Cuttings: January 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seen and heard: October to December 2025

Strange Horticulture – wonderful game, deservedly celebrated since its release last year. You run a plant shop in a fantasy version of the Lake District (there are witches in the woods, cultists in the towns, rituals at ancient stone circles), and your plants have both herbal and magical properties. The atmosphere veers between gloomy (it is frequently raining) and downright creepy. As customers visit your shop, the gameplay consists of trying to identify the plant they need with the aid of your trusty herbal, of following clues to locate new plants in a map of the landscape, and distilling elixirs from plant combinations. The challenge is nicely balanced – not too easy, but soluble with careful thought – and the characters and storylines grow with each passing simulated day. It's lovely to see a really great game from a British developer, and I have the sequel Strange Antiquities on my wishlist.

Frauds – superior heist drama, elevated by the central performances of two of our greatest actors: Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker. They play old crime-mates Bert and Sam, reunited after many years when Bert is released from a Spanish prison early because she is dying of cancer. She persuades Sam to do one last job, an art theft, and they assemble a rickety team, but it gradually becomes clear that Bert is not telling Sam everything, and it turns out Sam has secrets from Bert too. By the final episode, when against all odds the job actually goes down successfully, we find out that pretty much everybody has been deceiving everybody else in some way. It doesn’t leave a good feeling, because you end up not liking anyone. But a clever tale and a wild ride.

Tenebrae – concert ‘A Prayer for Deliverance’ at Saffron Hall. How good to hear one of our top-rank chamber choirs in superb acoustics. The repertoire is similar to Polymnia’s – nearly half their pieces were ones which we’ve done at some time in the past – but of course they do them better, indeed to perfection. The major work, previously unknown to me, was a Requiem by Howells: not in the same league as the Fauré or the Duruflé, but a decent pocket requiem. Most pleasingly they finished with the William Harris ‘Bring Us O Lord God’, which is the perfect end to a concert meditating on sleep, death and transformation.

Pine: A Story of Loss – meditative adventure game, or possibly a visual novel, about a woodcutter grieving after the death of his young wife. (So “pine” refers both to the trees that he chops and to his state of mind.) A worthy effort to tell an emotionally engaged story, which didn’t quite come off for me. It created its atmospheres powerfully and wordlessly, but the emotional beats didn’t always strike me as true – or perhaps my experience was just different from the woodcutter’s – and one of the mini-games (carving logs into sculptures of his wife) I found technically difficult to operate on my computer set-up, so that instead of being serene and beautiful it was awkward and frustrating. I’m glad to have played it, but it’s not a patch on Last Day of June.

Edna and Harvey: The Breakout (anniversary edition) – updated version of classic surreal and punkish adventure game, about a stroppy teenage girl trying to escape from a mental hospital with the aid of her toy rabbit, whom only she can hear speak. The story and the script are great, and the other inmates of the mental hospital are wonderfully conceived (including a man who wants to be a bee and two boys who have a fantasy that they are conjoined twins). It is, however, very hard and even an optimal solution – let alone roaming around experimenting to discover how to solve the puzzles – requires going back and forth and repeating whole chunks of dialogue. At least that dialogue is sparkling and the voice acting superb, which makes it all worthwhile.

Human – vivid and informative 5-part survey of the current state of pre-history, presented by the wonderful Ella Al-Shamahi. (When she speaks Arabic with one of the anthropologists she’s interviewing, it is SO cool!) Yes, how did the world go from six (at current count) species of humans to just one, our own particular African-descended homo sapiens? More a matter of chance than our arrogance (and earlier accounts of human history) would have us think, and less to do with weapons and warfare (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey) and more about the technology to create warm clothing, enabling us to survive a cooling climate even more successfully than homo neanderthalensis, which was better adapted to the colder environment of Northern Europe. Moving and humbling.

Empire with David Olugosa – well, this is one way of telling the story of the British Empire: not the way I’d have done it, but (of course) powerful and excellent on its own terms. In the absence of advance information, I expected the three episodes to be chronological, but in fact, they’re thematic: the first on the plantations (initially, sugar in Barbados) and the slave labour which enabled them; the second on Empire-driven migrations (not only the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but Indians indentured in Africa and convicts sent to Australia); and the third on the end of Empire and the contested histories we're left with today (he has both colonisers and colonised in his family history). Each programme is powerful and excellent in its own terms, but this is hardly a complete history; there should have been other episodes, perhaps making this one of those thirteen-part blockbusters the BBC used to do so well. I wanted to know where Ireland fitted in. And how can you do a series on the British Empire without mentioning China and the Opium Wars at all?

