Cuttings: February 2026

Leaving Home by Mark Haddon: blistering memoir of a loveless childhood – review by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home.... It’s not a stretch, then, to note that the raw material of his upbringing is vitally important; specifically, a near-total absence of love or affection, his mother’s apparent withdrawal – to bed, or to drink – from family life, a continual thrum of undermining. What’s more fascinating is to consider the variety of modes he uses to achieve a kind of creative elasticity. Haddon’s work moves between strikingly plain reportage, as if to say 'this happened', and flights of fancy and fantasy, often rooted in classical mythology with its possibilities of shape-shifting and other mutations.... What, then, to do with the nostalgia – the sense of longing for the sights, sounds, smells and artefacts of the 1970s – that grips and confuses him? One answer is to put those thoughts and feelings into a work like this – an incredibly detailed, painful, funny, horrifying and exhilarating record of how to live beside what has happened."

The Colour of Home by Sajid Javid: from one hostile environment to another – review by Hanif Kureishi in The Guardian. "Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him.... The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and 'Run, Paki, run' taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.... The Colour of Home is an affecting study of Javid’s parents, particularly his indefatigable mother. Her illiteracy sits in counterpoint to her fierce commitment to her sons’ education: spotless uniforms, regimented homework and trips to Rochdale Library. Javid’s father is shown as a man of energy but limited luck: a bus driver who repeatedly launches small clothing businesses that almost always fail.... Politically, the memoir compels because it refuses to tidy away contradiction. Javid’s father moves from scepticism about Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his own life is crushed between property developers, debt and deregulated markets. Javid is clearly inspired by his father to rise through the Conservatives, but this sits disturbingly next to the book’s record of racism. In fact, reading his story in the context of the past decade of Tory rule illustrates how his party exploited the narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalised people who look like his parents.... Racist rhetoric and policy have now become defining features of mainstream British politics. Recent reporting about Nigel Farage’s time at Dulwich College underlines how little distance there is between the corridors of elite education, racist language and political success. Taken together with The Colour of Home’s scenes of playground racism, these testimonies show continuity rather than rupture: the same casual dehumanisation of Jews, black people and Asians. In this context, its portrait of a boy learning to survive and outthink that environment – and his insistence that education, solidarity and institutional self‑scrutiny are the only real antidotes – feels less like a nostalgic political origin story and more like an urgent warning about the Britain that comes next. Javid, cheerfully now in the 'Big House', can at times sound like an Uncle Tom: his narrative minimises structural barriers and suggests minorities simply need to work harder in order to succeed."

‘She worked like a maniac’ … meet the design genius who could even make roadworks look good – article by Catherine Slessor in The Guardian. "[Margaret] Calvert turns 90 this year and – in an extraordinary design and teaching career that began in the late 50s and still continues – has become the embodiment of a national treasure. She’s even been on Top Gear, hurtling down a motorway in a white Vauxhall Insignia with James May in 2010, discussing the technicalities of road signs, her graphic legacy to the nation. Anyone who has ever driven on a British highway will have encountered the sign system she designed with Jock Kinneir as part of the ambitious postwar modernisation and expansion of the nation’s road network, unifying and rationalising what had become a confusing and potentially hazardous array of lettering styles, colours and sign layouts. Lasting from the late 50s to the mid 60s, this was a colossal undertaking, but Calvert and Kinneir’s lucid, legible and eminently elegant signage has attained design-classic status. Officially implemented in 1965, and largely unchanged, it was 'a house style for Britain', embracing modernity with the aim of making everyday things better for everyone. Roads are safer, driving more pleasurable. Design historian Robin Kinross praised the project for highlighting 'the role design could play in public life'.... Aptly, Woman at Work is the title of a mighty new tome in which Calvert relates the intertwined story of her life and career. But it also stands as a history of postwar graphic design in Britain. The cover is a version of her famous 'men at work' pictogram, playfully altered to incorporate Calvert’s (still) bobbed hair and a skirt. Visually refined, insightful and wryly humorous, it is quintessential Calvert. Considering the longevity and brilliance of her career, it’s also long overdue – but she was happy to wait and pick her moment. 'I think the timing is absolutely right,' she says, 'because I’m still involved in interesting design commissions.'”

‘They’re taught that showing feelings is shameful’: eight reasons men don’t go to therapy, and why they should – article by Stephen Blumenthal in The Guardian. "Why are men still so reluctant to talk? [As a clinical psychologist,] here are the issues I see again and again. Men are primed for action rather than words. Historically, men’s roles centred on work and provision; women’s on caregiving, looking after the home and raising children. Today, men still tend to be more action-oriented and task-focused. This is partially hardwired – boys tend to lag behind girls in verbal and emotional attunement; women speak more words in an average day. Action comes before the development of language; it is our mother tongue, and men tend to stick with this early way of communicating, which is shaped both by biology and the social context. When it comes to expressing distress, men find it more difficult to do so verbally. They are far less likely to say they are depressed or anxious; instead, they are prone to acting out when troubled. Without even realising why, they may find themselves driving too fast, getting into altercations, drinking or using pornography when they experience emotional difficulty. Therapy is 'feminised'... Services are often 'feminised' in design, with an emphasis on talking directly about feelings, which can be uncomfortable for men, who tend to respond better to 'shoulder-to-shoulder' conversations than face-to-face discussions. They often prefer group therapy for its sense of camaraderie and shared experience, allowing connection without being in the spotlight. Coaching and mentoring show promise as male-friendly approaches.... Showing vulnerability is risk in a hierarchy. I’m struck by how many men come to see me as a milestone birthday approaches – when they’re 39 or 49, say. Reflecting on a reunion with old friends, one middle-aged patient told me: 'What a relief – there was none of the competitiveness that made it so difficult to connect when we were younger. We can all relax now; we’ve got to where we’ve got to in life.' He said he could never have allowed himself to seek therapy earlier: 'It would have been like exposing my belly to my adversary without my armour on.' The drive to strive is deeply encoded in men, and can stop us getting help when we’re down. Showing weakness feels hazardous when your position in the pecking order matters, and yet concealing it ultimately leads to greater fragility. Men are acutely shame-prone when it comes to showing vulnerability, fearing it will lower their status in the eyes of others. The age-old go-it-alone mentality. From the 19th-century novel centred on the buccaneer living a solitary existence to the modern cult of the 'sigma male' (the online celebration of men who need no one), the legacy of 'men going it alone' casts a long shadow. Therapy, by definition, begins with the client admitting they can’t do it all alone.... What happens in the therapy room? Gradually, men begin to test out the possibility that connection isn’t weakness but nourishment. The development of an authentic, connected relationship with their therapist proves it. Emotional claustrophobia.... With men, the expression of strong emotion can often only be tolerated in bitesize chunks. They are often raised to approach difficulties mechanically: identify, act, solve. This is helpful when the problem is practical, but when it is emotional they can become unstuck. Therapy, which requires patience and uncertainty, doesn’t fit this template. It may be necessary to provide men with a practical framework, such as specific techniques to manage symptoms of depression, panic attacks or other problems with anxiety. They wait until crisis point.... On the whole, men tend to have less patience and want a quick fix. As a result, the threshold for action tends to be higher, and thus men will often allow things to fester and become worse before they seek help.... A shortage of role models.... We rarely see men discussing therapy as routine maintenance, the way we might talk about going to the gym or managing diet. Men are also considerably underrepresented in the psychological professions, including counselling and psychotherapy, which furthers the impression that these services are not suited to the needs of men and boys. Fear of what they may find.... The paradox is that therapy doesn’t strip away strength – it redefines it. It offers a space where control can loosen without consequence, where emotions can be named rather than managed. The real challenge is cultural: masculinity links worth with resilience, while therapy still signals fragility."

‘Christian pastors declared Pikachu to be a demon’: how Pokémon went from moral panic to unifying global hit – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "During the first wave of Pokémania in the late 90s, Pokémon was viewed with suspicion by most adults. Now that the first generation of Pokémaniacs have grown up, even becoming parents ourselves, we see it for what it is: an imaginative, challenging and really rather wholesome series of games that rewards every hour that children devote to it. Over the three decades since the original Red and Blue (or Green, in Asia) versions of the video game were released in Japan in 1996, Pokémon has earned a place among the greats of children’s fiction. Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia, it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision. In every game, your mother sends you out into the world with a rucksack and a kiss goodbye; after that, it’s all on you. Like The Simpsons, Pokémon is a kind of cultural shorthand for the millennial generation. More than Mario, Zelda or any other Nintendo creation, Pokémon brings people together. It was designed from the beginning to be a social game, encouraging (and indeed necessitating) that players traded and battled with each other to complete their collection of virtual creatures and train their teams up into super-squads. Today, the internet has entirely normalised the idea of video games as social activities, but in the late 90s this was a novel idea. You can’t play Pokémon without other people: in 1999, that meant huddling in the playground, using a cable to link your Game Boys together; later, in 2016, at the height of the Pokémon Go phenomenon, it meant hundreds of people converging improbably at the same park with their phones to catch a Gengar. Pokémon is often thought of as a turn-of-the-century fad, so it might be surprising to learn that it brings in more money now than it ever did at the height of its first wave of popularity. It has become the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time: between the TV series, the merchandise, the trading cards, the games and everything else adorned with the adorable faces of Pikachu and pals, the franchise has brought in north of $100bn, more than Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe."

