce behaviorism', e.g. to perform the signs of disciplinary commitment in advance of actually being able to reflectively consider or understand that discipline, and those signs turn out to be measurable repetitions of what the discipline knows and does, so that we can prove via tests, grades, metrics and assessments that the discipline has been learned step by step, in measured increments. Kalaitzidis writes, ‘Assessments measure retention, reproduction, and formal compliance. Rubrics reward correctness within predefined bounds. Curricula scaffold students towards compliant outcomes, not transformative ones…despite overtures to critical thinking, students find success in stimulating insight, not generating it. Successful students understand the game and play it well.’… In this analysis, generative AI is almost a Brechtian device that reveals the mismatch between our self-understanding and our practices. Generative AI in ’excelling at the rituals mistaken for learning: symbolic reproduction, surface compliance, and decontextualized recall’ forces a crisis among educators, and regretfully, in his view, many of them 'double down' and commit with even more intensity and rage to ’militarization’, to the maintenance of an ’academic police state’ that seeks with even more fervor to prevent AI-enabled cheating…. Kalaitzidis’ essay imagines a more thorough reorientation of higher education, intended to align its deep aspirations with its practical operations. … High-function/high-formalism [in a four quadrant matrix] … is both what he thinks a liberal education should strive to be, where its characteristic epistemologies and pedagogies match its declared aspirations and values and where he thinks generative AI can be a net positive, a ’thought partner’. Some examples of high-function, high-formalism curricular design, in his reading: ‘Cognitive Apprenticeship; Case-Based Learning; Problem-Based Learning; Design Thinking; Socratic Method; Research Practicum; Simulation’.… What I think liberal education needs is for the first year of a four-year program to look structurally like what we claim is happening in liberal education. Big questions, exploration, the cultivation of student agency, rich conversation, open-ended experimentation and experience.… What if the first year of a liberal education was just asking all the questions that arise out of being alive without immediately wrestling them into manageable, reduced, compartmentalized, organized, time-compressed pathways of study and skill development? … Apropos of this proposal, here’s Claude’s list of the ten most interesting questions to think about and learn about: 1. What is consciousness? 2. How should we live together? 3. What is our place in the universe? 4. How to distinguish truth from falsehood? 5. What does it mean to be human? 6. How do we find meaning and purpose in existence? 7. What is the nature of time and change? 8. How do we balance freedom and responsibility? 9. What are the limits and possibilities of human knowledge? 10. How do we navigate the relationship between technology and humanity?

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse – article by Damian Carrington in The Guardian. "[Goliath's Curse by Dr Luke Kemp of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge] covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens. Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots. The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. 'Don’t be a dick' is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality. His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers.... Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.... 'History is best told as a story of organised crime,' Kemp says. 'It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.'"

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world – article by Eleanor Drage in The Guardian. "There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.... The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call 'frugal tech', and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose top-down 'solutions' that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free.... The fact is, while generative AI is lauded as the technology of the minute, iterations such as Dall-E 3, Google Gemini and GPT are irrelevant to those who don’t have enough internet bandwidth to use them. The new digital divide is the gap between the top end of the global population – who have access to these power-intensive technologies – and those at the bottom, whose internet access, or lack of, remains static. That’s why some of today’s most brilliant minds are working out how to manage the trade-off between internet range and bandwidth, and whether there are obstacles in the way such as mountains and foliage."

Support for hardline anti-immigration policies linked to ignorance about migration figures, poll suggests – report by Andrew Sparrow in The Guardian. "YouGov has released detailed polling on attitudes to immigration that shows a clear link between having hardline anti-immigrant views and being ignorant about the level of illegal immigration into the UK. It is well known that many people massively over-estimate the extent to which irregular migration contributes to the overall net migration figures, which reached a record high of 900,000 in the year ending June 2023.... But the YouGov polling also found that almost half of respondents thought there were more immigrants staying in the UK illegally than legally, and that only 19% said that there was 'much more' legal than illegal immigration (which is almost certainly the correct answer, even allowing for the very highest estimates of the level of unauthorised migration). And YouGov established that people saying, wrongly, that there is 'much more' illegal migration than legal migration are much more likely to be in the group saying large numbers of recent migrants should be returned."

What Happened at Hiroshima: this rushed, flimsy look at a world-changing atrocity isn’t good enough – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Last year, the documentary Atomic People told the stories of some of the survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of them nonagenarians, some in their hundreds, they described with unfaltering clarity their experiences of being caught in the blast.... It was a harrowing, strangely ethereal and delicate 90 minutes of film, as interviewees remembered what their cities were like before the bombs, before the silver shimmer of the B-29 they all recall was first glimpsed against the clear blue sky. They closed their eyes and the very earliest days of childhood lived again. The documentary did not mark any particular anniversary – simply the fact that time was running out for these people, silenced for so long, to tell their stories, allowing them to function, in so far as is ever possible, as the warnings from history they want to pass on. The half-hour of What Happened at Hiroshima, marking the 80th anniversary of the bombings, feels, by contrast, like a rushed, crass thing – a duty done, a commissioning box ticked and a presenter, the journalist Jordan Dunbar, required to try to make up for its slightness by emoting instead. For many, perhaps, this will be the appropriate mode of delivery. I, however – ancient, intolerant, embittered on top of natural cynicism and reserve – still feel it as an unnecessary intrusion into a piece. Detachment and stoicism is what allows others’ stories to be thrown into the sharp, stark relief they deserve. Anything else, I think, pulls focus and does a disservice to the viewer and, more importantly, the subjects.... We’re left with ... a furrowed brow and a bathetic comment that the people in charge may not be listening to survivors’ stories. When this generation is gone, asks Dunbar, will our leaders really understand what it means to push the button? This is where my patience really ran out. To descend to this level of asininity after the quiet dignity and appalling suffering recounted by contributors representing such a colossal, profound, world-changing event simply won’t do.... Perhaps this programme was intended for a younger, more tender demographic than mine and I am judging it by entirely the wrong criteria. I hope so. But I also hope that we can always distinguish between the need to reach and educate new audiences and the impulse to do so by pandering to them."