The Birds and Other Stories, by Daphne du Maurier – a nice new edition of short stories by this fantastic writer, who's not so much read these days but jolly well should be, as the quality of her prose is far better than that of, say, Stephen King or Philip K. Dick (as examples of other authors frequently adapted for films). Somehow she manages to be creepy (“a sense of dread” if you’re being posh and literary) without showing any actual horror – except perhaps in ‘The Birds’, which is a really frightening tale. Reading it in 2025, in midst of climate emergency, it struck me as fundamentally about the natural world striking back against the human race, remorselessly, totally, for reasons unexplained and unknown and finally irrelevant. But the story it reminded me of most was Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, because of the ultra-narrow focus on a single family in the midst of global catastrophe, and the concrete detail of how they attempt to secure their home, which to its original readership will have brought back memories of second world war civil defence. Hitchcock’s film, though good in its own way, is really just about people being attacked by birds. 

Tomb Raider (2018) – with Alicia Vikander in the Lara Croft role. She’s a good actor, and it struck me that they’d set out to make the character more credible and less computer-gamey. The film’s plot is ludicrous, of course, and repeats tropes wholesale from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but Lara herself is realistic, if extreme. In her establishing scenes, we see her at a boxing gym and working as a cycle courier in London, displaying the death-defying skills of racing, running and jumping we will see in fantasy settings. Above all, she is vulnerable; when hit, she cries out in pain, and though she’s physically formidable she’s not hard as nails. She brings a light touch and a cheeky tone, especially in her final scene when she visits a gun dealer to equip herself for the first time with a firearm. “In fact, I’ll take two!” she says with a grin, brandishing the guns in the classic Lara Croft pose. Classic!

Cuttings: December 2025

Are we doomed? – article by David Runciman in The London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 1950, Japan had a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 4, which represents the average number of children a woman might expect to have in her lifetime. Continued over five generations, that would mean … each hundred-year-old might have sixteen direct descendants competing to look after them. Today Japan’s TFR is approaching 1: one child per woman (or one per couple, half a child each). That pattern continued over five generations means that each solitary infant has as many as sixteen great-great-grandparents vying for his or her attention. Within a century the pyramid of human obligation has been turned on its head.… We have got the relationship between population and climate change all wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, the world seemed to be confronted by the twin threats of overpopulation and ‘global cooling’: a planet drowning in people was apparently also facing a new ice age. We now know both doomsday scenarios were hopelessly misplaced. But because the population kept growing as the planet got warmer it was easy to miss what was happening. Climate change can appear to be a crisis of overproduction linked to overpopulation: more people means more mouths to feed, more industrial activity and more carbon in the atmosphere. It seemed to follow that one way to tackle the climate emergency was to have fewer children. That view is still widely held, especially among well-meaning progressives. [But] we don’t currently need fewer children. We need more.… in the absence of a move towards a stable birth rate there is a real risk that we will divert more and more of our attention and resources to the challenges of ageing societies.… We can already see the way falling birth rates affect national politics and economics. Ageing societies vote differently, consume differently and invest differently from more balanced societies. Older people are less likely to move house. They are more likely to worry about immigration. They tend to save rather than take risks with their money. And as they become more numerous relative to other cohorts, they decide elections…. Failing to look after the needs of the elderly would be a terrible injustice. But precisely because it will be necessary it will also be constraining: it threatens to distract our attention from the other things that matter.… Spears and Geruso offer a range of arguments for having more children… But [they] understate the difficulty of doing something about it. One problem is that the burden of having more children will fall on people who are already holding their societies together. Parents will have to bring up extra children while looking after more elderly relatives…. The politics already look very hard.”

The Proslogion of St Anselm – from the Office of Readings for Friday in the first week of Advent, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his Advent Bulletin for Turvey Abbey. "Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself a little to God and rest for a little in Him."

Met by the Beloved – Meditation (in CAC’s Daily Meditations) by Mirabai Starr, from her Saint John of the Cross: Luminous Darkness. “It is time to enter the desert. You may not take anything with you: not your insulated bottle of cool water, not a knife, not a single raisin. You may not take a sleeping bag. No cell phone or map. Leave the sunscreen behind. Burn. It is time to enter into utter unknowing – and, by unknowing, come to know truly. The mind is an impediment on this journey. The senses are misleading. Leave them on the porch when you slip away in the middle of the night. Be very quiet as you close the door behind you. The members of your household will not understand your quest. They will try to keep you home. Leave. Go now. No one claims this will be an easy journey. Your senses will thirst for the familiar juices that remind them of a time when the Holy One fed them from her own breasts. The intellect will grope around in the dark, panicking. Pay no attention. Walk through the night. Sit very still in the daytime and watch the miracle of your breath as it quietly fills your lungs and empties them again. Spend forty days in the wilderness, and forty nights. Don’t give up. The worst that will happen is that you will die. Die to your fragmented self and be reborn into your divine self. Enter knowing through the needle of unknowing. In silence, finally hear the voice of the Holy One. In surrendering to sheer emptiness, be filled with the Beloved at last.”

