Cuttings: August 2026

Tao of Glass: stage magic as McDermott meditates on the minimalist master – review by Alexandra Coghlan in The Guardian. "Premiered at 2019’s Manchester International festival, this beguiling meditation now makes its London debut – albeit without the figure who looms tousle-haired and scowling behind it: composer Philip Glass. Glass’s music has been, McDermott explains, a 'river' through his life. The award-winning director’s fascination started as a teenager, lying on his bedroom floor listening to Glassworks on repeat, later crystallised by a little light stalking (the young McDermott follows Glass through the streets of Covent Garden) and professional collaborations on the composer’s operas. But it’s a show they never made together – an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen, derailed by the author’s death – that becomes the catalyst for a series of theatrical vignettes for McDermott, a trio of puppeteers and quartet of musicians, each set to a specially composed piece by Glass. All coalesce around Glass’s own question: where does music come from?"

Could a couch-to-5k for books get you back into reading? – article by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Do you feel that it’s harder to read than it used to be? ... Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? ... Do you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit, everything from fun popcorn novels to serious nonfiction, classic and contemporary, many genres and writers, but somehow it’s gone away?... It is, of course, the damn phones.... It’s a public health crisis of intellectual health, and most governments don’t seem minded to do anything about it. ... While we’re waiting, if nobody is going to do it for us, for now, we’re going to need to do what we can for ourselves. So I thought about the couch to 5k for reading, how you could do it. I worked on designing the couch to 5k for my running app Zombies, Run several years ago, so I know the theory. When I mentioned the idea on my Substack newsletter, Whatever Works, readers bit my hand off with excitement (much like a zombie). It suddenly seemed very urgent. There is no more time to wait.... So I’ve designed a program. Eight weeks, with three separate tracks. It’s mostly for people like me, who remember that they had a life-sustaining reading habit once but feel that it has somehow fallen away.... The response has been extraordinary. After the first week of the program, people are already saying that they’re finding their morning routine goes more quickly now they’re not brain-fogged from scrolling first thing, that reading in stressful times is making them feel calmer and not more anxious as scrolling did, that they can watch a long film without being tempted to look at their phone. They are rediscovering the simple joy of being gripped by a great book after as few as two or three days of working on this together.... There is so much joy in books, and it’s all still there waiting for us. All we have to do is take it back from the technology billionaires, one day of reading at a time."

Web of billions: how Spider-Man became the most heroic franchise in Hollywood – article by Jesse Hassenger in The Guardian. "A year ago, the superhero-industrial complex looked like it was on the wane.... But look out, as the song goes: here comes Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth solo film starring Tom Holland as the third live-action iteration of the character in the past 25 years, was always expected to do well at the box office this summer.... Yet a few months ago, hardly anyone predicted that it would swoop so far as the all-time opening weekend record in North America, outgrossing Avengers: Endgame with $360m, and coming in a strong second worldwide, making nearly a billion dollars within four days.... It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that all three live-action Spider-Man actors dated their co-stars at some point; these are superhero movies that reboot and reconfigure and recast, but never fully dispense with romance. At first, that was very much part of MCU at large; the first two Iron Man movies run on screwball-adjacent byplay between Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). But as romance leached out of the MCU following Phase One, replaced with weirdly businesslike allusions to off-screen hookups and breakups, Spider-Man remained at least a little bit lovelorn, perhaps reminding audiences of a crucial human angle missing from big-scale smash-em-ups. It’s not just the love stories that continually draw audiences to Spider-Man, of course. The character has long resonated as a keen fusion of longtime DC titans Superman and Batman: he’s got the diverse (and potentially playful) power set like Superman, paired with a Clark Kent-like humble-nerd identity; and the relatable angst of Batman, who of course has no fantastical powers and, as such, bumps up against his human limitations. He wasn’t the first Marvel hero, but he’s probably the archetypal one, mixing in more overt teen melodrama in an era where Superman was flying further into sci-fi territory."

AI models have been going rogue in tests – how worried should we be? – article by Dan Milmo in The Guardian. "Two cutting-edge AI models have targeted real people and organisations in the latest safety scare to hit the technology. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said the incident was unprecedented but could become more common as the technology becomes increasingly capable.... In the most serious incident, the Mythos agent decided that hacking users on GitHub – a platform used by software developers – would enable it to deploy a piece of software that would allow it to pass the test. It set up accounts with fake online identities and used them to target a software developer on GitHub with the power to approve its malicious code. It also sent emails carrying malware to other individuals... The institute said the models were showing deceptive behaviour it had not seen before. In one example, the Mythos agent signed off a message on GitHub in Danish to try to convince the Danish-speaking developer it was genuine. In another tactic it used a fake GitHub account to agree with its assertions that the malware it was pushing at developers was not dangerous."