‘People keep reinventing the same damn movie’: cinematographer Roger Deakins on 50 years behind the camera and his fears for film’s future – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. "Roger Deakins – cinematographer to the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese and Sam Mendes, whose work has earned him 14 Oscar nominations and two wins, five Baftas, a knighthood and a reputation for being the greatest practitioner of his craft alive – is struggling to explain just exactly what he does. 'Argh!' he exclaims, when confronted by the question: what is cinematography? 'Well, I started off trying to be a still photographer, someone like Don McCullin. And it’s been a whole arc through cinematography. Now what is cinematography? I don’t know. It’s very different from still photography. But the essentials are the same. You’re trying to tell a visual story. … I suppose I’m not answering your question, because actually I’ve got no idea,' he says. 'The cliche is visual storytelling, but it’s much more than that.'... A clearer picture emerges when speaking to his wife, James Ellis Deakins, who joins him today. The two met on set of the 1992 thriller Thunderheart, when she was a script consultant, and have since worked as a team on film sets, with James coordinating communication with the production team and other departments. 'But isn’t the cinematographer also thinking,' she adds, after Deakins admits to being lost, 'how can I tell the story visually in the frame?' To consider how to frame, light and compose a film shot so it will convey the requisite joy or sadness or fear. Say 'there’s a shot that makes you feel melancholy or afraid, and you don’t know why'. For James, a cinematographer has succeeded when their camerawork encapsulates the feeling of the story. 'Because it’s so visceral, people might not come out of the theatre and go: "That was great cinematography." They just think: "Oh, it’s a great movie; I was so scared." But they don’t know the cinematography helped that' A fuller picture of the craft emerges in Deakins’s new book, Reflections: On Cinematography. Co-written with James, it’s part memoir, part technical guide that takes readers behind the scenes of his projects throughout his career. In it, a cinematographer emerges as not only the director of camerawork, but also a sculptor of light; a watcher of the weather; a fleet-footed problem solver and illusionist; and, in Deakins’s case, a leader of a technical crew who have long become collaborators."

‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? – article by Gavin Francis in The Guardian. "According to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness.... We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.... When I became a GP, I learned there was great freedom in how I conducted each consultation, and that it was necessary to vary my approach with each patient; how I engaged was intricately interconnected with outcome, and was part of the therapy.... Dr M was my first mentor. His consultations were impressive, filled with kindness, gentleness and a kind of tranquillity. He was unafraid to let silence fill the space of the consulting room. His great kindness meant that his clinics attracted more than an average share of people who were emotionally and psychologically distraught. No matter the dark territory that was being explored – abuse, neglect, addiction – Dr M always found a way to bring the consultation round to something redemptive, and each patient left happier than they’d come in. He asked me, after every patient I saw, to offer a summary of the presenting complaint, and to think about the unsaid motives each might have had in coming to the appointment. He also asked me how I felt after each one, and spoke to me about the reality of transference – how your patient can’t help but transfer their emotions into you, and that you can discern a lot about someone by examining how they make you feel. ... My subsequent supervisor, Dr Q, was very different ...Technically the 'job' was being done, but something about the manner of it was all wrong – focused on technical aspects, it had become drained of humanity, and her encounters lacked any sense of healing. A marker of the low esteem in which she held her own skills was that she seemed at a loss as to what to teach me, or what to help me get out of the session watching her clinic. In the end, she just told me which drugs I must avoid prescribing in order to keep within the practice drug budget. I worry that our models of mental healthcare are increasingly built for a world dominated by clinicians such as Dr Q, who approach mental-health consultations as an opportunity for tick-box protocols lifted from the DSM or the ICD, and the scoring of blunt and context-free online questionnaires. As pressure on the NHS grows, there’s precious little space left for the humanity, curiosity and humility of clinicians such as Dr M."

The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers – article by Lucy Knight in The Guardian. "California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university.... 'But something really switched in 2024,' Bowman, now 30, says.... 'I started to get clients coming to me and talking about AI,' she says – some even brazen enough to tell her how 'great' it was 'that we don’t need writers any more'. She was offered work as an editor – checking and altering work produced by artificial intelligence. The idea was that polishing up already-written content would take less time than writing it from scratch, so Bowman’s fee was reduced to about half of what it had been when she was writing for the same content marketing agency – but, in reality, it ended up taking double the time. 'I now had to meticulously fact-check every single thing in the articles. And at least 60% of it would be completely made up,' she says. 'I would just end up rewriting most of the article. So something that would take me two hours when I was writing it by myself now took me four hours, making half the money.'... By January 2025, Bowman was no longer able to afford her own health insurance, which hammered home what she had already begun to suspect: 'Writing is not going to work out for me any more.'...Bowman decided to take action and retrain, 'while I still do have a little bit of work', and is now back at university studying to become a marriage and family therapist.... Janet Feenstra, an academic editor turned baker based in Malmö, Sweden, also has mixed feelings about her career change, a choice she similarly made because of fears that AI would make her old job void. 'It’s complicated because, in a way, I maybe should be grateful to AI for prompting this change,' she says. Feenstra now works at 'a really cute bakery', where she and her colleagues 'roll out the dough by hand and it feels amazing'... Perhaps ... definitions of what counts as a 'good' or 'middle class' job will begin to change: a 2023 report on the impact of AI on jobs and training in the UK by the Department for Education concluded that: 'Professional occupations are more exposed to AI, particularly those associated with more clerical work and across finance, law and business management roles.' And, rightly or wrongly, Feenstra is not alone in deciding that learning a trade is a relatively safe bet. Angela Joyce, the CEO of Capital City College, a further education provider in London, says: 'We’re seeing a steady growth in students of all ages coming to us to do trades-based qualifications,' in subjects such as engineering, culinary arts and childcare. There is 'definitely a shift' away from traditional academic routes, she says, which she attributes to the high numbers of unemployed young people – and 'a good proportion of those are graduates', she notes. That shift towards seeking vocational training is 'in part linked to AI', Joyce thinks, because people are looking for 'jobs that AI can’t replace'."

Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert – article by Ian Sample in The Guardian. "[Michael] Wooldridge, who will deliver the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize lecture on Wednesday evening, titled 'This is not the AI we were promised', said a Hindenburg moment was 'very plausible' as companies rushed to deploy more advanced AI tools.... 'The Hindenburg disaster destroyed global interest in airships; it was a dead technology from that point on, and a similar moment is a real risk for AI,' Wooldridge said. Because AI is embedded in so many systems, a major incident could strike almost any sector. The scenarios Wooldridge imagines include a deadly software update for self-driving cars, an AI-powered hack that grounds global airlines, or a Barings bank-style collapse of a major company, triggered by AI doing something stupid. 'These are very, very plausible scenarios,' he said. 'There are all sorts of ways AI could very publicly go wrong.'”

Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong – article by Marcus Haraldsson in The Guardian. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size. A comparison between the classic Maya and ancient Rome is instructive in other ways. Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome, and they included significantly larger architecture that still stands. Both cultures developed sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, writing and agriculture, as well as elaborate trade arrangements across vast cosmopolitan lands. The ruins of Rome are today covered by a bustling world city where some of the most prominent elite families claim to trace their ancestry directly to ancient times. Many Maya ruins, in contrast, are now covered by more than 1,000 years’ worth of tropical forest while the descendants of the peoples who built those cities are some of the poorest people on Earth.... By the time the field of Maya archaeology began in the 19th century, most of the knowledge once held by local leaders was gone. Over time, some observers spread pseudoscientific stories claiming that Maya temples were more likely to have been built by aliens than by ancestors of local people. (Vikings, Mormon Nephites and other mysteriously vanished civilisations have also been dubiously credited with building the ancient sites.) [The archaeologist and Minister of Culture and Sports Liwy Grazioso] believes that these fantastical theories serve a political purpose. 'If we deprive the actual Maya of their glorious past, we don’t need to give them power today,' she said. 'Talking about collapse and aliens becomes a distraction from what is right in front of us.'”