‘A mini Battle of Cable Street’: the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Stirchley is a modest kind of [south Birmingham suburb], sandwiched between better known (and better off) areas such as Bournville and Moseley, but there is plenty of evidence here of the lively community spirit that last year resulted in the area being named the best place to live in the Midlands.... Scratch just below the surface, however, and there are signs of something much less harmonious going on.... On at least four occasions since September, members of a Birmingham-based group called Raise The Colours (RTC), wearing branded hard hats and hi-vis vests and using a cherrypicker, have hung hundreds of Saint George and union flags from Stirchley’s lamp-posts, as part of a widespread campaign they say is intended to 'fill the skyline with unity and patriotism'. On each occasion a group of local residents, objecting to what they describe as territory-marking as part of an anti-immigrant movement, have taken the flags down, but say they have been subject to harassment and intimidation when they have tried to protest.... Flag-flying has faded from the political agenda in England since the febrile summer months, when tensions over migration and an emboldening of the far right were accompanied by a wave of flags being erected in streets across the country, with the vocal approval of some residents and despite the often silenced objections of others. But in many communities, including some where flags are no longer so visible, this has remained a fraught and highly divisive issue, even if strikingly few politicians are willing to speak about it. In the absence of political leadership, some neighbourhood groups say it has been left to them to push back against an organised and well funded movement that, while certainly galvanising support among many individuals, has been driven and encouraged by figures with links to the far right.... Anne, 66, from Walkley in Sheffield, said the disputes over flags near her home have felt like 'a mini Battle of Cable Street'” – referencing the 1936 clashes in London’s East End when neighbours united to resist a march by fascists. Walkley has been the scene of angry standoffs between a group identifying itself on Facebook as Reform Sheffield East, which erected many flags in the area, and a group of local residents who did not want them. 'We really do feel that it is designed to intimidate, and it is intimidating,' said Anne, who has lived in the neighbourhood for more than 20 years. 'A lot of us feel – and I think the evidence bears this out – that when these flags start going up, people then feel emboldened to say the sort of things that they haven’t felt able to say for 30 years.'... 'We know what these flags are[,' said Andrew Scarsdale, spokesperson for a group called Sheffield Communities against Racism and Fascism (Scarf). ']This is not like flags coming out for the football. This has been a deliberately toxified symbol. Everyone knows what it means, including the people who put the flags up.' A YouGov poll last month found the majority of ethnic minority adults now see the Saint George flag as a racist symbol."

‘I don’t take no for an answer’: how a small group of women changed the law on deepfake porn – article by Anna Moore in The Guardian. "For Jodie [* not her real name], watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory.... Her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it – her best friend [– and] identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police.... Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of 'sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature' and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years. At that time, there were no laws against deepfake intimate image abuse, although experts had been raising the alarm since 2016.... More than two years passed before she felt ready to campaign for change, starting by telling her story on BBC Radio 4’s File on 4 in April 2024. ... Says Jodie, who works in financial services. 'I gradually realised the significance of there being no law which held him accountable for the deepfake abuse – and I wanted change.' Within little more than a year, she had it. The Data (Use and Access) Act, which received royal assent in June, has made the creation of a deepfake intimate image without consent a criminal offence and also criminalised requesting others to create the deepfake image – as her best friend had when he posted images of Jodie on forums. Both now carry a custodial sentence of up to six months, as well as an unlimited fine. It’s a huge victory won fast in a space where progress has been mind-bendingly slow. However, this isn’t the story of a new government determined to tackle an ever-evolving crime. It was fought for and pushed through by a small group of victims and experts who formed a WhatsApp group called Heroes...."

Young people have faced ‘violent indifference’ for decades, Lisa Nandy says – article by Pippa Crerar in The Guardian. "Young people have faced 'violent indifference' from the political establishment for decades, leaving them struggling to navigate a changing world, the culture secretary said as she announced the first national youth strategy in 15 years.... 'At the root of all of this is self-worth … They matter. They haven’t felt that they matter for a very long time, and that, in turn, makes them very vulnerable, whether it’s to gangs exploiting them to run drugs across county lines or it’s these online influencers who are preying on them.' Nandy said: 'There too many people in this country who feel that government is something that exists to stop them from living the lives they want to live, not enabling them to live the lives that they want to live. That’s very acute amongst young people.'”