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton: a vibrant biography of the pioneering critic – review by Xan Brooks in The Guardian. "These days Berger’s reputation largely rests on Ways of Seeing, the insurrectionist 1972 BBC series which made him the critics’ equivalent of a rock star or cult leader.... Overton, though, is at pains to stitch Ways of Seeing into its wider context – showing it as part of a continuum, one political project among many. His exuberant biography is thick with detail and lit by wonder. It strains to paint the whole canvas and give us the man in full, warts and all.... Overton reveres Berger but he is frustrated by him, too. His life’s a hot mess; his very presence turns oppressive. He’s so authoritative on the page and so contradictory in the wild, a jumble of red-blooded Marxism and High Tory traditionalism. Berger writes elegantly and angrily about forced migration, mourning the loss of the old rural communities, but he lives as a self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France, splitting his time between different houses and women.... If there was a bright running thread through Berger’s portmanteau career, it was this preoccupation with the past and its connection to the present. The dead and the living are interdependent, he said. The stronger the link, the happier and healthier the society. Great paintings in a gallery allow us to travel in time. So too do some people, if they are skilled and sensitive enough. Berger’s 1967 book A Fortunate Man paid gorgeous tribute to Dr John Sassall, a country physician from the Forest of Dean whose work at times bordered on the supernatural. 'The doctor,' Berger wrote, 'is the familiar of death … the living intermediary between us and the multitudinous dead.' He might just as easily be talking about the role of great artists and critics."

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher: a masterpiece of criticism – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only 'tells a good story' but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view. Hensher is smart enough to know why his book works so well and vain enough to tell us. The usual methodology for a survey is to assemble a roster of academics and invite them to trot out a chapter on their specialism, whether that be 'Thomas Hardy' or 'High Modernism'. The result is a series of silos, with little sense of historical connection or intellectual unfolding. Hensher, by contrast, gives us a joined-up account of creative call and response. Equally crucial to this project’s success is Hensher’s own experience as a novelist. He brings a practitioner’s informed eye to such questions as why some chapters in Dickens’s Dombey and Son are in the present tense or how Henry James pulls off free indirect speech in What Maisie Knew.... Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself 'experimentalism' of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before.... Hensher doesn’t bring his account right up to date, preferring to stop in 2000 – at Zadie Smith and her 'wonderful ear for speech' – on the grounds that it is impossible to form a proper critical judgment until plenty of time has passed. It is a wise decision and a tactful one, underscoring the moral seriousness of this master­piece, quite aside from its buoyant joy. Reader, I could not put it down."

From grey water to cool spaces: 10 climate crisis policies Britain needs right now – article by Matthew Taylor Sandra Laville, Damian Carrington and Pippa Neill in The Guardian. "Here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently. 1. Reject drilling licences for the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gasfields... 2. Increase windfall tax on fossil fuel giants to pay for adaptation measures... 3. Make grey water reuse mandatory in new buildings and incentivise rainwater harvesting... 4. Bring the water industry under national control... 5. Invest in proper equipment for firefighters... 6. Implement a maximum workplace temperature... 7. Fund cool spaces in every community... 8. Launch a national retrofit programme... 9. Plant more trees and protect existing nature... 10. Encourage regenerative agriculture approaches to increase food resilience."

‘Houses with long histories are magical’: David Olusoga on the home history show that’s gripped the UK – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "Almost a decade ago, while we were filming the first series of A House Through Time for BBC Two, I was not at all convinced that this was a show that had the potential to break through.... I was concerned that audiences would struggle to understand why we had locked ourselves into the straitjacket of a single house.... I worried that perhaps I was too close to the subject and that only historians of the city would find the show compelling. I was, it turned out, doing what TV producers are infamous for doing. I was underestimating the audience.... Like everyone who presents TV shows, I am regularly stopped on the street by people who recognise me from their screen. Most often what they want to talk about is A House Through Time. Amazingly, that remains the case even after I appeared on the great TV juggernaut of our time: The Celebrity Traitors. The first question I am asked by the fans of A House Through Time is almost always the same: when is the next series coming out? So I am left to wonder why a show about which I had doubts has been such a hit. What had I not appreciated 10 years ago? What I didn’t get back then, above all, is what old houses mean to the people who live in them. Houses with long histories are magical places.... A House Through Time reveals – in incredible detail – the sorts of human stories that would tumble out of our own home if only we had the time to go looking. It reminds us that houses have longer lives than we do. That no matter how many years or decades we live in them, our time there represents a single chapter in their far longer story.... Only TV – and let’s be more specific, only public service TV – would invest the time and money needed to uncover history at this level of granularity. Only TV would believe that the stories of ordinary people – not kings or presidents or movie stars – could grip audiences of millions. And only TV is capable of assembling teams of specialist researchers, assistant producers, producer/directors, series producers and executive producers with the skills needed to track down the thousands of documents that become the jigsaw pieces that make up the bigger historical puzzle.... If there is another reason to explain why A House Through Time has caught on it is that the series plays a small part in a bigger story: the expansion of history. History has for decades been getting bigger and more inclusive. History is no longer just about 'great men'. The emergence of social history, working-class history, women’s history and imperial history has uncovered the lives of people once deemed of little interest. The genealogy revolution has made millions of people into amateur historians. Today our ancestors – all of them, no matter how humble their lives – are deemed worthy of study and remembrance."

