Cuttings: March 2026

The Price of initiative just collapsed – article by Martha Lane Fox on her Substack, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “We tend to tell the story of printing as if the press arrived and — boom — knowledge spread. That’s true but incomplete…. Even if you could get your hands on a printed Bible, you still needed literacy — and not literacy as we know it: with public schools, clear fonts, and the assumption that the words were for you. You needed the language, the time, and the permission to learn. The technology was astonishing. The interface, for most people, was not.… Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1455. England did not even begin legislating for a national system of elementary education until 1870 — four centuries later, after long arguments over who should learn and what they should be allowed to read. The machine was fast. Everything else — institutions, access, the will to distribute — was slow. Those who could read surged ahead; those who could not were quietly kept in place. [Today] we do not have four centuries to close the gap between technology and society. We may not even have four years. New releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and newcomer Openclaw have blown apart what’s possible in the last 3 weeks…. You only really notice the shift when you give these systems a job you’d normally hand to a competent colleague. Not party tricks, not poems — real work with consequences. The change isn’t that the machines have become mystical; it’s that they’ve crossed the threshold of usefulness. They can now hold context long enough to complete messy, multi-step work — coherent, continuous, close enough to done.… My main lesson? The price of initiative is collapsing. When the cost of trying falls, the number of attempts rises. More prototypes, more internal tools, more strange little experiments that used to die in the ‘too hard / too expensive / not worth it‘ stage. The optimistic version of the future is a broadening of agency: more people able to act on their ideas, not just talk about them. The less comfortable version is that advantage flows to those who adapt fastest — not because they’re smarter or better, but because they compound earlier. They redesign workflows first. They learn what to trust and what to check. They shrink the time between insight and execution. The laggards don’t get a soft landing; they wake up to find the baseline has moved beneath their feet.“

Teacher v chatbot: my journey into the classroom in the age of AI – article by Peter C Barker in The Guardian. "Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English – to help young people become stronger readers, writers and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working as a freelance writer and as a novelist, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But ... what to do about artificial intelligence?... Last spring I started spending 15 hours a week observing a veteran English teacher in a large school in a Chicago suburb... I witnessed all the disruptive effects you read about in articles about AI and the classroom: fully AI-generated papers; AI-hallucinated quotes; tense student-teacher conversations about what exactly was provable. I sat with [my host teacher Emily] while she marked papers and joined her in stressing over ambiguous cases, trying to sort student nonsense from AI nonsense, student improvement from AI-powered polish.... Emily told me that most of the reading she assigned now had to happen in class and that she read much of it aloud, especially toward the beginning of the year. I was shocked. Yes, I’d read countless newspaper features on the 'contemporary reading crisis' but it was still dismaying to encounter the diminished baseline state of teen reading in the wild.... But then I watched Emily read to the class and my spirits lifted.... Shortly after I’d arrived, the younger classes started All Quiet on the Western Front. Students began by expressing disbelief: We’re really reading another whole book? Then, with Emily’s help, they got their bearings: first world war, young German soldiers, trench warfare, the loss of innocence, the psychological toll of daily proximity to death, the disconnect from the home front.... At some point the students stopped complaining and started getting into it: expressing a desire to know how it all turned out, gasping at dramatic turns, wondering aloud, and with feeling, why characters were doing what they were doing. [Back in the UK,] when I devoted class time to reading, it felt great.... I spent a lot of time trying to come up with outside-the-box writing assignments that were so well constructed – so damn interesting, so not the rigidly formulaic essays of yesteryear – that students would feel no desire to skip them... I loved reading these assignments. I loved learning how students understood what we were reading. I loved hearing their music. I loved learning about their relationships to gender, their cultural backgrounds, their neighbourhoods, making notes about my responses. But this love didn’t stop me from worrying.... On my last day of student teaching, I stayed late, grading a pile of my younger students’ work. We’d spent several weeks reading short stories on the complicated relationships we humans have with our teachers, mentors and role models. In place of essays, I’d asked them to write short stories where they plucked characters from across the unit and came up with original scenarios that brought them together in ways that reflected the unit’s themes. ... Overall, I was delighted by the inventiveness and quality of my students’ stories, and the depth of understanding of other authors’ work that they demonstrated.... The hours I spent reading those stories were a joy, and mostly uncomplicated by the AI anxieties that had colonised my mind for so much of the semester. The biggest threat to this joy was the steady stream of solicitations from the ... digital assignment-management tool. Did I want the machine to give me notes on my students’ stories? To grade them for me? To put them in categories based on similarities it detected among them? I didn’t. I wanted to read what my students had written.... Did I clock every single instance of AI cheating? I’m sure I didn’t... But I felt surprisingly at peace.... I picked up my pen, grabbed the next story from the pile, and began to read."

I’ve turned AI into my therapist. The results were pretty disquieting – article by Rhik Samadder in The Guardian. "‘I’ve become a carer to my 82-year-old mother,’ I write. ’Every day brings new problems. I help with hospital appointments, finances, gardening, shopping, home repairs, the council, insurance companies, letters, emails, endless IT problems …’ I’m using ChatGPT as a therapist. Nothing says ’modern mental health’ like crying into a chatbox, after all. Plenty of people are now doing the same – but can it really replace human support? I hope so. I had to stop seeing my therapist because I fell in love with her…. Halfway through its answer, I start crying. It comes up with a seven-point care plan for me, a triage system to prioritise tasks (with categories including medical, admin, shopping, tech and house) and ways to allocate time between them (which are urgent, and which can wait?) It suggests helpful mental reframings, and tips to lower the emotional temperature of interactions. Best of all, it makes me feel seen. ’You’re not failing,’ the AI told me. ’You’re carrying a load that would flatten most people.’ My feelings? Validated. I feel ambivalent about this, however…. Is therapy just about information? This feels like CBT. Incredibly helpful, but incomplete. In my experience, there are more profound therapies that lead to healing. In my experience, that involved a non-judgmental relationship of witness, with an empathetic professional over longer time. I often hear my therapist’s voice in my head; I’ve internalised her wisdom. I think that happens more easily, and more responsibly, between humans…. I have reservations that I can’t shake. A worry about wedges, and thin ends. I think there are processes, certain unbearable pieces of news, forms of loneliness, that should be held in human time and relationship; that should not be addressed in four seconds on a screen. AI does not have thoughts, let alone wisdom. Categorically, mental health should not be in the hands of pattern-predicting software with no accountability or oversight, that could potentially steer someone very wrong. And yet, unfortunately, my experience of being therapised by ChatGPT has been wonderful. Calming and instructive, with a veneer of caring. I think I’m in love.”

