The Gold – well-made BBC drama series, about the efforts of the police to bring to justice those who profited from the Brink's-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Every aspect is beautifully realised: both the task force (led by Hugh Bonneville as a hard-nosed copper, a million miles away from Lord Grantham) and the villains, whose drives and motivations are meticulously explored. No simple greed here, but in most cases the desire to escape from poverty and to get for themselves a share of the luxury others seemed to be grabbing in the acquisitive '80s: when owning a Spanish house with a swimming pool was the summit of desire. Because in fact the story turns out not to be about the gold, which was rapidly melted down, but about the money it spawned, much of it laundered through property development, thus increasing it to many times its original value. There are points where you want to kick the villains, in their smug defiance of the police, and yet there are other times – as their schemes and their lives start to unravel – when you almost feel sorry for them. Good drama, and a window on the times.
Shifty – latest documentary clip essay from Adam Curtis, this time looking at power shifts in Britain in the 1980s and '90s, and in particular the decline of trust: "not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves" (from his own article about it). I found that explanation necessary, because I found this series much harder to get into than his previous; the clips were striking, but what story were they telling? Even having watched the whole series (and it does get clearer in Episodes 2-4), I still feel that he’s telling us what happened, but not why – other than occasional gestures towards economic forces (which would fit with his critical theoretical outlook). Maybe, as Lucy Mangan suggests, one should let it just wash over one, like a piece of music or a work of art, and see what impression it leaves. But I do want something more from my history. I found something much more interesting afterwards in a transcript of a conversation between Curtis and Ari Aster, the director of Eddington, in which he said: "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.” The sadness and anger coming from a sense of loss of an imagined (and imaginary) past is one of the factors driving contemporary politics, and I can’t help wondering if a better relationship with history, and one’s own history, might contribute to healing and help people live better and more honestly (if still uncomfortably) in the present.
The Sense of an Ending – beautiful and engaging film from the Julian Barnes novel, with Jim Broadbent as an elderly curmudgeon, dealing awkwardly with his ex-wife and heavily pregnant daughter, who is prompted to revisit memories of his first great love and the related suicide of one of his school friends. Sensitive and powerful, as is typical with Barnes, and a deep acknowledgement of the incompleteness and fallibility of memory and the impossibility of truly knowing what is in someone else's mind – and the necessity of living with those limitations, nonetheless.
Red Pockets, by Alice Mah – vivid meditation on ancestors, environmental catastrophe, and relationship with future generations, all anchored in the concrete detail of Mah's journey to her ancestral village in China, where her ancestors' graves lie not merely unswept but unmarked, her work as an environmental scientist and attendance at Cop26, and her own history of migration from Canada to Coventry to Glasgow. By the end of the book, she seems to achieve her own balance, at peace with her "hungry ghosts", less stricken with eco-anxiety as she learns not to recycle despair, and with a Buddhist kind of acceptance. But there are gaps which you have to fill in for yourself – as indeed there should be, for this is not a template to copy but a sketch or outline of a movement we might all try to make in our own lives.
King Richard III Centre, Leicester – very nice museum by the site where his body was discovered in 2012 under what was then a municipal car park but at the time of his death had been a monastery burial ground. The ground floor is on the Wars of the Roses (even with heroic efforts at simplification the family / political hostilities are still mighty complicated), rehabilitating (as is now usual) Richard’s image from Shakespeare’s Tudor-interested calumnies, ending with the Battle of Bosworth Field, after which the victorious Henry Tudor, having had himself crowned Henry VII, re-write history by making Parliament pass an Act back-dating his coronation to the day before the battle, thus making everyone who had opposed him guilty of treason. The first floor is on the discovery and medical/scientific verification of his body: an extraordinary story, though one largely familiar to me having seen it unfold on television news at the time. Interesting to see how since then Richard has become a local hero (no longer the evil king of Shakespeare’s play and history textbooks, as he was until Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time (1951) popularised the argument that this was all Tudor propaganda, with slender evidential base); now pubs and cafés are named after him. A reversal of what happened after Bosworth Field, when a local inn called The White Boar – Richard’s heraldic emblem – quickly changed its name to The Red Boar - the heraldic emblem of one of the supporters of the royal usurper.
The Traitors, season 1 – a guilty pleasure, a very guilty pleasure. The Traitors-themed Prom in the BBC Proms programme prompted me to find out at last what this cultural phenomenon was all about, and OMG, I found it fascinating in a very dark and pathological way: like watching a car crash, you just can’t look away. Brilliantly designed and edited, with high production values, but OMG. The players, in a beautiful Scottish castle, do team games to increase their pot of potential winnings, but some of them have been secretly designated Traitors who each night can “murder” (eliminate) one of the others (the Faithful). And each evening, all the players vote to banish one of their number whom they think is a Traitor. The team games encourage and promote trust and collaboration, the banishments encourage and promote suspicion and mistrust, so the whole situation is perfectly calculated to mess with their heads. The first banishment was especially alarming for the certainty with which the players convinced themselves that they’d identified a Traitor – which they hadn’t, of course, there bring no evidence to go on. It made me think of how a medieval village would point the finger at a supposed witch, or accuse a Jew of having poisoned the well, or how Christopher Jefferies was accused by tabloid press and public opinion of having been the murderer of his tenant Joanna Watts (it turned out his only crime was having a dodgy haircut). The players were all (mostly) nice and basically decent people, and yet the pressure of the situation took them into fantasies to which they held with absolute conviction – until the game revealed that them to be completely wrong. Scary and horrible – and utterly fascinating, so that I had to watch the season to the end.