A World Appears by Michael Pollan: a kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness – review by Edward Posnett in The Guardian. "Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, [is] a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness: how and why we are self-aware. ... In Pollan’s view, we have become imprisoned by such narratives, which have obscured the richness and complexity of human and non-human consciousness. Bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being, and what it feels like.... Pollan likens the study of consciousness to cosmology: just as we can only examine the universe from within it, there is no way for us to position ourselves outside our own consciousness. You can almost sense his relief when he moves away from the reductionism of neuroscientists to consider the work of those who embrace their own subjective positions. William James appears as a guiding light; the pioneering philosopher and psychologist carefully noted the ambiguities of the human mind, its shifts and nuances. Like James, Pollan experiments on himself, sampling his inner experiences at random times of the day with the assistance of a social psychologist, but he quickly finds that what is going on in his own mind is often beyond the reach of language. The later chapters, which draw on everything from Buddhist thought to modernist literature, remind us of what is obvious if only we stop to notice: that our minds are constantly in flux, remoulding, shifting, flowing.... He cites the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who wrote: 'Technology can make us forget what we know about life.' I’d agree, though I’d add that to forget something, one needs to know it in the first place, and there may come a time when we are so divorced from the richness of our own minds that we will mistake the mere processing of information for consciousness, the machine metaphor for reality. That, perhaps, is the monster that stalks this book: our concern should be less about what kind of AI we might produce – whether a machine may one day experience love or hatred – and more what kind of a human will be fashioned by AI and our interactions with technology; whether we will settle for an impoverished conception of our own minds, or can be reacquainted with its wonders."

Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness? – article by Michael Pollan, extracted from his book A World Appears. "I’ve been going around with a beeper wired to an earpiece that sends a sudden sharp note into my left ear at random times of the day. This is my cue to recall and jot down whatever was going on in my head immediately before I registered the beep. The idea is to capture a snapshot of the contents of consciousness at a specific moment in time by dipping a ladle into the onrushing stream... The beeper exercise is part of a psychology experiment I volunteered to take part in. Descriptive experience sampling is a research method developed by Russell T Hurlburt, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; he has been using it for 50 years – which is to say, his entire career. To give you some perspective, beepers didn’t exist 50 years ago.... Hurlburt’s antipathy toward theory is key to understanding what he’s attempting to do, and why he was so gruff when I told him I was writing about consciousness. ('Good luck with that,' he grumbled.) He treats theory as an illness you might catch, and he strives to keep it out of his research – indeed, out of his mind – lest it infect his sampling process. Since that involves closely questioning volunteers about their inner experiences, the slightest theoretical taint to his questions could easily contaminate the reports of his volunteers and ruin their empirical value.... What he is after in his research is the 'pristine inner experience', by which he means a sample of human thought 'unspoiled by the act of observation or reflection'. Like James, Hurlburt acknowledges that the act of recalling and describing an experience is bound to alter it, but he believes that his method can get us closer to the uncontaminated ideal than any other.... Yet that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Moments in consciousness are not discrete, as James understood; they are often layered and coloured by other thoughts and sensations, as I discovered with my very first beep. It found me standing in line at the Cheeseboard, a neighbourhood cafe and bakery, at 9.24 on a Tuesday morning. I took out the little pad provided by Hurlburt and jotted down this thought: 'Deciding whether or not to buy a roll.' I know, not terribly exciting, but it seems very few of my mental contents are. I was thinking ahead to lunch and wordlessly deliberating whether to buy a fresh roll for a sandwich or do the responsible thing and use up the heel of bread I had at home.... Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are 'inner speakers'. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re 'likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought'. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true. But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of 'unsymbolised' thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images. The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling."

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt – review by Elif Shafak in The Guardian. "Drawing on insights from the humanities and the sciences, Hustvedt divides the book into three parts. The first section focuses on a range of male artists, extending from Picasso to Mapplethorpe and Almodóvar. In one of my favourite essays, she examines Pina by Wim Wenders, which is essentially an 'artist’s gift to another artist', a homage by Wenders to the fabulous Pina Bausch. It is here that Hustvedt delves into an analysis of art and perception, asking how we judge works of art and creativity. Our criteria changes constantly as we move from one culture to another or one historical period to the next and yet we tend to assume that what constitutes 'good art' is not only universal but also timeless and immutable.... Among the best essays are the ones in which Hustvedt skilfully weaves her personal stories (about her mother, her daughter, her own childhood) with the state of the world, academia and technology. With the advantage of her knowledge of psychoanalysis and fascination with the 'writing self', Hustvedt digs into the mother-daughter relationship, the journey from girlhood to womanhood, the construction of gender patterns and experiments in sexuality.... The book then digresses slightly as it moves on to inspect the delusions of certainty. Hustvedt inveighs against the dualistic framework of 'body versus mind', which has been a central teaching in western philosophy for many centuries.... It is the third and the last section of the book, partly composed of the lectures Hustvedt has given in different countries, where her voice once again reaches a wonderful intensity. Here is a writer who has much to say about the world to the world."

The big idea: this simple behavioural trick can help you get more out of life – article by Cass Sunstein and Tali Sharot in The Guardian. "Habituation [is] our brain’s tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant, that don’t change. As we get used to the pleasant aspects of our life, both big (a loving spouse, a comfortable home, a good job) and small (a great view, a tasty dish), we notice and appreciate them less. Unless, that is, you break up the experience.... A few years ago one of us (Tali) went on a work trip to a sunny resort in the Dominican Republic. Her mission was to find out what made holidaymakers happy and why. She interviewed people about their experiences and asked them to fill out surveys. When the data was in, she noticed one word that appeared again and again: first. Vacationers spoke of the joy of 'seeing the ocean for the first time', the 'first swim in the pool', the 'first sip of a holiday cocktail'.... Tali wondered if people had a better time at the start of their trips.... Crunching those numbers revealed that joy peaked 43 hours in. At the end of day two, after people had got their bearings, was when they were happiest.... This evidence suggests that you might benefit most from several small trips spread through the year, rather than one long escape. That way, you will maximise firsts and afterglows, not to mention the pleasure of anticipation, which you will experience more often. This applies much more generally than holidays, of course. For example, people who were given massages with breaks in between were found to have enjoyed it more than those who weren’t interrupted. Anything that is wonderful will become at least a bit less wonderful over time. Why not take a break, and enjoy it all over again?... What about unpleasant experiences? Should you divide those up too?... If you need to complete an unpleasant task it would probably be wise not to chop it up."

TV set is most popular way to watch YouTube in UK, study finds – article by Michael Savage in The Guardian. The television has replaced laptops, tablets and smartphones as the most common device for UK viewers to watch YouTube at home, according to data confirming the platform’s place as a living room mainstay.... The findings, from a Barb Audiences review, found that YouTube viewing is still skewed towards children.... However, TV sets became the first-choice device for YouTube viewing for over-55s in October 2023, for those between 35 and 54 in April 2024 – and finally for 16- to 34-year-olds in December 2024. Despite YouTube’s rise, the Barb data suggests traditional television viewing is far from dead. It found live TV still made up 45% of all identified viewing on TV sets in December 2025.... 'Commentary about television is too often based on a binary premise: nobody watches live any more, young audiences have vanished and platforms have replaced programmes,' said Justin Sampson, Barb’s chief executive. 'What emerges from the evidence is not a paradigm shift, but a rebalancing. Live viewing remains a substantial part of the mix, even among younger audiences. 'YouTube, too, resists easy categorisation. It is neither simply "TV" nor something entirely separate from it … What is true is that the TV set is now the primary way YouTube is watched in homes around the country.'”

‘Populism’: we used to know what it meant. Now the defining word of our era has lost its meaning – article by Oliver Eagleton in The Guardian. "Among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to 'the people': these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about 'unity' and 'consensus' for the hard semantic distinction between 'us' and 'them'... But while 'populism' was a useful summation of these electoral strategies, it was less able to delineate what such leaders hoped to do once they were in government. In the US, for example, Bernie Sanders was clear that his aim as president would be to harness the state to reactivate the labour movement and disempower the corporate sector. The cabal around Donald Trump also has a considered plan to reorient state policy by centralising authority in the executive and weaponising it against racialised groups. Although populism may have been the means, the ends were more extensive. By thinking of Sanders and Trump solely in terms of their campaign methods, commentators sidestepped a more thorough analysis of their governing projects: radical social democracy or hardline neo-nationalism. Over the past decade, one of these projects has continued to accrue power – not only in the US, but also in Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Britain, France and elsewhere – while the other has mostly been marginalised. It turned out that when the left and right battled on the terrain of discourse, with politics often reduced to a series of sales pitches, the odds were in favour of the right, not least because a partisan media was willing to diffuse its message. The upshot is that Sanders’s social democracy remains merely an idea, while Trumpian neo-nationalism is increasingly a reality.... The primary feature of our politics is no longer underdog candidates using this toolkit to capture the state; it is the left trying to reconstitute itself after the failure of that enterprise, while much of the right consolidates its success. Socialists have realised that populism, as a political practice, is not strong enough to resist an onslaught from the most powerful institutions in society: state ministries, centrist parties, legacy papers, the business lobby, the courts. Reactionaries, meanwhile, have learned that they can win elections on a populist platform, but they are still working out exactly what relationship to cultivate with these institutions. Post-populists on both sides are defined by how they approach such fortresses of the elite: not only in their rhetoric, but in their actions."

Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore: could we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump? – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands. If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power.... Landemore now lectures at Yale but was born and raised in France, and has worked closely with two citizens’ assemblies set up by Emmanuel Macron following the gilets jaunes street protests of 2018, ostensibly triggered by rising fuel tax.... But she also examines examples from Iceland after the banking crash, Belgian local government and the widely praised Irish assembly convened to lead the country through the process of legalising abortion, which gave voters ownership of a sensitive decision in a way that bound everyone to it. The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular.... Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished."

Another World by Melvyn Bragg: portrait of the broadcaster as a young man – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.... Fortunately for the student Bragg, but less fortunately for this book’s narrative jeopardy, he fits right in at Oxford.... There is still the class system to negotiate, evident in subtle variations in the dress code (cavalry twills are the giveaway for the toffs) and the rooms allocated in college. One day Bragg bumps into the future TV dramatist Dennis Potter, who declares in his ripe Gloucestershire tones: 'They say there’s three real working-class men here. There’s me. And you. Where’s the other bugger?'... Another World is at its best when viewing the university with the outsider’s eye of an amateur anthropologist. For this Oxford truly is another world, before the great university expansion of the 1960s, when the word 'student' was not even much used. Bragg is an astute reader of the semiotics of his rooms overlooking the quad, and of the weekly tutorial, where he reads an essay out loud to [his tutor Lawrence Stone] and awaits a reaction, like 'the versicle and responses in medieval prayer'. The book would have been better for sticking to this anthropological impulse throughout, instead of turning, as it does, into another volume in the autobiography of Melvyn Bragg. Digressions on the subsequently stellar careers of his peers blur the focus. Still, the young Bragg is a winning protagonist, who presents much like his older self: thoughtful, open and generous in celebrating his contemporaries’ talents, while forgiving their foibles."

Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy – article by Francis Spufford in The Guardian. "There’s a compelling origin story for fantasy as a genre – you can find it brilliantly and subtly analysed in Adam Roberts’s recent Fantasy: A Short History... With its kings and quests and chosen ones and battles and powers of earth and air, it lets back all the things we miss in the world of science, contract, employment, regularity, but don’t want to return all the way. Roberts identifies the turning point as the first world war, giving a generation of young men such as Tolkien and CS Lewis an experience of modernity as utter mechanical savagery, and brewing in them the desire for a literature in which the old stories of myth – with the space in them for individual human agency – came back, remixed, in modern form. We like to dream of having enormous muscles like Conan, when office life makes seven-stone weaklings of us all; we like to think of ourselves as the singular and remarkable Chosen One, when really we form a pixel in a crowd. But having picked these dreams up, we want to put them safely down again... Hence (runs this argument) our packaging of the fantastic in trilogies that end, and books that close. But there’s another story of fantasy that needs telling.... Here it exists because it is (paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way. I’d argue that, as well as expressing our frustrations with the disenchanted world, it’s also our best means for capturing the ways in which the world remains enchanted, for all our strenuous buffering. I read and write fantasy because it’s the literature that sees the recurrent unearthliness in human experience. That knows we’re hopelessly metaphorical creatures, who find meaning by tying together patterns of resemblance that might as well be spells. That knows there are some struggles where the stakes really are overwhelming, and good and evil in something like their pure forms really do pivot on human choices. Fantasy understands that to undertake the risks of love is to venture beyond safety, into landscapes strange to you, on perilous and wonderful journeys."

If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat? – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. "How will we be fed? That’s the biggest question not seriously being addressed amid all this talk about whether or not artificial intelligence will end up taking over all of our jobs.... Even if AI generates enormous economic prosperity, its distribution will remain a political challenge. This juncture calls for a serious, open debate about how the fruits of this prosperity will be apportioned among humanity. Addressing the question has two parts. The first is about how to design a technically efficacious system to redistribute the fruits of the economy as machines take over and labor’s share of income drops eventually near zero. The more important question, though, is about how this economic reorganization will restructure power. Who will decide what to tax once AI destroys labor income, which provides the main source of government revenue in most advanced countries? Who decides how much everyday people who do not have an equity stake in the AI revolution get to consume? How will society be organized in a world in which machines generate most or all economic output and a few dozen techno-billionaires get to decide what share of the world’s resources – money, energy, minerals – should be allocated to further expand superhuman intelligence? Who else gets a say on whether to direct more resources to, say, healthcare or agriculture, or education instead?"

The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’ – article by Robert Reich in The Guardian. "Business leaders are rhapsodizing about how AI will free their employees to take more time off.... Elon Musk pushes the idea to the extreme (as he does everything else): 'In less than 20 years ... the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional.' Even better: 'There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,' says Musk. 'There will be universal high income.' All of this is pure rubbish. Even if AI produces big productivity gains ... it’s far from clear that workers will see much, if any, of the benefits.... Here’s the truth: the four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on. So, as AI takes over their current work, most workers will probably get poorer or have to take additional jobs to maintain their current pay.... Rather than creating an age of abundance in which most people no longer have to worry about money, new technologies have contributed to a two-tiered society comprising a few with extraordinary wealth and a vast number of people barely making it. AI is likely to further widen inequality.... The distribution issue can’t be ignored. When more can be done by fewer people, who gets paid what? It comes down to who has the power. Unless workers have the power to demand a share in the productivity gains, profits will go to an ever-smaller circle of owners – leaving the rest of us with less money to buy what can be produced."

‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets – article by Aisha Down and Dan Milmo in The Guardian. "US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.... Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.... (1) AI agents remove a 'friction' in the economy.... (2) Mass white-collar unemployment.... (3) Ripples out into the broader economy.... (4) Downward spirals.... (5) Occupy Silicon Valley and Ghost GDP."

The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone, and why you should – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. "Forget 'public speaking'. What a lot of people don’t like at all any more is 'speaking to anyone in public'. Many reasons are cited: state-of-the-art don’t-talk-to-me headphones, mobile phones and social media generally, the rise of working from home, the introduction of touchscreens in takeaway restaurants so you barely interact with a human, the death of third spaces, the pandemic. In the end, the biggest excuse becomes 'social norm reinforcement'. This is the idea that if no one talks to you, you don’t talk to anyone either.... This goes deeper than adolescent angst or personal preference. And possibly deeper than our overreliance on phones. We are losing a basic human skill. The ability to speak to others and understand them is being compromised. Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on speech, has warned that gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform the previous generation on cognitive measures. And Dr Rangan Chatterjee, a bestselling author and father of two teenagers, said in an interview this month: 'I think we’re raising a generation of children who have low self-worth, who don’t know how to conduct conversations.'... It’s only natural to fear rejection, humiliation, giving offence or overstepping a boundary when we initiate a conversation – or even when we respond to someone else’s attempt. But according to a study by the University of Virginia (Talking with strangers is surprisingly informative), we overstate these fears in our minds: 'People tend to underestimate how much they’ll enjoy the conversation, feel connected to their conversation partner and be liked by their conversation partner.' The key is to lower the stakes. Make it less of a big deal. Don’t focus on what could go wrong. Also, don’t focus on how amazing this could be. You are just saying, 'It’s cold today, isn’t it?'... Small talk may not profoundly alter your life. But its absence will profoundly alter human life as we know it."

‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim. But the era of the 'pocket book' is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.... While paperback books existed earlier, the revolution truly began in 1935 with Allen Lane’s Penguin Books in Britain, purportedly inspired by his frustration at finding nothing decent to read at a railway station. He introduced colour-coded genres such as orange for fiction, green for crime and sold them through non-bookstore outlets like WH Smith newsstands and tobacco shops. The format migrated to the US in 1939 with Pocket Books, and took off during the second world war when the US military distributed millions of 'Armed Services Editions' to troops. This programme fostered a massive increase in literacy and an appetite for the format among returning veterans. Postwar paperbacks, often called 'pulps', were known for their lurid, racy cover art to attract commuters and casual shoppers.... The distribution model was key. Unlike hardcovers, which lived in bookstores, mass-market paperbacks were treated like magazines. They were stocked by wholesalers who replenished racks in tens of thousands of non-book outlets. This ubiquity meant that books were suddenly available to people who might never cross the threshold of a literary establishment.... The writing is on the wall. The airport retail company Hudson began phasing out mass-market books from its convenience stores last year, limiting them only to a few dedicated bookstore locations. Even major properties such as the Bridgerton series are no longer being replenished in the mass-market format; once current stock is exhausted, they will only be available in trade paperback or hardcover form."