I used to report from the West Bank. Twenty years after my last visit, I was shocked by how much worse it is today – article by Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian. "I had not planned to write anything about my trip to the West Bank last month. But I changed my mind when I witnessed how much daily life for Palestinians had deteriorated, how dispirited they have become and how much control Israel and its settlers now exercise over the Palestinian population. I had expected conditions for Palestinians would be worse, but not this much worse.... The most serious change since my last visit to the region is the expansion of Israeli settlements. There are 3.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including 435,000 in East Jerusalem. The number of Israeli settlers has jumped from 400,000 at the time of the second intifada to more than 700,000 now. But those figures do not convey the extent of the encroachment of the settlements, their suffocating impact, occupying more hilltops overlooking cities, towns and villages and even setting up in the middle of them, behind walls and barbed wire, often only yards from Palestinian homes, and protected by Israeli soldiers.... With a shortage of options from within, many Palestinians see the international community as their best hope, believing a turning point has been reached because of worldwide outrage over the destruction of Gaza. At the Birzeit conference, Saleh Hijazi, a policy coordinator for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, said more pressure had to be put on Israel by ending military ties, enforcing arrest warrants against Israelis accused of war crimes, divestment from complicit companies and expelling Israel from international bodies such as the UN, Fifa and the Olympics.... Such campaigns might work in the long run, as they did in South Africa. But in the short or medium term they will not change the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, caught between a Palestinian Authority that cannot protect them and Israel, with its military clampdown and its out-of-control settlers. While the body count in the West Bank was higher during the second intifada, life was absolutely worse now in every other way, said Budour Hassan, a legal researcher at Amnesty International. Hassan, who is from Nazareth, said: 'Even back then there was hope, maybe. Now the people seem completely desperate. They feel completely abandoned.'”

The volunteers putting their bodies between Israel settlers and a Palestinian village – article by Julian Borger and Quique Kierszenbaum in The Guardian. "Every morning, teenage Israeli settlers drive a herd of goats from their outpost in the hills down into the valley towards the Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja. The local men, women and children retreat inside their huts and tents. Any hint of resistance from a Palestinian is likely to bring in the Israeli army or the border police, confiscation of property and disappearance into the maw of 'administrative' detention without trial, for months or years. Instead, a small group of volunteers step forward each morning to face the descending settlers whose stated aim is to overrun and trample the village with their livestock, and drive Palestinians out. On this particular Saturday, the defenders of Ras Ein al-Auja are four Israeli Jews, a Hungarian and an American, who make a screen around Palestinian homes to shoo away the encroaching animals....It is a tense battle of wits. Chess, but played with goats. Just when the face-off is at its peak, the settlers in the outpost half a kilometre uphill unleash a surprise move – driving a herd of about 50 camels down towards the other end of the village, like a cavalry charge ordered by some unseen hilltop Napoleon, forcing the defenders to split up to confront the new threat.... On the day of the camel charge, a man with a light brown uniform and assault rifle slung around his shoulder arrived at the scene in a white pickup truck and walked alongside the goatherd boys in a show of support. Israeli activists identified the newcomer as Gabriel Kalish, the local security coordinator from Me’vo’ot Yericho, about 9km farther down the Jordan valley. Kalish refused to give an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that he happened to be passing by. However he added: 'This land belongs to the Jews.' Activists have photographed him many times, in a variety of different uniforms, at the site of settler incursions on Palestinian villages.... Since the beginning of the Gaza war, and the radical acceleration of an Israeli land grab across the West Bank, the 700 local people have largely been confined to the village, a string of huts, tents and animal shelters along a creek running east from a spring towards the River Jordan. They have cut down their flocks and bought feed for them, but refused so far to give up Ras Ein al-Auja altogether. 'It was very quiet here before. You could graze your flock east, west, north, south and there was no problem,' Naef Ja’alin, one of the villagers, said. 'The settlers started harassing us years ago, when we were grazing our flock, but that was some distance from the village. But since 7 October [2023], they have come closer and closer, to the point that today nobody takes their herd outside the village.' He said his son slept in his shoes so he is ready to run if the family is attacked at night."