I’ve taught thousands of people how to use AI: here’s what I’ve learned – article by Tom Hewitson in The Guardian. "Training teams to use AI at work has given me a front-row seat to a new kind of professional divide. Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all. But there’s a third group. They learn to work with AI critically, treat it like a bright, enthusiastic intern that needs to be managed and supported to do their best work. The difference? It’s rarely technical ability. It’s curiosity. A willingness to experiment, get things wrong, and figure out what AI is actually good at. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. (1) Most people fail with AI because they don’t understand what it actually is.... (2) The people who get the best results treat AI as a skill, not a shortcut.... (3) AI needs direction, feedback and correction – just like people do.... (4) You shouldn’t outsource your judgment to AI – or give it sensitive data.... (5) Ignoring AI won’t stop its impact.... (6) The pace of AI’s evolution leaves no room for slow decisions..."

The left is missing out on AI – article by Dan Kagan-Kans on Transformer website, referenced by John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “'Somehow all of the interesting energy for discussions about the long-range future of humanity is concentrated on the right,' wrote Joshua Achiam, head of mission alignment at OpenAI, on X last year. 'The left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake.'... As a movement, it appears the left has not been willing to engage seriously with AI — despite its potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in ways that would normally make it just the kind of threat, and opportunity, left politics would concern itself with. Instead, the left has, for a mix of reasons good and bad, convinced itself that AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore.... 'Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all,' argued Tyler Austin Harper, the self-described 'leftist, sort of Marxist-skewing' former professor, now The Atlantic staff writer, last summer.... As with many left ideas these days, the autocomplete view of AI is a popular adaptation of the views held by critical academics... In 2023, when chatbots were more toy than tool, AI-as-autocomplete was maybe a defensible position. But now?.. The properties of scale do not often enter the left conversation. Nor do several other factors. Factors such as the likelihood that training a system to predict across millions of different cases forces it to build representations of the world that then, even if you want to reserve the word 'understanding' for beings that walk around talking out of mouths, produce outputs that look a lot like understanding.... Given all this, the fraction of meaning in the autocomplete view of current AI is alarmingly akin to the random, not always incorrect observations about temperature cycles conservatives used to throw around in debates about climate change. In both cases, a debatable description of mechanism is mistaken for proof of (in)significance.... There are many costs of the left-intellectual world not taking AI seriously, and they will be paid by many quarters — with the left first in line.... More concretely, not taking AI seriously might blind the left to its political uses.... Then there are the costs beyond the left — costs to the public and policy. The left’s current stance leads to a focus not on dealing with AI by regulating it wisely or preparing for it but on popping the economic bubble, which here is a baked-in fact of history and not a possibility of the future.... So it’s probably not ideal that just before what might — or might not — be the moment of greatest job dispossession in history, or of democratic dispossession, or worse, or better, part of the group historically most concerned with such things is plugging its ears. What should it be doing instead?... On the near future, Dean W. Ball, until recently one of the White House’s key AI policy writers, is adamant that by not taking AI abilities seriously, the left is going to miss important ways of improving government.... Bores thinks AI offers an opportunity to speed the US to cleaner energy. 'We desperately need to upgrade our electric grid,' he said. 'Now we have a system where you have basically unlimited private capital willing to invest in our electric grid, but the incentives right now are to turn on or buy power privately from old coal or oil places, because it’s just quicker to get approval for that than it is to hook up a renewable source.' As for the far or more exotic futures: what’s the best shape to universal basic income if it’s needed? What if it’s wanted? Can treaties be designed to slow a race to superintelligence and reduce the risk of a catastrophe? What is the ethical view of post-humanism? Hardly any on the left is considering these questions in ways worth agreeing or disagreeing with. Aaron Bastani, the hard left British journalist, is one exception. His 2019 book Fully Automated Luxury Communism envisions the ways technological development could eventually abolish material scarcity and free humanity from toil."

Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu: a powerful memoir of postcolonial unease – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. "[Chigidu] tells two interlinked stories: Zimbabwe’s brutal war of independence, and his own search for belonging in the years that followed. It is a wide-ranging, restless book, passing through Uganda, Rwanda, Ireland and Mexico City. Yet at its centre are Zimbabwe and Britain, 'former colony and metropole', and the unfinished business between them. Chigudu’s parents, who became part of the growing post-independence black middle class, enrol him in elite private schools. There, he acquires what he calls a 'delicate, papery accent', plays 'white people’s sports' and learns the codes of respectability that promise safety but not belonging. He comes to appreciate early on that to be black is to be defined by others. Black Zimbabweans dismiss him as a 'salad' for his adopted white habits (such as eating salad). White Zimbabweans call him a soutpiel, or 'salt penis'; for having one foot in Africa, one in Europe, his genitals '[dangling] in the Mediterranean Sea'. In Britain, a student labels him 'the whitest black man' they know.... Later chapters explore his arrival in Oxford, where he eventually becomes one of about seven Black professors. His private education has equipped him to perform well there, and for a time he does. But after the Rhodes Must Fall movement (which demanded the removal of statues of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes) reaches Oxford, he abandons the role of the compliant academic. His politics harden after he takes part in a farcical debate on colonialism on local news, during which he was accused of spouting 'victimhood drivel'. 'This was my turning point.' Of the Oxford statue of Rhodes targeted by protesters, he declares: 'I now wanted that motherfucker taken down.' Chasing Freedom is an elegant exploration of how political liberation does not always bring freedom for oneself. Chigudu is a Zimbabwean Briton who writes with clarity and authority about the entangled histories of the two nations, his account all the more poignant because it speaks directly to a generation of Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, weary of inherited dogma but unwilling to surrender history to colonial revisionism. It asks what it means to stand up to the past without being trapped by it, and whether a different kind of freedom might still be possible."