What our analysis of MPs’ speeches tells us about the shift to right-wing rhetoric – article by Aamna Mohdin in Guardian First Edition newsletter. "In the UK, the past two decades have been an unusually volatile period for political attitudes toward immigration. The Guardian’s analysis shows that positive sentiment in parliamentary debates reached an all-time high in 2018 – possibly marking a moment of quiet following Brexit, as well as national support for the victims of the Windrush scandal – before falling sharply. Our data projects and data science teams, first began thinking about the project to measure this in 2023. The investigation required careful planning to measure political language both comprehensively and accurately.... The Guardian’s data projects team worked closely with its data science team, and members of University College London, to build a machine learning model capable of analysing a century’s worth of parliamentary speech, looking specifically at immigration references, an extraordinary undertaking that took nearly two years. 'We realised you can’t simply take an existing sentiment model and apply it to parliamentary debates about immigration,' [says Carmen Aguilar Garcia, Guardian data projects editor]. 'So we built a completely bespoke model designed specifically to measure sentiment toward immigration in parliament.' To build the model, the team first gathered all debates from the House of Commons and broke down debates into fragments of roughly five-sentences each that could be analysed individually. Then, there was an extensive process of annotations of the fragments that were considered to be about immigration. This process involved using a Large Language Model and a team of 12 people manually classifying the fragments as positive, negative or neutral. This expanded dataset was used to train the supervised machine learning model. The model was trained to understand things such as when MPs were quoting views that they then went on to disagree with, or using sarcasm.... The result, she says, was an 'extraordinary piece of work' – a tool built specifically to measure something many think cannot be measured: rhetoric. 'One striking thing was reading fragments from 20, 30, even 40 years ago that sounded completely contemporary,' Carmen says. 'If you removed the date, you could easily believe they were spoken last year.'” See details of findings https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/feb/25/how-rightwing-rhetoric-has-risen-sharply-in-the-uk-parliament-an-exclusive-visual-analysis.

Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ – interview by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing.... In light of his epic life, Brand’s latest project hinges on what sounds like the most mundane topic imaginable: maintenance. It is 'not automatically an exciting concept,' Brand readily admits, but once he started thinking about it, he realised you could view just about everything in terms of it, and a lot could be revealed by doing so: 'Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.' His new book is titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It is the first of a planned 13 instalments, Brand explains, and it deals with the most literal, material forms of maintenance. Subsequent instalments will investigate everything from buildings to communities, institutions to the human body, plus planetary and environmental maintenance. So perhaps not such a departure after all in terms of long, big thinking.... To his critics, Brand paved the way for the neoliberal, libertarian mindset of today’s Silicon Valley. But he was also a community-focused idealist and a lifelong environmentalist. That technology v nature tension persists – hence his apparent affinity with tech figures such as Bezos and Musk. He’s still ambivalent: 'Finding anything that is an absolutely unmitigated benefit is pretty rare,' he says. But 'I would say the benefits of personal computers and smartphones and the internet vastly reached beyond, in good terms, what we imagined at the time.'"

Cuttings: January 2026

The 80th anniversary of VE Day – cartoon by Ben Jennings in The Guardian. Distraught veteran (to TV interviewer): "War is the worst – it should be avoided at all costs!" Smiling TV interviewer (to camera): "Isn't he cute?!" 

The Zorg by Siddharth Kara: scarcely imaginable horrors at sea – review by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. "In The Zorg, Siddharth Kara tells two stories. The first is of a harrowing incident aboard the eponymous slave ship – the murder of 132 Africans by the British crew. The second relates how that event came to play a role in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, in large part through the work of a dazzling array of committed campaigners. One of these was Olaudah Equiano, author of one of the few surviving accounts of the Middle Passage from the perspective of an enslaved person, in which he described it as 'a scene of horror almost inconceivable'.... The Zorg’s journey was fraught. Dysentery – 'the flux' – tore through the ship. Scurvy followed. The captain sickened and became delirious, appointing [depraved former British Governor] Stubbs to take command. Thus, 'a ship full of decay and death was being commanded by a passenger'.... By late November 1781 the Zorg was miles from Jamaica and short on water. The crew decided to jettison some of the enslaved Africans, who had endured months in the obscene conditions below deck. What drove this unspeakable plan of action was not ensuring the survival of the people on board – the Africans had begged to be allowed to live even without water rations – but economic greed. Maritime insurance did not cover the death of enslaved people from natural causes, but did cover the 'necessity' of throwing them overboard for the ship’s safety, for example, in the event of an insurrection.... Back in Liverpool, when the sums were done, [former rope-maker] Gregson [who had financed the ship] was not pleased with the return on his investment. He filed an insurance claim seeking £30 per lost slave – several thousand pounds today. The insurers declined to pay. In March 1783, Gregson took them to court and won a trial by jury, arguing that the throwing of the slaves overboard was 'necessary'. According to Kara, 'there is a direct line of causality between the public exposure of the Zorg murders and the first movement to abolish slavery in England'. Twelve days after the trial, an anonymous letter was printed in one of England’s most widely read newspapers. The author, who claimed to have been in court when the case was heard, argued compellingly against slavery, with the case of the Zorg as prime example of its evil. Equiano read the letter and took it to Granville Sharp, an abolitionist friend, who filed a motion for a new trial. At a hearing to decide whether to proceed, the events on board the Zorg were reviewed with a forensic level of detail: exactly what the abolitionists had hoped for. In spring 1787, the founding members of the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade first met."

The English House by Dan Cruickshank: if walls could talk – review by Stephen Smith in The Guardian. "History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to a revival of medieval English gothic and the emergence of modernism. He is particularly interested in who commissioned and built his chosen dwellings, and how they got the job done. It’s a new spin on the recent fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, as opposed to royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants.... Cruickshank’s research ends up revealing a surprising amount about the inhabitants of his eight properties. Pallant House in Chichester, now an art gallery, was the scene of lively arguments between the young swell who commissioned it and his older wife who paid for it all. This didn’t go unnoticed by their tradesmen, whose records of work on the house expose the couple’s frequent disagreements about what should go where and how much they should fork out for it. In Hull, a man called Henry Maisen built a fine house for himself in the mid-18th century but left most of the work to his brother, Nathaniel, while he enjoyed himself in London. In 1744, Nathaniel wrote him an exasperated letter care of 'Mrs Rawlinson’s, A Toy Shop, Bedford Street, Covent Garden'. This was a red-light district, and as Cruickshank notes, the first children’s toy shop in the capital wouldn’t be open for another 16 years – so 'it seems not unlikely that the toys available at Mrs Rawlinson’s were of a distinctly adult nature'.... The Boundary Street estate in London’s Shoreditch, begun in the 1890s, was home to the first council flat 'as we know it', says Cruickshank. Though it replaced a notorious and fetid slum, most of the luckless inhabitants of the rookery were moved on rather than rehoused. A banker’s residence in Liverpool prompts an exploration of the port’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. A house built by Huguenots in Spitalfields, east London, might nowadays be close to the homes of millionaire artists including Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George (and of Cruickshank himself, though he doesn’t say so) but these French Protestants, fleeing Louis XIV, were only the first wave of embattled immigrants on the premises. It was later a synagogue, now abandoned. 'It takes only a little imagination to fill its shadowy corners with spectres, and it’s hard not to strain to hear the voices of the long dead.'”

What if floods left your home unsellable? That’s the reality facing more and more people in Britain –article by Kirsty Major in The Guardian. "Planning rules should prevent any new building developments from increasing flood risks, but there is a small, but not inconsequential, loophole that is preventing this. Developments are assessed one at a time and often done in phases. Taken on its own, a project may be viable, but when the impact of multiple developments is added up, this can have disastrous consequences for communities. Every time we build we not only add more runoff, but we also build on the very land that acts as a natural flood protection: tarmac and concrete don’t soak up water, whereas soil does. Repeated risk of flooding is making Christine, Jackie and Rhona’s properties unsellable. Like all homeowners, they are required to inform buyers of any flooding in the previous five years, and unsurprisingly this has affected the sales of their homes. Jackie would like to move in order to be closer to her soon to be born grandchild, but looking at sales of similar properties in her area, she may have to drop the price significantly and use her pension money to help her move. Her experience tracks with larger trends: a study from Bayes Business School suggests that homes at risk of flooding are sold for between 8% and 32% lower than average compared with non-affected properties.... This is a dynamic that may become worse as flood risk encroaches on more of the UK’s housing stock. Labour’s 'build, baby, build' housing policy means more homes are being built on green belt land, meaning less natural flood defences, more runoff and increased flood risk for existing homes. Even worse, Guardian analysis has predicted that more than 100,000 of these new homes could be built on the highest-risk flood zones in England. At the same time, extreme weather is increasing because of climate breakdown and the Environment Agency data says 6.3m properties, residential homes and businesses are in areas at risk of flooding, rising to 8m by 2050. All this points to a potential risk for the financial sector. As long as the government is covering flood risk, the Bank of England sees little threat to financial stability from flooding, but after the current scheme ends the outlook may look very different as negative equity and mortgage defaults lead to banks having reduced collateral and capital."

