The Reality of AI and the Crisis of Meaning – address by Matthew Harvey Sanders to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, 23 April 2026, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I want to start with the deepest pastoral fear many of you may already have, because it’s the right fear and it deserves a direct answer. The fear isn’t that AI is stupid. The fear is that AI will be trusted as if it were wise. The fear is that a thirteen-year-old girl with a conscience-burdened question will take that question not to a priest, not to her mother, not even to her friend, but to a chatbot. The fear is that a lonely widower in Portsmouth will pour his grief into an app whose business model is to keep him talking.... The problem in front of us isn’t, in the end, computer science. It’s an assault on the face and the voice. It’s an attempt, at industrial scale, to engineer substitutes for the two things that make a Catholic sacramental life possible: the human face, and the human voice.... With all of that in view, four things these systems simply cannot do. (1) They cannot know you. They have no interior life. (2) They cannot love you. Love is the willing of the good of the other. A machine has no will. (3) They cannot forgive you.... (4) They cannot accompany you. They can only be in the room.... Your parishioners aren’t in danger of believing the machine is God. They’re in danger of forgetting that they aren’t machines.... The great crisis of our century won’t be scarcity. It will be despair. A Universal Basic Income can’t fill a hole in the soul."
I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them? – article by Ioan Marc Jones in The Guardian. "A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the Guardian’s new list of the 100 best novels. I nearly collapsed with smugness. I’d read 68 of the books and decided on the spot to read the remaining 32.... I found my concentration lagging. I kept checking the football scores and I don’t really care about football.... Have we all changed? Or was it just me?... The page makes few demands. It is linear and monologic, allowing us to focus on a single task. The page has no pop-ups, no calls to action, no ads clamouring for attention. But screens, according to research by psychologist Gloria Mark, compel us to switch attention, push us towards new shiny things. We focus on interfaces, ads, dialogic elements, rather than the content. Online, according to research by Chartbeat, one in three readers spend less than 15 seconds on any given article. Many who started reading this piece will have not made it this far.... Screens have altered the way we read. They promote a shallower reading experience, encourage skimming and scanning. Reading on screen has undermined reading in general. And our dependence on screens has led to a form of text fatigue.... Work exacerbates the problem. More of us now occupy managerial rather than manual roles, according to the National Readership Survey. We spend days staring at screens, drowning in instant messages, emails and work slop. People do not want to spend their leisure time reading Victorian classics, after all that bad reading.... In less than a decade, I’d lost the ability to read some of the best books ever written. I had no idea how that had happened. The experts I spoke to told me, over and over again, that classics require patience and practice. A good reader needs to learn or relearn how to read them. So how do I practise the classics? The most common bit of advice: start small. Katie Garner, a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, advocates the 'Read like a Victorian' strategy: 'Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.'... You can break a book into chunks, or simply pick smaller books.... More recent classics tend to ease the reader into reading.... Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new.... Audiobooks improve accessibility and we should welcome anything that helps people read.... Supplementary materials improve accessibility.... It is perhaps best to end with some words of wisdom from Virginia Woolf, the one writer to appear on the Guardian’s list five times: 'The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.'”
‘The CGI would have cost millions. I spent $2,000.’ Is Dreams of Violets AI slop, or the future of film-making? – article by Cath Clarke in The Guardian. "Next week a breakthrough 75-minute drama about the brutal crackdown in Iran on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. 'I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,' says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Dreams of Violets is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance in an alleyway. How on earth has Koosha managed to pull together a drama about the killings in less than six months? The answer, it turns out, is by using artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI-generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearances, using people he has known in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he says. 'Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.' Where Dreams of Violets is breaking new ground is that it is the first fully-AI live action feature accepted at a major film festival. ... Koosha says that Dreams of Violets would be '100% impossible' to bring to the screen in the traditional way. 'If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions. I spent under $2,000.' He also points out the difficulties in raising finance and pre-production. 'It would take probably a year or two to get this right. The notion of making films at the speed of news itself is something I’m super interested in.' He also sees a role for AI in producing movies that look like massive studio productions at a fraction of the cost – removing the barriers for independent film-makers. 'An indie film-maker mind is often a lot more fresh and creative than an industrial film-maker mind. In my view most stories that are told with $100m should be told through the lens of an indie film-maker.'”
Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future…. In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a ‘transhuman’ future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves. … The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.… How should society intervene? Does our political system provide the tools to help steer the process in a pro-social direction?… The Trump administration has shown little interest so far in resisting the tech oligarch’s fantasy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the valley oligarchs’ project of techno-domination is inevitable. Misgivings are emerging among the Maga base…Other signs of trouble are brewing for the AI project – from college graduates booing commencement speakers who extol AI, to Trump’s brief moment of concern over the potential criminal capabilities of Anthropic’s new Mythos model before deciding not to regulate the thing after all.… Perhaps the most forceful, pro-human position has come from the Holy Father himself. On Monday, Pope Leo published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity. ‘This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,‘ he added…. One might also take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs’ dreamscape is so far-fetched. … Forget the part where human consciousness is rendered in digital form, merged with AI and beamed across the galaxy. The ostensibly more down-to-earth proposition that conscious AI is not just possible but around the corner is in fundamental tension with our tenuous grasp of what consciousness is. Even more mundane objectives, such as getting artificial intelligence to train itself, keep getting pushed forward into the event horizon.… Maybe the transhuman project will give way to a more or less recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins. Maybe it can even be achieved in a way that serves our long-forgotten dream of equitable prosperity. So far, though, our technological visionaries are pushing for something else, a future marked by vast concentrations of wealth and power, indifferent to the humdrum aspirations of the unwashed many.“
The Traveller by Andrea Wulf: an 18th century explorer far ahead of his time – review by Nick Bartlett in The Guardian. “At a time when racism pervaded public opinion as well as the philosophical texts of luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Forster moved brazenly to critique and correct them… It is unusual to devote almost half a biography to only three years of a subject’s life. But the decision tells us something about the weight the author places on the time Forster spent travelling the world as the assistant naturalist on board Captain James Cook’s HMS Resolution, beginning when he was just 17. Unlike the ship’s crew, Forster was concerned by how the expedition’s presence in the Pacific islands would damage social relations and disrupt local economies. In his diary, he wrote that the people who received them had every right ‘to look on our men as a set of invaders‘. He deplored the ‘vengeful‘ nature of his fellow sailors and spent his time with the Indigenous people they made contact with, among them the Māori, Easter Islanders and Tahitians. He admired the Tahitians’ unique conception of property and their absence of class distinctions. Towards the end of the journey a man from Bora Bora, named Hitihiti, voluntarily joined the crew, and he and Forster became close friends, teaching one another words from their respective mother tongues…. Despite his departures from mainstream opinion, Forster was lauded for his intellect and daring spirit, invited to address King George III and regularly called on by foreign envoys and European royals. In his celebrated account of the expedition, A Voyage Round the World (1777), he condemned the violence committed by the crew against Indigenous people and espoused what he termed ‘the general rights of mankind‘. The appeal to what we’d now call human rights was unprecedented and radical for its inclusion of everyone, regardless of race.“
The Children by Melissa Albert: intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. “Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged.… The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were becoming as famous as Christopher Robin – with all that implies. In the present day of the novel, grown-up Guin is the custodian of her mother’s literary legacy. She is releasing a ghostwritten and somewhat saccharine memoir about the years that she and Ennis spent running wild in rural isolation while Edith wrote the books that were to define their lives. But the truth, as Albert’s sometimes unwieldy triple time scheme lets us know bit by bit, is darker than Guin’s memoir suggests…. In the present tense of the novel,… Edith and Llewellyn have died in a fire that consumed the house; the sixth and last book in the Ninth City series never got written; and Guin and Ennis, once so close, have been on nonspeakers for two decades. A conceptual artist who builds uncanny installations, Ennis has always refused to talk about his childhood and the Ninth City books – but just as Guin is publicising her memoir, he announces a new show called Mother. The now of the story tracks Guin’s panicky peregrinations as we count down to its opening day and the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, a third time strand fills in Guin’s experiences between the death of her parents and the present…. One of the pleasures of The Children is that you’re quite some way through it before you figure out what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a haunted house story, or a dark fairytale? We’re certainly closing in on a secret, or rather a whole passel of them.”
‘You’re treated like this is the end’: Meet the dementia rebels, diagnosed and determined to change people’s minds – article by Anne Karpf in The Guardian. “People diagnosed with dementia are still routinely being advised to disengage from life as they know it and prepare to die – something that Kate Swaffer, an internationally known Australian dementia campaigner, calls ‘prescribed disengagement‘ – or given a bunch of leaflets, without any genuine support beyond groups in which many people living with dementia feel patronised. After diagnosis, Swaffer immediately lost her job…. [She is one of a number of] dementia activists, people living with dementia who are angry about the stereotypes surrounding the condition and the lack of support after diagnosis. It is a hybrid of ageism and ableism that combine, they believe, to perpetuate fear and anxiety. Instead of disengaging, they choose to engage even more vigorously: all four have thrown themselves into dementia activism, establishing new groups…
Project a Black Planet: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “The exhibition does not sing. It spits out theory instead. Every section is framed as an essay, with artworks chosen to illustrate an argument: one bay is based around the ideas of sociologist Stuart Hall, which the works don’t seem to illustrate anyway. This is a show that wants to conjure up a utopian place, Panafrica, and make it real, which would be a powerful piece of political enchantment. To do that it needed to be put together with artistic flair. Instead the curators approach their poetic fiction with leaden prosaicness. Rather than carrying you away to Panafrica on wings of imagination they keep stopping to recalibrate their academic echo-location machine. As a result the huge mix of art, from mid 20th-century sculptor Ronald Moody to a Marlene Dumas painting via a poster for Do the Right Thing, becomes an incoherent, often tedious stew. And there’s worse. This exhibition is so in thrall to theoretical musings around Panafrica it loses sight of … Africa. While this utopian dream of an imaginary continent was being constructed across the 20th and 21st centuries what was happening, you wonder, in Africa and to people worldwide of African descent?“
Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’ - article by Sammy Gecsoyler in The Guardian. “Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a ‘humiliating’ weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals…. Like all of the young people interviewed for this piece, Thomas has been unemployed for more than a year. He is one of 82,000 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the same grim predicament. Thomas, who lives in Warrington, gets £311 a month in universal credit. After his bills are paid and his dog’s food is accounted for, he has about £25 for the month. He is hardly lazy, having worked since he was 16. But this changed in October 2024 when he lost his job as a pub manager. Despite applying for about 2,000 jobs since, he’s had no luck.… Sadly, Thomas’s experience is the new normal for many young people across the UK.… Alan Milburn’s report on young people and work … says that about 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training (Neet).”