Bright and beautiful? The man causing millennial rapture with his school hymn singalongs – article by Fergal Kinney in The Guardian. "James B Partridge’s Primary School Bangers is the hit show that is storming UK arts centres, originally a viral video that has become a defiantly IRL phenomenon. 'It just brings back memories of primary school, sitting in the hall,' enthuses Hayley, 40. She is one of many teachers attending tonight. 'We don’t sing in primary schools much any more,' mourns Katie, 33. She is right: in the 2010s, funding cuts, Conservative policy and a crisis in teacher retention caused an ongoing fall in music at primary level. At her school, children sing just once every three weeks. Some of tonight’s pull is communal. 'You go to a show and you have to sit and watch,' says Frank, 61, 'but you’re actually participating in this, that’s the big difference.' On a stage decked out with gym equipment and blackboard, Partridge – who, in Warwick, the crowd greet in unison with a cheery singsong 'good evening Mr Partridge' – sings and plays the keyboard. He plays on their memories, too, with a tightly scripted show built on reflective interludes about school discos and Sunday night homework.... Partridge is intrigued that below-the-line commenters [for BBC News's TikTok of his Glastonbury performance] were unable to place it on the political spectrum. Some, he says, damned it as 'lefty woke nonsense. Others said it was all the Tories at Glastonbury. You can project whatever you want on to this, if you want to.'.. From the 1970s to the 1990s, he argues, 'people had the same experience in primary schools'. His show is about 'the last era where we grew up without constant access to the internet'.... 'People are going to church less,' observes Partridge, of a show that is 'not religious, but has songs that tell religious stories'. He pitches Primary School Bangers as part of a lineage that includes the BBC’s long-running Singing Together – though that was aimed at children, not their mums and dads. In fact, Partridge’s show is straightforward nostalgia, with broad callbacks to Panda Pops or S Club 7. And despite the show’s professed nostalgia for the overhead projectors that displayed the lyrics (you can buy T-shirts of them), here they are found via QR code. The glowing faces in the audience provide an easy metaphor for nostalgia mediated by phone use."

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI – article by Alice Speri in The Guardian. "American degrees often cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and result in decades of debt, and recent years have seen a freefall in public confidence in US higher education. With the potential for AI to increasingly substitute independent thought, a pressing question becomes even more urgent: what exactly is a university education for? The Guardian spoke with more than a dozen professors – almost all of them in the humanities or adjacent fields – about how they are adapting at a time of dizzying technological advancement with few standards and little guidance. By and large, they expressed the view that reliance on artificial intelligence is fundamentally antithetical to the development of human intelligence they are tasked with guiding. They described desperately trying to prevent students from turning to AI as a replacement for thought, at a time when the technology is threatening to upend not only their education, but everything from the stock market to social relations to war. Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. 'It’s driving so many of us up the wall,' one said. 'Generative AI is the bane of my existence,' another wrote in an email. 'I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.'... Some caution that the humanities will survive – but as a province of the few.... Several professors spoke about concerns that AI will exacerbate a widening divide in US higher education and that small numbers of elite students will have access to a more traditional, largely tech-free liberal arts education, while everyone else has a 'degraded, soulless form of vocational training administered by AI instructors', said [Dora Zhang, Professor at Berkeley]..... Much organizing against AI remains informal and via word of mouth, with faculty-led initiatives like the website Against AI, which offers resources to those trying to shield students from the intellectual ravages of outsourcing elements of their education to a machine.... Several professors noted that they have also begun to see mounting discomfort from students against the technology – and technology’s dominance in their lives overall.... 'I think the current crop of gen Z students are seeing that they are the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment,' said Zhang."

Tech oligarchs reshape humanity while billionaires of old seem quaint – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. "When Bill Gates became the first modern IT mogul to reach the apex of wealth and power in 1992, the world was a very different place. Gates joined the top 10 on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list alongside Japanese, German, Canadian, South Korean and Swedish billionaires, including those with family fortunes from Britain and America. A broad mix of industries was on the list: Retail and media, property management and packaging, an investment firm and a couple of industrial conglomerates. Their fortunes almost added up to $100bn – equivalent to about 0.4% of the US’s GDP that year. The oligarchy has changed drastically since then. Bernard Arnault, of French luxury group LVMH, Amancio Ortega, the Spanish clothing mogul, and Warren Buffett, the US investor, were the only old-school billionaires among the top 10 in 2025. The rest largely made their money from high-tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 amassed over $16trn, which is about 8% of US GDP. This evolution offers a startling reminder of how fast new technologies have revolutionized the world economy over the last quarter-century, and how narrowly this brave new world is sharing the fruits of its prosperity. It raises a critical question: what happens when a narrow clutch of oligarchs at the helm of the technological revolution, sitting at the apex of wealth and power, get to determine the direction of humanity?... Consequential questions, [such as the future direction and effects of AI, being decided] not... through public deliberation or democratic choice [but by this] tight knot of people ... is problematic not just because they are billionaires, untouched by the daily concerns of most humans. Their worldview is embedded in a belief that technology offers the best solution to all of humanity’s challenges, whether social, political, economic, demographic, biological, psychological, environmental, or whatever other dimension one might think of. Their preferred AI-laced future has little space for the humdrum concerns of the all-too-real people who populate the present. It has no patience for slow, messy democratic governance, especially if said governance slows down the path to utopia.... I find myself nostalgic for the billionaires of yore. They seem so harmless from our perch in the present. They made Tetra Paks and sold real estate in Japan. They owned supermarkets. The guys at the helm of our economy today are way scarier. And they aim to transform human civilization as fast as they can."