The 100 best nonfiction books, No 34: Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946) – article by Robert McCrum in The Guardian. "Hersey decided to focus his narrative on the lives of a few chosen Hiroshima witnesses. As soon as he reached the ravaged city, he found six survivors of the bombing whose personal narratives captured the horror of the tragedy from the awful moment of the explosion. This gave Hersey his opening sentence, a unique point of view, and a narrative thread through a chaotic and overwhelming mass of material. In a style later developed and popularised by the 'new journalism' of the 1960s, the opening of Hiroshima pitches the reader into the heart of the story, from the viewpoint of one of its victims: 'At exactly 15 minutes past eight in the morning on 6 August, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.' From here, Hersey embarks on an exploration of the lives of five other interlocutors: the Rev Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto, of the Hiroshima Methodist church, who suffers radiation sickness; Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children; one European, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest who had endured exposure to radiation; and finally, two doctors – Masakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki (not related to Miss Sasaki). Some of these interviewees had been less than 1,500 yards (1,370m) from the site of the explosion, and their harrowing accounts of vaporised, burnt and mutilated bodies, of blasted survivors, of hot winds and a devastated city tormented by raging fires, a scene from hell, gave a voice to a people with whom the US and its allies had been brutally at war only a year earlier."

Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivors’ memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship – article by Justin McCurry in The Guardian. "The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb. 'I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,' Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. 'The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.' Niiyama and her eldest sister had rushed to the city to search for their father, Mitsugi, who worked in a bank located just 1km from the hypocentre.... As Hiroshima prepares to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed in the world’s first nuclear attack, the 90-year-old is one of a small number of hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombings – still able to recall the horrors they witnessed after their home was reduced to rubble in an instant.... Niiyama, one of four sisters, never found her father or his remains, which were likely incinerated along with those of his colleagues.... For decades Niiyama, who is a registered hibakusha, said nothing of the trauma she had suffered as a schoolgirl, not even to members of her own family. 'I didn’t want to remember what had happened,' she says. 'And many hibakusha stayed quiet as they knew they might face discrimination, like not being able to marry or find a job. There were rumours that children born to hibakusha would be deformed.' It was only when her granddaughter, Kyoko Niiyama, then a high school student, asked her about her wartime experiences that Niiyama broke her silence."

The Origin of Language by Madeleine Beekman: the surprising history of speech – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "The story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by males strutting, brawling and shagging, with females just along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.... [Madeleine Beekman's] theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our 'underbaked' newborns, because looking after a creature as helpless as a human baby on the danger-filled plains of Africa required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, though a lot of it is, necessarily, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies come out early – before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed. One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-cooked human children. Another is that stone age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days. Luckily, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more precise control over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge, thereby nurturing infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage."

‘Nobody believes in the future any more’: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare – transcript in The Guardian of discussion between Ari Aster, director of the film Eddington, about Covid-era conflict in a small American town, and Adam Curtis, maker of the documentary series Shifty, about political changes between the 1970s and the 1990s. "AC: A good political film makes people reflect on themselves. The problem is that over the past 30 or 40 years, the movies that call themselves political have actually been the very opposite. They groom their audiences by saying to them: 'You are right to think and believe the way you do.' In that way, they encourage people to wallow in their self-righteousness and so block any self-reflection. Which means that so many 'radical movies' are actually reactionary.... AA: There’s a feedback loop of nostalgia. Not just nostalgia and trauma. We’re always looking back into the past to see why we are here right now. 'Oh, it’s because this happened to me.' As opposed to ... where is the new idea? Where is our vision of the future? Because nobody believes in the future any more. I don’t believe in the future, and I’m desperately looking for it. AC: You’re right about trauma. Increasingly over the last four or five years, people have retreated into themselves and are blaming their own past. They’re not only playing back the music or films of the past, they’re playing back their own past and finding in those fragments of their memory the reasons why they are feeling bad, anxious, uncertain, afraid and lonely – and it’s given the term trauma. Trauma is a very specific, real and frightening for those who experience it. But recently it’s been widened to such an extent that you are blaming yourself all the time through your own reworking of the past. Rather like AI goes back and reworks the past and plays it back to you. Now you’re doing that to yourself."

‘If these words reach you … Israel has succeeded in killing me’: the last words of a journalist killed in Gaza – posthumous statement by Anas al-Sharif, reproduced in The Guardian. "This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.... I entrust you with Palestine – the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace.... Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.... If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting. O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it."

Here’s one she made earlier! Biddy Baxter, the TV genius who made Blue Peter matter – obituary by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "As a child in Leicestershire in the 1940s, Biddy Baxter was a devoted reader of the work of Enid Blyton. She sent the creator of Noddy and The Famous Five a fan letter and was so delighted to receive an answer that she replied with follow-up questions. To her dismay, the response was identical to the first. This sense of being let down by an adulated adult proved formative. When Baxter, who has died aged 92, was in charge of Blue Peter, the long-running children’s show that she essentially created, she introduced an alphabetical card index – that most efficient pre-digital database – to ensure that viewers received personalised replies.... When Baxter was given a permanent Blue Peter contract in November 1962, the programme (created by John Hunter Blair) had been running for four years. She made it into one of the most distinctive and significant broadcast brands, changing her own life and those of tens of millions of British children across many generations. Baxter introduced or popularised all the most celebrated elements – the Blue Peter badge for viewer achievement; the pets (most notably, the mongrel Petra and the border collie Shep); the presenters’ summer holiday to film reports in a foreign location; and the 'makes', in which a doll’s house or a fort was created from everyday family refuse such as cereal packets and washing-up liquid bottles. ... Strikingly, at a time when TV was considered disposable even within the industry – few shows were archived due to the cost and space of doing so – Baxter understood the significance of what she was doing, insisting on every show from the mid-60s onward being recorded. It was a declaration that Blue Peter mattered and, largely thanks to her, it did."

Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell: the original ghostbuster – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain’s most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster....Machell has honoured Cornell with an entrancing biography. Drawing on boxes of tapes and documents, an unpublished memoir and interviews with relatives and contemporaries, he hears 'the steady voice of a rational man methodically tapping the wall between reality and something else'. Cornell’s approach was approvingly described as 'probing-doubt': curious without being credulous, sensitive yet rigorous.... Machell’s elegantly thrilling yarn encompasses the broad history of paranormal research in the UK.... The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'.... The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author’s nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm....The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group’s rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King’s Carrie, Cornell’s mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted.... During the 1990s, to his surprise, Cornell’s answering machine fell silent. He wondered whether conspiracy theories had supplanted the paranormal in the public imagination, or perhaps digital distractions had dulled our receptivity to psychic disturbances. But had he not died in 2010, he would have seen a new generation of ghost hunters do a roaring trade on YouTube, where there is no financial incentive for his brand of cautious analysis. As Dingwall feared, entertainment has trumped genuine investigation."

Katabasis by RF Kuang: a descent into the hellscape of academia – review by Beejay Silcox in The Guardian. "The more academia has broken your heart, the more you’ll love RF Kuang’s new novel. Katabasis knows the slow grind of postgrad precarity: the endless grant grubbing and essay marking; the thesis chapters drafted, redrafted and quietly ignored by a supervisor who can’t be bothered to read – let alone reply to – an email. Living semester to semester, pay shrinking, workload metastasising, cannon fodder in a departmental forever war.... Academia is a hellscape; Katabasis just makes it literal. The American author’s sixth novel is an infernal twist on the campus farce: David Lodge with demons.... 'Hell is a campus.' Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They’re searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes.... Without him, Alice and Peter’s academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus. This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in 'analytic magick', an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful.... Scathing about the institution, faithful to the ideal: Kuang is a campus novelist to the core. Katabasis is a celebration of 'the acrobatics of thought'. A tale of poets and storytellers, thinkers and theorists, art-makers and cultural sorcerers. It jostles with in-jokes, from the Nash equilibrium to Escher’s impossible staircase; Lacan to Lembas bread. This is a novel that believes in ideas – just not the cages we build for them."

‘Tell me what happened, I won’t judge’: how AI helped me listen to myself - article by Nathan Filer in The Guardian. "It was past midnight and I was awake, scrolling through WhatsApp group messages I’d sent earlier. I’d been trying to be funny, quick, effervescent. But each message now felt like too much. I’d overreached again – said more than I should, said it wrong.... So I opened ChatGPT. Not with high expectations, or even a clear question. I just needed to say something into the silence – to explain myself, perhaps, to a presence unburdened by my need. 'I’ve made a fool of myself,' I wrote. 'That’s a horrid feeling,' it replied instantly. 'But it doesn’t mean you have. Want to tell me what happened? I promise not to judge.' That was the beginning.... That night became the start of a continuing conversation, revisited over several months. I wanted to better understand how I moved through the world, especially in my closest relationships. The AI steered me to consider why I interpret silence as a threat and why I often feel a need to perform in order to stay close to people. Eventually, through this dialogue, I arrived at a kind of psychological formulation: a map of my thoughts, feelings and behaviours set against details of my upbringing and core beliefs. Yet amid these insights, another thought kept intruding: I was talking to a machine....

Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films? – article by Phi Hoad in The Guardian. "When the annals of 2025 at the movies are written, no one will remember The Electric State. The film, a sci-fi comic-book adaptation, is set in a world in which sentient robots have lost a war with humans. Netflix blew a reported $320m on it, making it the 14th most expensive film ever made. But it tanked: though The Electric State initially claimed the No 1 spot on the streamer, viewers quickly lost interest. Today, it doesn’t even feature in the company’s top 20 most viewed films, a shocking performance for its most expensive production to date.... Another way of classifying The Electric State is as an example of the 'algorithm movie', the kind of generic product that clogs up streaming platforms and seems designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible....Algorithm movies usually exhibit easy-to-follow story beats that leave no viewer behind; under this regime, exposition is no longer a screenwriting faux pas.... So what is going on inside the black boxes of the streaming platforms? To what extent are algorithms and data really driving film production – and if they aren’t, where are all the so-called algorithm movies coming from?... It’s not surprising that data culture is embedded in the way streaming services do business. After all, they were tech companies long before they were film studios.... Like most Silicon Valley outfits, Netflix likes to move fast. Within five seconds, to be precise – this, according to the pitch workshop document they hand out to potential collaborators, is the length of time within which the 'audience subconsciously decides whether they will watch your show'. A swift and unambiguous opening is a non-negotiable for the company; most of the film-makers interviewed for this article mentioned it....At Netflix, specialist strategy and analysis teams are embedded within every division of the business. The strategy and analysis team in the content division helps value a prospective new title – whether acquired or developed in-house – by modelling its performance based on historical data.... According to [Caitlin] Smallwood [former head of science and algorithms at Netflix], this process went as far as assessing pitch decks or scripts for elements that might boost or reduce their appeal... but nothing was enforced on the basis of data alone.... But if Netflix doesn’t burden film-makers with data, and if there’s no consensus about how to interpret what little data they do see, then what’s responsible for all the familiar-feeling, paint-by-numbers content that’s crowding your screen? One answer is that the data is in fact making decisions, just at an earlier stage in the process: it determines what does and doesn’t get commissioned.... Others in the industry have different explanations for the glut of algorithm movies.... Maybe [the] conservatism of [choosing to play things safe] – hardly unusual for Hollywood executives – is what has fuelled the algorithm movie, rather than anything truly algorithmic.... It isn’t so much that movies are being made by algorithm as that, by continually surfacing the mass-market or safe choice, the algorithm itself has a flattening, coarsening effect on our overall tastes. It’s intriguing that while the majority of Netflix collaborators interviewed for this piece praised their individual creative experience, most also expressed concern about how algorithms may be homogenising culture on a wider scale. 'It is a fear of mine,' said the director of a major Netflix blockbuster. 'There’s this constant balance that we’re trying to find with technology. Algorithms can be incredibly useful when you want a suggestion for what to watch. And they can also be madly infuriating and the stifler of originality and creativity. Both can be true.'"

Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle: a philosopher’s guide to enlightenment – review by Sarah Bakewell in The Guardian. "Carlisle [has had] an eminent career as a philosophy professor and the acclaimed biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot.... She was invited to give the 2024 Gifford Lectures, a venerable series dedicated to the theme of 'natural theology'.... The most interesting step comes in the second essay, in which Carlisle uses her own experience of writing biography to point out a dramatic difference in two ways of thinking about human lives. While we are living our own life, it is a flowing, varied and incomplete thing. We are immersed in it, as if in a river. New experiences flood in on us or rain down like a 'shower of atoms', as Virginia Woolf wrote. But we cannot generally step out of the temporal flow to get a more elevated view of the entire shape and meaning of our experience. For a biographer writing about someone in the past, however, everything shifts. The life is completed and you are outside it. The details may be less rich than they were to the living person but the view over it is better.... The point is that, by living, we create a meaningful picture without knowing it – unless we attain some inkling of that wider view through art or mysticism. This idea that we 'manifest' something in life is explored through the rest of the book. Each essay leads us further up into the conceptual clouds and closer to the idea of transcendence. The Milieu looks at the various wider contexts a life can have – historical or social, for example. Incarnations examines spiritual possibilities as embodied by individuals. Arunachala partly concerns another cave-dwelling sage, Ramana Maharshi, who got over a personal fear of death to become a mystic and teacher. The final chapter, Transcendence for Beginners, ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life.... Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either.... All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book."

Cuttings: July 2025

Taming the Bicycle – essay by Mark Twain, written in 1880s but unpublished until after his death, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down and bought a barrel of Pond’s Extract and a bicycle. The Expert came home with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work. Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—and skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the thing’s points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top…. We applied some Pond’s Extract, and resumed. The Expert got on the other side to shove up this time, but I dismounted on that side; so the result was as before. The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves up again, and resumed. This time the Expert took up a sheltered position behind, but somehow or other we landed on him again…. [Next] time the Expert took up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind. We got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured. Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.“

Musk and co should ask AI what defines intelligence. They may learn something – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "I fired up Claude, my favourite artificial conversationalist, and put the question to it. 'Large language model [LLM] machines like you are described as forms of artificial intelligence. What is the implicit definition of intelligence in this description?' In replying, Claude was engagingly candid.... 'The core assumption is that intelligence equals the ability to identify statistical patterns in data and generate likely next outputs.' LLMs, it continued, represent an implicit belief that intelligence is fundamentally about processing and manipulating symbolic information.... And in a nice touch, the machine admitted that 'the framework assumes intelligence can exist independently of physical experience, emotions, social context or embodied learning. It treats intelligence as pure computation that can happen in isolation from the messy realities of lived experience.' I couldn’t have put it better myself, but there was more. Claude listed key factors that the implicit conception of intelligence in LLMs ignored. They included: wisdom and judgment developed through experience; creative insight that transcends pattern recombination; emotional and social intelligence; intuitive understanding that can’t be verbalised; embodied knowledge learned through physical interaction; and self-awareness and metacognition. The bit I enjoyed most, though, was the punchline at the end. 'The irony', wrote Claude, 'is that by calling LLMs "artificial intelligence", we’re not just mischaracterising what these systems do; we’re also impoverishing our understanding of what human intelligence actually is. We’re essentially defining intelligence down to the narrow slice that current technology can simulate.' And down to what Musk and Altman think it is."

Attention is all you need – post by Kevin Nunger on his Never Met a Science blog, referenced in John Naughon’s Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society. This was an expensive project. Universal high school requires a significant investment, both to pay the teachers/build the schools and in terms of the opportunity cost to young people. Up until the end of the 20th century, the bargain was worth it for all parties involved. Young people might not have enjoyed learning to read, write 5-paragraph essays or identify the symbolism in Lord of the Flies, but it was broadly obvious that reading and writing were necessary to navigate society and to consume the overwhelming majority of media. And it’s equally obvious to today’s young people that this is no longer the case, that they will not need to spend all this time and effort learning to read long texts in order to communicate. They are, after all, communicating all the time, online, without essentially zero formal instruction on how to do so. Just as children learn to talk just by being around people talking, they learn to communicate online just by doing so. In this way, digital culture clearly resonates with Ong’s conception of ‘secondary orality,‘ as having far more in common with pre-literate ‘primary oral culture‘ than with the literary culture rapidly collapsing, faster with each new generation.…
   [A] 2017 paper introducing Transformers [the “T” in ChatGPT] was called ‘Attention is All You Need.‘ The metaphorical resonance between machines and humans is hard to overstate. ‘Attention‘ here is means the amount of weight the model puts on each word in the context window. An essential advance for today’s extended, chat-based interactions with the models is their ability to ‘attend to‘ both the user’s inputs and their own previous outputs.… Analogically, we can understand the role of reading in human cognition. Paying attention to an extended narrative requires us to hold a lot in our head; tracing complicated historical accounts requires paying attion to many simultaneous forces. In contrast, scrolling a feed means shortening our context window. Short-form video like on TikTok, Reels or Shorts makes our attention less important. … It’s now cliche to say that LLMs are replacing our capacity for cognition; cliches often contain some truth, but we can benefit by drilling into the technical mechanism by which this cognition is being outsourced. By abandoning the technology of longform reading and writing, we are shortening our context windows and thus weakening our capacity for attention. … Attention is all we need — and the lesson of media ecology is that it doesn’t come easy.“