‘A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit? – article by Martin Belam in The Guardian. “The announcement that the BBC has abandoned the planned Doctor Who Christmas special, and is ending its partnership with showrunner Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf production company, will not have come as much of a surprise to many fans…. Viewing figures [have dipped] to the lowest in the show’s history – although the current streaming landscape makes it difficult to make like-for-like comparisons with previous eras….When 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner suspected the show faced cancellation, he and script editor Andrew Cartmel carefully left the series open ended. Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred walked off into the distance with a monologue from him that became fandom lore…. Davies and Bad Wolf, conversely, have left the show on a series of cliffhangers that are unlikely ever to be resolved. Why did we suddenly get flashing psychic messages from the Doctor’s granddaughter in the middle of the Interstellar Song Contest? Why did the Doctor appear to regenerate into the face of a former companion? The 2005 revival worked because Davies threw away the continuity baggage, only gradually reintroducing old elements. Assuming a new production company wants a clean slate – a new showrunner, Doctor, companions and a reimagining of the concept – the end of The Reality War and the lingering question of: 'Is or isn’t Billie Piper the new Doctor?' feel like a poisoned chalice. Part of the problem remains that the BBC is unclear as to what it wants the show to be. It is a valuable franchise and a British cultural touchstone, but it lacks the global reach of Star Wars or Marvel, despite having to compete against them for attention. At the same time, the BBC still thinks it can use it on Saturday linear TV to unite a family audience that probably no longer exists. Putting the show out to tender suggests they are looking for somebody else to square those circles.“
This is Rambert: 100th birthday knees-up is a big leap forward – review by Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian. “Britain’s oldest dance company is celebrating its 100th anniversary but this celebratory tour is decidedly no exercise in nostalgia. As the title, This is Rambert, makes clear, it’s a mission statement, a manifesto, and all about the present moment. So no harking back to the company’s beginnings in the early years of British ballet, or the deliberate shift into modern dance in the 1960s. The Rambert brand has gone through some chameleonic changes across the last century, settling for a while into a pattern of reputable, reliable, something-for-everyone shows. Current artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer wants to shake things up, to prove there’s nothing geriatric about this centenarian…. What does [the programme] say about Rambert’s mission, then? To move fast, but not necessarily break everything. To continue commissioning new choreography and keep a stunning set of dancers in forward motion. This is all very good, and everything tonight is good, even if only some of it really thrills – that’s the necessary risk of new work. Let’s hope they’re still dancing in another 100 years.”
‘Once, Mandela was seen as the devil incarnate’: the TV show laying bare the true struggle against apartheid – article by Emine Saner in The Guardian. “We tend to look back at the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, says Peter Hain… ‘as one of the great success stories of protests and Nelson Mandela as a global icon, and rightly so. But Mandela was considered the devil incarnate. He was denounced as a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher only a few years before his release. We were vilified.’ It was nothing compared to what Black people in South Africa faced, he stresses, but still he was targeted…. Dali Tambo grew up expecting the worst would happen to his father, Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile who had brought his family to London in 1960. Other activists who had left South Africa had been assassinated… In London, the ANC offices were bombed.… The British anti-apartheid movement was hugely significant, says Hain. ’Of course newly independent African countries were expressing solidarity, and the US [movement], particularly the Black community, which itself was suffering from enormous racism. But the British anti-apartheid movement [became] the centre of the international anti-apartheid struggle.’ Both Hain and Tambo harnessed sport and culture. Hain led the protests against the 1969 Springbok rugby tour of Britain and Ireland, and succeeded in getting the South African cricket tour cancelled the following year. ‘The sports campaign brought to millions of sports fans a sudden awareness: what’s apartheid about?’ Hain later became an MP, cabinet minister and now sits in the House of Lords.“
Free Nelson Mandela: this gripping documentary pulls no punches – review by Phil Harrison in The Guardian. “Nelson Mandela died in December 2013 but he had long before been canonised as a secular saint. Many people – particularly on the political right – found it convenient to forget that for decades they had regarded him as a terrorist. He had become the world’s grandad: an icon of spiritual generosity and reconciliation. This three-part series directed by James Rogan ends in 1994, when Mandela became president of South Africa and that process of sanctification was under way. It’s gripping, it’s revelatory and it pulls no punches. It evokes the grim reality faced by Mandela and his allies during their decades-long struggle against apartheid. It’s a world of white South Africans suggesting their Black compatriots had ‘only just come down from the trees‘. Of British young Conservatives with their ‘Hang Nelson Mandela‘ posters. Of physical violence, emotional torment and awful economic unfairness…. As Mandela and other ANC leaders languished in captivity, the series tracks the diasporic face of the resistance. Musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela went into exile abroad but relentlessly spread the word. Via disrupted sporting events and street protests, the likes of Peter Hain engaged in activism in Britain. Inside South Africa, ANC fighters, such as James Mange were at the sharp end. Mange eventually ended up on Robben Island, where Mandela was startled by the movement’s new militancy. But events recorded in history books are barely half the story. This telling brutally emphasises the personal cost of Mandela’s resistance. He lost his mother and son in consecutive years and mourned them remotely. His wife Winnie, meanwhile, is a complex figure about whom the series is wisely nonjudgmental. If, eventually, her radicalism became incompatible with her husband’s gentle pragmatism, it is made clear that she had every justification for her rage…. [Mandela’s] three-way release negotiation – with the ANC, his fellow prisoners and the South African authorities – remains a miracle of diplomacy. It was helped … by a world waking up to South Africa…. The reminder of the BBC’s decision to screen Mandela’s 70th birthday concert in 1988 in the face of legal threats from Conservative MPs is poignant in the light of the BBC’s apparent unwillingness to interrogate hard right, anti-immigrant tropes. As Neil Kinnock puts it: ‘In the Commonwealth, South Africa’s only friend and defender was Margaret Thatcher.‘ Given the flux of the world in 1990, Mandela’s release seemed inevitable at the time. This series shows that it wasn’t, and demonstrates how much could have gone wrong. The conclusion alludes to the Truth and Reconciliation process that took place in South Africa through the 90s but steps away at this point – Mandela’s post-prison life is worthy of another series in itself.“
‘Why would you put a toxic product into the hands of a young child?’: director turned activist Beeban Kidron on why big tech needs its ‘tobacco moment’ – interview by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, on the publication of her book Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. “The book Kidron has written ... isn’t simply furious. In parts it’s gossipy, even unexpectedly funny, as her old celebrity life as the director of movies such as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason collides with her new political mission…. But the woman in front of me, makeup free and with her hair bundled up in a clip, is no Hollywood luvvie. Her expertise dates back to 2012, and a documentary she made when her own son and daughter were teenagers about how smartphones were changing childhood. That led to her founding the charity 5Rights Foundation, which campaigns for children’s rights online, and a search for solutions taking her from Silicon Valley boardrooms to the Vatican and many places in between. The book is an impassioned cri de coeur against an industry she sees as out of control, though she says it was written partly to show that we’re not powerless to put it back in its box: that in an attention economy, individuals have the ultimate sanction of withholding our attention from the platforms desperate for it. But it’s also an ‘absolute cry of rage against the political class’ for what she sees as successive governments’ failure to protect not just children but adults whose lives have also been reshaped by tech. ‘Come for the children, stay for humanity,’ she says drily.”
How To Read A Novel – SubStack post by Steven Johnson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Last week, I happened on a tweet from Patrick Collison [asking] why we should read classic novels… I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events.… But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters…. Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers…. In Middlemarch, the key events of the narratives are all deeply influenced by forces existing at at least seven distinct bands of the spectrum: MIND (Dorothea’s emotional and sexual attraction to Ladislaw; her drive for intellectual autonomy) FAMILY (The possibility of having children; the impact on her choices on her father and sister) CAREER (Dorothea’s active oversight over the Lowick estate, and the social impact of 'improving' Lowick) COMMUNITY (The town gossip, which is effectively its own character in the novel) ECONOMY (The financial consequences of relinquishing Causabon’s fortune) TECHNOLOGY (The chaos of the railroad; the productivity of the new agricultural techniques.) POLITICS (The reform movement that catalyzed the events of 1832; Ladislaw’s political ambitions within that movement.)… Bleak House added a new band to the spectrum, one that becomes central in 20th-century classics like The Trial, 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: the bureaucratic state, most famously the Court Of Chancery with its endless litigations and a whole comical troupe of nascent knowledge workers churning through ‘bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense.’ … why should we read these books? To me, the answer comes down to this: getting your brain to accurately assess the full spectrum takes effort, but it’s a valuable skill to have in life. If you over-index on one layer at the expense of the others, you’ll end up making less nuanced choices, both personally and professionally, because your mental model about what is actually happening at a given crossroads of your life will be too narrow. And so we should embrace any opportunity to practice thinking across scales, in part because most educational environments are deliberately designed to keep you specialized in one part of the spectrum. So in a way, I’ve come to think about books like Middlemarch or Bleak House—using the language of deep learning—as a source of training data for full-spectrum thinking. They are trial runs that prepare you for the real thing.“
‘Wow, it really worked!’: the 70s TV show that’s causing worldwide panic, 50 years later – article by Phil Tinline in The Guardian. “On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the ‘brain drain‘ of British scientists to the US. But it emerged that some of these scientists had vanished completely, while others had died in strange circumstances. The journalists had stumbled on something huge. As the host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton, solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect would soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and this had forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to work together in secret to implement ‘Alternative 3‘: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a ‘human survival colony‘ for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists had been co-opted to play their part; the dead ones had threatened to leak the plan. As you probably guessed, the ‘documentary’ was a drama – as signalled by end credits listing the actors who played the horrified reporters and terrified scientists. Science Report did not exist; the whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose.… The show was meant to be broadcast on April Fools’ Day, but fatefully, it had to be moved back, and went out on 20 June. Ambrose says he ‘intended to cause a flap’ – and he did. While those end credits did begin with a dateline saying 'April 1st', many people took the show seriously. ITV was hit by a barrage of calls from viewers – some protesting, others seeking reassurance the programme was fiction.… Ambrose’s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show’s notion that the elite was plotting to abandon Earth keyed into existing visions of imminent apocalypse.… Alternative 3’s afterlife really took off in 1991, when the conspiracist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book’s paranoid tales of secret government evil, 'evidenced' by fictions like Alternative 3, influenced not just paid-up conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, nothing-is-as-it-seems world of The X-Files to an array of hip-hop stars…. Cooper fused Alternative 3 with theories about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote Casebook on Alternative 3, complete with a chapter on 'Missing Scientists'. The book begins by acknowledging the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just an elite trick? Meanwhile, other conspiracists were worrying about who would get to go to Mars: just how senior a Freemason did you need to be?“
The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren: can the ideal society ever exist? – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek ‘eu-topos‘, meaning good place, and ‘ou-topos‘, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both. In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic… Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where ’nothing is private’, and so ’the common affairs be earnestly looked upon’. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war… Inasmuch as utopias are primarily ‘organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought’, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s ’anarchist utopia’ of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans…. The best utopian fiction ... ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself.”