‘Charismatic and extremely confident’: how to recognise, and handle, a psychopath – article by Emile Saner in The Guardian, on the publication of her book Poisonous People. "In her consulting work, [Leanne Ten Brinke, professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia,] was brought in by a financial advisory company to help assess which hedge fund managers it should trust with its money. 'I was particularly looking for signs that they might be lying, which certainly the company would want to know before handing over millions of dollars. But we were also looking at the personality traits of these individuals.' Several stuck out. At one investor conference, Ten Brinke watched in fascination as one CEO demeaned colleagues and potential clients – which can be a sign of a dark personality. 'Everything had to revolve around him, all attention on him, no one else could get any praise.' He would constantly interrupt people. 'What was so interesting is that the audience was actually really into that. His behaviour seemed to validate perceptions of what kind of personality would succeed in this role, even though our research suggests that these traits actually lead to decreased returns.'... Recognising dark personalities can help us make more informed choices in many areas of life, says Ten Brinke. 'It can be either a "detect and avoid" or a "detect and manage" type of situation, depending on the circumstances.'... It’s important to remember that someone’s personality is a pattern, she says – 'first impressions will only get you so far' – but there are broad behaviours to watch out for. 'If someone interrupts often, but gets really angry if they are interrupted; if they ignore and push personal and professional boundaries.' They can be charismatic, and charming. In romantic relationships, "love bombing" at the start is often a feature.... People with dark personalities can be skilled at deception, but we tend to be quite bad at detecting this... It’s unrealistic, she adds, to avoid everyone with dark personality traits. Instead, for those with lower levels of psychopathy and other negative traits, you can usually manage them.... Having rules – and writing them down or saying them out loud – makes it harder for the person to break or test them, whether this is in a family or work setting.... Rewards can be key.... 'We know that people, especially with psychopathic personalities, are very reward-motivated. Punishment really doesn’t hit them very hard. So you can help to shape their behaviour by rewarding when they do something good.'... It may be wise to look at ourselves – the world does not need more people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits. 'I do think that recognising that we can all become a little bit less manipulative, a little bit more caring, and that all of these things will add up across people and across time, is a hopeful message.'”

How the US far right bought into the myth of white South Africa’s persecution – article by Eve Fairbanks in The Guardian. "There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa – a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities – that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size.... No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania.... Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison. Understanding that Mandela’s liberation meant that white-minority rule was coming to an end, the founders trekked into the desert, bought a disused mining town wholesale and established a colony.... Could people of European descent live in South Africa without relying on people of colour to do manual labour, pump their petrol and clean their houses? In Orania, they stressed, white residents would do such work. Orania’s founders also foresaw a brutal race war, predicting that the population of the town would grow to 10,000 and its ideals would spread across an entire nearby province, drawing in hundreds of thousands.... Lately, the fascination with Orania has spread to the right wing outside South Africa. Starting in the mid-2010s, as Donald Trump was muscling his way on to the political stage, Australian, European and, especially, American conservative commentators began to talk about the town. They, too, portrayed it as thriving – because of the enormous threat they claimed white people faced in the rest of South Africa.... Although it may have been immoral, these South Africans’ story went, white-minority rule had created safe, stable and happy lives for white people. After losing influence, white South Africans became increasingly subject to discrimination, violence and even a so-called white genocide by citizens of colour bent on pursuing revenge.... The problem is that the tale peddled about white South Africans’ historical trajectory isn’t true. They are not, as a group, subject to violent persecution on the basis of their skin colour. As of 2023, white households’ average income remained four and a half times that of Black households. Although South Africa’s devastatingly high crime rate victimises all the country’s inhabitants, white South Africans are overall less likely than Black citizens to be victims of crime. And to many white South Africans, the warped way their country is depicted abroad isn’t even the most important distortion. Spend some time speaking to some of the estimated 4.5 million white people who still live in South Africa – a number that has remained nearly steady since the late 1990s – and most will tell you that they are better off than they were under the white regime that was purportedly designed to protect them."

Fifty years of sexing up tech: Apple’s epic hits and misses – article by Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian. The hits: Apple II (1977)[,] Macintosh (1984)[,] iMac G3 (1998)[,] iPod (2001)[,] iPhone (2007)[.] Misses: Apple III (1980)[,] Macintosh Portable (1989)[,] Newton MessagePad (1993)[,] Apple Pippin (1996)[,] Apple Vision Pro (2024).

I wrote a book about theft and deception, and now AI scams are flooding my inbox – article by Walter Marsh in The Guardian. "My latest book had been out for less than a month when the emails started to arrive. One came from 'Elena', with the tantalising subject line, 'When history flutters its wings and reveals a crime too beautiful to ignore.' Then followed a long, florid message about how it was 'one of those rare true stories that makes you question everything you thought you knew about history, museums, and human obsession. What’s more, she said I had written with 'prose that feels like chasing a butterfly through time graceful, deliberate, and a little dangerous' I don’t know what it says about me that my gut reaction to such gushing praise is suspicion. There were other red flags. A reverse image search of Elena’s profile picture revealed that this smiling woman dressed in white, raising a coffee cup to the camera, was in fact a widely circulated stock image.... As a journalist I’m used to an inbox filled with spam and cold-call pitches. But these emails seemed tailored to me and my work, despite their language and tone bearing the je-ne-sais-quoi-fakeness of a learning language model. Authors like me are being targeted by AI-powered accounts promising exposure and fake reviews – even though my book is about theft and fraud... Scams tend to have a few things in common. First, they play to our emotions. Writing a book is an incredibly emotional undertaking; all that time and effort with no guarantee that anyone will read it, let alone care. Second, they’re a numbers game – you send enough phishing emails and unsolicited phone calls and you’ll eventually snare someone. Where these scams hit differently is the use of language models to customise each email to its mark. This grabs our attention in a way that would have been far too laborious before. I’m lucky to have a publisher, a publicist and enough genuine interest from readers that these emails immediately stick out as inauthentic guff. But I know there are many aspiring authors out there who aren’t in that position, for whom an out-of-the-blue email from someone not only engaging with their work, but wanting to help, is a tempting hook."

Surely if you rule the manosphere, you can be your own boss? These influencers aren’t even that – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "Who wouldn’t want to be an influencer? You’re famous and maybe even rich, just for doing what you’d be doing anyway: working out at the gym, hanging out with your mates and mucking about on the internet. You get paid to say what you think (or are at least sent free stuff), and no one’s telling you what to do. Surely only a sucker would do anything else.... Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary reveals the catch. Though focused on the misogynistic online manosphere, it is equally compelling as a grim look behind the curtain of influencer production, revealing it to be at best shabby and at worst soul-destroying....Going behind the scenes, you see what is absent from the social media highlights and edgy viral clips: life as an influencer is often banal and just as much of a trap as the standard nine-to-five. It is also much harder to get out of. Even the manosphere, characterised in the mainstream as a hotbed of dangerous misogyny, might more accurately be characterised as a large-scale grift, as Theroux told the Guardian.... For many in the manosphere, the misogyny seems almost besides the point. Like racism, homophobia or antisemitism, it serves only as a button to press to generate attention and profit."