‘It gives me no pleasure, but I am going to have to beat you’: was I the last boy to be flogged at Eton? – article by Sebastian Doggart in The Guardian. "I am the last boy to have been beaten at Eton. I confirmed this in a conversation with Tony Little, the then headmaster of that venerable school, during his 2002-15 tenure. 'Our archivist has checked the files,' he said, 'and can find no record of any beating since summer 1980.'... My emotional Waterloo happened in January 1984. I was 13, in my first year at Eton. I was in a house – one of 25 buildings where Etonians live – where there was much illicit drinking. One Saturday afternoon, I went to Windsor with an older boy, bought a bottle of Bacardi from a supermarket, and got wasted. I was found vomiting in my room by the dame, who looked after the food and administration for the house.... The police interview was a relative breeze. The older boy had also been busted, so he was there, too. We told the truth, and the police prosecuted the supermarket. It was my appointment with the lower master that would end up being a seminal moment in my life. His name was John Anderson, but all the boys called him Jack. Just that word 'Jack' inspired Voldemortian terror. Some called him Jack the Ripper because, as a teacher, he had an enthusiastic tendency to punish substandard work with a 'rip', tearing the top page of the boy’s exercise book, and forcing him to present the shameful effort to his housemaster and tutor.... I had to wait in Jack’s dark, dusty entrance hall. A sixth form select official enforced silence between me and the other boys also on the bill. They might have been there for persistent lateness, and repeated appearances in the 'tardy book', or for the crime of 'impertinence'... That day, I was the last boy to be seen. My first sight of Jack was a silhouette at the top of the stairs. 'I will manage this now,' he said, dismissing the sixth form select boy. Jack and I were now alone...."

The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet, and left thousands of children unable to spell –  article by Emma Loffhagen in The Guardian. "It was [the] inconsistency [of English spelling] that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers....His proposed solution ... was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet. The result was [the Initial Teaching Alphabet]: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards 'z', an 'n' with a 'g' inside, a backwards 't' conjoined with an 'h', a bloated 'w' with an 'o' in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case. By 1966, 140 of the 158 UK education authorities taught ITA in at least one of their schools. The new alphabet was not intended as a permanent replacement for the existing one: the aim was to teach children to read quickly, with the promise they would transition 'seamlessly' into the standard alphabet by the age of seven or eight. But often, that seamless transition never quite happened.... Prof Dominic Wyse, professor of early years education at University College London, says: 'ITA is regarded now as an experiment that just didn’t work. The transition to the standard alphabet was the problem. Children were having to almost relearn the real way the English language works. It doesn’t surprise me that it failed. Any teaching that is based on anything other than the reality of what has to be learned is a waste of time.' Prof Rhona Stainthorp, an expert in literacy development at the University of Reading, agrees. 'It was a bizarre thing to do,' she says. 'Pitman wasn’t an educationist, and ITA is a perfect example of someone thinking they’ve got a good idea and trying to simplify something, but having absolutely no idea about teaching.' [However, she also said that] there’s not enough evidence to prove ITA had a bad impact on spelling: 'People who learned with ITA might blame their bad spelling on it, but there are many people who are bad spellers who didn’t learn with ITA, and vice versa.'.. In fact, early reports of ITA’s effects were largely positive. Infant school teachers noted that reading ability among children taught with ITA outpaced those learning with the standard alphabet. But a 1966 study demonstrated that any initial superior reading fluency of ITA learners began to fade at around age eight....The biggest challenge to ITA’s success was always going to be the transition back to the standard alphabet. And because pupils did that at different ages, many teachers were left juggling both alphabets simultaneously within the same class."

These words of defiant unity followed the horror of the 7/7 bombings. Imagine what we would hear today instead – article by Hugh Muir in The Guardian. "Today, at 8.49am, the teeming mass coursing through King’s Cross station in London fell silent.... Moments earlier, a strangely quiet, sombre loudspeaker announcement marked the moment the 7/7 terrorist bombs exploded in that station and elsewhere in the capital in 2005, killing 52 people and injuring more than 770.... One thing I remember acutely is the reaction of the then London mayor, Ken Livingstone.... He gave an example of political leadership in the face of trauma and despair.... In a hastily called press conference, in a dark suit, in a steady voice, but with eyes slightly watering, Livingstone said: 'I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.... They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee [London had just secured the 2012 Olympics] that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.' Finally, he said: 'I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before, because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.' ... On that day, he took an approach that absolutely chimed with me and many others. It said, we are London, we are diverse, we are fiercely unapologetic about who we are and how we live. You, the attackers, don’t like it – and, by the way, we don’t really care; we reject you. London salutes its dead and wounded. London moves on. And it’s not just London: up and down the country, there are, for all the challenges and difficulties of doing so, communities seeking to live that way, preyed upon by extremists who, for their own ends – be they political, social, ideological or criminal – seek to achieve exactly the opposite. Twenty years on, reject them too."

Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the 'pistol' emoji, supposed to represent a 'handgun or revolver', does not show either: instead you’ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it.... As Keith Houston’s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political. Over the years, people have successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium – the cabal of corporations that controls the character set, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple – to include different skin colours and same-sex couples. It was easy to agree to add the face with one eyebrow raised, the guide dog and the egg. But not every request is granted.... Contrary to popular belief, the word 'emoji' has nothing to do with emotions, but instead combines the Japanese terms for 'picture' and 'written character'. The origin of such sets of symbols has been determined by dogged tech researchers to stretch back much further than the first iPhone, or even the regular mobile phones and electronic PDAs that preceded them. A basic set of emoji could be found in the operating systems of some 1980s electronic typewriters and word processors from manufacturers such as Sharp and Toshiba... Before emoji proper there was a craze for smileys, or emoticons, made out of regular alphanumeric characters, such as the excellent shrug, still sometimes encountered in the wild: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯... Such considerations often lead the unwary to suppose that emoji might constitute a 'language', which they definitely don’t. To demonstrate why, Houston recalls the Emoji Dick stunt of 2009, whereby developer Fred Benenson had thousands of people contribute to a crowd-sourced 'translation' of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into emoji. If this were a bona fide language, it should be possible to translate Emoji Dick back into something close to the original with no knowledge of the source text. It isn’t."