Cross purposes: how the England flag got caught in a tug-of-war between rightwing nationalists and football fans – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. “We’re gearing up for a summer of both exciting international football and ugly far-right protests and riots, as recent events in Belfast and Southampton have shown. The England flag will be a prominent fixture of both – great news for flag sellers, but a confusing and anxious time for the rest of us. How did England’s national symbol come to evoke such mixed feelings and carry such contradictory meanings? … Our politicians have been as uncertain about this as everyone else. That became clear last summer, when England flags and union jacks suddenly began to appear on lamp-posts in towns and cities across the country. …The initiative was pushed by groups such as Raise the Colours, a self-described ‘grassroots movement‘ that proclaimed it was campaigning ‘to cover Britain in symbols of unity and patriotism‘ – but it clearly generated local support too… In the Southey Green area of Sheffield on Monday, every lamp-post along the main street still has both a St George’s cross and a union jack on it. One lamp-post at the top of the hill sports six flags: two St George’s crosses, a union jack, the Welsh and Scottish national flags, and a remembrance flag with poppies and planes…. Talking to people in the area – which swung from Labour to Reform in the recent local elections – most appear to be either in favour of the flags or indifferent to them. ‘There’s a lot of people who say: “Ooh, it’s racist.“ How is it racist?’ asks Danny, a 37-year-old white man, from the porch of a house draped in several England flags.… To him, he says, the flag simply means: ‘We’re proud of this country. And we want to be proud of his country again because in all fairness it’s gone to shit.‘ He is not racist, he says, but he’s opposed to ‘the ones that are coming across and getting everything for nowt‘. He claims to know of eastern European migrants who laugh and joke about different benefits and student grants they are getting from the government…. Many of the locals I spoke to evoked military patriotism in relation to the flags, saying they had relatives in the armed forces or had served themselves. There was a lot of national pride but also a sense of wounded pride, perhaps, mixed with nostalgia…. The line between flagging as a ‘grassroots’ initiative and as a provocation by the organised far right has begun to evaporate. Scarf and Hope Not Hate have both identified Raise the Colours figures as former members of far-right groups such as the English Defence League, the National Front, Britain First and the UK Independence party (which is now a Christian nationalist group). Many former members of Raise the Colours have reportedly left the organisation as it has become more extreme and anti-migrant… According to recent research by British Future, a non-partisan thinktank concerned with issues of integration, migration, identity and race, 62% of people in England agreed that: ’I would like to be able to fly an England flag without appearing to support the far right.’ And 81% of people in England, and 74% of ethnic minorities, saw the flying of England flags to support the country’s football teams in major tournaments as ’a healthy expression of English national pride’.”
Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate – article by Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. “In 2024, the buy-now-pay-later company Klarna announced that it would cut hundreds of customer service roles and begin using an artificial intelligence chatbot instead. The move was expected to save the company millions. But a year later, after customers complained about the degraded quality of customer service, Klarna began to recruit human customer service agents back. At first glance, the reversal appeared to be a victory for human workers in the age of AI. The reality was more complex. Instead of bringing on full-time customer service agents, [instead] an AI chatbot continues to handle most of customers’ basic queries, while a growing number of gig workers handle the more advanced ones.… Consider this a glimpse into one of the ways artificial intelligence is poised to transform work…. The optimistic interpretation of this is that AI will take on more of the menial tasks from human workers, freeing them up to do higher-level work. The cynical interpretation? As companies increasingly integrate AI, they will use it to hire fewer full-time employees, shifting toward a fragmented workforce that resembles the gig economy. ‘Gig work’ refers to flexible, short-term or on-demand work. The term originally comes from the music industry, like a band playing a ‘gig’. It’s now commonly used to describe workers on platforms like Uber, DoorDash or Taskrabbit. These jobs give workers some autonomy to choose when and how much to work, but they also lack most of the benefits afforded to full-time workers: paid time off, health insurance, workers’ compensation, overtime or even a minimum wage. ‘One of the things we talk about as sociologists who study work is this idea about work moving from the career to the job to the gig. And AI makes it even easier to do that,’ says Alexandrea Ravenelle, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… This transformation is hitting white-collar desk workers hardest as companies strive to show efficiency gains from adopting AI.… ‘We are going to see it in every industry,’ says Ravenelle. ‘I don’t believe there’s any industry that’s safe from this.’”
‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "A 'centaur', in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a 'reverse centaur', hero of Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is a 'human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine'. Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn’t otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn’t crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer’s money checking Gemini’s command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids’ jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future’s already here.... [Doctorow] came to mass attention as a tech writer with his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It; it’s hard to believe it was only published last year, and impossible to remember what we did without that word. People now use 'enshittification' for everything, from the degradation of public services post-austerity to climate-crisis-related chaos events, when in fact Doctorow’s proposition had quite a specific use regarding tech: giant platforms lock you in and then make your experience worse on purpose. 'I’m not frustrated by that at all. I think it’s glorious. My first two languages are English and Yiddish, languages that don’t have language academies, where dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, where words change meaning.'... Why, he wonders, are capital allocators allocating so much capital to [AI]? It’s because of a promise as old as the loom: that bosses will be able to replace their workers with machines. This isn’t just about money – often, when the machine is ultimately not as good as a human, or needs so much supervision from a human that it becomes more expensive, there’s still tremendous appetite for automation. 'The one thing a boss does not want is co-determination. Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they’re driving the car, if they don’t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they’re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car. It’s products without product designers. Workplaces without workers, screenplays without screenwriters, movies without actors, hospitals without doctors and nurses. This is the promise.... Do you not remember when they said cryptocurrency would replace all of the world’s financial systems? They told us that the metaverse would be the default, that we wouldn’t have tourism or sex any more,' Doctorow says, with vaudeville outrage. 'We have such poor object permanence!' (This is fancy, child-development vocabulary for 'really bad memories'.) ... Whenever an exercise in automation fails and is abandoned – you may remember Amazon’s staff-less grocery stores, which actually required three people to be constantly watching each shopper on CCTV and guessing what they were putting in their baskets – it never dents the AI cheerleaders’ confidence that they’re speeding towards a post-worker world; nor, so far, the enthusiasm of investors. It’s got to the point where it’s more important to keep the narrative afloat than to consider whether it’s realistic.... Fundamentally, this is a Marxist analysis, I suggest: that labour and capital are elementally at odds, and the latter will exploit the former even if all value is lost in the process. 'I don’t necessarily disagree, but that’s not the argument I’m making. The argument I’m making is that bosses resent and work relentlessly to end co-determination as a class.' But that’s the same, I insist, and he shrugs, as if to say: we can bicker about Marx after we’ve stopped this runaway train."
The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow: the real price of artificial intelligence – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.... AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book pithily explains why.... Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s defining messages: 'The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.' Just as the Luddites weren’t angry with machines per se, most anti-AI sentiment is really anti-capitalist rather than anti-tech. Doctorow uses a framework a 19th-century socialist would recognise: the bosses will pull every trick to avoid paying workers more unless workers unionise to fight back. The problem with the AI business is the same thing that drives enshittification. The improbable price-to-sales ratios of tech companies are based on the promise of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the Metaverse or the failed social media platform Google+. The AI sector’s colossal valuation derives largely from the salaries of the human workers it aims to replace – Morgan Stanley predicts it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S&P 500. And because the net worth of tech bosses is tied to stock value rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: today AI may be a money pit, but just you wait.... One thing to give anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow’s suggestion that the industry is deliberately juicing outrage about things like AI-generated art as a form of hype: if people are this scared and angered, then the promise of replacing human labour must be real. In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: 'To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.'”
‘It’s where the poetry is written in cinema language’: the female editors behind cinema’s masterpieces – article by Bethany Elliott in The Guardian. "Behind every great director, to coin a phrase, is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman. In a historically male-dominated industry, this familiar Hollywood dynamic is a phenomenon that is worth investigating. It goes back decades. During the supermacho Hollywood new wave era, Dede Allen worked with Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), and Thelma Schoonmaker edited Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and GoodFellas for Martin Scorsese (and much else besides). David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia may have contained no female speaking characters, but it won Anne V Coates an editing Oscar. Anne Bauchens was nominated for Cleopatra in 1934, when the Oscars’ editing category was created, and became its first female winner in 1940 for Cecil B DeMille’s North West Mounted Police. The received wisdom is that women came to occupy the editing suite while being excluded from other creative roles as it was assumed that editing was monotonous, unskilled labour and, as the male-dominated studio system emerged, editors were subordinate to the producer and director. This, however, may not be the full story. 'During the studio system, editing was not considered unskilled labour,' says JE Smyth, professor of history at the University of Warwick. 'Women were the best editors in the studio system; many had musical backgrounds which helped them with finding a flow.'"
‘Emotional and horrific’: volunteers ‘live’ as Somerset animals to study wildlife risks – article by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian. "What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train? Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.... In the pioneering study – conducted by the University of the West of England and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), funded by the Ecological Citizen(s) Network – participants were given a detailed scientific briefing about the sensory powers of their chosen animal collaborators' and trained to undertake exercises in the wild. Encouraged to use a single key sense, they were advised by social anthropologists on the research team not to interpret, explain or evaluate, but simply to describe their experiences. By 'de-centering' human understanding, they were told they might allow another understanding to come through, before they reported their oral testimonies back to researchers.... The project reflects a growing interest in the rights of nature movement and the burgeoning More-Than-Human Life programme, and follows innovative thinkers such as Charles Foster, whose pioneering book Being a Beast documented him living as a fox, red deer, badger and swift."
For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music: it’s amazing that this staggering show exists – review by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "The consensus seemed to be that [documentary series like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man] – huge, cerebral, expensive – would simply not get made today, unless it was dumbed down and cut-price and rebranded ... So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Cosmic Shambles Network’s new documentary series, For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, takes its title as seriously as it does.... I assumed, naively, that the series would largely be about the sort of music that was popularised in the 20th century, with a nod to classical along the way. Nope. The first 15 minutes are spent discussing the soundwaves produced by the Big Bang, explained via interviews with astrophysicists and theoretical cosmologists.... Then we learn what sound actually is, with digressions about how the size, shape and texture of a room can affect acoustics.... It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for. It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for... Still, this isn’t an alienatingly brainy series. Its trump card is its host, Charlotte Ritchie.... She is a vital presence, because the show has a lot of very big ideas that it needs to link together.... To reiterate the scale of the endeavour, by the end of the first episode we are still only at about 800BC. That leaves close to three millennia (the ones containing all the music that any of us will be familiar with) to get through in just eight episodes. Apparently No 2 will largely revolve around the ancient Mesopotamian use of Pythagorean tuning. I wouldn’t miss it for the world."
Saturday, 4 July 2026
Saturday, 20 June 2026
Seen and Heard: January to March 2006
Spider-Man films (live action and animated: Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home, Into the Spiderverse, Across the Spiderverse) – more interesting than most other superhero films, because of the built-in dynamic of (in the earlier films) Peter Parker trying to balance normal teenage anxieties with the added stress of being a secret superhero, or trying to win the respect and acceptance of the grown-up Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And the CGI really earns its place by making Spider-Man's web-swinging look really good, almost as good as the static comic-book originals. The films are especially fun when the multiverse allows the combination of different Peter Parkers from different parts of the sequence, or in the case of the animated films, different animation styles. I'm not sure that it all adds up to anything very profound, but very agreeable entertainment over the Christmas holiday season.
Hunger Games original trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay Part 1, Mockingjay Part 2) – justly-celebrated high-quality realisations of the young adult sequence, skilfully working through the contrasts and contradictions between the young adult and the adult worlds. Jennifer Lawrence, together with her designer, director and cinematographer, does an astonishing job of making Caitness seem at some times very mature, especially when she is with her peers, and at other times very gauche and naive, especially when she is with the proper grown-ups. Running through the films is the theme of how her image is manipulated – first by the broadcasters of the Hunger Games, to create appealing television, and then by the rebel leaders, to create a figurehead for their uprising against the Capitol – and the moral, political or perhaps simply human question of how one acts under such circumstances.