The world can't wait – Guardian supporter email by Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor, 18 March 2026. "Having been a foreign correspondent in China, Japan and Latin America for more than 20 years, and now an environment editor based in the Amazon rainforest, I can see how the degradation of truth and nature are so closely entwined.... Extreme weather is causing extreme politics. It is at the roots of rampant inequality and migration pressures which are being weaponised by far-right demagogues.... Meanwhile, tech billionaires, who once promised the internet would usher in a bright new era of super-informed electorates, are now helping would-be dictators push the world towards a new dark age.... Meanwhile, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post – the paper that uncovered the Watergate scandal – has gutted its editorial staff, shutting numerous overseas bureaus, and is laying off at least 14 of its climate journalists.... It is no coincidence this is happening at exactly the same time that the US administration is trying to shut down or dramatically curtail the world’s leading climate science institutions... Meanwhile, the White House continues its strategy of diverting attention away from scandals by 'flooding the zone' with fabricated controversies.... I believe this wider assault is happening because those with power and money fully understand the world is in very great danger of a climate and nature apocalypse. Despite denials of the scientific proof, the actions of Trump and the coterie around him are consistent with people who realise destructive change is underway. That is why they want Greenland and Canada. That’s why they are building up the military and raising walls. That’s why they are trying to prevent people from realising what is happening by attacking science and journalism. And it is why they are distracting the public by ramping up hate campaigns against migrants."

A bookplate for every genre – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Five cut-out-and-keep bookplates. Sci-Fi: Nanotechnology tracks the book, monitors its condition and summons a retrieval drone if necessary. Horror: An ancient curse creates feelings of unease, rising to appalling abject horror unless the book is returned. Romance: Acts as an invite to the county's grandest ball, but revoked if not returned in a polite and timely manner. Crime: Tailed by a dishevelled gumshoe, who seems cynical, but loves books more than dames and bourbon. Fantasy: A fellowship of heroes lead the borrower on an epic quest to return the book to its rightful shelf."

Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them by Liam: a surprisingly original prescription – review by Andy Beckett in The Guardian. "At first glance, the former New Labour minister Liam Byrne is not the ideal person to explain the rise of rightwing populism in Britain and beyond, and how it might be stopped... Across the west, actual and potential populist voters are often motivated by myths: for example, that immigration to Britain is rising, when in fact it is falling. Suggesting, as Byrne does here, that centrist parties can win back these voters with policies that accept some of the populist worldview – rather than seeking to challenge its fantasies and prejudices – feels at best optimistic, and at worst dangerously naive. And yet, as his book gallops along, it soon becomes clear that in between its unconvincing stretches are others in which populism is considered with more rigour and originality. Byrne neatly lays out the movement’s paradoxes and hypocrisies. It’s against elites, but led and funded by the rich. It presents itself as a mass uprising, but relies on low turnouts for much of its electoral success. It talks a lot about freedom, but its policies are authoritarian. It promises a glorious future, but its social vision is 'soaked in the brandy of nostalgia' – one of several rich and irreverent images with which Byrne decorates his chapters.... A particularly free-ranging and useful chapter looks at the language and themes of populism’s public messaging.... Byrne is refreshingly interested in the world beyond Westminster orthodoxies. Although only up to a point. Without explicitly saying so or explaining why, the book treats populism as an essentially rightwing phenomenon. Leftwing populism barely features despite its promise and achievements, from Zohran Mamdani in New York to Zack Polanski’s rising Green party. Nor does Byrne consider whether the radical left in general has a part to play against rightwing populism – by mobilising on the streets, for example. Britain has seen large and regular anti-racist and anti-fascist protests since Reform began its current surge. These blind spots are revealing. Leaving the left out of the story enables centrists, even relatively open-minded ones such as Byrne, to downplay the role of increasing inequality in populism’s rise – an inequality that centrist governments and their corporate allies have done little to challenge, or actively worsened. Seeing populism as driven by traditional patriotism, cultural conservatism and anger at the decline of 'left behind' places is not wrong, and Byrne explains these factors well. But this perspective conveniently minimises its economic causes, which are more uncomfortable for mainstream political and business elites to think about, because they are still invested in the economic status quo."

The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism – article by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian. "Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime. The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism. Three popular recent candidates are the overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022, #MeToo, and the Epstein files. Let’s first remember that the US is not the whole world. There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on – the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.... Things change. They change for the better because we make them change, or for the worse because we don’t show up or lose the battle. But if you forget the sheer profundity of the changes of the last several decades, you can mourn what the right is trying to do to pretty much everything from the climate to women’s rights without seeing that what they’re really trying to do is change things back, to return to their version of the good old days that for a lot of us were the bad old days. That’s a reminder that we changed a lot of things, and the fact that they’re not happy about it should feel like confirmation that these changes matter.... Don’t stop now."

Talk is precious: in the age of communication collapse, Jürgen Habermas’s message remains vital – article by Eva von Redecker in The Guardian. "Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school [but] a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the 'thumbs down' or 'blocking' exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it. Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation.... As his early writings make clear, Habermas was faithful to the Marxist endeavour of finding progressive forces in history as it was actually unfolding. But he did not think that technological development or growth in production held any residues of reason, something that his teachers, too, had already started to suspect. Habermas thus settled for a human capacity other than productive labour, namely communication.... Whatever it takes to redeem history has to be right there, within it. Perhaps our age of nihilism, disinformation and AI slop lends new credibility to that idea. If communication breaks down, there is little left other than the proto-fascist 'might is right'. And Habermas was anything but blind to the possibility of such breakdowns. One of his major, two-volume works, the 1981 Theory of Communicative Action, maps in thorough detail how systems mediated by non-verbal powers – such as the market and bureaucratic rationalisation – can override the negotiation possible in what he calls the 'lifeworld'. Only the lifeworld – family, civil society, education – is at least in principle organised in a communicative way, and can thus answer to moral demands.... At least according to Habermas, we misunderstand what communication is if we do not accept that besides all strategic aims, it also seeks to establish a certain shared understanding. And that understanding, again more in principle than actuality, can be described as a non-coercive consensus. The test for morality is whether it could achieve such approval by anyone concerned. Most actual utterances fail the test, but if language lost all aspiration to reach understanding, communication would break down, even if words kept being uttered. Maybe it has. And yet, dear reader, aren’t we still communicating?"