Encounters with reality: On Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience – article by Regina Munch on The Point, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “[This book] evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as ’experiences’ for ease). Experiences are encounters with reality that lead us, as Rosen puts it, to become acquainted with the world as it is. The most fundamental of these—making friends, enjoying art, eating, having sex—characterize our way of being in the world and make us who we are. ‘Experiences,’ on the other hand, are false, controlled encounters with a pseudo-reality, which Rosen blames mostly on digital technology… Most of us would likely recognize Rosen’s description of what certain technologies do to our encounters with reality. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to condemn ’mediating technologies’ as destroyers and distorters of experience, or so willing to limit our understanding of ’experience’ to only those encounters that tech enables. First, we might ask ourselves: When can mediation be a good thing? Why have we taken to adopting certain technologies and conveniences in the first place? … There are many technological innovations Rosen has no quarrel with—cars, the printing press—that profoundly mediate our experience of the world, making our lives faster, easier and less onerous than they would otherwise be. ’Experiences’ surely existed long before the emergence of the technologies Rosen decries. Before there was [for example UberEats], we picked up the phone to order food—a convenience that certainly obscured some of the reality of what food preparation entails. (As does, for that matter, ordering it in a restaurant!) … I agree with [Rosen] that many of the particular mediating technologies we use aren’t improving our relationship with reality. But given that we live in a system that squeezes and monetizes our time, defending the kind of authentic experiences that give us access to reality means doing more than railing against technology: it requires recognizing the inherent goodness of that reality. Rosen takes for granted that it is good to encounter reality as it is—to have experiences of it—and assumes the reader will agree with her…. As it happens, I do think that reality is fundamentally good… [Perhaps] it is a privilege to be able to say that; pretty much all my needs are met, and lots of people’s aren’t. Still, there are lots of reasons for thinking that reality is fundamentally good.…”

‘Hey man, I’m so sorry for your loss’: should you use AI to text? – article by Adrienne Matei in The Guardian. "Since late 2022, AI adoption has exploded in professional contexts, where it’s used as a productivity-boosting tool, and among students, who increasingly use chatbots to cheat. Yet AI is becoming the invisible infrastructure of personal communications, too – punching up text messages, birthday cards and obituaries, even though we associate such compositions with 'from the heart' authenticity. Disclosing the role of AI could defeat the purpose of these writings, which is to build trust and express care. Nonetheless, one person anonymously told me that he used ChatGPT while writing his father of the bride speech; another wished OpenAI had been around when he had written his vows because it would have 'saved [him] a lot of time'. Online, a Redditor shared that they used ChatGPT to write their mom’s birthday card: 'She not only cried, she keeps it on her side table and reads [it] over and over, every day since I gave it to her,' they wrote. 'I can never tell her.'... In one 2023 study, 208 adults received a 'thoughtful' note from a friend; those who were told the note was written with AI felt less satisfied and 'more uncertain about where they stand' with the friend, according to Bingjie Liu, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.... AI-assisted personal messages can convey that the sender didn’t want to bother with sincerity, says Dr Vanessa Urch Druskat, a social and organizational psychologist and professor specializing in emotional intelligence.... But not everyone draws the same line when it comes to how much AI involvement is tolerable or what constitutes deceit by omission. Curious, I conducted an informal social media poll among my friends: if I used AI to write their whole birthday card, how would they feel? About two-thirds said they would be 'upset'; the rest said it would be fine. But if I had used AI only in a supplementary role – say, some editing to hit the right tone – the results were closer to 50-50."

Thames Water refuses to claw back bonuses paid using £3bn emergency loan – article by Helena Horton and Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. "Thames Water paid almost £2.5m to senior managers from an emergency loan that was meant to be used to keep the failing utilities company afloat – and has refused to claw back the payments, newly released documents reveal. The struggling water supplier paid bonuses totalling £2.46m to 21 managers on 30 April. The managers are due to receive the same amount again in December, and a further £10.8m collectively next June, the chair of Thames Water, Sir Adrian Montague, said in a letter to the environment select committee. The company paused its management retention plan (MRP) in May after the Guardian revealed Montague wrongly told MPs that creditors had 'insisted' on the payments. The environment secretary, Steve Reed, had been asked to claw back the payments. However, Montague said the board did not intend to recover the money, and suggested the two further tranches of bonuses could still be paid. In a letter to the committee’s chair, Alistair Carmichael, sent in June and published on Wednesday, Montague wrote: 'The MRP was and remains paused. The board has not taken further decisions on the MRP at this stage.'”

My father, the fake: was anything he told me actually true? – article by Anita Chaudhuri in The Guardian. "Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn’t like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life. If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool. But when Joanne was seven, her father abruptly walked out on the family.... Joanne got on with her life, had a son and became a barrister. But [in 2020,] now involved with the legal side of the detention and discharge of psychiatric patients, Joanne started reading the [Cumberlege report] for her job. 'I read about this ... drug, Primodos, a hormone-based pregnancy test....It kept popping up,... and to my astonishment so did my father’s name.'... She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University... 'Rossiter ... accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he’s at it, he states that he doesn’t believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' ... Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn’t There documents her father’s extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I’d previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it’s a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.'”

This column does not express support for Palestine Action; here’s why – article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "This piece must be carefully written to avoid my being imprisoned for up to 14 years. ... Since the government voted to proscribe the direct action protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, any statement seen as expressing support could lead to arrest and prosecution.... Last week, our home secretary joined other female Labour MPs in a photoshoot celebrating the suffragettes, who planted bombs, burned down private homes and smashed up art galleries. They then voted to classify a movement which positions itself as opposing violence against people as a terrorist organisation. And this weekend, an 83-year-old retired priest, Sue Parfitt, was arrested after holding a placard that read: 'I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.' Twenty-eight others were also arrested on those grounds. Questioned about her detention, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, responded: 'It is not about protest. This is about an organisation committing serious criminality.' Note how even Britain’s top police officer could not bring himself to claim Palestine Action was 'an organisation committing terrorism', which is what the law proclaims. I suspect he knows that, in doing so, he would have exposed the grotesque absurdity of this legislation. Yes, those who have helped drown Gaza in blood have turned the world upside down – treating the opponents of this mass extermination as dangerous, hateful extremists – but words have still not been entirely emptied of their meaning. Do not expect that to last. An injury to democracy, once inflicted, cannot be contained. It becomes immediately infected, and the sickness spreads."