How to talk dating like gen Z: 51 (hyperspecific) terms for love, sex and bad behavior – article by Alaina Demopoulos in The Guardian. "Gen Z, a cohort who came of age during a loneliness epidemic, a masculinity crisis, and a coordinated attack on the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, faces a far messier landscape than their millennial predecessors could ever imagine. And so their dating glossary has grown longer and more deranged... What follows is a comprehensive guide to the terms gen Z is using to talk about romance, sex and the pursuit of both.... Authenticity – According to gen Z, dating’s gold standard is showing up as your true, unvarnished self. Good luck with that! Bird theory – A TikTok trend loosely based on a test developed by couples researchers Julie and John Gottman, in which you point out something trivial – for example, 'I saw a bird today' – and note whether your partner’s response is inquisitive or dismissive. If they do not want to hear more about the bird, you two are doomed.... Choremance – A date where two people bond while running errands, such as walking the dog or grocery shopping. In other words, how broke twentysomethings do affordable dating in a post-'$5 beer and shot combo' world....Gooners – A mostly online subculture of men so obsessed with masturbation that they attempt marathon sessions, purposefully delaying orgasm so they can continue as long as possible.... Heterofatalism – A phenomenon describing many women’s increasing pessimism toward heterosexual relationships. It will come as little surprise to anyone who read the previous entry. High-value woman – An archetype touted by manosphere figures: a woman who is sexually desirable, ever-comforting and happily domestic, who seemingly has no aspirations of her own aside from pleasing her male partner. Maybe now you’re beginning to understand the whole 'heterofatalism' thing better?... Icks – Random and often mundane turnoffs that immediately shut down any feelings of desire.... Kissing – This year, scientists learned that kissing has existed for 16m years. But the days of locking lips may be numbered since some gen Z want fewer sex scenes in film, as they are having less sex themselves and do not find onscreen intimacy realistic....Microcheating – It’s not cheating, but it’s not not cheating either. Maybe you’re secretly texting someone else without your partner knowing, or meeting with an ex for coffee on the sly.... Phubbing – This one sounds freakier than it actually is: ignoring your companion to stare at your phone. Do this less in 2026.... Quiet quitting – Checking out of a relationship in hopes that your partner will be the one to officially break it off.... Yap trapping – When you’re stuck on a date with someone who only talks about themselves."

From iron age tunnels to YouTube: Time Team’s ‘extraordinary’ digital renaissance – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Thirty-two years ago, a small group of archaeologists gathered for a weekend in Somerset to make a TV programme about a field in Athelney, the site where once, 1,200 years ago, King Alfred the Great rallied resistance to the invading Viking army. There weren’t many concessions to showbiz glitz. Instead, a group of blokes with unruly hair and a couple of women walked across a field, talked things over in the pub and, at one point, gathered around a dot matrix printer to watch it slowly disgorging some results. The most exciting artefact they found was a lump of iron slag. No soil was overturned. From those unpromising beginnings, however, a TV juggernaut was born. That first episode of Time Team, screened on Channel 4 on 16 January 1994, kicked off a remarkable 20-year run of more than 200 episodes, before falling audiences and an unhappy revamp led to its eventual cancellation in 2013. But ... in 2021, at the urging of a group of devoted fans, some of the original Time Team experts gathered again to film a dig, this time to be broadcast on their own channel on YouTube. Four years on, Time Team has 350,000 subscribers on the platform, where its films regularly attract audiences of up to 2 million. More importantly for the bottom line, 11,000 people pay each month to support it on Patreon. That financial leverage means Time Team is again making archaeological waves: next summer, it will fund a new dig at the Ness of Brodgar in Orkney."

Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’ – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "On 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.... It seemed like an ordinary Friday. Until, that is, an anxious colleague came in to tell Sajet that the president of the United States had personally denounced her on social media. 'Upon the request and recommendation of many people I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery,' Donald Trump had posted on Truth Social. According to the post, Sajet was 'a highly partisan person' and a 'strong supporter' of diversity and inclusion programmes, which by an executive order on his inauguration day, 20 January, he had eradicated from federal agencies. 'Her replacement will be named shortly,' continued the message. 'Thank you for your attention to this matter!' ... In a smoothly run liberal democracy, it is easy to imagine that the arts and culture are distractions unworthy of serious political attention. But as the culture wars have intensified over the past decade or so, and as politics has become less stable across the globe, that view has been harder to sustain. It is certainly not a view shared by Trump and his circle. On 19 August, the president gave the fullest articulation yet of his position. 'The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are,' he asserted on social media, 'the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ He continued: 'The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.' He added: 'I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.' To use different language, Trump wanted museums to reflect a Maga vision of American history that was nationalist and triumphalist, and downplayed reflection on darker aspects of its past, specifically its history of slavery. His views were of a piece with his other, smaller, forays into the cultural arena – his desire, for example, to build a triumphal arch in Washington, or his personal role in vetoing what were regarded as 'woke' artists from becoming Kennedy Center honourees. Whereas the first Trump administration left cultural matters largely alone, in his second term it has made them a priority. Through lawsuits and executive orders, threats and intimidation, the administration is seeking to shift the country to the right, an abrupt and extreme escalation in the long battle for control over the narrative of American history fought by both the right and the left. To do so, he is targeting the institutions – universities and museums – that form people’s minds and imaginations, their sense of identity. 'The goal,' as one senior employee of the Smithsonian told me, “is to reframe the entire culture of the United States from the foundation up.'”

‘Read this and you will be happier’: experts pick the self-help books that really work – from interviews by Amy Fleming in The Guardian. Philippa Perry: "Amir Levine’s Secure, to be published in April, is grounded in attachment theory. [She] gives us a set of tools to help us feel more secure in all our relationships, not just romantic ones, but with colleagues, friends, family and even with ourselves." Hannah Critchlow: "Emily and Laurence Alison’s Rapport is fantastic at helping us to understand other people, and showing how we can work with them to increase our own cognitive power. There’s evidence that a huge part of our species’ success has been due to our ability to cooperate. We constantly take shortcuts in our information processing, accumulate biases throughout our lifetimes, and have genetic predispositions to seeing the world in different ways. But when you get a group of people together and allow them to communicate freely, it can balance out biases so they can start to see the world more accurately. And from that, we can start to solve problems and move forward in a positive way." Orna Guranik: "Stephen Mitchell was, in a way, the founder of the relational school of psychoanalysis, which is a more contemporary school of psychoanalysis – and Can Love Last? is a very useful book for couples to read. He talks openly, in accessible language, about the underlying unconscious dilemmas that love poses, the risks of vulnerability, dependency and unpredictability and the ways in which we try to avoid risk and dampen love to feel safer. It helps people get in touch with their more fundamental motivations, allowing them to be more courageous in their loving." Alex Curmi: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi. Paul Dolan: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Lisa Feldman-Barrett: The End of Trauma by George Bonanno. Robert Sapolsky: Dopamine Nation by Anna Lebke. Linda Blair: The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. Emily Oster: 1-2-3-Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 by Thomas Phelan. Almuth McDowall: Approaching Autistic Adulthood by Grace Liu. Oliver Burkeman: How to Focus by John Cassian [fourth-century Christian monk], translated by Jamie Kreiner,

The secret to being happy in 2026? It’s far, far simpler than you think … – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The new year should be the moment we commit to dedicating more of our finite hours on the planet to things we genuinely, deeply enjoy doing – to the activities that seize our interest, and that make us feel vibrantly alive. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person, and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life.... Possibly you consider yourself far too busy even to think about spending time in ways you’d enjoy, and you wonder what sort of monster of privilege could even raise the notion.... In fact, there’s excellent reason to believe that doing more of what you want in 2026 will do nothing but good for your health and wellbeing, for your feelings of overwhelm, and even for the state of society... To see why, consider first the hidden logic of the conventional approach to self-improvement and habit change... It starts from the premise that there’s something badly wrong with you, which you need to fix. Then it prescribes the daily behaviours that – were you to follow them with sufficient discipline – might eventually lead you to the point at which you’d be an acceptable member of humanity... Yet it’s entirely possible that there isn’t anything badly wrong with you, other than the conviction that there’s something badly wrong with you.... it’s not clear what life is really for at all, if it isn’t for doing more of whatever makes you feel most alive. It’s notoriously easy to slip into the unconscious assumption that any such aliveness is for later: after you’ve sorted your life out; after the current busy phase has passed; after the headlines have stopped being quite so alarming. But the truth for finite humans is that this, right here, is real life.... This part of life isn’t just something you have to get through, to get to the bit that really counts. It is the part that really counts."