You Talkin’ to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama, by Sam Leith – clear and very funny exposition of classical rhetoric, using familiar examples from political history, though being first published in 2011 it doesn't include Trump and the current wave of populists. (It does include Hitler and Churchill.) Tremendous and highly readable as the book is however, it does have two major limitations. The first is that that the terminology of classical rhetoric isn't mapped on that of contemporary linguistics; for example we hear about "ethos", or presenting yourself as the right kind of person to be speaking on the subject, as the first part of rhetoric, but there's no clue that linguists today would call this "positioning". The second is that the examples, and by implication the scope of rhetoric, are drawn from politics and law, which is fair enough, except that there are many other areas of life in which people encounter rhetoric these days: I would mention advertising and management. I'm all for increasing people's love and appreciation of and competence in rhetoric, which is the author's goal, but given that most of us aren't lawyers or politicians I'd have liked to see it brought closer to everyday life.
Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home, exhibition at the Weston Library, Oxford – the basic story of the early days of broadcast radio, told through the artefacts of producers (chiefly the BBC), is familiar; more interesting is the testimony of listeners, compiled by audience researchers Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, on the effect radio was having on their lives. As the first mass medium bringing the outside world into the home, its impact was unexpected and profound, comparable to that of the internet at the end of the century. It was also very sudden; I was surprised to see that radio usage reached a majority of the population within just a few years – faster than internet access. Also salutery to be reminded that radio listening was then as much a collective activity (on a sitting room set) as an individual one (on headphones). The next big change, I think, was the rise in the 1960s of the transistor radio (often called a “transistor” or “tranny”, after its core technology) which made radios portable, so that young people could take their music with them wherever they went.
Inter Alia – blisteringly good play (streamed to cinemas), with a tremendous high-energy performance by Rosamund Pike, on stage continuously for the full duration, giving first-person stream-of-consciousness, changing place, emotion, mood, in an instant. We first see her as a judge, commanding her court like a rock star, protecting a vulnerable witness in a rape trial from the hostility of the (male) barrister defending her (alleged) assailant; then as a mother, still as protective and concerned for the wellbeing of her now late-teenage son as she was when he was little. And then the two sides of her life come into conflict when a girl makes online accusations against him after a party. He’s a decent boy: confused and gauche, maybe, but definitely not evil, and she’s brought him up to respect women and understand the importance of consent, so what’s going on? Proper, proper theatre: great characters raising powerful and immediate issues. I ended up seeing it twice, because the first time the streaming broke down so we missed the last five minutes and didn’t find out how it ended – and it was even better the second time. (See an interesting and illuminating interview with author Suzie Miller.)
Breaking the Code – biographical drama about Alan Turing, which I first saw in a television production in the 1980s with Derek Jacobi in the lead role. More proper theatre, in a great revival at the wonderful Northampton Royal; very timely too, with Turing’s speculations about the possibilities and implications of intelligent machines having proved to be deeply prescient. The lovely thing about this play, by contrast with say The Imitation Game (a more recent biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing) is that we actually get to hear Turing talking about maths and codes and computing machines, so that he comes across properly as a celebrity mathematician, not just a celebrity homosexual. He also comes across, interestingly, as a fun person, not at all geeky, and with a practical knack, not just a theoretician.
Near-Mage – comedy gothic adventure game, from an indie studio which really is based in Transylvania. (If you’ve got the address, you might as well make something of it…) I supported this game’s development on Kickstarter because I liked what we could see of the plot (the premise being that Illy discovers she has witch blood and enrols in the Transylvania Institute of Magick), the artwork (with numerous possibilities for customising Illy’s clothing and myriad background characters lounging, strolling or flying through each scene) and the gameplay (several different ways to solve each problem, and the possibility of casting any of Illy’s entire repertoire of spells in each case). The game certainly fulfiled its promise on all of these fronts, though I was disappointed to find it highly linear in its storyline; in fact, in the second half of the game, Illy has no choice about her course at all, being directed to her next task as soon as the previous one is completed through a message delivered by a flying mitzkin. At this point, it started to feel more like a visual novel than an adventure game. However, considered as a visual novel I think it is a good one, with a decent plot, very rich and stylish environments, and truly excellent voice acting (I can’t recall another game in which the minor characters are played so well).
Thursday, 23 October 2025
Thursday, 2 October 2025
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)."
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."
Monday, 8 September 2025
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."
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."
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