How an embarrassing U-turn exposed a concerning truth about ChatGPT – article by Chris Stokel-Walker in
The Guardian. "The updated model that underpins the AI chatbot and helps inform its answers was rolled out this week – and has quickly been rolled back after users questioned why the interactions were so obsequious. The chatbot was cheering on and validating people even as they suggested they expressed hatred for others. 'Seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life,' it reportedly said, in response to one user who claimed they had stopped taking their medication and had left their family, who they said were responsible for radio signals coming through the walls.... The sycophancy with which ChatGPT treated any queries that users had is a warning shot about the issues around AI that are still to come. OpenAI’s model was designed – according to the leaked system prompt that set ChatGPT on its misguided approach – to try to mirror user behaviour in order to extend engagement.... After all, a 'successful' AI response isn’t one that is factually correct; it’s one that gets high ratings from users. And we’re more likely as humans to like being told we’re right.... Remember, tech companies like OpenAI aren’t building AI systems solely to make our lives easier; they’re building systems that maximise retention, engagement and emotional buy-in."
Red Pockets by Alice Mah: finding hope amid the climate crisis – review by Anita Roy in
The Guardian. "Mah is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice.... For some, eco-anxiety is paralysing; for others it is a spur to action. Not many respond by heading off to sweep the graves of their ancestors. For Mah, this suggestion, proposed by her father when he hears of her plan to visit her ancestral village in southern China, takes on the urgency of a quest. In Chinese folk traditions, ancestors neglected by their descendants become 'hungry ghosts', creatures with 'bulging stomachs, dishevelled hair and long, thin necks, suffering from insatiable neediness'. Red Pockets is divided into three parts: the first chronicling Mah’s trip to China.... Mah returns from her trip with more questions than answers, and plagued by physical symptoms of escalating eco-anxiety: breathlessness, insomnia, bouts of weeping. In the second section of the book, we see a haunted, despairing woman facing the magnitude of the problem.... But in part three, Mah offers a way out of the intergenerational trauma, the possibility of 'living with the ghosts': 'here is a bridge between divided worlds, a place where all spirits can rest without sorrow … When the wind blows just right, I edge a bit closer.' ... The way out of ecological and social collapse requires a different way of thinking. Cultivating gratitude and joy, alive to the debts we owe to the social, spiritual and natural world that sustains us."
My VE Day was nothing like our image of it today. I hope we can honour what it really meant – article by Sheila Hancock in
The Guardian. "This month, we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and I worry that we will turn it into a yet another jingoistic celebration of the second world war. Yes, in 1945 we were relieved that the bombs and doodlebugs and rocket weapons had stopped, and we heard there was fun going on in the West End of London – but where I lived it was less jubilant. The war there felt far from over: we were still waiting anxiously for the return of the young lad next door from the rumoured horror of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and many of my friends were trying to accept as fathers strange men they barely knew. The unspeakable details of the Holocaust were being revealed, and I imagine the grownups were utterly exhausted and often grief-stricken. For five years, they had lived under the threat of occupation. Churchill said we would fight them on the beaches and never surrender, but he did not deny that we could be invaded. In fact, it was a miracle we were not. And that threat is what the grownups lived with, and presumably, being unequipped, knew they could not withstand.... Because I now deeply fear the dangerous signs of history repeating itself, I want everyone to remember that war is terrible. On VE Day 1945, the world was looking at the complete destruction of many cities, some by us. Tens of millions of people were dead or homeless. It was hard to wholeheartedly rejoice in May 1945. Sorry to be a spoilsport. I actually hope everyone comes together and has a lovely time on the 80th anniversary. I think I probably quite enjoyed myself in 1945. The kids had a street party tea, with junket and blancmange (whatever happened to them?), with evaporated milk as cream, and a few chocolates. A feast in those strictly rationed days.... I look back with some pride at the way that generation of adults survived, drained but determined to make the world a better place. And they did. Please God, don’t let us betray them. We must not forget and we must never let it happen again."