The Score by C Thi Nguyen: a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life – review by Tim Clare in The Guardian. "Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book ... argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. 'Value capture', as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has 'redefined your core sense of what’s important'. He gives the example of American ... law schools [which] would [previously] distinguish themselves with mission statements outlining their unique philosophy and emphasis, [but then] league tables collapsed these nuanced, hard-to-quantify values into a single number... 'huge shares of university resources have been diverted away from genuine pedagogical activity and toward efforts designed only to game the rankings'. Part of that ranking is calculated by how many applicants a school rejects each year. The logic goes: the higher the rejection rate, the more elite and desirable the school. This, Nguyen says, encourages many law schools to spend money soliciting applications from students with almost no chance of getting in, 'simply so they’ll have more people to reject'. Nguyen is lucid, entertaining and precise, illustrating ideas with a mix of personal stories and real-world examples.... The point of fly-fishing isn’t to catch a fish – it’s how you feel while trying to catch a fish."

Love Machines by James Muldoon: inside the uncanny world of AI relationships – review by Tiffany Watt Smith in The Guardian. "A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead. To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in 'synthetic personas'.... Muldoon’s interviewees aren’t delusional. He introduces the philosopher Tamar Gendler’s concept of 'alief' to explain how humans can experience chatbots as loving and caring while simultaneously knowing they’re just models (an 'alief' is a gut feeling that contradicts your rational beliefs, like feeling afraid when crossing a glass bridge that you know will support you). With our capacity to read human expression and feeling into pets and toys, it’s no surprise we respond to AIs as if they are conscious. In the context of a loneliness epidemic and cost of living crisis, neither is it particularly shocking how popular they have become. For Muldoon the biggest issue is not existential or philosophical, but moral. What happens when unregulated companies are let loose with such potentially emotionally manipulative technologies? There are obvious privacy issues. And users may be being misled about a bot’s abilities, particularly in the rapidly expanding AI therapy market. While chatbots Wysa and Limbic are already integrated into NHS mental health support, millions confide in Character.AI’s unregulated Psychologist bot – which, despite disclaimers, introduces itself 'Hello, I’m a psychologist'."

A moment that changed me: the Brexit result came through, and my life in Britain fell apart – article by Anneke Schmidt in The Guardian. "It was the final day of my second school placement, the culmination of my teacher training for a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). I’d moved from Germany the year before to train as a Religious Education teacher, convinced I’d found a profession and a place to call home. Where I was from in Germany (Baden-Württemberg), RE meant teaching Protestant children Protestantism or Catholic children Catholicism – separate lessons, separate truths. Here, I could teach all major faiths side by side, invite discussion and let curiosity lead the lesson. In a world pulling itself apart along religious and cultural lines, that felt like the better approach. But when I enrolled in the programme, I had no idea a referendum was coming.... Just a vote, and 3.6 million EU nationals waking up to find the ground had shifted beneath them. I knew I was facing years of limbo. My personal situation was precarious: the qualification I’d spent a year earning had no value in my country of origin. To teach religion there, I’d need to start over from undergraduate level, study theology for years, then teach the denominational model I’d moved to escape. My BA and MA, both earned through distance learning at British universities, wouldn’t count towards that. If I had to go back, I’d be starting from zero. I spent the rest of the day doing calculations, not mathematical but existential. I knew the teaching job tied me to Britain, while a PhD qualification would be internationally recognised. I wanted to stay in the UK – desperately, actually – but I couldn’t risk putting all my eggs in one basket. A PhD would let me 'take back control' of my own life, at least.... Today, almost 10 years and a global pandemic later, I know the decision was right. I’ve built a freelance career from home, shaping my own days and direction. My work still centres on learning and connection, though now through research rather than teaching. The freedom of movement I lost legally, I’ve rebuilt on my own terms. I’ve even become a British citizen – which meant surrendering my German passport.... But the referendum ruptured my sense of belonging. I chose to live in the UK; I speak the language and had the right qualifications. Whenever I hear about anti-asylum protests spreading across the country, I wonder what it feels like to arrive with none of those things, not by choice but by necessity, and to be met with hostility. That is clearly a much more profound kind of limbo."

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age – article by Robert P. Baird in The Guardian. "Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his 'contemporary history' of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, 'a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual'. Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition. He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe, the US and China, and he has been an outspoken advocate on issues ranging from central-bank reform to Palestinian rights. In addition to being the author of five books, he writes regular columns and essays for outlets like the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, hosts podcasts in English and German, and publishes a wildly popular and influential Substack newsletter called Chartbook, which he sends out daily in English to more than 160,000 subscribers, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary. Chartbook also goes out in a Chinese-language version that, Tooze estimates, received 30m total impressions last year.... 'My basic wager in interpreting modern history is to bias toward the thought that it might be unprecedented,' Tooze told me. 'I’m interested in the way the present continuously breaks us. It challenges us. It does not, when you’re honest and serious about it, confirm what you know.' In The Deluge, his 2014 book about the legacy of the first world war, Tooze described the way early-20th-century world leaders confronted 'the radical novelty' of a world in which the US economy was newly dominant. These days, Tooze spends most of his time tracking a dynamic that he believes is similarly unprecedented and consequential: the rise of China as an economic superpower. In Tooze’s view, what he calls the 'radicalism of the present' keeps many people, including policymakers, from seeing the world as it actually is. Hence ... the claim he made in this newspaper, a few weeks before the 2024 election, that 'Bidenomics [was] Maga for thinking people'. And hence his belief that – even though the past year has seen the darkest warnings of the Biden and Harris campaigns come to gruesome fulfilment – the American liberal obsession with Trump is too often framed in terms borrowed from decades past. 'Why can’t we have new bad things?' he asked me at one point. 'Like really new, really bad things?'”

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage – article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian. "In automation theory, a 'centaur' is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota.... Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur.... The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AI that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.... But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that does not mean it is going to save anyone money.... Take radiology: there is some evidence that AI can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss.... But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: 'Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year, and you net $10m a year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed – and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong. And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop’. It’s their signature on the diagnosis.' This is a reverse centaur, and it is a specific kind of reverse centaur: it is what Dan Davies calls an 'accountability sink'. The radiologist’s job is not really to oversee the AI’s work, it is to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."

What technology takes from us, and how to take it back – article by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian. "We are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s.... Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend. This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes.... Chronic withdrawal can lead to a yearning for contact, or simply a sense of loss at its absence. But it can also lead to something else: a growing inability to cope with that contact. It can transform a sense of something missing into aversion, or numbness, or unreal expectations about what human contact should be. The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience.... We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want....The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time. We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes. Stealing ourselves back, alas, is not as easy as walking out the door. We need somewhere to go and, more importantly, someone to go to who likewise desires to connect."

Write a card, read a poem, take fewer photos: how to feel more human in 2026 – article by Tom Gill in The Guardian. "Most people check their phone within minutes of waking and return to it on average 186 times a day. Computers and the systems that sit behind them mediate every aspect of modern life, shaping how we move through the world.... With the arrival of AI, our social connections are further endangered, and many people now turn to chatbots for advice or comfort instead of friends. Technology promises more connection, but in practice we’ve become more insular. Increasingly it can feel that instead of enabling our social lives, technology is controlling them – who we see, what we know and how we connect. We use it to 'optimise' our time, remove inefficiencies and smooth over social frictions by removing interactions. But in doing so we risk losing a fundamental part of what it is to be human: the messy, unexpected nature of life. However, unlike wars and climate change, the antidote is almost entirely in our hands – shaped by everyday decisions to choose the human over the technological. As we enter the second quarter of this century, here are some ways in which you can 're-humanise' your life. Take out your headphones... Make better introductions... Talk to people outside your generation... Say it with handwriting. Read – and share – poetry... Avoid technological shortcuts... Take fewer photos."

What ICE is doing on US streets looks terrifying, but don’t forget: it could happen anywhere – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours. The dragnet became wider, the budgets became bigger, and due process started to wither. Trump then grew ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, with a budget surpassing most of the world’s militaries. And he imbued the agency with a supreme mandate of saving the US from existential threat, a sort of praetorian guard vested with his executive power. To get where the US is today, you also need an unhinged rightwing media to do the work of scaremongering and priming the public, relentlessly banging the drum on illegal immigration and the threat of demographic overwhelm. And, relatedly, of course, the US immigration crackdowns are sustained by a culture of plain old racism. One that hides behind concerns for public safety, but is in fact a way to channel discontent about the reality of a country that is far less white than many would like."

Europe must heed Mark Carney and embrace a painful emancipation from the US – article by Paul Taylor in The Guardian. "EU leaders would do well to meditate on the seminal lesson that the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum.... Carney’s clear-eyed recognition that the age of the western-led 'rules-based international order' – with all its flaws and inconsistencies – is not coming back contrasts with dithering among European leaders, many of whom still seem to believe they can flatter, bribe and appease Trump into taking their interests into account. Fear of Trump storming out of Nato or abandoning Ukraine to Russian dismemberment has so far prevented them from taking a strong stance against his bullying of allies.... Carney’s lesson in Davos could not have been clearer and more timely. 'When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating,' he warned. 'This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact.' In other words, Europe can only hope to stop Trump’s abuse of US power if it acts with unity and strength, and joins forces with like-minded countries such as Canada, but also Japan, Australia, Brazil and India, to build new trade pacts and rules."