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026): A Critical Appreciation – article on Explaining History Podcast website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Habermas’s ... The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) ... reconstructed the historical emergence of a 'bourgeois public sphere' in eighteenth-century Europe. In coffee houses, salons, and literary societies, private individuals gathered to debate matters of public concern, subjecting state authority to rational criticism. This sphere was not a place but a practice: reasoned debate among participants bracketing social status, oriented toward consensus rather than strategic advantage. The public sphere, Habermas argued, mediated between civil society and the state. It transformed subjects into citizens by creating a space where public opinion could form through rational-critical debate.... The book then traced this sphere’s decline in the twentieth century. Mass media, corporate power, and the interventionist welfare state transformed the public from active participants into passive consumers.... Theory of Communicative Action (1981) ... distinguished two fundamental forms of action that correspond to different dimensions of social life. Instrumental action concerns manipulating the objective world to achieve goals. It follows technical rules and strategic calculation. This is the logic of work, technology, and what Habermas called 'systems'—most importantly, the market economy and state bureaucracy. Systems coordinate action through impersonal media: money and power. They operate independently of participants’ conscious intentions, following their own logic. Communicative action concerns reaching understanding with others. It operates in the 'lifeworld'—the shared background of cultural meanings, social norms, and personal identities that makes mutual understanding possible. When we engage in communicative action, we raise implicit validity claims: that our statements are true (corresponding to facts), right (appropriate to normative contexts), and sincere (expressing genuine intentions). Successful communication depends on these claims being accepted, at least provisionally.... Pathology arises when system logic 'colonizes' the lifeworld—when money and power replace understanding as the medium of social integration. A family governed by market calculation ceases to be a family. A citizen treated as a consumer of state services ceases to be a citizen. Social movements, from feminism to environmentalism to regional autonomy movements, can be understood as resistance to this colonization: attempts to defend ways of life against bureaucratic and market imperatives. This framework gave Habermas a way to diagnose contemporary social conflicts without reducing them to class struggle or irrational backlash. It also preserved the critical impulse of Marxism while abandoning its economic determinism and revolutionary teleology.... Any serious assessment must acknowledge substantial critiques of Habermas’s work that have accumulated over decades. From within critical theory, some argue his 'linguistic turn' abandoned the earlier Frankfurt School’s focus on material domination and economic structure. By privileging consensus and mutual understanding, he may underestimate irreconcilable social antagonisms. Class conflict, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression are not resolvable through better argument alone—they are built into the structure of society and require structural transformation, not just improved communication."

Restraining and sedating dementia patients ‘routine’ in hospitals in England, study finds – article by Tobi Thomas in The Guardian. "People with dementia are being subjected to restraints and non-consensual sedation while in hospitals in England, according to the first study of its kind. These restrictive practices were found to be an embedded aspect of routine ward care', according to the analysis, with such examples including dementia patients having their bedside rails raised, doors and pathways blocked by furniture, experiencing verbal commands to sit down or go back to bed, and physical interventions such as non-consensual sedation. The report, by academics at the University of West London, involved analysis of 225 days of ethnographic observation across nine NHS wards in England alongside more than 1,000 interviews with healthcare professionals. They also found that many hospital staff did not see these practices as being restrictive due to their routine use throughout NHS wards, with staff questioning how else they could care for patients with dementia to keep them safe without harming themselves or others."

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ – article by Ashifa Kassam in The Guardian. "The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. 'My job is to make things shitty,' the man explains. 'The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.' The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the 'enshittification', or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.... Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term ... refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents. In late February, in a campaign that is believed to be the first of its kind, the publicly funded Norwegian council joined forces with more than 70 groups and individuals across Europe and the US, including trade unions and human rights organisations."

A photo of Iran’s bombed schoolgirl graveyard went viral. Why did AI say it wasn’t real? – article by Tess McClure in The Guardian. "The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll. But is it real? Ask Gemini, the AI service powered by Google, and the answer you receive is no – in fact, Gemini claims the photograph is from two years earlier and more than 2,000km (1,240 miles) away.... Like Gemini, Grok will breezily assure you the photo is not from Iran at all – although it lands on a different date, disaster and location.... In both cases, the AI answers sound sure: they don’t equivocate, and even provide 'sources' for the original image, should you choose to check them. Follow the thread to examine those, however, and you’ll begin to hit dead ends: either the image doesn’t appear at all, or the link provided is to a news report that doesn’t exist. For all their impression of clarity and precision, the AIs are simply wrong. The cemetery image, it turns out, is authentic. Researchers have cross referenced the photo of the site with satellite images that confirm its location, and it can be cross-referenced again with dozens more images taken of the same site from slightly different angles, and again with video footage – none of which experts say show signs of tampering or digital manipulation. The 'factchecks' by Gemini and Grok are just one example of a tidal wave of AI-generated slop – hallucinated facts, nonsense analysis and faked images – that are engulfing coverage of the Iran war. Experts say it is wasting investigative time and risks atrocities being denied – as well as heralding alarming weaknesses as people increasingly rely on AI summaries for news and information."

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying – article by Kevin T Baker in The Guardian. "On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.... Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.... The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about... The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility.... But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody was going to. ... In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does. It has also occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an 'AI problem' gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide."