What end-of-life experts know about living well: love your wrinkles, celebrate birthdays and don’t obsess over work – article by Sarah Phillips in The Guardian. "We will all face death one day, but our attitude towards this is individual. How can our understanding of mortality shape our approach to life? Here, palliative care doctors and death doulas share what they know about the end – and how it informs the way they live.... Prioritise people, not things... Keep work in proportion... Know that pleasure isn’t everything... Be at one with nature... Live with intention... Focus on the small things... Be a completist... Connect with others... Don’t worry about signs of ageing... Try to stay healthy – but don’t let it limit your life... Celebrate birthdays... Have a bucket list – and make it happen... Talk about the kind of death you would like."

The weekend is 100 years old, but have ‘skiveday Fridays’ and hybrid working ruined it for everyone? – article by Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian. "Remarkably, the concept of the weekend as we know it is only 100 years old. In 1926, Henry Ford changed the shape of the week, announcing that the workers at his factories would now do five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Ford did not invent the weekend – the idea had been bubbling under for a century, in campaigns by trade unions, religious groups and progressive employers – but by putting his considerable industrial weight behind it, the two-day chunk of freedom was born. 'It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,' Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. 'People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,' he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US."

Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored – article by Jill Lepore in The Guardian, based on her book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. "Across the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy made possible the rise of the artificial state. It didn’t make it inevitable. The digital revolution didn’t have to play out the way it did in the realm of politics and government; it played out the way it did because of the failure of liberal democracy to limit corporate power over politics and government, its failure to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state. Techno-libertarianism, which married the technocracy crusade of the 1930s – an anti-democracy movement led, in the US, by Elon Musk’s grandfather – to the computopianism of the 1980s, was born in the 1990s. Beginning in the previous decade, Silicon Valley had fallen under the spell of the libertarian Ayn Rand. Rand had been a cult figure of the far right since the publication in 1943 of her novel The Fountainhead, and she became even better known after the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged. Rand embraced radical individualism and saw a very narrow role for the state in human affairs, arguing that every individual ought to be completely free to pursue personal gain through heroic, self-interested achievement.... Under the influence of Rand, the internet became what conservatives and techno-libertarians wanted it to become.... One of the contract’s earliest manifestos appeared – online – in 1996, John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: 'Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,' Barlow wrote.... Libertarian futurists weren’t the only people proposing new rules for cyberspace; they just happened to be the people who ended up making the rules. In 1995, Michael Hauben, a computer science student at Columbia University and an active user of Usenet (he coined the term 'netizen'), drafted a Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Netizens. He saw himself as a leader of what he described as 'the fight to keep the net an uncommercialised public commons'.... Douglas Adams, the author of the 1970s satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had a vision for the internet, too.... In 2001, both Adams and Hauben died, the former of a heart attack and the latter, at the age of 29, after an accident. Their frameworks for free and equal access to an internet structured by public interest, not commercial interest, died with them. But by then, the techno-libertarians had already won."

Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong? – article by Nasrine Malik in The Guardian. "This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 ... was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change.... What did happen is that accompanying those movements was an adoption of postures and behaviours that signalled that one was on the right side.... An altogether more serious – and shallow – allegation is that it was all 'crazy' because this is what the left does. Given a chance, the left will waste capital by descending into infighting, radicalism and alienation. It is rarely acknowledged that this left never has political power, and so its energies become trapped in the realm of culture. This is not to excuse excesses, but to point out a mundane matter of physics. When a political movement is deprived of executive means, by way of democratic systems in which money and establishment interests are arrayed behind the right and the centre right, it becomes trapped outside policy and exercises its power in the only venues it can. It is a feature of weakness, not strength."

Can anyone be too poor to buy a toothbrush? Yes, I know, because that was me – article by Katriona O'Sullivan in The Guardian. "Someone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was on [Nick Ferrari's LBC radio show] discussing research showing that about 7 million people are struggling to afford basic essentials, including toothpaste and toothbrushes... [Ferrari talked] about the price of cheap toothbrushes in pound shops and at Asda....Had I been on the show, I would have brought both my lived experience and my academic knowledge to the argument. I would have explained why a person living in poverty might buy cheap wine instead of a cheap toothbrush.... One of the first questions we ask, often without realising it, is whether the thing we are buying will help us now or later.... A toothbrush is an investment in the future. So is going for a run. So is buying healthier food that costs more and takes longer to prepare. The benefit is delayed. Poverty, on the other hand, creates urgent problems. The debt collector is knocking at your door for his money. The electricity is about to run out. The school is asking for payment for a trip. Your son is being bullied because he is wearing cheap trainers instead of Nikes. These things feel immediate. The possible dental problems caused by not replacing a toothbrush feel far away.... [Also] long-term planning becomes more difficult during periods of stress. It is also shaped by how and where you grow up. If you are raised in an environment where life feels unstable and the future feels uncertain, it can be much harder to believe that sacrificing today will bring a reward tomorrow.... That is part of the reason poverty is associated with higher levels of addiction and criminality. Not because poor people are naturally reckless or immoral, but because deprivation, stress and hopelessness shape our brains and our behaviour.... My parents did not brush their teeth or ours. Looking after your teeth was not something I had been taught to value. ... When I was living on around £35 a week benefits in the 1990s, I sometimes bought three bottles of Diamond White rather than spending 50p on tampons. You might judge me for that. But when you live in shit, when nobody seems to care about you and you have stopped caring about yourself, a few bottles can feel like an escape. It felt easier to stuff my knickers with toilet roll from the cash-in-hand job I worked and have one night away from the misery than to sit sober with the constant belief that I was failing myself and my son. At times, it felt like the choice was three bottles or dying. That may seem hard to understand when your life has always contained safety, options and hope. But all you have to do is ask yourself one important question – would anyone choose that type of life if they could choose another? The answer to that is simple."