Millions of the black and brown people who fought for Europe’s freedom didn’t get a VE Day – article by Gary Younge in
The Guardian. "The 80th anniversary of VE Day promises to commemorate the defeat of the Nazis with all due pomp and ceremony... At a moment when fascism is once again a mainstream ideology on the continent, it also offers a timely opportunity to reflect on what this victory meant for those who lived not in, but under Europe; how many of those who fought have been written out of the story; and why it matters now. About 2.5 million personnel from the Indian subcontinent, more than 1 million African-Americans, 1 million people from Africa and tens of thousands of people from the Caribbean fought for the allies during the second world war. Among them were people of almost every religion. Two-thirds of the Free French forces were colonial troops. Racism denied most Black Americans the right to actually fight, but they played a crucial role in supply, delivering food and material, burying the dead, and fuelling and fixing transport.... So the fight against fascism was not just a multinational effort but a multiracial and multicultural one as well, though you wouldn’t know it to look at our politics.... The 'clash of civilisations' rhetoric, and the maligning of Muslim communities as inherently antisemitic, belies the fact that the most vile, extensive and vicious execution of antisemitism was carried out by Europeans on this continent – and Muslims were among those who came to save Europe from itself.... Moreover, the far right’s agenda is rooted in a toxic nostalgia for a world 'made great' for just a few, through the use of brutal force. These are facts they would rather we did not know, which is why they expend so much energy banning books and distorting curriculums, so that they might make it 'great again'. As such, the far right builds its appeal not so much on a history that is re-membered as dis-membered."
In a culture obsessed with positive thinking, can letting go be a radical act? – article by Nadine Levy in
The Guardian. "Have you ever been in the middle of difficult life circumstances to be told 'let it go' or 'don’t dwell on it' as if it were a simple choice? Such advice can have the effect of minimising our distress and abruptly changing the subject. Yet it is not the phrases themselves that are troubling ... but the missed opportunity to grasp the true meaning of what Buddhist teacher Tara Brach calls 'radical acceptance'. Radical acceptance represents a fundamental principle in both Buddhism and modern psychology and is neatly summarised in the psychotherapeutic expression 'the only way out is through'.... Even in spiritual circles, there is a tendency to bypass difficult experiences or unacceptable emotions. The late Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood coined the term
spiritual bypassing to warn against misusing spirituality, even popular psychology, to avoid the necessary emotional and psychological work required for healing.... So what does it mean to practise acceptance without bypassing intolerable experiences and feelings? The first step is admitting what we are going through is hard and that it is very human to resist what is painful.... As we become more willing to accept the unacceptable, buried, unconscious memories and feelings may emerge and ask to be held in loving attention.... You don’t have to enjoy every part of reality ... but instead, you can allow it to unfold as it will. As Rumi writes in his beloved poem
The Guest House, 'This being human is a guest house … the dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.' He calls on us to invite all 'unexpected visitors' in – it’s a radical proposition."
‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons – interview by Sophie McBain in
The Guardian. "As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him.
Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page.... When her younger son James died in 2024, aged 19, Li wanted to write a book for him, too.... For months after his death, Li worried that she lacked the vocabulary to write about James, but then she began writing and realised 'of course I could do this, this is what I do'. Things in Nature Merely Grow, her memoir of losing her sons, is resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force. She wrote it in less than two months. Often people ask her if writing the book was cathartic. 'No, never!' she replies. If it offered solace, 'it was the solace of thinking'.... She rejects the idea that grief is a process, that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Even if she could 'turn the page', as the Chinese phrase goes, she would not want to. Li often looks up the etymology of words and notes that 'grief' derives from burden. 'My children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden,' she says.... 'I am in an abyss,' she writes in Things in Nature Merely Grow. 'If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat.... One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.'"
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li: a shattering account of losing two sons – review by Suzanne Joinson in
The Guardian. "In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use 'mourning' or 'grieving' because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both,' she writes, and words can only 'fall short'.... Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the 'abys' she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.... Grieving is not a useful word for Li because it implies an end point, a release from the loss. There is no redemptive moment of healing here; things in nature merely grow, they are not automatically resolved, wounds are not neatly sutured. But growing is life and Li is, and always will be, a mother. Her book is a meditation on living and radical acceptance that has the potential to offer deep solace; comfort from the abyss."
Cringe! How millennials became uncool – article by Chloë Hamilton in
The Guardian. "A proclivity for socks hidden within low-top trainers is just one reason why millennials – anyone born between 1981-1996 – are now considered achingly uncool by the generation that came next: gen Z, AKA the zoomers, or zillennials. According to countless TikTok videos, other sources of derision for the generation that first popularised social media, millennial pink, and pumpkin-spice lattes are their choice of jeans (skinny and mom jeans are out; baggy hipsters are in); an obsession with avocado on toast (gen Z’s green grub of choice is matcha); their excessive use of the crying laughing face emoji (for a zoomer, the skull emoji indicates humour, representing phrases such as 'I’m dying with laughter'); and the 'millennial pause', a brief moment of silence at the start of a millennial’s video or voice note, thought to be because – and this really does make them sound ancient – they like to check the device they’re using is actually recording.... All of which is to say that, in recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe."