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government – article by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "Minutes after [Trump's inauguration] ceremony began, programmers working for Doge requested access to the computer systems of the US Office of Personnel Management. Within half an hour, they had taken possession of files with information about millions of federal workers. Days later, they also gained the authority to send out an email to all federal employees from a single address. They used this power to make the same offer in the same language (subject line: fork in the road) that Musk had made at Twitter years earlier: quit with paid leave or face the likelihood of getting fired.... The logic of deletion was clearest in zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the method that Musk embraced at both Twitter and Doge. Invented in the 1960s, ZBB forced every department to justify each expense anew rather than carrying budgets forward. Long dismissed as unworkable, by 2024, Silicon Valley firms were claiming that new technology had finally made ZBB feasible. Manually analysing and justifying each budget item was terribly time-intensive. But with large language models (LLMs) and AI accounting tools, this process could be performed automatically. Budgets could be rebuilt by bot.... Zero-based budgeting rarely succeeds in cutting costs. Its real effect, in Musk’s hands, was the concentration of power. His approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data – whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff or illegitimate people – could simply be deleted. What Doge sought to automate, the media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was 'not paperwork but democratic decision-making'. Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.... The kind of total digital unification envisioned by Doge was unprecedented. It found its most ambitious expression in the attempt to make all taxpayer data – including names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns and employment information – accessible from one portal.... Doge’s endpoint was governance by AI: the state not as a space of deliberation but as lines of executable code. Musk reinforced the conceit with a 'tech support' T-shirt at cabinet meetings, presenting his role in apolitical terms. But the project was deeply political. Doge’s dream of data omniscience went beyond cost-benefit analysis or software modernisation – those had been mantras of earlier administrations. For Doge, the hunt for 'waste, fraud and abuse' blurred seamlessly into the hunt for illegitimate people: irregularities to be deleted. Muskism was not just about trimming budgets. Scaled to society, it meant purging those deemed out of place... Seen one way, Doge exposed the limits of Muskism as a mode of governance. Companies can treat workers as disposable units because the surrounding state guarantees their basic existence. Musk had ruthlessly deleted workers at his own companies and made deft use of labour law’s loopholes, but in seeking to make real cuts at Doge, he collided with the fragile contract at the core of American life – misleadingly called 'entitlements', but better understood as the survival infrastructure for many millions of people. As Americans vented their anger at feared or actual loss of access to social security and Medicare benefits, Musk’s reputation suffered. Musk had imagined Doge as the realisation of the dream of reactionary technocracy, in which engineers disciplined society like a factory floor. But society is not a factory. It encompasses children, elderly people, disabled people, the geographically stranded – the very categories of life that markets define as surplus. In trying to impose a cyborg logic of optimisation, Musk discovered that humans were not programmable units, and that the public sector’s role is precisely to provide goods that the private sector can’t or won’t. The conflation of codebase, company and state didn’t work."

Solidarity by Rowan Williams: what does it really mean to stand by someone? – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "You don’t need to scroll far down a social media feed to find someone expressing 'solidarity' for the victims of cruelty or injustice. A show of solidarity feels more emphatic than expressing support or sympathy. As Rowan Williams argues, it can act as 'a moral intensifier', positioning us squarely alongside the victim. It can also be a declaration of innocence, a way of distancing ourselves definitively from the perpetrators and their guilt. Williams wants to move us beyond this idea of solidarity as unequivocal identification. He has some sharp things to say about 'empathy' as a modern solve-all, when it too often serves the needs of 'a clamorous self' that 'cannot bear the idea of a real stranger'. True solidarity, he argues, is less a virtue to be cultivated than a human condition to be acknowledged. It requires us to accept two stubborn truths: first, that we can never identify completely with someone else, because we are inescapably separate from them in mind and body; and second, that we are innately social beings, linked to each other by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity. For Williams, then, solidarity is hard work. It takes time and emotional labour to recognise our fellow humans, in both their implacable otherness and their commonality with us."

‘We don’t tell the car what it should do’: my ride in a self-driving taxi – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Riding in a self-driving car for the first time is a little like your first flight in an aeroplane: borderline terrifying for a few seconds, then reassuringly unremarkable. At least, that is my experience. By the time I step out, 20 minutes later, I’m convinced Wayve is a better driver than most humans – better than me, anyway. Other Londoners will soon be able to judge for themselves, because these robotaxis are coming to town. Since the passage of the Automated Vehicles Act in 2024, the UK government has been working to approve self-driving taxis by the end of next year. Wayve, in partnership with Uber, will be at the starting line, as will the US giant Waymo and the Chinese company Baidu, among others. London may never be the same again.... Wayve aces our driving test.... When a man with a walking stick approaches a zebra crossing, the car slows to a halt before he steps on to it. 'We don’t tell the car what it should do; it learns the body language,' [say Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve,] as we sit and watch. Several other people walk past the crossing, but the car can see that they’re not going to cross. This is how Wayve’s AI differs from other versions, Kendall says as we start moving again. 'It’s got a sense of being able to predict how the world works, how to predict risk and safety. It’s actually understanding the dynamics of the scene.' London’s roads throw everything they can at us: confusing double roundabouts; narrow roads with cars coming in the opposite direction. When another driver flashes their lights, our car understands they’re letting us go first. Kendall never touches the steering wheel or any other controls, but, for now, there has to be a human behind the wheel."

Chain of Ideas by Ibram X Kendi: anatomy of a conspiracy theory – review by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "The central thesis is that the ideological origins of what Kendi terms 'our authoritarian age' lie in the so-called 'great replacement theory'. This is defined as 'a political theory that powerful elites are enabling peoples of colour to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms of White people, who now need authoritarian protection'.... Crucially, great replacement theory is not a single concept but a chain of interlocking ideas. The idea that racism against peoples of colour is over is connected to the idea that anti-white racism is on the rise, which is connected to the idea that insurrections against democracy protect the nation and so on. These ideas are easily challenged when looked at in isolation; it is their interconnectedness that gives the great replacement theory its emotional resonance.... One interesting aspect of modern politics is how many prominent people from marginalised or minority identities are at the helm of rightwing parties.... 'The more the sexism, homophobia, and racism of their parties turns off voters, the more great replacement parties will turn to women, gay people, and people of colour to lead their parties – for proximity denial.' Great replacement theory, you see, presents itself as reasonable and respectable. It goes to great pains to cast off accusations of extremism."