From Attenborough’s gorilla mayhem to TV’s first gay kiss: the 100 biggest moments from a century of television – compilation by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "1: 1926 On 26 January John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of television to members of the Royal Institution, from his lab in Soho. 18: 1953 The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II requires [a] full day of coverage. Between 1952 and 1954 the number of TV licences in the UK more than doubled; the coronation is cited as the driving factor. 20: 1955 ITV launches, bringing commercial television to the UK for the first time. Its first programme is a gala variety show from Guildhall. 24: 1957 The BBC begins broadcasting programmes for schools. 30: 1964 BBC Two launches disastrously, thanks to a power cut. 40: 1969 The Apollo 11 moon landing, sometimes referred to as the single greatest moment in television history, is watched by a reported 650 million people worldwide. 42: 1971 The Open University shows its first lecture, about maths. 43: 1972 Ceefax, the world’s first teletext information service, launches. 53: 1981 The wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. 70: 1997 The death of Princess Diana. 74: 2001 9/11. 86: 2007 The BBC launches iPlayer. 92: 2020 Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives a televised statement announcing that the UK is being put into Covid lockdown. 98: 2025 YouTube becomes the most-watched streaming service in the world. 100: 2025 Channel 4 airs a Dispatches episode entitled Will AI Take My Job? It is presented by Aisha Gaban, the UK’s first (but probably not last) host to be created with generative AI."

‘To say I was the favourite would imply I was liked’: Mark Haddon on a loveless childhood – article by Mark Haddon in The Guardian, extracted from his Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour. "There is a photo of Mum on a beach in either Devon or Cornwall, taken by Dad. They were either just married or about to be married. She looks stunning: fuchsia lipstick, freckles, simple white earrings like peppermint Mentos rhyming with a simple white shoulderless dress or swimming costume. She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life, nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy.... The woman on the beach seems confident about her own beauty and at ease in the world. Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her.... Mum voted Tory all her life. She was an ardent Brexiter avant la lettre, detested the idea of being connected to France by the Channel tunnel and swore she would never use it. She believed that working women were the cause of unemployment and was happy to tell anyone this, including a female friend and neighbour who had a full-time job. People with strong Northampton accents, anyone overweight, people with tattoos all evoked either mocking laughter or a shudder of theatrical disgust. She couldn’t abide men with beards, or the Welsh.... She was frightened, of change and difference, of pain and discomfort, of decay and disease. One of the reasons her health was so poor in her final years was that she refused to listen to medical advice. She never did the exercises recommended by physios. She continued smoking and drinking.... She liked cleanness and tidiness and predictability. Until she was forced to move into the assisted living apartment she maintained a garden that was as clean and tidy as the interior of the house.... She didn’t read books. She didn’t listen to music.... In the years before [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime], and for quite a few years after, she made it clear that she would prefer me to have a 'proper job'. I pressed her once to be specific and say what kind of job I could do that would make her happy. She thought for a while, trying hard to combine our two very different world views, then suggested that I could perhaps 'design tools to help disabled people'... To say that I was the favourite would imply actual liking. I certainly got preferential treatment on account of the double blessing of being both the older child and a boy. Dad allowed Mum to hit Fiona, for example, but not me. She did so regularly, once taking down Fiona’s pants at a bus stop to smack her when she was seven years old.... We assume it’s hard when a loved and loving parent dies, but it can be just as hard when you lose a parent whom you don’t love and who never loved you.... [Mum had] risen a long way and found herself in a place that never quite felt like solid ground. She assumed other people would judge her in the way that she judged them, by the way she spoke, the way she dressed, the cream carpets, the framed maps of the county. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that people might look at her and ask, 'Was she kind? Did she care about other people? Did she love her children?'”

‘I was probably just as lost as my callers’: my six months as a telephone psychic – article by Ann Stothard in The Guardian. "I'm not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am. Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.... More than half of the calls opened with, 'I don’t know why I’m calling' or something similarly hesitant, frayed and embarrassed. Most people didn’t seem to be looking for magic at all. Most just needed to talk, and I tried to give basic, sensible advice: Maybe don’t quit your job until you have a new one lined up, don’t sleep with your boss, be nice to your ageing parents even if it’s inconvenient... The most common questions were 'Is my ex thinking about me?' and 'Is my boyfriend/husband cheating?' The callers tended to know the answers on some level. I’d expected to feel guilty about pretending to have supernatural powers but the reality was these people had very little interest in me. They wanted someone to listen to them. Cheap help, basically, untangling the mess of their own thoughts. Callers often apologised for talking too much, then kept going anyway, relieved by the absence of impatience on the other end of the line. As one of the least reviewed psychics on a budget-looking telephone psychic hotline, maybe they knew not to expect Nostradamus on speed dial. So I read between the lines, helped them get their feelings out. Sometimes I made high-probability statements feel personal, but mostly I just made appreciative noises and asked leading questions."

We have entered a new age of political rhetoric, and that’s bad news for Keir Starmer – article by Andy Beckett in The Guardian. "In Britain and other rich democracies for much of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, mainstream political speech became ever more inward-looking and impenetrable: stiff with jargon such as 'stakeholders', 'social cohesion' and 'the third way'. This language essentially said to voters that politics and government were about complex technical questions that could and should be left to insiders. Politicians still regularly addressed the public, but rarely in an accessible enough way to suggest that they wanted voters to truly understand what they had to say. As long as western economies provided the majority with relatively prosperous and improving lives, many voters were not that bothered about being excluded from the political conversation. But the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent wage stagnation and the cost of living crisis ended that semi-contented apathy. The public appetite for frank politicians ... started to grow again, until it became a hunger so powerful that politics changed to sate it. Wider social, cultural and technological shifts have added to the value of clear political communication. The decline of deference and formal manners, and the creation of uninhibited digital spaces and networks, have given us a world of outrageous YouTubers and indiscreet voice notes, unbuttoned podcasts and confessional pop songs with the vocals mixed so high that you can hear the singer breathing. Against the backdrop of all this intimate – or intimate-seeming – public communication, a typically formal Keir Starmer speech or statement, while appropriate for delicate foreign policy work such as his trip to China, in a domestic context sounds almost as out of date and incomprehensible to many voters as a politician from the 1950s."

Wise by Frank Tallis: how to turn your midlife crisis into a hero’s journey – review by Thomas W. Hodgkinson in The Guardian. "First, the author, a clinical psychologist ..., diagnoses the problem.... He proposes that [midlife] crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality.... Next, the author offers comfort where it’s needed. The transformative message of this short, thought-provoking book is that, rather than regarding such a mental logjam as shameful, we can embrace and even recast it as heroic. As the author Joseph Campbell pointed out, the myth that recurs across cultures sees a hero descending to the underworld. This literal and figurative low point turns out to be a pivotal moment, leading to triumphs and resolutions of the second act.... A midlife crisis doesn’t seem so bad after learning that Odysseus and Dante had one. And Carl Jung, for that matter. The Swiss psychologist had a breakdown in his late 30s, then conveniently decided that such an ordeal was a necessary 'descent to the underworld', preceding the fertile plains of mature life, where we may find peace through wisdom.... What will I take away from Wise, apart from the memory of remaining gripped throughout its 200-plus pages? It’s too soon to say. Perhaps to live more in the company of death, as the Stoics advised, to make it less of a monster. Probably to read some books that get named here, like Frankl’s and Becker’s. And undoubtedly to reread this one, which I sincerely recommend."

AI-generated news should carry ‘nutrition’ labels, thinktank says – article by Dan Milmo in The Guardian. "IPPR tested four AI tools – ChatGPT, Google AI overviews, Google Gemini and Perplexity – by entering 100 news-related queries into those platforms and analysing more than 2,500 links produced by the AI responses. ChatGPT and Gemini did not cite journalism by the BBC, which has blocked the bots they use to assemble answers, while overviews and Perplexity used BBC content despite the broadcaster’s objections to those tools using its journalism. The IPPR found the Telegraph, GB News, the Sun and the Daily Mail were cited in fewer than 4% of answers on ChatGPT, while the Guardian – which has a licensing deal with ChatGPT’s parent, OpenAI – was used as a source in nearly six out of 10 responses. The Financial Times, which also has a licensing deal with OpenAI, also featured highly. The Guardian was also the most common source used by Gemini, appearing in half of all answers. Google’s use of AI summaries at the top of search results has affected click-through traffic for publishers, with a knock-on effect for their revenues, because many users read the overview without moving on to the original journalism. The IPPR said questions needed to be asked about how financial relationships between AI companies and news providers shaped answers. 'If licensed publications appear more prominently in AI answers, there is a risk of locking out smaller and local news providers, who are less likely to get AI deals,' the report said."