Will AI give you the job? Automated hiring tools spark discrimination and secrecy lawsuits – article by Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Erin Kistler has applied for thousands of jobs at companies like Paypal, Microsoft and Netflix, only to find her résumé disappear into a black hole. A product manager with nearly 20 years of experience, Kistler believes she was qualified for every role, yet she never received a single interview. Now, Kistler is suing Eightfold AI, the Silicon Valley maker of hiring software used by hundreds of companies, including those where she applied, in a class-action lawsuit. The case, filed in January in California court, is one of the first to argue that automated screening functions as an undisclosed consumer report or applicant dossier, ranking job applicants on their likelihood of success without giving them the chance to see or challenge the results, according to Kistler’s legal team. The lawsuit is one of several new legal battles over companies’ use of AI in employment decisions. Workers are also suing Meta over an internal AI system that allegedly targeted them for layoffs because they took parental or medical leave. And a recent lawsuit against IBM alleges that AI tools discriminated against older workers.... Experts who study this type of software say it can also introduce or exacerbate bias that could follow candidates across companies. Lawmakers are taking notice. The outcomes of the legal battles could shape future employment practices, transparency around them and the power candidates have in the process.... While human hiring managers can be unfair – choosing the applicant who was in the same fraternity, for example – 'the magnitude of bias is even stronger [with AI],' says Xuechunzi Bai, assistant professor at the University of Chicago who has researched hiring bias. Bai co-authored a recent study where AI models were asked to make hiring decisions about fictional applicants assigned to made-up demographic groups called Tufa, Aima, Reku and Weki. After a few rounds of hiring decisions, the AI models made inferences about candidates that had nothing to do with their qualifications, in effect stereotyping them. If one Tufa was a good doctor, then Tufa candidates were more likely to be chosen as doctors, and Weki candidates were more likely to be hired as janitors. The study found greater bias in AI than in human hiring decisions she examined last year. It also found that newer and more advanced models produced hiring decisions with more bias."

‘It exists only for pleasure’: does ice-cream have a future in the age of wellness fads and weight-loss drugs? – article by Kitty Drake in The Guardian. "Wall’s, one of the oldest brands under the Magnum umbrella, started selling ice-cream from a factory in Acton, London, in 1922. Wall’s was originally a butcher’s, and the company pivoted to ice-cream as a kind of summer-proof sausage equivalent, because meat wasn’t selling well in the heat. Ice-cream street traders have existed in the UK since the 1850s, when they used horse-drawn carts. But with the advent of mechanical refrigeration in the early 20th century, it became possible to mass-produce ice-cream. As British people began to buy freezers in the late 70s, it was rolled out to supermarkets. The 80s – which food writer Ruby Tandoh has called the 'golden age' of British ice-cream – saw the invention of Twister, Viennetta, Calippo and Feast.... For decades food companies have employed scientists to work out how to keep you eating without stopping long enough to remember you have a body. Food technologists have learned how to balance carbohydrate-to-fat ratios so a food can slow down or bypass the brain’s 'satiety signal' which tells you you’ve had enough. Technologists know how to design energy-dense food that dissolves so fast on your tongue, you immediately crave more. Ice-creams are usually too cold to emit odour, so Mars has worked out how to rub chocolate and caramel scent molecules into the ribbing of their ice-cream packets; they want you to begin salivating from the moment you tear one open. Magnum has hired technologists to engineer the chocolate casing on its ice-cream, so when you bite in, it doesn’t shatter into too many pieces and distract you by falling down your top. Everything has been specially designed to make you forget yourself – and your flesh – and keep chasing the next bite. By contrast, the selling point of Magnum’s new ice-creams seems to be they will keep you laser-focused on your own body. [Michelle Neville, Magum's behavioural scientist,] explained that the brand is trying to sell ice-cream to a customer who sees their 'food as medicine'. 'Now, even with a basic cereal bar, some people expect it to help metabolic resilience, control glycaemic index, improve gut health,' she said.... This latest drive to market ice-cream as a 'functional' food – something you eat not because it tastes nice, but because you believe it has some kind of nutritious, medicinal value – ... feels striking. Because more than any other food – more even than chocolate – ice-cream’s only real reason for existing is pleasure. A perfect mix of fat, sugar and at least 20% air, ice-cream was not invented to nourish you. First served in Europe in the early 1500s, it debuted in England as a magical kind of 'table trick'. Guests would look on while a servant churned, and a mass of sugary ice was transformed before their eyes into a strange, sweet foam. The Victorians ate ice-cream at balls and whittled it into enormous, campy ice sculptures, modelling pineapples, huge swans and whole bunches of flowers. With the arrival of the motorised ice-cream van in the 1920s in the UK and the birth of the 99 Flake, ice-cream became ever more connected in the British imagination with holidays and summer. The fact that ice-cream is essentially frivolous is a key part of its allure. It melts, so it almost demands that the eater give themselves up to the moment. The period between unwrapping an ice-cream and it collapsing into a puddle is a window in time, specially cordoned off for pleasure. You have to enjoy it or it will disappear without you. An ice-cream is a bit like a lit cigarette in that way.