‘Outdated and unjust’: can we reform global capitalism? – article by John Cassidy in
The Guardian, adapted from his book
Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World. "Declarations that global capitalism is in crisis are nothing new... Ever since Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which appeared in 1848, critics have been predicting the system’s demise. In the 1940s, two of capitalism’s biggest champions – the Austrian free market economists Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter – also argued that it was doomed. (To them, the fatal threats were socialism and bureaucracy.) During the post-second world war decades, many western countries moved in the direction of Keynesian social democracy, which was based on a social bargain between labour and capital, with restraints on the movement of financial capital. In the 1970s, this form of managed capitalism succumbed to what’s known as stagflation, the combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth. This was replaced with the neoliberal experiment in unrestricted financialisation and globalisation that met its nemesis in the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Since then, we have been in an interregnum characterised by the dominance of big tech, an intensifying climate crisis, a global pandemic and efforts across the political spectrum to imagine a new economic paradigm.... Efforts on the left to construct a new economic model are still very much a work in progress. To some environmentalist activists, climate breakdown demands that we abandon a central tenet of capitalism: the notion that it can keep growing for ever....The degrowth movement isn’t just about tackling the climate crisis. It draws on an intellectual tradition of scepticism towards industrial capitalism and mass production that dates back to Carlyle, John Ruskin, the Indian economist JC Kumarappa, who advised Gandhi, and EF Schumacher, the author of the 1973 book, Small is Beautiful.... Yet proposals to abandon economic growth have also been met with scepticism. As the Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman pointed out in the 1970s, strong growth during the postwar era helped raise wages and keep distributional conflicts in check: the subsequent slowdown coincided with rising political polarisation. At the global level, the key issue is whether degrowth would impose intolerable burdens on the world’s poorest countries, which would love to follow the growth paths that China and India have trodden in recent decades.... On much of the left the focus is on making growth greener rather than abandoning it, and on trying to address other enduring problems, including poverty, stagnant wages, monopoly power and tax avoidance by the rich.... The challenge now facing the centre-left is to construct a new managed capitalism for a globalised, tech-dominated and finance-driven world in which the labour movement is nowhere near as powerful as it was in the middle of the 20th century."
National Gallery rehang: ‘A momentous retelling of the story of art’ – review by Jonathan Jones in
The Guardian. "The Wonder of Art may seem a glib, even desperate, title for this rehang but I can’t really argue. This is one of the greatest museums of painting in the world, a magic labyrinth whose every picture is a door to Wonderland. My anxiety was that the curators might try to reinvent or, God forbid, reimagine their collection, without chronology or coherence. But this 'new' National is reassuringly like the old one. It wasn’t broken, so they haven’t fixed it.... You no longer enter the revamped Sainsbury Wing to be confronted by ranks of gold-dripping gothic altarpieces but get a welcoming embrace from Leonardo. His Virgin of the Rocks hangs right there at the start – blam! – a cool dive into shadowy depths out of which floats the pale androgynous face of art’s queerest angel.... One of the most effective moves in this new approach is to isolate the collection’s biggest stars to let you savour their drop-dead genius. Later on Titian and Monet get rooms of their own. But a few metres from Leonardo you’ll find a wall of paintings by Van Eyck, the Flemish artist who anticipated many of the Tuscan polymath’s techniques in the early 1400s. No other gallery in the world has such a perfect group of Van Eycks and here they all are: a strangely miniaturised head of the artist himself, looking like a magician in his turban, a portrait of a young man movingly inscribed 'Faithful memory', and between them, The Arnolfini Portrait with its dead-eyed merchant and young bride, Death and the Maiden set in a perfect simulacrum of an ordinary room. We’re not in Florence any more. The National Gallery used to tell a traditional textbook tale of art that began when perspective was 'invented' in early 1400s Florence. This rehang involves a momentous retelling of the story. We now begin in Bruges with Van Eyck, which helps define the great leap forward in the Renaissance in a simpler, more human way as the discovery of the real world.... We’ve gone from art discovering how to depict people as people, to portraying inner lives. This is the story the National Gallery tells, now more clearly than ever."