Oppenheimer – a disappointment to those like me who were expecting a film about America’s Manhatten Project to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis, which Oppenheimer led. And the scientific technical endeavour is in there, somewhere, but the film is mainly about American politics: the post-bomb drive towards Cold War with the USSR (despite Oppenheimer’s efforts to establish bi-lateral nuclear understanding) and the anti-Communist witch hunts which saw Oppenheimer stripped of his security clearance on the strength of his pre-war Communist sympathies and associations. Oppenheimer’s unhappy wife is very well and painfully played by Emily Blunt, but I’m not sure what that had to do with anything else – except that it was part of Oppenheimer’s life. Well, “Oppenheimer” was the film we were promised, so I suppose I can’t really complain.
Red Eye, season 2; Curfew; The Capture – multi-part TV thrillers, which I find ideal for taking my mind off things after a day's work. All of them have plotlines in which security systems turn out to be unreliable, to the point that they can't believe what the cameras and access records are telling them – a sign of the digital degeneration of our times, when even the cops and the spooks don't know what's going on. Of the three female protagonists, my favourite is Hana Li in Red Shift, as basically the most normal and grounded: an ordinary police detective dropped into extraordinary situations, but surviving by basically being quicker, sharper and bolder than everyone else. She's still in the closed environment, this time the American Embassy under lockdown; it's her good friend the head of MI5 who's trapped on a plane with a bomb. Curfew, as well as the powerful presence of Sarah Parish, had an interesting premise in its night-time curfew for men, to protect the safety of women and girls (the mystery is a murder, apparently committed by a man, but with no sign of curfew violation) – unfortunately quite incredible politically even when it was made, and certainly now. (And as Lucy Mangan points out in The Guardian: are we to believe men's violence against women happens only at night?) The Capture is the most ambitious, attempting to anticipate the implications of AI for policing and counter-terrorism, and more widely security and justice – so successfully that the third season had to go a bit over the top, real events catching up with the first two. Holliday Grainger is a police detective who discovers that security camera footage of an assault has been faked in real time, casting doubt on a counter-terrorism conviction of her own, and drawing her into the murky world of "correction" or the manufacture of images which represent what its creators believe (they would say "know") to have happened because they are more convincing to juries and the general public. This is like the Instagram user slogan "pix, or it didn't happen", though the storylines rapidly move into "pix, and it didn't happen". Very exciting, with continual jolts, best of which (in Season 2) is the Home Secretary, transported to a safe house for protection, catching sight of (supposedly) himself giving an interview on live television.
Hunger Games original trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay Part 1, Mockingjay Part 2) – justly-celebrated high-quality realisations of the young adult sequence, skilfully working through the contrasts and contradictions between the young adult and the adult worlds. Jennifer Lawrence, together with her designer, director and cinematographer, does an astonishing job of making Caitness seem at some times very mature, especially when she is with her peers, and at other times very gauche and naive, especially when she is with the proper grown-ups. Running through the films is the theme of how her image is manipulated – first by the broadcasters of the Hunger Games, to create appealing television, and then by the rebel leaders, to create a figurehead for their uprising against the Capitol – and the moral, political or perhaps simply human question of how one acts under such circumstances.
Oppenheimer – a disappointment to those like me who were expecting a film about America’s Manhatten Project to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis, which Oppenheimer led. And the scientific technical endeavour is in there, somewhere, but the film is mainly about American politics: the post-bomb drive towards Cold War with the USSR (despite Oppenheimer’s efforts to establish bi-lateral nuclear understanding) and the anti-Communist witch hunts which saw Oppenheimer stripped of his security clearance on the strength of his pre-war Communist sympathies and associations. Oppenheimer’s unhappy wife is very well and painfully played by Emily Blunt, but I’m not sure what that had to do with anything else – except that it was part of Oppenheimer’s life. Well, “Oppenheimer” was the film we were promised, so I suppose I can’t really complain.
Red Eye, season 2; Curfew; The Capture – multi-part TV thrillers, which I find ideal for taking my mind off things after a day's work. All of them have plotlines in which security systems turn out to be unreliable, to the point that they can't believe what the cameras and access records are telling them – a sign of the digital degeneration of our times, when even the cops and the spooks don't know what's going on. Of the three female protagonists, my favourite is Hana Li in Red Shift, as basically the most normal and grounded: an ordinary police detective dropped into extraordinary situations, but surviving by basically being quicker, sharper and bolder than everyone else. She's still in the closed environment, this time the American Embassy under lockdown; it's her good friend the head of MI5 who's trapped on a plane with a bomb. Curfew, as well as the powerful presence of Sarah Parish, had an interesting premise in its night-time curfew for men, to protect the safety of women and girls (the mystery is a murder, apparently committed by a man, but with no sign of curfew violation) – unfortunately quite incredible politically even when it was made, and certainly now. (And as Lucy Mangan points out in The Guardian: are we to believe men's violence against women happens only at night?) The Capture is the most ambitious, attempting to anticipate the implications of AI for policing and counter-terrorism, and more widely security and justice – so successfully that the third season had to go a bit over the top, real events catching up with the first two. Holliday Grainger is a police detective who discovers that security camera footage of an assault has been faked in real time, casting doubt on a counter-terrorism conviction of her own, and drawing her into the murky world of "correction" or the manufacture of images which represent what its creators believe (they would say "know") to have happened because they are more convincing to juries and the general public. This is like the Instagram user slogan "pix, or it didn't happen", though the storylines rapidly move into "pix, and it didn't happen". Very exciting, with continual jolts, best of which (in Season 2) is the Home Secretary, transported to a safe house for protection, catching sight of (supposedly) himself giving an interview on live television.
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Future, by Steven Novella – a frustrating and annoying book for me. I got it because it promised to survey the futuristic dreams and visions of the early and later 20th century: interesting for what they reveal about people, even though scientifically and technically far of the mark. Novella does a bit of this… but most of the book is his predictions about the technologies which might actually be developed, across several different timeframes and degrees of probability. (Quantum computing, brain-machine interfaces, controlled nuclear fusion, synthetic life, and so on) The real problem (especially when discussing AI) is that, for him, people are just an obstacle and a blocker: resisting or refusing to accept obviously progressive technologies. It’s not quite as blinkered as what comes out of the mouths of the West Coast tech bros, but from the same gene pool. The problem stems seeing issues of technology only in cognitive and technical terms, and disregarding issues of implementation as trivial or uninteresting. It’s those issues of implementation which will kybosh or divert his predictions. For a “skeptic’s guide”, he should have been more sceptical.
A good corrective I also read at about this time came, surprisingly, from Francis Fukuyama, on the particular difficulties with clean water supply, which he’d heard a tech bro promise would soon be solved by AI. "The reason [that water supply in the developing world is a problem] isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems."
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King – a fun and witty account of his early years trying to make it as a writer, plus some sound and common-sensical advice of the craft of writing. I didn’t feel there was anything stupendously unusual or revelatory, though, which I had been sort of expecting, given the celebrity of this book and its multiple editions. So I had a fun time but I was slightly disappointed.
REM + Sherlock Jr – I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr in the cinema, even though I was unsure about the wisdom of giving it a soundtrack with music by the rock band REM. Well. As one reviewer commented, at least the music didn’t NOT fit or get in the way. For my money, the best soundtracks to the old silent comedies were the trad jazz soundtracks created for ‘Golden Silents’: Michael Bentine’s 1969 clip shows for BBC TV, which was where I first met and loved the comedians of the silent films, of whom I still regard Keaton as the master.
Small Prophets – lovely gentle affectionate slow comedy, from Mackenzie Crook the creator of Detectorists, with Pearce Quigley as a Christ-like man living at right-angles to the world, troubled by the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend on Christmas Eve seven years previously, who learns from his father, played beautifully by Michael Palin, the secret of growing homunculi – which he follows through, because they are supposed to be compelled to answer truthfully any question put to them. The final episode leaves the door open for a second series, but I’m very content with this one; why try to extend what’s perfect? (See Guardian review.)
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry – this time she's in serious mode; after gleefully disassembling popular gadgets to show how they work, now she investigates the stories behind some of AI's greatest scandals: the young man who broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow after his chatbot encouraged him to kill the Queen, the non-driver in a driverless car which killed a pedestrian, the man who shot the CEO of an American health insurance company which was using algorithms to minimise payouts by denying claims. In each case she proves herself to be a sensitive interviewer, as well as a great explainer of the technology. Good work.
Resurrection – very strange film from Chinese director Bi Gan, which I travelled to London to see on the strength of Peter Bradshaw's enthusiastic review. It was certainly an experience, parts of which I slept through (being tired), which somehow seemed appropriate for its languid pace and I don't think diminished my appreciation (such as it was) at all. There's beautiful and skilful filming, but the overall framework is high concept: five episodes, in five time periods from the early 20th century to New Year's Eve 1999, each being made in a film style of the time. (So the first has really bad camera work, far too far back, and includes an homage to L'arroseur arrosé, and the last is one apparently continuous shot, like 1917.) I'm glad to have seen it, but I think this is more one for the film buffs. Just as memorable was the Garden Cinema where it was shown, decked out like an art deco night club.
Singapore 1942: End of Empire – very good two-part BBC documentary, which I would probably have passed over had I not had a family connection: my mother was there, growing up in her Chinese family, aged sixteen at the time of the fall of Singapore. Even told almost exclusively from the British and Singaporean perspective, the story is dramatic enough, as the British colony anxiously watched the Japanese army fight its way down the Malayan peninsula towards the island which Imperial leaders confidently announced would stand firm and never fall. But fall it did, and what the programme persuasively argues is that this marked the start of the end of the British Empire. Although British rule was restored after the defeat of Japan in World War II, what the fall of Singapore had shown was that Britain – admittedly distracted by war in Europe and itself resisting invasion – would not or could not devote the miliary forces to secure its far Eastern possessions, thus emboldening pre-existing independence movements and giving even Empire loyalists reason to doubt how much benefit there was in loyalty to Britain. In this narrative, it was Singapore in 1942 not India in 1947 which was the first of the dominos to fall.
A good corrective I also read at about this time came, surprisingly, from Francis Fukuyama, on the particular difficulties with clean water supply, which he’d heard a tech bro promise would soon be solved by AI. "The reason [that water supply in the developing world is a problem] isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems."
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King – a fun and witty account of his early years trying to make it as a writer, plus some sound and common-sensical advice of the craft of writing. I didn’t feel there was anything stupendously unusual or revelatory, though, which I had been sort of expecting, given the celebrity of this book and its multiple editions. So I had a fun time but I was slightly disappointed.
REM + Sherlock Jr – I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr in the cinema, even though I was unsure about the wisdom of giving it a soundtrack with music by the rock band REM. Well. As one reviewer commented, at least the music didn’t NOT fit or get in the way. For my money, the best soundtracks to the old silent comedies were the trad jazz soundtracks created for ‘Golden Silents’: Michael Bentine’s 1969 clip shows for BBC TV, which was where I first met and loved the comedians of the silent films, of whom I still regard Keaton as the master.
Small Prophets – lovely gentle affectionate slow comedy, from Mackenzie Crook the creator of Detectorists, with Pearce Quigley as a Christ-like man living at right-angles to the world, troubled by the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend on Christmas Eve seven years previously, who learns from his father, played beautifully by Michael Palin, the secret of growing homunculi – which he follows through, because they are supposed to be compelled to answer truthfully any question put to them. The final episode leaves the door open for a second series, but I’m very content with this one; why try to extend what’s perfect? (See Guardian review.)