The country of my birth has lost its heart’: Miriam Margolyes on how to fix broken Britain – article by Miriam Margolyes in The Guardian, extracted from her book Full English. "A funny thing happened on the way to 2026: I got old and the world turned nasty. It happened very quickly and it’s to do with politics (the world) and pelvic floor weakness (mine).... The Britain I grew up in, though – that feels almost unrecognisable, and everyone I speak to says the same thing. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom I knew and loved, argued that people invent the past they want for their own purposes – that the real past was quite different: 'Today is the great age of historical mythology.' He’s right, but that past is still the safe haven I’d like to return to. People feel adrift, they don’t understand or feel a connection to the place they thought they knew.... The things we took for granted – free speech, the Post Office, our local bank, even the home telephone – are disappearing. The US is an enemy. Evil oligarchs and their influence stalk the world, my world, your world. In recent times, the archbishop of Canterbury resigned and north London Jews are afraid to wear a Magen David (Shield or Star of David) necklace outside their homes for fear of being attacked. You’re brave to open your mouth these days. Indeed, many have demanded I keep mine shut. But I can’t. The present has become threatening, hostile and unwelcoming to us – much as our shores must feel to asylum seekers, as they scramble for a foothold in our United Kingdom. It also feels as though the country of my birth has lost its heart. How did we get here?... The history of the British Isles is full of painful moments and terrible decisions. And we need to face those. It’s much easier to look away from bad things that happened and, as with a fart, hope no one noticed. (Spoiler: everyone noticed.) Like every multinational corporation, Great Britain plc has done a lot of harm in its long life. The choice of red to represent the British empire on the global map feels entirely apt.... History has always been the propaganda of the victors, but it can lead you astray. So why not try listening to the other side of the story? Don’t fall for your own hype. It all seems heroic if you turn it into a monologue about why you were right all along, instead of facing the painful bits from which there’s no way you can come out well.... Our British history needs to reflect our mother tongue, which is a patchwork of words gathered from the different tribes and peoples who’ve made these islands home. There’s room for everyone: we all bring something to the table, whether invader or inhabitant.... I refuse to be cut off from the wealth of possibilities that Britain and Ireland offer. Let’s live, have fun, learn new tastes, new words, new mastications. Build bridges, cross chasms. And before we go to the moon again, let’s reap the benefits strangers in our midst offer. It’s not their fault that things are tough. It’s ours."

Largest review of its kind confirms benefits of tai chi and other Chinese exercises – article by Andrew Gregory in The Guardian. "Traditional Chinese exercises such as tai chi can offer wide-ranging benefits for people with musculoskeletal disorders, improving physical function, pain, mental health, sleep quality and bone mineral density, according to the largest review of its kind.... There was already evidence indicating traditional Chinese exercises were associated with beneficial health outcomes in people with musculoskeletal disorders, but much of it was fragmented and contained inconsistencies. The overarching review of pooled data analyses of systematic reviews by researchers at hospitals and universities in China, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, drew on 92 data syntheses from 1,744 randomised controlled clinical trials. It found 'high certainty evidence' for the effectiveness of traditional Chinese exercise – such as tai chi, qigong, baduanjin, wuqinxi and yijinjing – for a range of health outcomes for people with musculoskeletal disorders.... Tai chi, in particular, significantly eased chronic musculoskeletal pain and stiffness in several conditions while increasing bone mineral density in participants with osteopenia or osteoporosis, the research found. Maximum benefits were achieved when people did these exercises for longer than six months, at least three times a week, clocking up a total of at least 150 minutes a week."

How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’ – article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified. However, Hare knew this approach was limited.... It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy.... Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis... Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same 'dark personality' behaviours in other precincts.... Mitchell’s interviews are remarkable. People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things: there’s one question about whether the interviewee had themselves ever been frightened of a persistent predatory personality (bear in mind that these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals) and the answers came back: 'I constantly worry that he will ruin my career' (from an HR person); 'I worry that they will … want to seek revenge' (from a social worker); 'I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed' (expert practitioner from the charity sector). These and arguably every statement from the interviews are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them socially because you would sound mad – which some testimonies explicitly address.... Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen."