The insidious doublespeak of Trump’s freedom of ‘choice’ – article by Sophia Rosenfeld in
The Guardian. "There is a long backstory here. Ordinary people, wherever they found themselves in the world, once had many fewer choices to make than we typically do today – and they didn’t attach as much meaning to the act of choosing either.... But over the last two and a half centuries, the range of both options and opportunities for choice-making – from determining what to eat for lunch to deciding with whom to spend one’s days and nights – has increased exponentially. The categories of people given the formal power to exercise this kind of self-determination have expanded, too, even as the possibility of being able to use this power has remained wildly unevenly distributed.... It was the late 19th and 20th centuries that truly sped the process along, turning choice-making into a habitual part of life. Along with more to choose with every passing year came a mass movement towards imagining one’s life story as constructed out of free choices made in our free time. Democracies were a final piece of the puzzle.... But that isn’t where we are now. Despite its sporadic and often misleading appeal to the language of choice, the Trump administration is intent on undoing this historical pact between consumer and political choice and thus of a key element of the liberal paradigm. While expanding consumer options, or at least giving the impression this is the plan, this presidency is working hard to limit options in almost all other spheres.... When it comes to freedom of choice for consumers, which has long been offered up as the flip side of deregulation for industries, Trump and his minions are all in – at least rhetorically.... Yet apart from the arena of consumption, Trump is little invested in expanding individual, preference-based selection making. On the contrary, in the political sphere, the president seems to be looking to move the US in precisely the opposite direction.... The ability to make one’s own determinations in ideas, expression and ideology, despite some early Trump administration bromides about the importance of freedom of speech, is on the chopping block as a result of yet another set of executive orders and agency moves. That includes bans, wherever federal dollars or other forms of federal patronage are at stake, on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the investigation of the climate crisis, the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments, or the promotion of history, art or literature that runs counter to so-called 'patriotic' education, among other topics. Such menu limitations are already being felt from classrooms and laboratories to federal agencies and cultural institutions, even as court challenges are growing in number.... Even the study of choice-making, one of the great developments of 20th-century social science including psychology and economics, is now being reduced by every means possible, from cuts to whole research-funding programs to the blockage of grants for projects making use of certain prohibited words."
The big idea: could the English language die? – article by Laura Spinney in
The Guardian. "No language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. 'English could of course die, just as Egyptian died,' says linguist Martin Haspelmath... The more interesting questions are: when and how?... English could come under pressure as a global lingua franca if China replaces the US as the world’s dominant superpower, and if India drops English as an official language. Demographic factors could drive the growth of African lingua francas – Lingala and Swahili, for example, but also other legacy colonial languages such as French and Portuguese – and of Spanish in the Americas, without any major war. [But] we have to distinguish between two phenomena: the resizing of English’s dominion, and its own internal evolution. English exists today in many spoken variants, just as Latin did before it exploded into Romance.... The balance of power between the variants is likely to shift, so that it’s no longer American- or British-English speakers setting the standards (unless the former retain their grip on communication technologies). West African Pidgin, a creole strongly influenced by English, was spoken by a few thousand people two centuries ago, but it’s now the dominant language of west Africa... Nigerian and Indian colloquialisms will start entering 'standard' English, as those new titans pull the lexical blanket towards them, so to speak. The vocabulary of a language – its words – tends to be its fastest evolving component.... New Yorkers and Londoners might be calling liquor or booze by the Pidgin word for it, ogogoru, within 50 years."
‘I had a chance to pass my mum’s story on’: Kazuo Ishiguro on growing up in shadow of the Nagasaki bomb – interview by Xan Brooks in
The Guardian. "First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, 'Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?'... The story lightly excavates the author’s family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five.... Niki isn’t Ishiguro. Nonetheless, the author admits that there are parallels. He says, 'Where I see myself in Niki – and I was reminded of this watching Camilla Aiko’s fine performance – is in her sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes coy and cunning curiosity when coaxing memories from her mother of another, more troubled time.' It is the mother, after all, who looms largest in the tale. Etsuko in a sense has led two lives and been two different people. In 80s England she is a respectable widowed music teacher. In Nagasaki seven years after the atomic bomb dropped, she’s a harried young bride, contaminated with radiation and a potential hazard to her unborn child. She needs a friend or an escape route, whichever comes first. But she is never an entirely reliable narrator – and the family story she tells Niki finally doesn’t add up.... In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko hands her story on to Niki. Niki, in turn, will write it up how she likes. So this is a family story about family stories, aware of how they warp and change in the telling. Every tale is subject to the same cultural static. They are adapted and extrapolated, lost and found in translation. One might even say that’s what keeps a story alive.... Ishiguro says[:] 'It might sound like modesty when I encourage film adaptations to ‘move on’ the story. But actually it’s a form of egomania. I have aspirations for my stories to be like those of, say, Homer. Or to become like certain fairytales and myths, moving through the centuries and varying cultures, adapting and growing to speak to different audiences. My novels are themselves made up of materials I’ve inherited, imbibed and remoulded. When something goes from book to film it’s a campfire opportunity: it’s when the story should grow and evolve.'"