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry – this time she's in serious mode; after gleefully disassembling popular gadgets to show how they work, now she investigates the stories behind some of AI's greatest scandals: the young man who broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow after his chatbot encouraged him to kill the Queen, the non-driver in a driverless car which killed a pedestrian, the man who shot the CEO of an American health insurance company which was using algorithms to minimise payouts by denying claims. In each case she proves herself to be a sensitive interviewer, as well as a great explainer of the technology. Good work.
Resurrection – very strange film from Chinese director Bi Gan, which I travelled to London to see on the strength of Peter Bradshaw's enthusiastic review. It was certainly an experience, parts of which I slept through (being tired), which somehow seemed appropriate for its languid pace and I don't think diminished my appreciation (such as it was) at all. There's beautiful and skilful filming, but the overall framework is high concept: five episodes, in five time periods from the early 20th century to New Year's Eve 1999, each being made in a film style of the time. (So the first has really bad camera work, far too far back, and includes an homage to L'arroseur arrosé, and the last is one apparently continuous shot, like 1917.) I'm glad to have seen it, but I think this is more one for the film buffs. Just as memorable was the Garden Cinema where it was shown, decked out like an art deco night club.
Singapore 1942: End of Empire – very good two-part BBC documentary, which I would probably have passed over had I not had a family connection: my mother was there, growing up in her Chinese family, aged sixteen at the time of the fall of Singapore. Even told almost exclusively from the British and Singaporean perspective, the story is dramatic enough, as the British colony anxiously watched the Japanese army fight its way down the Malayan peninsula towards the island which Imperial leaders confidently announced would stand firm and never fall. But fall it did, and what the programme persuasively argues is that this marked the start of the end of the British Empire. Although British rule was restored after the defeat of Japan in World War II, what the fall of Singapore had shown was that Britain – admittedly distracted by war in Europe and itself resisting invasion – would not or could not devote the miliary forces to secure its far Eastern possessions, thus emboldening pre-existing independence movements and giving even Empire loyalists reason to doubt how much benefit there was in loyalty to Britain. In this narrative, it was Singapore in 1942 not India in 1947 which was the first of the dominos to fall.
Wednesday, 3 June 2026
Cuttings: May
‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think? – interview by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist ... It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas.... Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had 'lost courage': it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was 'kind of leaving them to it'.... With a colleague, she established an existential therapy centre at Arbours, the first of its kind in this country. Existential therapy is 'a philosophical approach to therapy and how to live your life in a better way,' Van Deurzen explains, 'it is about working with life, rather than just with the psyche'.... Van Deurzen became aware of other thinkers who were adopting a similar approach to psychotherapy, including Rollo May and Irvin Yalom in the US. Over the past five decades, existential therapy has grown into a loose, international movement.... In her new book, Beginning to Live, the first she has written for a general readership, she draws on the work of many philosophers – not only the canonical existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard and Simone de Beauvoir – and demonstrates a knack for distilling complex ideas into something easy to grasp and practical.... She is interested in how we can cultivate meaning, courage and freedom despite or because of the suffering life throws at us, a process that begins with how we approach life, how we cultivate our inner worlds. She quotes the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who recognised that the one freedom that cannot be taken from us is the freedom 'to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances', and also the poet Rumi, who wrote: 'If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom of the place unless you take off your shoes.' Often, Van Deurzen believes, these too-tight shoes are of our own making."
The faceless voice – post on The Pilgrim Age website, referenced in The Guardian First Edition newsletter. "My father had been out, working the call from his car, until a dying phone battery sent him home, back to the one room where his son happened to be. He came home for the dullest reason imaginable: a small machine was running out of power. I have thought a great deal, since, about how thin the thread was. A full battery and I would be writing a different essay, or none at all. I did not hear the words at first. I felt the wrongness of it the way you feel a draft from a door you cannot see.... I asked an AI what a call like this might be. It answered before I finished the question: firearm scam. It described the script my father was, at that moment, halfway through.... The longer I sat with it, the less it looked like a crime and the more it looked like something older. A spell. My parents had been enchanted; there is no softer word that is also true. And once you see the con as enchantment, you realize it is the oldest story our species tells. Every dark bargain in every tradition has the same three terms. Sign now. Tell no one. And I will not show you my face. Urgency, secrecy, the hidden face. The devil at the crossroads keeps his hood up... Here is what I learned by watching it: a spell breaks the way it always has, by a name, a shock, a hunger, and the return of daylight.... The things that broke it were embarrassingly small. A dead battery, first: the thing that carried my father back into a room with another living person in it. Then hunger. My mother, an hour and a half in, said the truest sentence of the afternoon: it's past one, we haven't eaten. The body, asking for lunch. And the faceless voice, I will never get over this, granted permission. We can continue after you've eaten, he said, because he could not afford to seem like what he was. That pause was a crack of daylight. In it, the trance loosened by a degree....I told him to put the phone down and call American Express himself, on the real line, the one printed on the back of the card. He did. And somewhere in that second call, on hold, in the silence, with no urgent voice filling the air, his own mind began, at last, to catch up.... The bank, it turned out, had been fielding these firearm calls for weeks. By the time the truth arrived, he had already begun to reach it himself, in the quiet, which is the only place truth has ever been able to reach anyone. No one out-argued the scammer. We out-slowed him. The whole apparatus only works at speed, and the moment a real body entered the room and said I'm hungry, the speed broke, and the spell could not survive the slowness."
Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender – article by Sian Cain in The Guardian. "An acclaimed Canadian fiddle player has launched a $1.5m civil lawsuit against Google, alleging that the online giant defamed him by falsely identifying him as a sex offender in an AI-generated summary of his life and career. Ashley MacIsaac, a three-time Juno award-winning musician, filed the claim in the Ontario superior court of justice, asserting that Google was liable for the 'foreseeable republication' of its AI-generated Overview feature, which previously published defamatory claims that he had been convicted of multiple criminal offences, including the sexual assault of a woman, internet luring involving a child with the intention of sexual assaulting the child, and assault causing bodily harm. Google’s AI Overview also wrongly stated that MacIsaac had been listed on the national sex offender registry for life, the lawsuit says....The musician is suing Google for $500,000 in general damages, $500,000 in aggravated damages and $500,000 in punitive damages."
How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news; now reality itself feels fake’ – article by Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, The Guardian. "In her recent book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, Naomi Alderman makes a convincing case that what we face today is an information crisis, with very few precedents in human history. 'We live in a tidal wave of data,' she writes. But we lack the 'social and informational structures […] to manage it'.... Now if all we had to worry about was a deluge of accurate new information at our fingertips, perhaps we would not be facing a crisis of such magnitude. But as we know, the world is full of bad actors actively stoking the information crisis. No one is more aware of this than journalists. One measure of the importance of this work is how far the powerful will go to shut it down: through censorship, or legal persecution, or by polluting the information environment with the help of trolls, bots and propagandists, so that the truth becomes impossible to discern. ('Flood the zone with shit,' as Steve Bannon infamously put it.) At its most extreme, opponents of the truth simply kill their enemies. Last year, 129 journalists and media workers were killed..... These efforts to prevent journalists from doing their work are not new, even if they are becoming more common. The thing that has truly brought us into this age of information crisis is technology. It is hardly controversial, these days, to note that so much digital technology seems designed to produce conflict, to prioritise lies over truth. Rather than unlocking the best in human nature, it seems designed to stoke the worst in us.... As tech companies have prioritised capturing attention, truth has been downgraded. AI slop and deepfakes are now so rampant that it feels that your brain can no longer compute what it’s seeing. You start to question things that turn out to be true. It doesn’t help that reality itself has become so much stranger and more grotesque....We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake. The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online. Who can blame them?... I believe we must try to help people to look up and out instead, to connect with one another. Good journalism can do this.... At the Guardian, we have no proprietor demanding political or commercial returns. We have no profit-driven shareholders demanding cuts or cash. The purpose of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, is to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity, serving the public interest, not the interests of the wealthy.... we are free to focus on producing journalism without fear of political or commercial interference. This starts with reporting.... We also believe in the value of collaboration.... We work tirelessly to establish the facts – and when we get them wrong, we correct them.... We want our journalism to be nourishing.... We want to provide journalism that is fun and funny and that will leave you feeling more knowledgeable and more curious about the world. The reverse of joyless scrolling. The opposite of internet slop.... It is because we have put human-centred, hopeful, public-interest journalism first that we have built such a loyal community of readers. And it is those readers who sustain our work.... When I became editor in 2015, the Guardian had been loss-making for a long time, and, although the Scott Trust sustained the losses, we were depleted and vulnerable.... We made a lot of very tough decisions ... But the one that had the biggest impact was introducing voluntary financial contributions – the idea that our readers choose to give us money for something they could get for free.... Against most advice, we asked our audience to give us money, rather than forcing them to. And they did. They understood right away what we were trying to do. In the last financial year, our readers directly gave us more than £125m.... To fight for the Guardian and organisations like it is not just fighting for a business model; it’s fighting for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape. It is urgent: the world won’t wait. Hope and connection are how we survive, together. How we stay human. We are not alone. There are many millions of us."
‘We’re remixing her library for a new medium’: the video games capturing the happy-sad spirit of Tove Jansson’s Moomins – review by Lewis Gordon in The Guardian. "Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right. Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.... The visuals carry the scratchy, hand-illustrated quality of Jansson’s original drawings. It may look like an effortless translation, but the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to oversee Jansson’s original creations, is rigorous, says the game’s art director Marcus Kjeldsen.... For the previous Snufkin game, Skaufjord wrote that the abrasive teenager Little My should react gleefully about getting rich. But, as the approvals team stressed, capitalism is a construct that has not yet graced the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked.... There is a reason these stories continue to resonate. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional configurations of people and family. But there is also a disquieting sense that the unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Both games deftly capture these timely aspects of Jansson’s treasured work. Hyper Games head, Are Sundnes, draws a parallel between the fractured politics of today and those of the mid-20th century. 'We live in a world that’s darker and more uncertain than it has been,' he says. 'It’s similar to the period when these books were written.'”
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment – article by Micah Nathan in The Guardian. "As the first [writing] workshop started,... I turned to the ostensible authors and told them I knew that AI wrote their stories. I didn’t need AI-detection software to know; I just knew. The prose was too polished for a young writer, the arcs too tidy, every character prepackaged, every metaphor a pastiche without context. I told the class the workshop couldn’t proceed because I won’t give feedback to an author who doesn’t exist, but I assured the would-be authors that they weren’t in trouble.... For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece. The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged. One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks? The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making."