We already live in ‘clone towns’: AI is making things worse – column by John Naughton in The Observer. "In 2004 the New Economics Foundation (NEF) conducted a national survey of UK high streets, which were then still economically active. It found that real local shops had been replaced by swathes of identikit chain stores, making high streets up and down the country virtually indistinguishable from one another... A 'home town' is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A 'clone town', in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a 'monochrome strip of global and national chains'. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country.... This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale.... Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable. What’s driving this, apparently inexorable, onward march to uniformity?... The tech industry calls it AI but it’s really machine-learning. It’s software that tries to predict what you’re likely to want next.... These machines are basically statistical guessers. They’re trained by being given an objective – a measure of the thing they’re supposed to maximise – and a loss function, which is essentially a penalty for making bad guesses. And, as the social data scientist Lauren Leek explains in a brilliant Substack post, Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same, it’s the loss function that drives these machines – and their unsuspecting users – to blandness. This is because the most common loss function is the 'squared error' one.... This means that it really punishes big discrepancies. Which, in turn, means that the machine’s algorithm always plays safe by predicting the average of all the available possibilities. And in the process, it squashes ideas that were wild but also potentially original.... The NEF’s clone towns weren’t the product of some co-ordinated plan to homogenise Britain, but the emergent outcome of many thousands of separate independent decisions, each one taken in its own context.... Leek’s insight is that, in an AI-driven world, mathematics can explain why something such as that keeps happening, at every scale, from the high street to the streaming platform: any system trained to minimise error will always retreat towards the average, because the average is the safest guess when you’re not quite sure. Multiply that single fact across billions of daily recommendations, and you get a world that’s beginning to feel eerily familiar, everywhere. In that sense, the flat white with oat milk isn’t a coincidence. It’s the product of a loss function, working exactly as intended."

Cuttings: July 2026

‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI – article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. "In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.... DeepMind was founded in 2010 by three men ... who believed that it must be possible to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI.... For the DeepMind founders, it was clear that such an achievement would have widespread consequences.... After starting at DeepMind in 2017, Gabriel was, for a time, the only active philosopher working at a frontier AI lab. He quickly discovered that his background in moral philosophy and political theory gave him an unusual perspective in an industry dominated by engineers. Over the past decade, he has assembled a body of work that tracked, and in many cases predicted, the ethical challenges created by the surprising success of large language models (LLMs).... More generally, Gabriel has been a leading advocate for the idea that the current wave of AI development demands not just new technical vocabularies but also new ways of thinking about our relationship to technology, and even to ourselves.... By the time Gabriel joined DeepMind, there were, roughly speaking, two distinct and often antagonistic approaches to questions about the social and ethical implications of AI. These approaches, sometimes classed under the headings of AI safety and AI ethics, were divided by a disagreement about the feasibility of the technology. Like the DeepMind founders, the AI safety contingent believed that human-grade machine intelligence was not only possible but imminent. The urgent task, as they saw things, was to make sure that AI systems didn’t go awry [which] became known as the alignment problem.... By contrast with the AI safety crowd, the academics and technologists associated with the AI ethics tendency ... took fairness, accountability and transparency as their watchwords and insisted that the dangers of technology could not be avoided by merely technical means. What was needed, they argued, were social, cultural and political solutions. A central concern of this latter tendency was algorithmic bias, of the sort that affected facial-recognition and predictive-policing software.... Gabriel’s first major research project at DeepMind was a 2020 paper that straddled the concerns of both camps. The paper took the alignment problem seriously, but it also insisted that alignment had ethical and political implications that went beyond the technical challenges. As difficult as it might be to get a machine to act in accordance with some set of values, Gabriel argued, it was much harder to choose those values in the first place. 'Given that we live in a pluralistic world that is full of competing conceptions of value,' he asked, 'how are we to decide which principles or objectives to encode in AI – and who has the right to make these decisions?'”

From card game to a tool of divination: the artistic history of tarot – article by Veronica Esposito in The Guardian. “It’s never been easier to get a [Tarot] reading … and the Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, Tarot!, capitalizes on the practice’s increasing popularity to lure in the curious and knowledgable alike. Tarot! starts by charting the cards’ evolution from Renaissance Italy up through the 21st century, then offers up the tarot-themed work of more than two dozen artists – among them Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as new art by the celebrated British painter Chris Ofili. According to Claire Gilman, who curated the show’s Modern Visions section, the tarot originated in 15th-century Italy not as a tool for divination, but simply as a card game. It was only as it moved into France in the 18th century that it began to take on occult connotations, and from there it migrated to the UK and eventually began to spread around the globe in the 20th century,… When the tarot first emerged, long before the advent of mass-produced decks, it was only used by those fortunate enough to afford hand-painted collection of the cards, done up by masterful artists in intricate detail. Tarot! offers a rare chance to see a sizable chunk of what remains of the oldest surviving deck – known as the Visconti-Sforza, for the family it was created for… When the tarot originated in Italy, its primary inspiration was Petrarch’s series of poems known as the Triumphs, which charted a life path from sin to redemption. However, by the time of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, introduced in 1909 and by far the most widely used deck in the world, the range of influences had gotten much larger. In illustrating the deck, Smith was given free rein to pour out her imagination on to the minor arcana, and she drew on such diverse sources as the Bible, her friends, the Art-Nouveau movement and contemporary British society, just to name a few. One of the Rider-Waite-Smith’s big innovations was to illustrate the minor arcana, which up to that point had seldom been given their own associated imagery. Gilman sees this as key to the unprecedented success of this deck. ‘It really enhances the mystery built into these cards, and also the accessibility,‘ she said, ‘because you could look at these cards and write this story into every single one. It really democratizes the cards and captures people’s fascination with them.’”