Young people are longing for the low-tech 90s, and so would I, if I could only remember them – article by Emma Beddington in The Guardian. "'People have to start going 90s,' according to the content creator Mike Sheffer. In other words: leave your phone at home. 'In the 90s no one had cellphones,' Sheffer explains, helpfully, on a reel I saw on Instagram, in which he describes how he and his friends do this, using it as a challenge to be in the moment and invite serendipity. 'Things just happen,' he says. 'There’s a different energy.' Ah yes, the serendipitous 90s energy of arranging to meet someone 'under the clock at M&S' and hanging around for 40 minutes when they didn’t show, of trudging dangerous miles home late at night thanks to transport fails (several comments on Sheffer’s reel highlighted the safety angle), or of forgetting your keys and spending hours locked out... You can see this nostalgia for a time they didn’t know as a depressing indication of how unpalatable the future looks, but a counterargument says it might be future-facing. 'Perhaps they are productively focusing their nostalgia on a technological era before they were alive,' theorised the social psychologist Dr Clay Routledge in the New York Times, citing research that indicated gen Z were 'mining the past to enrich their present lives – especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living'.... I don’t remember the 90s. Not because I partied like it was 1999 ... but because I’m a confused, hormonally depleted husk, addled by overexposure to a digital culture my analogue brain struggles to process. I need a diary reminder to put on deodorant; obviously I have no idea what 1992 was like.... Ah well. Isn’t memory just a story you tell yourself, anyway? I’ve concluded that 'the 90s' has become an imaginative construct, and that means it can be as much gen Z’s as ours. So good luck to kids vibe-mining our forgotten youth for 'going 90s' inspo: Mandela and the macarena; CDs and landlines; discovering stuff without algorithmic prompting; things just happening; having the freedom to screw up unobserved."

I have stage four cancer, there will be no cure, but death isn’t necessarily imminent: this is how it feels to live in the long middle – article by Janis Chen in The Guardian. "I am not a 'survivor' in the triumphalist sense of the word, nor am I imminently dying. I occupy the long middle – a rarely charted territory where the body remains fragile, treatment constant, and life does not so much move forward as stubbornly persist. This liminal state is a distinctly modern byproduct of a medical revolution.... While median survival is now measured in years rather than months, we are seeing the emergence of 'super-responders' navigating their second decade post-diagnosis. As a psychologist, I view this not just as a medical victory but as a profound existential shift: we have replaced the suddenness of the cliff with the tenuous permanence of the high ridge. Such a progression has inadvertently birthed a new demographic: the 'chronically terminal'. We occupy an interstitial space, standing in the spectre of what is destined to take us, yet still burdened with the responsibility of being within the world. This surreal duality compels us to face our finitude while tending to the unsentimental task of deciding which relationships are still worth the oxygen they require. There is a dark incongruity to this way of living. We know our horizon with terrifying clarity, but we are still subject to the same randomness as the healthy – the theoretical bus that might strike tomorrow. But for those of us in the long middle, that bus is already idling in the driveway.... We rarely speak of the psychological tax of persistence, of the unseen labour required to carry on when the tank is empty. Viewed as such, my illness is a visible manifestation of a universal struggle: the constant, weary negotiation between what the body can endure and what the world demands. Living with stage four lung cancer has taught me that strength is not a metric of productivity or a narrative of 'recovery'. It is found instead in staying present within a life that no longer fits the frantic success stories we are sold. In a culture that fetishises the loud 'bounce-back', choosing to live gently, attentively and on one’s own terms is an act of quiet defiance. The long middle is not a waiting room, nor a preamble to a finish line; it is a demanding, vibrant and profoundly human place to be alive."

Cambridge offers botany course that inspired Darwin after rare archive uncovered – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin and qualified him to work as a naturalist on HMS Beagle have been unearthed from an archive in Cambridge and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany. The fragile specimens, ink drawings and watercolour illustrations of plants belonged to Darwin’s teacher and mentor, Prof John Stevens Henslow, and have been stored in Cambridge University’s herbarium for nearly 200 years... When Darwin arrived in Cambridge in 1828, he became one of the first students to attend Henslow’s groundbreaking five-week course....Henslow took Darwin and his fellow students on 'herborising excursions' into the Cambridgeshire fens and taught them how to identify, categorise and collect plants, while systematically observing the adaptations of different plant species to their environment. This formed Darwin’s introduction to the scientific study of botany and the insights that rigorous collection of empirical data could offer about the natural world. He later described Henslow as having 'influenced my whole career more than any other'. [Cambridge University Botanic Garden (CUBG)] is reviving the spirit and content of Henslow’s teaching by launching a four-week summer course in botany aimed at internal and external undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic researchers and professionals working in ecology, horticulture, conservation or related fields. During the course, students will be taught about botany using the original teaching materials and hands-on techniques Henslow used to teach Darwin in the 1820s, as well as field excursions to the kinds of habitats Darwin visited in the Cambridgeshire countryside. 'Botany has all but disappeared as a stand-alone undergraduate degree in the UK, and that creates a real gap in how people are trained to understand plants,' said Prof Sam Brockington, CUBG curator. 'Even in plant science laboratories, we increasingly find otherwise talented students who don’t have the language or conceptual framework to describe plant form and diversity.'”

What AI Hypists Miss – article by Francis Fukuyama on the Persuasion website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20 percent per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone. I happen to know something about the latter issue. I’ve been teaching cases over the past decade on why South Asian cities like Hyderabad and Dhaka have struggled with providing municipal water. The reason isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems. And this points to a central conceit that plagues the whole AI field: a gross overestimation of the value of intelligence by itself to solve problems.... Many of the enthusiasts hyping AI’s capabilities think of policy problems as if they were long-standing problems in mathematics that human beings had great difficulties solving, such as the four-color map theorem or the Cap Set problem. But math problems are entirely cognitive in nature and it is not surprising that AI could make advances in that realm. The people building AI systems are themselves very smart mathematically, and tend to overvalue the importance of this kind of pure intelligence. Policy problems are different. They require connection to the real world, whether that’s physical objects or entrenched stakeholders who don’t necessarily want changes to occur.... AI may move faster on a cognitive level, but it may not be able to solve implementation problems more quickly than in previous historical periods."

Cuttings: February 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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