A warning to the news industry: act now or the Joe Rogan/Piers Morgan ecosystem will leave you far behind – article by Deborah Turness in The Guardian, extracted from her Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture. "I believe that the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth – that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalists and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels and writing their own Substack feeds, where they can monetise their work directly. From Piers Morgan’s Uncensored YouTube channel to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall’s The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest is … brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack. And in the US, from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell to new brands such as Puck and The Ankler. This creator journalism is not a sideshow. It is fast becoming the show.... The move away from mass reach, and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape, is what defines this revolution. It is a long-term irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood. And it is completely reshaping our industry. This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E, after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Despite juggling long shifts and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She has just downloaded Substack. I asked her why – and her answer was very simple: 'I trust them. I feel like I know them.' Not once did she mention a traditional news provider. We have lost Sarah. The reason why this matters transcends the impact of any one organisation. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe. Or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations.... I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world. The talented, experienced, expert journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation – and consumers who crave a connection with them. Brands that have meaning for audiences. And a legacy of trust. However, my optimism is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust, reconnect through authenticity and reinvent the newsroom."
‘There are no rules’: spotlight on Gossip Goblin as AI film-making enters new era – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as 'automated slop' or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked. This was a production from a new era by Gossip Goblin, the nom de plume of a tiny kitchen-table AI film-making outfit led by Zack London, whose audience is growing fast – he calculates more than 500m views. Gossip Goblin’s speciality is grotesque and satirical sci-fi shorts that riff on the absurdities and anxieties of the technological zeitgeist, all knocked together at low cost in London’s Stockholm apartment using off-the-shelf AI tools and with a team of eight collaborators dotted across Europe. But this is no longer a hobby. Heavyweight LA talent agents, movie producers, screenwriters, studios, streamers and A-list actors are clamouring to get involved, with some leading Hollywood players boarding flights to Stockholm in the coming weeks, intrigued not least by Gossip Goblin’s surging Instagram and YouTube audience numbers.... AI film-makers stand on the brink of a breakthrough that backers believe will unleash a new wave of creativity. A new cadre, no longer blocked by red lights from studios, feel liberated. They don’t care that the Oscars and the Cannes film festival have in recent weeks ruled AI out of the running for some of their most prestigious prizes. 'Way back in films in the 1920s it was anarchy, but people with good ideas could get them through without having to go through the gatekeepers saying "that’s not going to work",' London says. 'I have found myself at the inception of a new thing where there are no rules.'"
Experience: I smuggled myself out of the UK - article in The Guardian, author's name withheld. "I escaped from my home, Soran, in the Erbil area of northern Iraq, in 2011 when I was 19 years old. My life was in danger – powerful people had made threats to kill me. I had been told that the UK was a secure place for refugees. I decided to try to get there and hoped the government would grant me protection. I travelled by lorry across Europe and arrived in October of that year. I claimed asylum and felt lucky to be in a peaceful country.... I was hoping to rebuild my life in the UK, but a few months after I arrived, my asylum claim was refused. I went through a long appeal process, and lived in Home Office accommodation in different parts of the UK for more than a decade.... At first, the Home Office asked me to report every three months, but then I was told to report once a month, and then once a week. I love the UK and feel it is where I belong, as I’ve spent almost half my life there, but I never felt treated as an equal, nor was I shown any humanity. We are banned from doing many things – we can’t work or open a bank account. I was scared and sure it was only a matter of time before I would be detained and then deported back to Iraq. I decided that the only way to avoid that was to smuggle myself out to mainland Europe...."
Listen and learn: the hidden secret to spotting a liar – article by Holly Watt in The Guardian. "Can you tell if someone is lying? Close your eyes. You’re already twice as good as you were before. Our voices change in an instant. When you’re hit by a surge of adrenaline, your fight-or-flight response triggers muscles around your larynx, making your voice high-pitched and wobbly. When you answer the phone to someone you love, your voice softens and deepens. When someone lies, the rhythm and intonation of their speech change. And, weirdly, you are almost twice as good at spotting that distortion if you only hear – not see – them speak. Our voices give away a huge amount of information with every sentence, and human beings are remarkably good at interpreting these subtleties...."
How to become emotionally mature, at any age: ‘We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing’ – article by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "Around the time of the pandemic, a self-help book with a somewhat unglamorous but functional title – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – took off on social media, ... its success fuelled by readers who recognised their own childhood in its pages and their experience with parents who had uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or were self-absorbed, unavailable or lacking empathy. In the view of its author, Lindsay C Gibson, these were parents whose own emotional developmental stage was closer to that of, say, a four- or five-year-old. Their own children had overtaken them, and were now recognising it. Gibson’s latest book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, is a guide for those of us who don’t want our children to experience the same kind of childhood we did. Perhaps you’ve realised – the self-awareness is key – that you’re lacking enough maturity of your own, and feel clueless about what you should be doing.... Perhaps the most important attitude parents could start with, says Gibson, is the idea that your child is 'real inside'. It will probably be obvious to other parents, but from my own experience of often viewing my children as objects to be fed, clothed and ferried around, this was a sharp reminder.... 'We tend to think that children don’t experience humiliation or embarrassment, that children don’t have a natural sense of dignity, that we can say and do what we want with them and they’ll still love us. But what we do to them is going to register emotionally. They don’t have the language or the experience to express that, so it’s easy to miss. We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing.' ... It is not about being a perfect parent or putting a child’s needs first at all times, stresses Gibson, nor about being the epitome of emotional maturity ourselves – it’s a spectrum, and we can all slide down to toddlerdom at times of stress, illness or tiredness. Rather, it’s about being more mindful of how we relate to our children. I know I’m quick to snap at mine when I’m stressed. If I’m making dinner or working, and my son wants to talk about a video game I have no interest in, do I have to drop everything and give him my full attention? No, says Gibson. 'We want to find a style of parenting that doesn’t exhaust you, and that scenario would be exhausting. You can’t do 50 things at once. If you notice that your child is trying to engage you, and you say: "I really want to hear about this, but I can’t give this the attention it deserves. Can we talk about it later?" how long did that take, 10 seconds? He feels acknowledged, he knows you noticed that he was excited. Let’s say you blew him off. Maybe he doesn’t learn: "It’s best not to talk to Mom when she’s up to her ears." Maybe he generalises and says: "Maybe it’s best not to bring joyful things to Mom."' An emotionally attuned parent might still snap in the moment, but would notice their child’s pained look and later apologise. 'You can come back and you can repair it,' says Gibson, who likes the paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s idea of the 'good enough' parent."
‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings) – interview with Steve Rose in The Guardian. "[Oxford professor] Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does.... [His] latest book [is] Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World. He’s taught the subject to his students for more than 15 years, he says. Now it’s our turn. There’s no maths in Wooldridge’s book; instead he translates game theory into 21 digestible scenarios, incorporating everything from Atlantic cod fishing, to Pepsi v Coca-Cola, to the existence of God.... This is not just about warfare, or even games, Wooldridge stresses. He defines game theory in the book as 'a mathematical theory that aspires to understand situations in which self-interested parties interact with one another'. That, he argues, could apply to all manner of situations: social, political and philosophical. The concept of the 'zero-sum game', for example, has become a mainstream term ... even if it’s widely misunderstood. A zero-sum game is not simply one where one side gains what the other side loses; it is one where the incentive is to make your opponent lose as badly as possible, Wooldridge explains. So, technically, chess is not a zero-sum game because you’re just trying to win, not to destroy or humiliate your opponent. There’s a socio-political dimension to this. 'This zero-sum mentality is very damaging. It’s a very male trait,' he says. 'And the evidence is that, not only do you end up not necessarily doing as well in life as you could do, but actually you end as a more miserable person. You feel like you have less agency in your affairs. One of the important lessons from game theory is that, actually, the majority of interactions that we’re in are not zero-sum.' This adversarial worldview is the engine of populist politics – in the 'migrants are coming to take your jobs' sense. You are losing because others are winning. One of Wooldridge’s favourite games encourages us to think the opposite: the Veil of Ignorance was devised in 1971 by the philosopher John Rawls and the premise is that you can design society in any way you want, but afterwards, you will be placed randomly within it. Wooldridge describes it as 'a beautiful thought experiment … It incentivises a socially desirable outcome, but people are still following their self-interest.' .... In 2025, Wooldridge won the Royal Society’s prestigious Faraday prize for his expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. His accompanying lecture, given in February, was titled This Is Not the AI We Were Promised. Around the same time, Wooldridge speculated on AI having a 'Hindenburg moment' – the Hindenburg crash killed the airship industry overnight.... Having said that, when it comes to existential risks, 'AI is not high on my list of things that keeps me awake at night,' he says. 'I don’t worry about a robot takeover. At least, it’s not in my top five.' The fact that he considers nuclear war a greater threat is hardly reassuring, mind you."
Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list – article by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "[The Guardian polled] more than 170 novelists, critics and academics .... for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100.... Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, 'anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged'. Virginia Woolf famously declared it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.... Another undisputed masterpiece is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved at No 2.... Woolf is the surprise winner of our list, coming in at No 4 with To the Lighthouse, just after her arch‑rival James Joyce and his modernist epic Ulysses. With five novels on the list, she is the most voted for writer – beating even Austen and Dickens, with four each.... In Search of Lost Time at No 5 (a whopping seven volumes and 4,000 pages), War and Peace, Bleak House, Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy; many of the leviathans are here – and that’s just the top 20. This is not a list for the literary faint-hearted.... Thank goodness for F Scott Fitzgerald’s slender American masterpiece The Great Gatsby – a shot of perfection at No 11."
Saint Levant: the pop star from Gaza caught between passionate fandom and bitter disapproval – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "At a time when Palestine had produced a tragically galvanising moment for Arabs, Saint Levant emerged as the region’s first bona fide commercial Palestinian pop artist, and in the process had become one of the biggest stars in the Middle East. The few Palestinian artists who had made it big before him had done so through rousing political anthems. Among other Arab artists, Palestine was the preserve of older generations, who had produced now canonical songs of yearning and lament for Palestine. A singer who was of Palestine, but broke with the sobriety of expression about it, was a shock to the system in a way that was invigorating and scandalising. And so Saint Levant quickly became a flashpoint. To some, he seemed to have instrumentalised politics to help his career and broken the rules of vigil by embracing revelry. To others, he was an artist who inspired fierce loyalty for plotting the right way out of grief while proudly championing the Palestinian cause. He had become a test case of something bigger. For many Arabs, this was a moment of unifying crisis, but it triggered different and contradictory impulses. Some wanted to mourn and rage against what was being destroyed, others wanted to celebrate and seek comfort in all that remained. In the middle of the two, between passionate fandom and bitter scepticism, was a young man from Gaza... As his popularity increased, he began to divide opinion. 'Cringe' is how I have sometimes heard him described, like he was performing a tacky pastiche of Palestinian identity, while leaning into his pin-up appeal. In these criticisms, there was a hint of tension about class and authenticity. Despite his origins in Gaza, Saint Levant is sometimes seen as a privileged kid with the affect of the bougie diaspora Arab, distant from the hunger and killings visited on his people in Palestine. For his fans, there is plenty of evidence that Saint Levant was always political, not someone who suddenly chose to ride a political moment once the assault on Gaza began. After 7 October, he continued to post clips detailing how language used to describe the conflict 'makes it easier to justify oppression to the average person'. (He aspired, in this form, to emulate his idol, the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said.) In November 2023, when accepting musician of the year from GQ France in Paris, Saint Levant said that he had been cautioned not to mention Palestine or Gaza in his acceptance speech. 'But you cannot censor me,' he said, 'and I cannot stay silent while 8,000 Palestinian children are being murdered by the Israeli occupation that has been going on for 75 years.' But walking the line between the world of GQ awards and political authenticity is tricky.... Social media posts about Saint Levant tend to become swirls of fandom and criticism, a cultural split that highlights a tension around what is acceptable behaviour during genocide and starvation. Saint Levant is not unique in this respect. The broader cause of Palestine has become strained by the contradictions and tensions of going mainstream. The violations in Gaza and the West Bank have been rendered in popular films such as The Voice of Hind Rajab and the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, resulting in jarringly glamorous red carpet appearances and glitzy ceremonies at film festivals, where, as the Palestinian writer Mohammed R Mhawish put it, audiences give 'standing ovations for Palestinian pain'."