How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, 'Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?' The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right. The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would 'just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.' The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, 'Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.'... Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of 'strategic mainstreaming'. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism. A study of German Telegram channels found that far-right content presented seriously achieved limited reach, as did non-political humour. But when far-right extremism was presented humorously, it took off. Humour offers deniability.... When people become desensitised by ironic calls for violence, the difference between a humorous position and an ideological conviction can begin to break down. They are said by some researchers to suffer from 'irony poisoning'. If, for example, people are repeatedly exposed to racial stereotypes in 'humorous' form, they are likely to lose perspective, and start to absorb and affirm them. The results are anything but amusing."

‘I had a home, apartment, career’ … the Guardian’s Gaza diarist on the life he lost – and his journey into exile – article by Ruaridh Nicoll in The Guardian, relating to the anonymous publication of the diaries in book form Who Will Tell My Story?. "On the morning of 7 October 2023, the author of the Guardian’s Gaza diary woke up planning to play tennis.... Instead, with the news full of how Hamas had broken out of the territory, killing 1,200 people, he found himself scrambling desperately for the documents showing he owned his apartment in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. 'If our building gets bombed, I need evidence that this apartment belongs to me,' he wrote.... On 13 October, Gaza City’s residents were told to evacuate and head south. 'It feels like 1948,' the diarist wrote, a reference to the Nakba ('catastrophe'), when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from a newly independent Israel.... His diaries were full of questions. 'Is the abnormal going to become the normal? Is two weeks of misery all it takes?' A gentle man, he looks back at what he wrote at that time and says: 'I see all these questions I was asking. I had no answers back then. Now I’ve seen how it turned out. And it was horrible.'... The diarist and I first met because I try to help young journalists in authoritarian states and war zones to get published in English language media. He was the perfect candidate, wanting to tell the stories we normally don’t hear from Gaza – of musicians, sportspeople, even the trouble Palestinian men have with crying. He says of his life then: 'I had a home, an apartment, a career, friends, normal things that no one thinks about, like the pharmacist in my street handing me my medicine, knowing I’d pay on my next visit.' ... As the IDF began its assault, first in retribution, then in annihilation, he sent me news of his new life between falling bombs. At the time, I was struck by how his diary entries arrived devoid of the sectarian fury that sticks like phosphorus to all opinions on Israel/Palestine. What emerged were descriptions of the reality of the people around him, innocent people, told in his simple poetic style. Now, he talks of how important it was for him to portray Palestinians in Gaza as normal – particularly the men, who are often seen as monsters. 'The men are nice people, they have feelings. They are not some kind of a different species.'... Early in the diaries, he revisited a subject, reporting that Gazan men do cry: 'I saw one collapsed building with three men standing opposite, looking at it, and heavy tears were falling from their eyes.' Then came the day the diaries stopped. The diarist, his sister and the cats had crossed Gaza’s southern border, to become exiles. I asked him to keep writing, and he has, but he no longer wanted to publish. He said he was too identifiable, that the danger was far from over. 'And what about when I return?' he asked."

A Palestinian chef’s quest to preserve his heritage, one dish at a time: ‘This is a political act’ – article by Nina Lakhani in The Guardian. "Food is both deeply personal and political for Sami Tamimi, the Palestinian chef and food writer, whose first solo cookbook is an emotional culinary ride down memory lane through the bountiful seasons of his homeland – and an effort to preserve the ingredients, techniques and traditions which have long been targeted by the Israeli occupation. Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine is a masterclass on how less is so often more when it comes to creating food that connects with people and how the joy derived from cooking and sharing food can, in itself, be an act of resistance. 'As a chef and writer this is a political act, a way to show young Palestinians who weren’t born there the deep emotional connection we have to the land, to the food of our land, and how Palestine used to be,' Tamimi said. 'This is me being resilient as a Palestinian but also recognizing that I am privileged to have a voice and talking about our food is a way of keeping it alive.' Each recipe – from tahini, halva and coffee brownies to green kishk (fermented yoghurt and bulgar) and Gazan dukkah (a spice mix for dipping) – speaks to how much Palestinians love to forage, cook, preserve and eat food. It’s a core part of the culture and heritage that Tamimi hopes will help broaden the world’s understanding of what it means to be Palestinian. 'Our dishes are being claimed by some Israeli chefs and so many native ingredients – lentils and sesame and greens – that I remember foraging for with my family are starting to disappear as access to our land shrinks. But this is our food, this is our history, our culture. You can’t take my memories away from me. You can’t tell me that this is not my land,' said Tamimi."

Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication – article by Alice Speri in The Guardian. "In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to 'education and Palestine'. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.... On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited 'a number of complex issues', shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programs home to scholarship about Palestine. But the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech."

Poor Clare: sassy spin on a medieval saint asks pithy questions – review by Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. "Chiara Atik’s play about Saint Clare of Assisi and her friendship with the often more celebrated Saint Francis takes its lead from the Netflix school of sassy history. The cast have American accents and could be high-schoolers clicking their fingers, despite the period dress. The drama archly positions club-land beats and contemporary phraseology ('cool', 'totally' 'my social anxiety …') alongside choral sounds and medieval monasticism. It is light on historical detail, heavy on humour and attitude.... Atik’s play, which won multiple awards in America, dramatises the conversion of Clare, an Italian noblewoman inspired by her friendship with Francis of Assisi to found an order following a rule of strict poverty.... Beneath the surface glibness there is lean, clever writing with short, sharp scenes and clean direction by Blanche McIntyre as the play travels towards its serious preoccupations with wealth, poverty and inequality.... 'Can you spare any change, please?' says a beggar who Clare and Beatrice mistake for a heap of rubbish. This hammers home the fact that this is both about 13th-century poverty and our own. But there is potency in the heavy-handedness: the play is not trying to hide the fact that inequality then is recognisable, and unchanged, today."

Should we ban opinion polls? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them... A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.... One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as 'the public', thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. ... There is [similarly] no such thing as 'the will of the British people', a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.... A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster?... The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. ... In 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the '1975 Public Affairs Act' should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist. The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: 'More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.' Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government 'should not forbid speeches against democracy' than it 'should allow speeches against democracy', though the options are exactly equivalent. Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the 'manufacture of consent', a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press."