Infighting, broken promises and insisting on the national anthem: what seven months of Reform UK in charge actually looks like – article by Helen Pidd in The Guardian. "Reform won Lancashire on a remarkably flimsy policy platform. Though many candidates spent much of their time posting anti-immigration rhetoric on social media, they were vague about what they would actually change as councillors, perhaps because many of them didn’t understand what a county council can and can’t do. They promised to 'cut bloated salaries' – notably the £236,960 paid to the council’s chief executive – as well as 'woke spending'. They pledged to freeze council tax and fix 'all' potholes. They said no to four-day weeks ...and vowed to reintroduce weekly bin collections, something out of the council’s control. Some of the new councillors seem to have totally different priorities from the party’s leadership. I get chatting to Ellie Close, councillor for Leyland South. She says that more than anything else, she wants to speed up diagnoses for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).... I say that’s interesting, given Farage’s views on the 'overdiagnoses' of Send which he said was 'creating a class of victims'. She looks shocked and asks me to repeat it. 'I’m not really sure what to say to that,' she says, 'because I’ve got personal experience with it. I think it’s something that we need to currently look at.' It’s clear that following Reform in Lancashire is going to be an interesting ride.... Things start to get crunchy for Reform in Lancashire when they launch a consultation on closing five local authority old people’s homes and day centres and moving residents into the private sector. The buildings are dilapidated, they’re not fit for purpose and they’ll cost millions to fix, is essentially the argument.... The idea immediately provokes controversy and a flurry of bad press, largely thanks to a 92-year-old resident of one of the homes earmarked for closure, who becomes the face and voice of the campaign to keep them open.... For all their talk about fighting the 'woke blob' and bringing common sense back to British politics, it is how Reform handle these human battles that will ultimately decide whether voters judge Farage fit to move into Downing Street. They can mess about with flags and play the national anthem and rail against DEI all they like. But if they shut down your mum’s nursing home, will you vote for them? Sitting at the back of the meeting with a big St George’s flag is Phil Price, whose 93-year-old mother lives in [one of the homes marked for closure].... He believes [the Reform cabinet member in charge of adult social care] does stand to benefit from the care home closures.... 'I’m a paid-up member of Reform and I’m disgusted with him... I wrote to Nigel Farage, because I thought they were going to come and change everything. And all they’re doing is coming in and tearing people’s lives apart.' I put it to him that Reform did make clear they were going to make cuts in Lancashire, to save money and eliminate 'waste': 'If there are parents who have paid into the system all their lives, worked hard for this country, if they’re waste, then we might as well just give up,' he says. I ask him why he voted Reform. 'I thought it was going to change Great Britain for the good. You know, to stop all the boats and everything coming in, and to be fair to the people who’ve paid into the system, who’ve lived here all their lives. All politicians, they’re all in it for themselves, I think. I was really excited about them and now I’m disillusioned.'”

‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act – article by Susanna Rustin in The Guardian. "[Celia Brayfield] started aged 19, as an assistant to Shirley Conran – then women’s editor of the Observer. When Conran moved to the Daily Mail, Brayfield went, too. 'The Daily Mail was a very sexist organisation,' she told me. 'I can’t tell you how awful women’s pages were, except for Mary Stott’s at the Guardian. All the news of the women’s movement in America was flooding across the Atlantic, but editors were profoundly uninterested. I always thought you couldn’t mention anything to do with equality before the fifth paragraph. You were radicalised by your workplace.' Brayfield found her own way of reporting on developments in the women’s liberation movement (WLM), as the resurgent feminism of those years was known. She would set up interviews with the movement’s big hitters and then, when editors rejected them, offer them to the underground press instead. A piece on the radical feminist author Kate Millett was published by Frendz magazine, which Rosie Boycott co-edited before launching the women’s movement journal Spare Rib. Along with Conran, Brayfield also joined Women in Media, a pressure group set up in 1970 to challenge sexism in the industry and beyond. Its activities have been largely forgotten, and many of those involved have died. But it played a key role in the campaign to outlaw sex discrimination and enforce equal pay – as well as lobbying bosses for equal opportunities at work. One policy that especially riled them, and became a focus, was the broadcasters’ refusal to let women read the news. The public would find this 'unnatural', the BBC executive Robin Scott told the Daily Mirror in 1972. 'There’s always bad news about and it’s much easier for a man to deal with that.' Fifty years on, such brazen sexism appears comically old-fashioned. But the women’s libbers who confronted it have also often been the butt of jokes. While achievements such as equal pay and the establishment of women’s refuges are recognised, the movement that fought for them has uncertain status. Second-wave feminists, as this generation is known, have been derided as man-hating harridans but also as entitled princesses – with their unrealistic demand for 24-hour nurseries and insufficiently intersectional politics. Their suffragette grandmothers, by contrast, are held up as courageous heroines."