Groundbreaking genomic test could spare millions of breast cancer patients chemotherapy – article by Andrew Gregory in The Guardian. "Treatment for breast cancer, the world’s most prevalent form of the disease, involves surgery to remove tumours. Chemotherapy is then usually recommended when doctors believe there is a risk the disease will return. But chemotherapy’s toxic side-effects, which can include hair loss, rashes, nausea, insomnia and fatigue, are physically and emotionally gruelling for patients. Some women may face life-changing consequences such as infertility, cognitive impairment or early menopause. For decades, there has been little choice for patients. Now scientists have developed a genomic test that can spot who needs chemotherapy and who doesn’t. The breakthrough enables doctors to determine which patients can safely skip it, paving the way for a new era of personalised medicine. Results from an international trial of the test suggest millions of women could safely avoid chemotherapy, sparing them side-effects without increasing the risk of their cancer returning. The findings will be presented at the world’s largest cancer conference, the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, in Chicago on Saturday."
‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling – article by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.... 'More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,' Blake explains. 'What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.'... Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. 'I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,' explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. 'He asked some children what "indignant" meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just "angry" or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.' For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to 'proper' books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that 'you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.'”
The faceless voice – post on The Pilgrim Age website, referenced in The Guardian First Edition newsletter. "My father had been out, working the call from his car, until a dying phone battery sent him home, back to the one room where his son happened to be. He came home for the dullest reason imaginable: a small machine was running out of power. I have thought a great deal, since, about how thin the thread was. A full battery and I would be writing a different essay, or none at all. I did not hear the words at first. I felt the wrongness of it the way you feel a draft from a door you cannot see.... I asked an AI what a call like this might be. It answered before I finished the question: firearm scam. It described the script my father was, at that moment, halfway through.... The longer I sat with it, the less it looked like a crime and the more it looked like something older. A spell. My parents had been enchanted; there is no softer word that is also true. And once you see the con as enchantment, you realize it is the oldest story our species tells. Every dark bargain in every tradition has the same three terms. Sign now. Tell no one. And I will not show you my face. Urgency, secrecy, the hidden face. The devil at the crossroads keeps his hood up... Here is what I learned by watching it: a spell breaks the way it always has, by a name, a shock, a hunger, and the return of daylight.... The things that broke it were embarrassingly small. A dead battery, first: the thing that carried my father back into a room with another living person in it. Then hunger. My mother, an hour and a half in, said the truest sentence of the afternoon: it's past one, we haven't eaten. The body, asking for lunch. And the faceless voice, I will never get over this, granted permission. We can continue after you've eaten, he said, because he could not afford to seem like what he was. That pause was a crack of daylight. In it, the trance loosened by a degree....I told him to put the phone down and call American Express himself, on the real line, the one printed on the back of the card. He did. And somewhere in that second call, on hold, in the silence, with no urgent voice filling the air, his own mind began, at last, to catch up.... The bank, it turned out, had been fielding these firearm calls for weeks. By the time the truth arrived, he had already begun to reach it himself, in the quiet, which is the only place truth has ever been able to reach anyone. No one out-argued the scammer. We out-slowed him. The whole apparatus only works at speed, and the moment a real body entered the room and said I'm hungry, the speed broke, and the spell could not survive the slowness."
Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender – article by Sian Cain in The Guardian. "An acclaimed Canadian fiddle player has launched a $1.5m civil lawsuit against Google, alleging that the online giant defamed him by falsely identifying him as a sex offender in an AI-generated summary of his life and career. Ashley MacIsaac, a three-time Juno award-winning musician, filed the claim in the Ontario superior court of justice, asserting that Google was liable for the 'foreseeable republication' of its AI-generated Overview feature, which previously published defamatory claims that he had been convicted of multiple criminal offences, including the sexual assault of a woman, internet luring involving a child with the intention of sexual assaulting the child, and assault causing bodily harm. Google’s AI Overview also wrongly stated that MacIsaac had been listed on the national sex offender registry for life, the lawsuit says....The musician is suing Google for $500,000 in general damages, $500,000 in aggravated damages and $500,000 in punitive damages."
How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news; now reality itself feels fake’ – article by Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, The Guardian. "In her recent book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, Naomi Alderman makes a convincing case that what we face today is an information crisis, with very few precedents in human history. 'We live in a tidal wave of data,' she writes. But we lack the 'social and informational structures […] to manage it'.... Now if all we had to worry about was a deluge of accurate new information at our fingertips, perhaps we would not be facing a crisis of such magnitude. But as we know, the world is full of bad actors actively stoking the information crisis. No one is more aware of this than journalists. One measure of the importance of this work is how far the powerful will go to shut it down: through censorship, or legal persecution, or by polluting the information environment with the help of trolls, bots and propagandists, so that the truth becomes impossible to discern. ('Flood the zone with shit,' as Steve Bannon infamously put it.) At its most extreme, opponents of the truth simply kill their enemies. Last year, 129 journalists and media workers were killed..... These efforts to prevent journalists from doing their work are not new, even if they are becoming more common. The thing that has truly brought us into this age of information crisis is technology. It is hardly controversial, these days, to note that so much digital technology seems designed to produce conflict, to prioritise lies over truth. Rather than unlocking the best in human nature, it seems designed to stoke the worst in us.... As tech companies have prioritised capturing attention, truth has been downgraded. AI slop and deepfakes are now so rampant that it feels that your brain can no longer compute what it’s seeing. You start to question things that turn out to be true. It doesn’t help that reality itself has become so much stranger and more grotesque....We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake. The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online. Who can blame them?... I believe we must try to help people to look up and out instead, to connect with one another. Good journalism can do this.... At the Guardian, we have no proprietor demanding political or commercial returns. We have no profit-driven shareholders demanding cuts or cash. The purpose of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, is to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity, serving the public interest, not the interests of the wealthy.... we are free to focus on producing journalism without fear of political or commercial interference. This starts with reporting.... We also believe in the value of collaboration.... We work tirelessly to establish the facts – and when we get them wrong, we correct them.... We want our journalism to be nourishing.... We want to provide journalism that is fun and funny and that will leave you feeling more knowledgeable and more curious about the world. The reverse of joyless scrolling. The opposite of internet slop.... It is because we have put human-centred, hopeful, public-interest journalism first that we have built such a loyal community of readers. And it is those readers who sustain our work.... When I became editor in 2015, the Guardian had been loss-making for a long time, and, although the Scott Trust sustained the losses, we were depleted and vulnerable.... We made a lot of very tough decisions ... But the one that had the biggest impact was introducing voluntary financial contributions – the idea that our readers choose to give us money for something they could get for free.... Against most advice, we asked our audience to give us money, rather than forcing them to. And they did. They understood right away what we were trying to do. In the last financial year, our readers directly gave us more than £125m.... To fight for the Guardian and organisations like it is not just fighting for a business model; it’s fighting for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape. It is urgent: the world won’t wait. Hope and connection are how we survive, together. How we stay human. We are not alone. There are many millions of us."
‘We’re remixing her library for a new medium’: the video games capturing the happy-sad spirit of Tove Jansson’s Moomins – review by Lewis Gordon in The Guardian. "Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right. Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.... The visuals carry the scratchy, hand-illustrated quality of Jansson’s original drawings. It may look like an effortless translation, but the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to oversee Jansson’s original creations, is rigorous, says the game’s art director Marcus Kjeldsen.... For the previous Snufkin game, Skaufjord wrote that the abrasive teenager Little My should react gleefully about getting rich. But, as the approvals team stressed, capitalism is a construct that has not yet graced the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked.... There is a reason these stories continue to resonate. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional configurations of people and family. But there is also a disquieting sense that the unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Both games deftly capture these timely aspects of Jansson’s treasured work. Hyper Games head, Are Sundnes, draws a parallel between the fractured politics of today and those of the mid-20th century. 'We live in a world that’s darker and more uncertain than it has been,' he says. 'It’s similar to the period when these books were written.'”
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment – article by Micah Nathan in The Guardian. "As the first [writing] workshop started,... I turned to the ostensible authors and told them I knew that AI wrote their stories. I didn’t need AI-detection software to know; I just knew. The prose was too polished for a young writer, the arcs too tidy, every character prepackaged, every metaphor a pastiche without context. I told the class the workshop couldn’t proceed because I won’t give feedback to an author who doesn’t exist, but I assured the would-be authors that they weren’t in trouble.... For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece. The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged. One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks? The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making."
A warning to the news industry: act now or the Joe Rogan/Piers Morgan ecosystem will leave you far behind – article by Deborah Turness in The Guardian, extracted from her Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture. "I believe that the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth – that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalists and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels and writing their own Substack feeds, where they can monetise their work directly. From Piers Morgan’s Uncensored YouTube channel to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall’s The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest is … brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack. And in the US, from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell to new brands such as Puck and The Ankler. This creator journalism is not a sideshow. It is fast becoming the show.... The move away from mass reach, and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape, is what defines this revolution. It is a long-term irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood. And it is completely reshaping our industry. This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E, after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Despite juggling long shifts and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She has just downloaded Substack. I asked her why – and her answer was very simple: 'I trust them. I feel like I know them.' Not once did she mention a traditional news provider. We have lost Sarah. The reason why this matters transcends the impact of any one organisation. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe. Or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations.... I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world. The talented, experienced, expert journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation – and consumers who crave a connection with them. Brands that have meaning for audiences. And a legacy of trust. However, my optimism is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust, reconnect through authenticity and reinvent the newsroom."
‘There are no rules’: spotlight on Gossip Goblin as AI film-making enters new era – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as 'automated slop' or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked. This was a production from a new era by Gossip Goblin, the nom de plume of a tiny kitchen-table AI film-making outfit led by Zack London, whose audience is growing fast – he calculates more than 500m views. Gossip Goblin’s speciality is grotesque and satirical sci-fi shorts that riff on the absurdities and anxieties of the technological zeitgeist, all knocked together at low cost in London’s Stockholm apartment using off-the-shelf AI tools and with a team of eight collaborators dotted across Europe. But this is no longer a hobby. Heavyweight LA talent agents, movie producers, screenwriters, studios, streamers and A-list actors are clamouring to get involved, with some leading Hollywood players boarding flights to Stockholm in the coming weeks, intrigued not least by Gossip Goblin’s surging Instagram and YouTube audience numbers.... AI film-makers stand on the brink of a breakthrough that backers believe will unleash a new wave of creativity. A new cadre, no longer blocked by red lights from studios, feel liberated. They don’t care that the Oscars and the Cannes film festival have in recent weeks ruled AI out of the running for some of their most prestigious prizes. 'Way back in films in the 1920s it was anarchy, but people with good ideas could get them through without having to go through the gatekeepers saying "that’s not going to work",' London says. 'I have found myself at the inception of a new thing where there are no rules.'"