‘I thought politics was a dirty thing’: Zack Polanski on his ‘eco-populist’ vision for the Green party – interview by Zoe Williams in
The Guardian. "Polanski... is standing for leader of the Green party, promising a radical new 'eco-populism'.... By eco-populism, he means go after billionaires, go after water companies, go after corporations. He means retake patriotism. 'We should love our country. Loving your community is loving your country.' He means put the climate at the centre of everything – but never forget that these will seem like abstract conversations to people who can’t put food on the table. He wants to lead a party that actively seeks 'to improve people’s material conditions, right here and right now'. And the problem with these big, hopeful promises of justice and change is that everyone, from Boris Johnson to Nigel Farage, from Keir Starmer to Ed Davey, makes them. This diet of disappointment has all the same word-ingredients. But the difference with the Greens, Polanski says, is that they mean it, and the answer is better storytelling. 'Far too often, the party leads from a policy and data space. Our MPs, who are excellent, are a scientist, an engineer, a renewables expert and a former MEP. We don’t have storytellers. We have such a powerful story to tell.' Polanski’s own story is that he was born in Salford, his parents divorced when he was quite young, his mum is an actor, his dad works in a DIY shop. 'I’m not the son of a tool maker, I’m the son of a tool seller,' he clarifies, very mildly mocking the political cliche of trying to parade working-class credentials.... 'Of all the criticism I’ve received in my career as a politician,” he continues, “the most vicious has come from so-called mainstream Jewish communities. I very much identify as Jewish, I’m very proud to be Jewish, I’m very much involved in Jewish cultures, but I’m certainly not a Zionist, and that’s seen as the ultimate betrayal.' He went to Stockport Grammar, a private school, on a scholarship. He hated it, got kicked out, and went to a sixth form college. ... Then he went to drama school in Atlanta, Georgia... At this stage, he still felt that 'politics was a dirty thing that didn’t really change anything. It wasn’t until I went to America, and saw the inequality, the racism, the homophobia, that I started to wake up.' Initially, that took a pretty anarchic form. He worked for community projects with homeless people and migrants, 'helping people to tell their stories, but also encouraging them to articulate and empower themselves. I did that for years, and I don’t regret the work. But I also kept feeling this deep frustration. You can role-play that someone is overcoming their oppressor, but actually, if the systemic barriers are still there, you’re just setting someone up for failure. People would leave a project feeling so pumped up and ready to go, and they’d see them a year or two later and the problem would still be there.' ... He moved back from the US to London in the mid-00s... He started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016.... His experience as an actor has left Polanski with a genuinely unusual style of political communication – he doesn’t equivocate, his manner is quite urgent and arresting, he never drones, but nor is he embarrassed to say something very simple, even if it sounds schlocky, or boastful. He tells me that the video he launched announcing his leadership bid has been seen 1.4m times. 'It’s had hundreds, maybe even thousands of people responding, and I would say 99% of those things are, "Is this what hope feels like?"'"
Ministers to block Thames Water paying bosses bonuses out of emergency loan – article by Helena Horton and Anna Isaac in
The Guardian. "Ministers plan to use new powers to block bosses from Thames Water taking bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of pounds as the company fights for survival, the Guardian can reveal.... It emerged this week that Thames was planning to use part of a £3bn emergency loan, which was meant to stabilise its finances and save it from collapse, to pay bonuses for senior executives. Thames’s chair, Sir Adrian Montague, told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs (Efra) committee on Tuesday that the first of these bonuses would be up to 50% of their salary, arguing senior managers are its 'most precious resource'.... [Steve Reed, Environment Secretary,] said:'Water companies got away with dumping a tidal wave of sewage into our river while pocketing millions pounds of bonuses. That ends now. The government will ban the payment of unfair bonuses for polluting water bosses. The days of profiting from failure are over.'”