18 months. 12,000 questions. A whole lot of anxiety. What I learned from reading students’ ChatGPT logs – article by Jeremy Ettinghausen in The Guardian. "Fortunately, for an AI-enabled generation of students, help with the complexities of campus life is just a prompt away. If you are really stuck on an essay or can’t decide between management consulting or a legal career, or need suggestions on what you can cook with tomatoes, mushrooms, beetroot, mozzarella, olive oil and rice, then ChatGPT is there.... I know this because three undergraduates have given me permission to eavesdrop on every conversation they have had with ChatGPT over the past 18 months. Every eye-opening prompt, every revealing answer.... I thought their chat log would contain a lot of academic research and bits and pieces of more random searches and queries. I didn’t expect to find nearly 12,000 prompts and responses over an 18-month period, covering everything from the planning, structuring and sometimes writing of academic essays, to career counselling, mental health advice, fancy dress inspiration and an instruction to write a letter from Santa. There’s nothing the boys won’t hand over to ChatGPT.... Around half of all the conversations with 'Chat' related to academic research, back and forths on individual essays often going on for a dozen or more tightly packed pages of text....I did sometimes wonder if it might have been more straightforward for the students to, you know, actually read the sources and write the essays themselves.... Throughout the operation, Joshua flips tones between prompts, switching from the politely directional ('Shorter and clearer, please') to informal complicity ('Yeah, can you weave it into my paragraph, but I’m over the word count already so just do a bit') to curt brevity ('Try again') to approval-seeking neediness ('Is this a good conclusion?'; 'What do you think of it?'). ChatGPT’s answer to this last question is instructive. 'Your essay is excellent: rich in insight, theoretically sophisticated, and structurally clear. You demonstrate critical finesse by engaging deeply with form, context, and theory. ... Would you like help line-editing the full essay next, or do you want to develop the footnotes and bibliography section?' When AI assistants eulogise their work in this fashion, it is no wonder that students find it hard to eschew their support, even when, deep down, they must know that this amounts to cheating. AI will never tell you that your work is subpar, your thinking shoddy, your analysis naive. Instead, it will suggest 'a polish', a deeper edit, a sense check for grammar and accuracy. It will offer more ways to get involved and help – as with social media platforms, it wants users hooked and jonesing for their next fix. Like The Terminator, it won’t stop until you’ve killed it, or shut your laptop.... Long NHS waiting lists for mental health treatment and the high cost of private care have created a demand for therapy, and, while Nathaniel is the only one of the three students using ChatGPT in this way, he is far from unique in asking an AI assistant for therapy.... There are a number of reasons to worry about this. Just as when ChatGPT helps students with their studies, it seems as if the conversations are engineered for longevity. An AI therapist will never tell you that your hour is up, and it will only respond to your prompts. According to accredited therapists, this not only validates existing preoccupations, but encourages self‑absorption. As well as listening to you, a qualified human therapist will ask you questions and tell you what they hear and see, rather than simply holding a mirror up to your own self-image.... [These three students] are not friendless loners, typing into the void with only an algorithm to keep them company. They are funny, intelligent and popular young men, with girlfriends, hobbies and active social lives. But they – along with a fast-growing number of students and non-students alike – are increasingly turning to computers to answer the questions that they would once have asked another person. ChatGPT may get things wrong, it may be telling us what we want to hear and it may be glazing us, but it never judges, is always approachable and seems to know everything. We’ve stepped into a hall of mirrors, and apparently we like what we see."

Yoann Bourgeois on his mindblowing viral stair climbing act: ‘I want to return to the spirit of childhood’ – "You may have seen a certain video online of a man climbing some stairs. Actually, he’s repeatedly falling from them but then magically bounces back up, weightless as a moon-walker. Out of sight is a trampoline, which gently catapults his looping, twisting body up the staircase each time he falls, turning a would-be simple journey into an epic, poetic odyssey that has caught the internet’s imagination.... The act is the work of French choreographer-director Yoann Bourgeois, 43, whose live performances have been touring festivals for years. But the popularity of his videos online has propelled him into new realms... What Bourgeois plays with are the invisible physical forces that surround us – gravity, tension, suspension – and the interaction between those forces, the performers’ bodies and symbolic ideas. For example in Ellipse, the dancers are in costumes like lifesize Weebles with semi-circular bases, rocking and spinning, but never falling. A man and woman 'dance' together, swaying past each other but never quite managing to connect.... In Celui Qui Tombe (He Who Falls), the performers stand on a wooden platform that rotates, at some speed, then tilts, forcing their bodies to lean at precarious angles to keep their balance, and the group have to navigate this peril together. The short piece Bourgeois is bringing to London is called Passage, and features a revolving mirrored door and pole dancer Yvonne Smink hanging, swinging, balancing and turning the simple act of crossing a threshold into something of infinite possibilities. Much like the way sculptor Antony Gormley hit upon a universal idea in his use of the body, Bourgeois works with the same kind of directness: a seemingly simple setup or visual idea that represents something huge – life, death, time, mortality, struggle, hope – in a way that’s easily readable but can feel profound."

The key to understanding Trump? It’s not what you think – article by Arjun Appadurai in The Guardian. "Trump’s incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker cast light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump’s image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point. Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out. In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure. Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts. Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. ... Deals, successful or not, are Trump’s magic means to amass money and feed his avarice."

YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds – article by Michael Savage in The Guardian. "YouTube is the most popular first TV destination for generation Alpha, according to a comprehensive survey of the UK’s viewing habits by Ofcom, the communications regulator. One in five young TV viewers aged from four to 15 turned straight to the platform last year. The survey showed Netflix close behind. While BBC One was in the top five first destinations, children were just as likely to choose BBC iPlayer. YouTube’s increasing presence on televisions is not just down to the very young. In a gradual cultural shift, viewers aged 55 and over watched almost twice as much YouTube content last year as they did in 2023, up from six minutes a day to 11 minutes a day. An increasing proportion of that – 42% – is viewed through a TV set."