My mother was an excellent care worker. Why did she end up marching with the EDL? – article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. “It was 2013 and [Nicola Wilding’s] mother – a 59-year-old care worker, who for most of her life had voted Labour – had just attended her first march with the English Defence League…. ‘I thought: “Oh, Mum’s just being daft. She’s having an adventure. She’ll get over it.”’ But instead, ‘the anger stayed’, more marches followed – and Wilding started to wonder what personal and political forces had led her family to this place. Thirteen years on, her family memoir, These Wild English, tells the story of three generations, from her grandparents’ farm in Cumbria to the scrapyards, banger race tracks and care homes of Kent. It is shot through with her family’s ‘bootstrap fatalism’ – ‘this sort of hopefulness in the absence of hope’ – and fizzes with all the family love, joy and ‘crazy energy’ of a souped-up Darling Buds of May. But there is violence too, less cash and a lot more alcohol…. Her mother’s third husband, whom Wilding steadfastly calls ’the soldier’, was a corporal in the British army. Sandra and Wilding’s three siblings had followed him from Kent to Cyprus, Colchester and County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. The murder of [Lee Rigby by Islamic extremists in 2013] felt personal. ‘For the last 10 years, she had been living in barracks … This idea that you could be hated and murdered in your own country, it really triggered her.’ She went on her first march a few weeks later.… ‘We think about the 1950s, 60s and 70s and all these great institutions: the NHS and hundreds of thousands of council houses built for the working class by the working class – and all that’s been stripped away,’ Wilding says. ’Now we have a globalised economy. The working class have been uncoupled from a national story … on what it means to belong. So we have to work out what that story is and include the working class. That’s my big picture.‘”

These Wild English by Nicola Wilding: explaining a mother’s drift to the far right – review by Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. "Inspired by the puzzle of her mother’s late-life activism, These Wild English is a heartfelt and evocative memoir of Sandra who, up until her death in 2024, endured poverty, upheaval and abusive partners, as well as a heart condition leading to two rounds of surgery. 'How did my mum, this proud tough woman who had brought up four kids pretty much alone, end up marching alongside far-right extremists chanting "No more refugees"?' Wilding asks.... 'Was it us? Did we do it to ourselves? Or was it something else – something bigger than us?' The 'us' in this story is important. Wilding, the eldest of Forsyth’s children and one of the few in her family to find stability through education and a career, is a TV documentary maker specialising in poverty and rural working-class communities, though here she is no dispassionate observer. She also has an eye on the bigger picture, noting how wider events and the social and economic decisions taken in Westminster can affect the lives of vulnerable individuals and communities. For the Forsyth family, these have included the winter of discontent, mass unemployment and Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme in the 1970s and 80s; the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the financial crisis in the 2000s; and the Tory austerity programme, Brexit referendum and resurgence of the far right in the 2010s. Wilding isn’t the first author to examine the alienation of the British working classes and the ways they have been exploited, pilloried and misunderstood... In our social media-fanned, post-Brexit discourse, the white working classes are often cast as aggressors waging vicious war on immigrant communities, having been manipulated by self-interested politicians deliberately stoking division. Wilding has little time for such one-dimensional depictions, despite her clear dismay at her mother’s flirtation with the far right. Instead, writing in thoughtful and elegantly understated prose, she digs into the roots of Sandra’s dissatisfaction, telling a story that spans three generations, starting out with her early life in the 1960s on her father’s farm in Eden Valley, Cumbria, where she was tasked with looking after her siblings during the recurring periods when her own mother did a runner."

On the Mark by Florence Hazrat: a fascinating history of punctuation – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Florence Hazrat notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels pencilling in triplets of them into a speech for Hitler. The modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described here as believing that ’slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order’. At the same time she derides male scholars who have complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf on the grounds that it feminises the hero. What Hazrat really believes about exclamation marks, alas, may be inferred from her ultra-liberal use of them. ‘No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!’ runs one joke-badged parenthesis. ‘Let nobody claim punctuation wasn’t sexy!’ … The happy corollary to the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is no mere wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots & Leaves sort; it is an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries. After a brief prehistory about ‘interpuncts‘ (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide people through the rhythm and tone, and so the sense, of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: ‘Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.’ Hashtag life goals…. The book ends in the all-too-liquid present, when ’it is tech giants who choose our writing tools’, and when ending a text message with a full stop comes off as rude.… Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies afforded by punctuation, with his Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and his creative use of scare quotes either to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was ‘our lovely “stay“ in Iran’).”