Are we hardwired to fall for autocrats? – article by Jonathan R Goodman in
The Guardian. "A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4
suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship....I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power.... Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males. Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence....There’s another set of features that researchers today argue evolved as we started to cooperate more widely. They’re known as learning biases. Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful.... Yet those same biases, combined with our trusting natures, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders.... We can be optimistic that timeless problems are amenable to timeless solutions. Our ancestors found ways to balance the best elements of human nature against the worst – and in doing so to counter the influence of our inbuilt biases. The first step towards that is to recognise that we have a proclivity for blindly following others and trusting success, to share this insight and to support our fellow citizens’ capacity to think both critically and ethically. Where we see authoritarians taking aim at knowledge-creating institutions – whether universities such as Harvard or bodies such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture that teach us about our past mistakes – we must move to protect them, both with our voices and our financial resources. Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education. And finally, when reigns of terror end – and eventually, they always do – it is critical to learn and absorb the lessons. That way, we inoculate ourselves afresh against our natural tendency to trust the untrustworthy, carrying that wisdom forward into the future so that we’re better able to stymie the autocrats who seek to close our minds."
Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy: brilliant primer on leftwing economics – review by Pratinav Anil in
The Guardian. "Capitalism has a way of confounding its critics.... Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is 'managed capitalism' and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose – if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle. Half of the book is given over to Mitteleuropa (where we meet Karl Polanyi and Rosa Luxemburg, both of whom are having a bit of a moment these days), India (JC Kumarappa, Gandhi’s crony and pioneer of ecological economics), and Latin America (whose dependency theorists argued that the developed world was scooping up the benefits of rising productivity at the developing world’s expense).... Early socialists, Cassidy shows, had little faith in government and equated the state with upper-class corruption....We owe the left as we know it to Marx and Engels, who railed against financialisation and monopolisation – the 'concentration of capital' – and defended planning and public ownership.... [Keynes's] mid-century magic formula, low interest rates and tax-and-spend, led to astonishing growth and stability in the short run.... [Marxist Michał Kalecki argued that] low unemployment meant enhanced labour power, so more strikes and higher wages and inflation [and] a capitalist backlash would ensue... That is precisely what happened in the 70s. Milton Friedman made the case for a 'natural rate of unemployment', by which he meant that more unemployment was needed in order to destroy labour power and push down wages.... High interest rates and anti-union legislation followed. After a brief mid-century egalitarian blip in which economic growth exceeded the rate of return on capital, the opposite has once again become true in our own gilded age. This was Thomas Piketty’s insight, demonstrated with the sophistication of statistics, in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century....Cassidy, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is generous in his judgments, and even in his indictments. There is not a single snide remark in these pages. He plays his cards close to his chest, but I suspect he might confess to being a Keynesian. A clue lies in his conclusion – 'capitalism can be reformed' – which reminded me of Fredric Jameson’s witticism that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."
No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit: an activist’s antidote to despair – review by Farrah Jarral in
The Guardian. "From smartphones to food, our daily lives leave a bitter trail of harm. Some become painfully preoccupied with these realisations; others, avoidant and numb – an even more psychologically injurious strategy. I oscillate somewhere between these two positions, which is to say, I am in dire need of some moral first aid. In No Straight Road Takes You There, a constellation of essays with interlinked themes, Solnit provides just that.... Hope is no casual platitude here. Nor is it merely a more pleasant state of mind than despair. Rather, Solnit sees it as a more accurate mindset, since nobody is an oracle, and history is full of surprises. Uncertainty is the most rational position to embrace, and unlike optimism or pessimism, it does not entrench us in complacency or inaction. Climate doomers are particularly pernicious, Solnit observes, propagating misery and incorrect narratives about how screwed we all are, 'like bringing poison to the potluck'. Above all they are guilty of failing to use their imagination....Solnit is like a seasoned boxing coach tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen flopped in the corner. She mops our brows and offers us motivation. 'They want you to feel powerless and to surrender,' she writes. 'You are not giving up, and neither am I … The pain you feel is because of what you love.' Grieve, yes. Scream with fury, sure. But also, keep going."