The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore: do we finally know what causes schizophrenia? – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "Bullmore, a professor of psychiatry, [points to] a bogus divide between the body and the mind. He calls this the 'original schism', bequeathed to us by Descartes, and before him Saint Paul. It falsely suggests that our thoughts and any psychological distress we experience exist in a separate domain, detached from the flesh. Diseases are either 'organic' (like cholera or Alzheimer’s) or 'functional' (like depression or schizophrenia), emerging mysteriously from an entirely healthy body. Practically speaking, this schism cleaves psychiatry from the rest of medicine, meaning the physical health of patients with mental illness is often badly neglected. But it also sets up a division within psychiatry itself, between what has been referred to glibly as the 'mindless' tribe, which believes biology explains everything, and the 'brainless' one, which ignores neuroscience and looks for answers in a person’s upbringing and way of relating to the world.... But science does march on, and in the last four decades there has been loads of it, which Bullmore charts from his vantage point first at the Maudsley in London, where the tribes clustered in different parts of the canteen, and then at the University of Cambridge. One of his touchstones is Susan Sontag’s essay Illness As Metaphor, which showed how any 'intractable and capricious' disease becomes a container for morbid fantasies until such time as we have a better explanation. Now we know that TB is a bacterial infection of the lungs, we don’t tend to think that sensitive poets are naturally more prone to it, as we once did. Schizophrenia may finally be on the cusp of that transformation – something truly momentous, given the puzzle this strange and brutal disease has posed for so long. As Bullmore carefully explains, advances in scanning, maths, genomics and immunology have piled up to give us a clearer understanding of the illness. It is probably caused by the abnormal development of brain networks in childhood and adolescence; this, the evidence suggests, happens under the influence of immune dysfunction, and the cause of that is variation in a broad range of genes, interacting in particular ways with the environment. Triggers can include infections, abuse, social stress or drug use. The emerging picture marries biology and experience in a way that was always inevitable, since they are not really divided at all. The task for the next generation is to translate the science into better outcomes in the real world. Given what we now know, prevention, including better health and social services for mothers and young children, should play a major role."

Capitalism by Sven Beckert: an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "In the early 17th century, the Peruvian city of Potosí billed itself as the 'treasure of the world' and 'envy of kings'. Sprouting at the foot of the Cerro Rico, South America’s most populous settlement produced 60% of the world’s silver, which not only enabled Spain to wage its wars and service its debts, but also accelerated the economic development of India and China. The city’s wealthy elites could enjoy crystal from Venice and diamonds from Ceylon while one in four of its mostly indigenous miners perished. Cerro Rico became known as 'the mountain that eats men'. The story of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, contains the core elements of Sven Beckert’s mammoth history of capitalism: extravagant wealth, immense suffering, complex international networks, a world transformed. The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium.... The word 'capitalism' originated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists 'socialism', 'communism' and 'anarchism', but the system was much older. 'Capitalism is a process,' Beckert writes, 'not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end'. He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150. This vibrant trade hub between Asia and the Middle East, in what is now Yemen, was one of several 'islands of capital' which formed a 'capitalist archipelago'. Inventing new trades like accountancy and insurance, its 'strikingly modern' residents were in the vanguard of a global insurgency.... What they needed was the state’s collaboration. This developed during the 'Great Connecting' between 1450 and 1650, when the discovery of the Americas (named after a slave-owning merchant) finally enabled European traders to challenge Asia and the Middle East while making themselves indispensable. In the era of 'war capitalism', new trade routes and territorial seizures triggered conflict, which trade then financed. Colonialism established capitalism’s 'connected diversity'... If Adam Smith was wrong to see capitalism as human nature manifest, then Beckert overcorrects by presenting it as anti-human: a “rogue artificial intelligence”, an invasive species, an alien force, a supernatural hunger. It is insatiable and unkillable. Beckert calls his book an 'actor-centred history' about a phenomenon 'made by people', but it is ultimately a kind of horror story about a monster that eats men."

Converts by Melanie McDonagh: roads to Rome – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene. But there was a whole host of poets, artists and public intellectuals less known to us today, whose “going over to Rome” provoked envy and dismay. In this thoughtful though brisk book, Melanie McDonagh, a columnist for The Tablet, gives us 16 case histories of Britons who went 'Poping' during the scariest decades of the 20th century. At a time when reason and decency appeared to have been chased out by political extremism and global warfare, it was only natural to long for something solid.... Contrary to lurid Protestant fantasies, Catholic priests were not on the hunt for celebrity scalps to 'lure' into their incense-fugged, whiskey-sodden clutches. Again and again, McDonagh’s converts report being taken aback by the way in which their approaches to Brompton Oratory or Chelsea’s Farm Street Church were met with a cool equanimity and slightly humiliating lack of interest.... The aesthetic pleasures of Roman Catholicism also turned out to be largely illusory. Unless attending one of the smart London churches, converts had to get used to worshipping in ugly modern buildings alongside largely working-class congregations.... If you wanted magnificent buildings, glorious hymns, beautiful vernacular liturgy and the sort of clergyman whom you could invite to your club then you would be better off staying with the Established Church. Then there was the inevitable censure. When Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie tartly declared that 'only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics' she was voicing a general prejudice. Also commonplace were charges of moral turpitude (it didn’t help that Wilde, Bosie Douglas, Aubrey Beardsley and many other 1890s decadents had converted). To become a Catholic was to invite suspicion that you were mad, secretly gay or spying for a foreign power. Despite these penalties, few converts seem to have regretted their decision although, as McDonagh points out, it is hard to know for certain."