Experience: I smuggled myself out of the UK - article in The Guardian, author's name withheld. "I escaped from my home, Soran, in the Erbil area of northern Iraq, in 2011 when I was 19 years old. My life was in danger – powerful people had made threats to kill me. I had been told that the UK was a secure place for refugees. I decided to try to get there and hoped the government would grant me protection. I travelled by lorry across Europe and arrived in October of that year. I claimed asylum and felt lucky to be in a peaceful country.... I was hoping to rebuild my life in the UK, but a few months after I arrived, my asylum claim was refused. I went through a long appeal process, and lived in Home Office accommodation in different parts of the UK for more than a decade.... At first, the Home Office asked me to report every three months, but then I was told to report once a month, and then once a week. I love the UK and feel it is where I belong, as I’ve spent almost half my life there, but I never felt treated as an equal, nor was I shown any humanity. We are banned from doing many things – we can’t work or open a bank account. I was scared and sure it was only a matter of time before I would be detained and then deported back to Iraq. I decided that the only way to avoid that was to smuggle myself out to mainland Europe...."
Listen and learn: the hidden secret to spotting a liar – article by Holly Watt in The Guardian. "Can you tell if someone is lying? Close your eyes. You’re already twice as good as you were before. Our voices change in an instant. When you’re hit by a surge of adrenaline, your fight-or-flight response triggers muscles around your larynx, making your voice high-pitched and wobbly. When you answer the phone to someone you love, your voice softens and deepens. When someone lies, the rhythm and intonation of their speech change. And, weirdly, you are almost twice as good at spotting that distortion if you only hear – not see – them speak. Our voices give away a huge amount of information with every sentence, and human beings are remarkably good at interpreting these subtleties...."
How to become emotionally mature, at any age: ‘We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing’ – article by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "Around the time of the pandemic, a self-help book with a somewhat unglamorous but functional title – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – took off on social media, ... its success fuelled by readers who recognised their own childhood in its pages and their experience with parents who had uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or were self-absorbed, unavailable or lacking empathy. In the view of its author, Lindsay C Gibson, these were parents whose own emotional developmental stage was closer to that of, say, a four- or five-year-old. Their own children had overtaken them, and were now recognising it. Gibson’s latest book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, is a guide for those of us who don’t want our children to experience the same kind of childhood we did. Perhaps you’ve realised – the self-awareness is key – that you’re lacking enough maturity of your own, and feel clueless about what you should be doing.... Perhaps the most important attitude parents could start with, says Gibson, is the idea that your child is 'real inside'. It will probably be obvious to other parents, but from my own experience of often viewing my children as objects to be fed, clothed and ferried around, this was a sharp reminder.... 'We tend to think that children don’t experience humiliation or embarrassment, that children don’t have a natural sense of dignity, that we can say and do what we want with them and they’ll still love us. But what we do to them is going to register emotionally. They don’t have the language or the experience to express that, so it’s easy to miss. We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing.' ... It is not about being a perfect parent or putting a child’s needs first at all times, stresses Gibson, nor about being the epitome of emotional maturity ourselves – it’s a spectrum, and we can all slide down to toddlerdom at times of stress, illness or tiredness. Rather, it’s about being more mindful of how we relate to our children. I know I’m quick to snap at mine when I’m stressed. If I’m making dinner or working, and my son wants to talk about a video game I have no interest in, do I have to drop everything and give him my full attention? No, says Gibson. 'We want to find a style of parenting that doesn’t exhaust you, and that scenario would be exhausting. You can’t do 50 things at once. If you notice that your child is trying to engage you, and you say: "I really want to hear about this, but I can’t give this the attention it deserves. Can we talk about it later?" how long did that take, 10 seconds? He feels acknowledged, he knows you noticed that he was excited. Let’s say you blew him off. Maybe he doesn’t learn: "It’s best not to talk to Mom when she’s up to her ears." Maybe he generalises and says: "Maybe it’s best not to bring joyful things to Mom."' An emotionally attuned parent might still snap in the moment, but would notice their child’s pained look and later apologise. 'You can come back and you can repair it,' says Gibson, who likes the paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s idea of the 'good enough' parent."
‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings) – interview with Steve Rose in The Guardian. "[Oxford professor] Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does.... [His] latest book [is] Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World. He’s taught the subject to his students for more than 15 years, he says. Now it’s our turn. There’s no maths in Wooldridge’s book; instead he translates game theory into 21 digestible scenarios, incorporating everything from Atlantic cod fishing, to Pepsi v Coca-Cola, to the existence of God.... This is not just about warfare, or even games, Wooldridge stresses. He defines game theory in the book as 'a mathematical theory that aspires to understand situations in which self-interested parties interact with one another'. That, he argues, could apply to all manner of situations: social, political and philosophical. The concept of the 'zero-sum game', for example, has become a mainstream term ... even if it’s widely misunderstood. A zero-sum game is not simply one where one side gains what the other side loses; it is one where the incentive is to make your opponent lose as badly as possible, Wooldridge explains. So, technically, chess is not a zero-sum game because you’re just trying to win, not to destroy or humiliate your opponent. There’s a socio-political dimension to this. 'This zero-sum mentality is very damaging. It’s a very male trait,' he says. 'And the evidence is that, not only do you end up not necessarily doing as well in life as you could do, but actually you end as a more miserable person. You feel like you have less agency in your affairs. One of the important lessons from game theory is that, actually, the majority of interactions that we’re in are not zero-sum.' This adversarial worldview is the engine of populist politics – in the 'migrants are coming to take your jobs' sense. You are losing because others are winning. One of Wooldridge’s favourite games encourages us to think the opposite: the Veil of Ignorance was devised in 1971 by the philosopher John Rawls and the premise is that you can design society in any way you want, but afterwards, you will be placed randomly within it. Wooldridge describes it as 'a beautiful thought experiment … It incentivises a socially desirable outcome, but people are still following their self-interest.' .... In 2025, Wooldridge won the Royal Society’s prestigious Faraday prize for his expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. His accompanying lecture, given in February, was titled This Is Not the AI We Were Promised. Around the same time, Wooldridge speculated on AI having a 'Hindenburg moment' – the Hindenburg crash killed the airship industry overnight.... Having said that, when it comes to existential risks, 'AI is not high on my list of things that keeps me awake at night,' he says. 'I don’t worry about a robot takeover. At least, it’s not in my top five.' The fact that he considers nuclear war a greater threat is hardly reassuring, mind you."
Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list – article by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "[The Guardian polled] more than 170 novelists, critics and academics .... for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100.... Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, 'anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged'. Virginia Woolf famously declared it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.... Another undisputed masterpiece is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved at No 2.... Woolf is the surprise winner of our list, coming in at No 4 with To the Lighthouse, just after her arch‑rival James Joyce and his modernist epic Ulysses. With five novels on the list, she is the most voted for writer – beating even Austen and Dickens, with four each.... In Search of Lost Time at No 5 (a whopping seven volumes and 4,000 pages), War and Peace, Bleak House, Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy; many of the leviathans are here – and that’s just the top 20. This is not a list for the literary faint-hearted.... Thank goodness for F Scott Fitzgerald’s slender American masterpiece The Great Gatsby – a shot of perfection at No 11."
Saint Levant: the pop star from Gaza caught between passionate fandom and bitter disapproval – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "At a time when Palestine had produced a tragically galvanising moment for Arabs, Saint Levant emerged as the region’s first bona fide commercial Palestinian pop artist, and in the process had become one of the biggest stars in the Middle East. The few Palestinian artists who had made it big before him had done so through rousing political anthems. Among other Arab artists, Palestine was the preserve of older generations, who had produced now canonical songs of yearning and lament for Palestine. A singer who was of Palestine, but broke with the sobriety of expression about it, was a shock to the system in a way that was invigorating and scandalising. And so Saint Levant quickly became a flashpoint. To some, he seemed to have instrumentalised politics to help his career and broken the rules of vigil by embracing revelry. To others, he was an artist who inspired fierce loyalty for plotting the right way out of grief while proudly championing the Palestinian cause. He had become a test case of something bigger. For many Arabs, this was a moment of unifying crisis, but it triggered different and contradictory impulses. Some wanted to mourn and rage against what was being destroyed, others wanted to celebrate and seek comfort in all that remained. In the middle of the two, between passionate fandom and bitter scepticism, was a young man from Gaza... As his popularity increased, he began to divide opinion. 'Cringe' is how I have sometimes heard him described, like he was performing a tacky pastiche of Palestinian identity, while leaning into his pin-up appeal. In these criticisms, there was a hint of tension about class and authenticity. Despite his origins in Gaza, Saint Levant is sometimes seen as a privileged kid with the affect of the bougie diaspora Arab, distant from the hunger and killings visited on his people in Palestine. For his fans, there is plenty of evidence that Saint Levant was always political, not someone who suddenly chose to ride a political moment once the assault on Gaza began. After 7 October, he continued to post clips detailing how language used to describe the conflict 'makes it easier to justify oppression to the average person'. (He aspired, in this form, to emulate his idol, the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said.) In November 2023, when accepting musician of the year from GQ France in Paris, Saint Levant said that he had been cautioned not to mention Palestine or Gaza in his acceptance speech. 'But you cannot censor me,' he said, 'and I cannot stay silent while 8,000 Palestinian children are being murdered by the Israeli occupation that has been going on for 75 years.' But walking the line between the world of GQ awards and political authenticity is tricky.... Social media posts about Saint Levant tend to become swirls of fandom and criticism, a cultural split that highlights a tension around what is acceptable behaviour during genocide and starvation. Saint Levant is not unique in this respect. The broader cause of Palestine has become strained by the contradictions and tensions of going mainstream. The violations in Gaza and the West Bank have been rendered in popular films such as The Voice of Hind Rajab and the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, resulting in jarringly glamorous red carpet appearances and glitzy ceremonies at film festivals, where, as the Palestinian writer Mohammed R Mhawish put it, audiences give 'standing ovations for Palestinian pain'."
Groundbreaking genomic test could spare millions of breast cancer patients chemotherapy – article by Andrew Gregory in The Guardian. "Treatment for breast cancer, the world’s most prevalent form of the disease, involves surgery to remove tumours. Chemotherapy is then usually recommended when doctors believe there is a risk the disease will return. But chemotherapy’s toxic side-effects, which can include hair loss, rashes, nausea, insomnia and fatigue, are physically and emotionally gruelling for patients. Some women may face life-changing consequences such as infertility, cognitive impairment or early menopause. For decades, there has been little choice for patients. Now scientists have developed a genomic test that can spot who needs chemotherapy and who doesn’t. The breakthrough enables doctors to determine which patients can safely skip it, paving the way for a new era of personalised medicine. Results from an international trial of the test suggest millions of women could safely avoid chemotherapy, sparing them side-effects without increasing the risk of their cancer returning. The findings will be presented at the world’s largest cancer conference, the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, in Chicago on Saturday."
‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling – article by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.... 'More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,' Blake explains. 'What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.'... Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. 'I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,' explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his Power of Pictures programme. 'He asked some children what "indignant" meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just "angry" or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.' For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to 'proper' books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that 'you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.'”
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