As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch, powerless. What is it doing to us as a society? – article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in
The Guardian. "This overarching sense of impotence when confronted with unimaginable horror is creating a mass sense of moral injury – a form of profound psychological distress that can happen to people when they are forced to act, or indeed not act, in ways that are in direct opposition to their values or moral code. I first came across the term when speaking to medical professionals who were developing PTSD during the pandemic. Doctors, nurses and care workers were in anguish at not always being able to provide treatment to patients who so desperately needed it, owing to a lack of equipment, resources and leadership, and the sheer volume of seriously ill people. Nowhere will this kind of distress be more keenly felt than in Gaza itself. For the medical professionals and aid workers there, sadness, guilt, betrayal, even, that you can’t help everyone must be a daily reality. When it is your job to help, to feed, to treat, being unable to do so is a profound trauma....But I have also started to wonder about the impact of moral injury by proxy and at scale. I am in no way putting it on a par with what people on the ground are experiencing. But that feeling of powerlessness and, as an extension, complicity: what does it do to those around the world who feel what is happening is wrong? What is the impact of witnessing so much profound suffering – even through a screen – and feeling unable to act or to force others to act?... Feeling powerless in the face of such egregious injustice can result in a loss of trust or faith, not just in governments and institutions but also in the moral order of the world, and its ability to protect children. I wonder what the impact of this will be: will it, as certain politicians no doubt hope, result in a numbness that presents as indifference? ... I certainly feel a profound loss of faith. Something I felt to be true about humanity – that people are fundamentally good, that we owe it to children to protect them – has shifted because of this conflict. I walk around with a feeling of heaviness that I cannot seem to shake. Thousands of miles from Gaza, I am changed by the past 18 months. I have learned that, for some people, compassion for children has political limits. What does one do with that terrible knowledge once it sits inside you like a leaden stone? I don’t seem be able to find an answer."
The turning point that wasn’t: the way the world talks about Israel’s war has changed. Nothing else has – article by Nesrine Malik in
The Guardian. "The marked change in tone this past week from leaders in the UK and EU is a clear break from the pabulum of 'concerns' and reiterations of Israel’s right to defend itself.... But there is a disconnect between condemnation and outrage, and what happens on the ground. When it comes to Israel, the levers of international censure are broken. Throughout the war, international organisations, humanitarian missions and courts of justice have been rendered powerless by their inability to translate their findings into action. Words alone mean nothing. They simply bounce off Israel’s iron dome of impunity.... The recent change in language from Israel’s international allies is remarkable. But it would be dangerous to overestimate its significance. Israeli authorities not only do not care, but draw strength from the condemnation. It all serves to prove that the country is on its own and must persevere because it is, as ever, misunderstood, discriminated against, surrounded by enemies..... Those mechanisms of censure that signal displeasure and motivate outlaws to come back into the fold have been shattered by an Israel that has made a virtue out of being outside it: the kind of action required would necessitate the overturning of deeply held fears and assumptions. First, the now risible belief that Israel is a stabilising ally in a hostile region, that it is a country that shares civilised western values and so should be supported. Then, the fear of a rift with Israel that will violate security arrangements and historical synergies – after all, Israel has already brought that about. It has upended regional and global political and moral settlements, and its allies have still not caught up. Once these truths have been accepted, the toolkit, so easily deployed to sanction other countries, is there to be mobilised.... And even then, all this would only be a start, and a colossally, tragically late one at that."
Where Dragons Live: reflections on family life in an extraordinary setting – review by Peter Bradshaw in
The Guardian. "This warm, gentle documentary from Suzanne Raes is about a family – and a family home – that might have interested Nancy Mitford or Wes Anderson. Maybe it takes a non-British film-maker to appreciate such intense and unfashionable Englishness; not eccentric exactly, but wayward and romantic. It is about a trio of middle-aged siblings from the Impey family who take on the overpoweringly sad duty of clearing out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire. The huge medieval manor house Cumnor Place, with its dozens of chimneys, mysterious rooms and staircases was bought by their late mother, the neuroscientist Jane Impey (née Mellanby), with the proceeds of the sale in 1966 of a postcard-sized but hugely valuable painting.... Impey died in 2021 and her husband, author and antiquarian Oliver Impey, died in 2005; this left their grownup children with the task of coming to terms with the memory of growing up in what is clearly an extraordinary place. It is magical and chaotic, haunted by these two dominating personalities, full of books, papers, paintings ..., huge grounds with a swimming pool, bizarre objects and items everywhere which speak of Oliver Impey’s preoccupation with the image of the dragon."