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are 'AI slop' – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found. The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop. ... The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop.... Bandar Apna Dost, the most-viewed channel in the study, is based in India and now has 2.4bn views. It features the adventures of an anthropomorphic rhesus monkey and a muscular character modelled off the Incredible Hulk who fights demons and travels on a helicopter made of tomatoes. Kapwing estimated that the channel could make as much as $4.25m.... Pouty Frenchie, based in Singapore, has 2bn views and appears to target children. It chronicles the adventures of a French bulldog – driving to a candy forest, eating crystal sushi – many of them set to a soundtrack of children’s laughter. Kapwing estimates it makes nearly $4m a year.... Meanwhile, The AI World, based in Pakistan, contains AI-generated shorts of catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, with titles like Poor People, Poor Family, and Flood Kitchen. Many of these videos are set to a soundtrack called Relaxing Rain, Thunder & Lightning Ambience for Sleep. The channel itself has 1.3bn views.... For some, it’s a living. And while new, attention-grabbing ideas – such as exploding pressure cookers – constantly emerge, when it comes to AI slop, human creativity matters far less than the algorithms that distribute the content on Meta and YouTube. 'These websites are huge A/B testing machines just by their nature,' said [Max Read, a journalist who has written extensively on AI slop.] 'Almost anything that you can think of, you could already find on Facebook. So the question is, how do you find the things that are kind of doing well, and then how do you scale that? How do you make 10 of them?'”

From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet – article by Aisha Down in The Guardian. "In 2024, [AI slop] began to achieve peak cultural moments. Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats. In 2025, the flood continued, growing more uncanny and more explicitly copyright-violating. This spring saw the advent of Ghiblification – that is, a trend in which users from Nayib Bukele to the White House rendered images, including of deportations, in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.... Other AI slop moments followed: a spate of videos of AI-generated obese people participating in the Olympics, pressure cookers exploding, more cats. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the military junta in Burkina Faso, became the centrepiece of an AI slop cult featuring videos of Justin Bieber singing on the streets of Ouagadougou. In some ways, AI slop has improved. Gone – mostly – are the days of six-fingered hands and missing limbs that characterised the output of early image generators. In some ways, though, AI slop has hardly changed at all. It is still uncanny and contextless, still aimed directly at the amygdala, still chasing virality by virtue of having the lowest barriers to entry imaginable: no plot, no exposition, surreal imagery and cats, cats, cats."

Stop thinking – Substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Supernormal stimuli are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli that trigger stronger responses than the original stimuli they’re based on.... The classic example comes from Tinbergen’s experiments with birds. He found that birds would preferentially incubate artificially enlarged eggs or eggs with more vivid markings over their own natural eggs, even though the artificial ones were impractically large. Similarly, baby birds would beg more vigorously for food from fake parent beaks that were larger and more colorful than real ones.... We humans love supernormal stimuli. Think roller coasters. Spicy food. Tear-jerker movies. Public hangings. Pornography. Doomscrolling. – And, most impactful at this exact moment: LLM AIs.... What ChatGPT and the other AIs are doing is hijacking this instinct by performing as a conversational partner who has immediate availability, infinite patience, broad knowledge, whom we can access without the social cost of appearing ignorant, and whose responses are tailored to engage to our specific view of the world. Talking to an LLM entails no social risk, judgment, or interpersonal complexity, yet yields the pleasurable sensation of ideas 'clicking' without the friction of genuine disagreement. Every single one of these qualities is a pressure point vulnerable to supernormal stimulation.... I’m not here to throw LLMs under the bus. Remember, verstand [understanding] is incredibly useful and important. Hegel’s faculty of understanding is what gets us through 99% of our day. Having a tool that can help you do that is worth its weight in gold. It’s the other 1% that really matters, though. This where the Trolley Problems of your real life loom in a world of unexpected problems... That 1% is also where truly new ideas come from... an LLM is not going to help you recognize or generate a thought that is entirely new, since as I said, its ‘thinking’ process relies entirely on the existing connections between ideas. ... When you’re using an AI, picture yourself as a poor hapless bird sitting on a really big, super-speckled ball that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t a real egg. Your real eggs are there, scattered about you – unfinished ideas you can’t even name yet, much less ask some entity about; people who intrigue you but who you don’t know how to approach; movements and religious ideas that have struck a chord in you, but that you don’t know how to engage with. Raise your eyes, and you’ll apprehend a world of liminal things – undefined, unnamed, awaiting your particular mind and experience to render them real for others. Only you can name what’s really fresh in the world. Try moving to a different egg. It may not seem as rewarding at first. But unlike that big shiny one, it might one day hatch."