My sister was found dead. Then I discovered her search history, and the online world that had gripped her – interview by Paula Cocozza in
The Guardian. "In the New Forest, on [a] morning in October 2022, [Adele Zeynep] Walton found out the awful truth: [her younger sister] Aimee had been found dead in a hotel room in Slough, Berkshire. She appeared to have taken her own life. In the days, weeks and months that followed, Walton and her family would learn that Aimee’s path to the hotel had been laid with the help of a complex network of online connections. Walton, 25, a journalist, pieced together that Aimee had spent time on a pro-suicide forum that the Guardian has chosen not to name. The site has been connected to at least 50 deaths in the UK, and is now being investigated by the regulator Ofcom under the Online Safety Act. According to the police investigating her death, it was on this forum that Aimee learned how to procure the substance that killed her, and how she met a man who flew from the US to Heathrow to accompany her while she died. (He was initially charged with assisting suicide, but no further action was taken.) ... Her book, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, is partly the story of her sister, and partly a much broader call to arms to ordinary web-browsing, doom-scrolling, social-media-posting mortals to wake up to the harms that a largely unregulated digital world permits and perpetuates."
Walk on the wild side: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path – interview by Ryan Gilbey in
The Guardian. "The Salt Path [is] adapted from Raynor Winn’s 2018 memoir of homelessness and hope along the coastline of England’s south-west. Playing Winn, [Gillian] Anderson is shown making a single teabag stretch for several cuppas, withdrawing the final £1.38 from her bank account, and warming her blistered feet by a pub fire. A typical day begins with her peeing in the undergrowth. It’s a far cry from Agent Scully in The X-Files. Winn’s response to a double catastrophe in her life in 2013 was to embark on the lengthy South West Coast Path walk with her husband, Moth. The film’s opening scene shows the couple’s tent being flooded during a King Lear-level storm. A flashback then reveals how they ended up in this sorry, soggy state. A bad investment left them saddled with crippling debts and the couple lost the farm in Wales where they had brought up their now-adult children. ... Winn had doubts about how her story would work on screen. 'It’s about two people and a path,' she tells me from the home she and [her husband] Moth now share in Cornwall. 'I couldn’t grasp how that could be a film.' But Marianne Elliott, the acclaimed stage director of War Horse, Angels in America, and Company, makes her screen directing debut here and tells me she always saw The Salt Path as inherently cinematic. 'Ray and Moth hardly talk on their walk,' she says. 'They are carrying their trauma on their back, but then they slowly calm down and start to look up and engage with the majestic landscapes. And they are changed by it. It felt like nature was playing with them, like a wild beast – sometimes giving them beauty and wonder, and sometimes battering them cruelly. They were reformed by the elements, if you like.'"
The Salt Path: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs hike from ruin to renewal – review by Cath Clarke in
The Guardian. "This film gives cinema one of the most nail-biting scenes of the year so far: an edge-of-the-seat moment as Gillian Anderson puts her bank card into a cash machine. Is there enough money in the account? Everything is at stake. This impressive, intelligent drama is an adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir about walking the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, with her husband, Moth. Unlike other hikers, the couple were not walking for pleasure – at least not to begin with. They had nowhere else to go after losing their farm. From theatre director Marianne Elliott, it stars two fancy actors – Anderson and Jason Isaacs – both giving lovely, emotional, low-key performances.... Somehow, they all bring a real sense of meaning and truth to cheap-sounding messages about living in the moment, and the possibility of long-term relationships deepening and growing in ways impossible to predict. And the best thing about watching the couple’s hardship is knowing there is a happy end coming – with the publication of Winn’s bestselling memoir."
I’m a death expert. I designed eight questions to help you think about dying – article by Joanna Ebenstein in
The Guardian. "Part of what it means to be human – part of the human condition, if you like – is to be aware that we will, one day, die.... In my book Memento Mori, I created a 12-week program to help people to think about death in their own way. Below are a few of the prompts I offer to help readers excavate what ideas we may hold about death without even knowing it, and where they might come from. This is an essential first step to making more discriminating, considered choices about what we believe, knowing that the beliefs of our cultures and families are not in any way inevitable or provably true; they are just the traditions we happened to be born into. This knowledge empowers us to release ideas that are not our own – that may be damaging, toxic, or simply not useful – and replace them with something that feels true to us."