‘Of course he abused pupils’: ex-Dulwich teacher speaks out about Farage racism claims – article by Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. "It was 1981 and Nigel Farage was turning 17. He was already a figure of some controversy, as would become a lifelong habit, among the younger pupils and staff at Dulwich college in south-east London. 'I remember it was either in a particular English lesson or a particular form period that his name came up,' said Chloë Deakin, then a young English teacher, of a discussion with a class of 11- and 12-year-olds. 'There was something about bullying, and he was being referred to, quite specifically, as a bully. And I thought: "Who is this boy?"' Deakin conferred with colleagues in the staff room who corroborated accounts of harassment of fellow pupils and of Farage’s apparent fascination with the far right, including claims that he had been 'goose-stepping' on combined cadet force marches.... Despite the chatter in the playground and staffroom, Farage was put on a draft list of prefects by the headteacher... 'So when I heard that Farage’s name was on the finalised prefect list, I was appalled and that was why I wrote independently to [the headteacher], because I felt strongly about it – I still do,' Deakin recalled. Deakin’s letter of June 1981, first revealed by the Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick in a report in 2013, is uncompromising. She has never spoken before of this episode with the letter – written after Farage’s 17th birthday – emerging only as a result of her having given a copy of it to a senior teacher at the time, as was the practice at the school. She wrote: 'You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a "fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect" invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room...' The letter concluded: 'You will appreciate that I regard this as a very serious matter. I have often heard you tell our senior boys that they are the nation’s future leaders. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that these leaders are enlightened and compassionate.'... Deakin, now 74,... was not personally acquainted with Farage and did not see or hear his alleged racism and antisemitism, she said. But her memories of boys’ complaints of bullying, the subsequent testimony of the staff, the contemporaneous letter – written by her decades before Farage gained public prominence – and the sheer weight of credible allegations in recent weeks should leave no room for doubt for the public, she said. 'Of course Farage directly abused pupils,' Deakin said. 'His was the only name I recall boys mentioning to me.'”

I knew all about the NHS’s challenges and flaws. But then as a patient, I saw the love and the magic – article by Anne Perkins in The Guardian. "The NHS sits at the heart of politics and for most of my career in journalism, and charting the crises, the numbers, the arguments, the possibilities and the costs was a staple of my work. You can write all that, you can read about all that, but it can feel very different when events dictate that you cross the line from commentator to patient; when, like me, you pitch up as someone who arrives as an emergency, with a condition that might require major surgery and at least a week of post-operative hospital care – or might just go away of its own accord.... At its heart is the sense of a shared destination. It’s like getting on a bus, maybe not the sleekest model and definitely overloaded, but we’re all on the journey together. Everyone who’s seriously and unexpectedly ill comes here. Everyone. You don’t lie in your narrow hospital bed imagining the four-star facilities you might be enjoying if only you had more dosh, because it’s odds on that if it’s an emergency, that person too is just behind the curtain hanging limply to your right....If you haven’t experienced it, it is hard to explain the effect of witnessing this level not only of professionalism and patience, but of love. There are studies that show that for all the criticism and brickbats aimed at the NHS, those who use it most are the most positive about it. When you’re there and watch, you understand.... If we’re here, we’re in the same boat. We are in some way hurt, or we are supporting someone who is hurt, or maybe we’re making good on earlier kindness. It’s not magic. Everyone is still themselves, but softer. Warmer. Maybe even happier. Where else in our angry and atomised nation does this happen?"

Number of people who say Britons must be born in UK is rising, study shows – article by Eleni Courea in The Guardian. "Although a majority of the public still believe being British is rooted in shared values, a growing proportion see it as a product of ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry, according to analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and shared with the Guardian. About one-third of people (36%) thought a person must be born in Britain to be truly British, up from one in five (19%) in 2023, a YouGov poll carried out this month for the thinktank found. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK held the most extreme views of any party backers, with 71% saying that having British ancestry was a prerequisite for someone to be truly British, and 59% saying they believed the nation was an ethnic, not a civic, community. Strikingly, the findings suggest a significant proportion of Farage’s supporters believe being white is an important national characteristic, and that Britain has become too ethnically diverse. More than a third (37%) of Reform UK voters said they would be prouder of Britain if there were fewer people from minority ethnic backgrounds in a decade’s time, and 10% said it was important to have white skin to be a good British citizen."