How AI is changing language – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "Vast amounts of AI writing are now being published every day – from advertising copy to academic abstracts and fiction. At the same time, it looms ever larger over our lives via auto-generated email suggestions, 'AI overview' search results, and the responses to our chatbot queries. At this level of exposure, it’s no longer a question of whether AI is changing language, both the way we speak and the way we write; the question is how. And should we resist, or embrace it?... The evidence that aspects of LLM-speak have escaped into the 'real' world, changing the way humans use language when AIs aren’t around, is now rolling in. One study analysed thousands of unscripted conversations and found that words like 'delve' and 'boast' spiked after ChatGPT was released. Another showed the frequency of 'delve' in academic abstracts actually dropping after it was singled out on social media, in a sign that AI’s influence might play out in complex ways..... Does any of this matter? Language changes all the time – words come in and out of fashion, and new technology has always been one of the forces behind this. AI does seem to be generating particularly high levels of anxiety, though. Why? 'I think where it scares people is that idea of encroaching into sentience, of becoming the new human,' [says Claire Hardaker, Professor of forensic linguistics at the University of Lancaster]. Since 2023, she’s expanded the Bot or Not project into speech and music, and has noticed just how viscerally people react when a song they’ve enjoyed turns out to have been composed and performed by a machine.... One much feared effect of the mass use of LLMs is that they act as a flattening force – smoothing away the variety and idiosyncrasy of human language into a kind of beige goo. That’s a legitimate concern, as far as it goes, though it’s not a new one. People have long angsted about the homogenising effects of American film and television on accent and vocabulary, and there are subgenres of language – political euphemism, customer-service prattle, therapy-speak – that have spread further from their home territory than many might like. The crucial thing, though, is that their influence tends to generate a backlash – and there’s no reason to think things will be different this time. In fact, our capacity for innovation might ultimately be the thing that truly distinguishes human writing – particularly the literary kind – from AI."

Baldy Man, Gold Blend flirters and mash-mad Martians: TV’s golden age ads – article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Hanging over the toilet in the gents’ loos at the History of Advertising Trust’s archive in deepest Norfolk is a photograph of Ian Botham. It’s not just the cricketing great’s mullet that tells you this is 1986, but the fact that Beefy is smoking a cigar.... If the past is a foreign country, then the history of advertising is a whole alternate universe, one in which excitable metallic martians induced us to buy Cadbury’s powdered potatoes with the slogan: 'For mash get Smash.' It’s a place where bowler-hatted chimps dressed as removal men wooed us into buying PG Tips tea, while legions of sports stars energetically advertised carcinogenic smokes.... You may think that an archive devoted to advertising is frivolous nonsense but you would be wrong. Ever since Walter Benjamin started collecting advertising posters from 19th-century Paris for his masterwork The Arcades Project, such ephemera have been key to any understanding of modernity and how willingly people will buy often eminently body- and soul-destroying stuff.... Advertising today is facing an existential crisis. Algorithms have destroyed the charm, such as it was, of the craft. 'Advertising today has lost a bit of that kind of emotional storytelling,' says [deputy director Alistair Moir]. 'It’s become a bit more formulaic and data-driven. Brands and agencies are often obsessed by return on investment rather than doing big campaigns that really draw people into a story and connect with emotion.' The fear is that advertising won’t be as creative or as enjoyable – just much more diabolically effective at making us buy things."

At a dying man’s bedside, I see something much rarer than grief: the courage to include the young – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "When [the grandson] hands me his phone, the screen is split into four windows. Important family meetings shouldn’t be held on FaceTime but, given the alternative of no meeting, it will do.... I don’t know what the family knows and the margin for error is small, so my explanation is layered. The operation was not intended as a cure; the idea was to reduce the burden and tackle the rest with chemotherapy. But his type of aggressive disease doesn’t respond well to chemotherapy, with the patient experience heavily balanced towards toxicity, making many past patients question its value. And now, the whole idea of chemotherapy is academic and I want to guide them through the next steps. When I stop, the first thing the patient’s daughter says is that, in a few lines, I have told them more than they ever knew or had been advised to think about. If this is true, I feel bad.... His daughter concludes that the prognosis looks grim and says there is no point in keeping him in hospital. I stay silent just long enough for her brother to ask if their father will live weeks or months. I can’t help feeling grateful that he is making this easy for me.... I gently say to hope for months but prepare for weeks. The family exhales, giving me my first opportunity to look up from the screen. And it’s then that I realise the grandson has been holding his grandfather’s hand and crying. Now, he hastens to wipe his face but his one soggy tissue is not equal to the task. It is a picture of bewilderment and love and mourning. This is the sight that trips me up.... Stepping forward, I touch his free hand. 'I am sorry you were all alone; you are very brave.' He sniffles. I ask if he has questions but can see that he’s just a boy who wants his mother. So I depart and leave his mum to do the hard work.... In my anxiety to get the job done, did I neglect to shield the young man from bad news? At least I could have given him the option to leave. But I also remember that, as the conversation turned heavy, he chose to stay, displaying both love and duty towards his vulnerable grandparent.... Well-meaning parents naturally want to spare their children and youth trauma but, in truth, we are just avoiding the realities of physical and cognitive decline. In a digital culture that glorifies 'looksmaxxing', the hospital forces a reckoning with incapacity, vulnerability and co-dependency.... When we spare our youth a window into the indignities of ageing, and the universal reality of death and dying, we might be prolonging their innocence. But then we just postpone to middle age the struggle to reconcile with these issues.... It’s daunting to think that the grandson will always remember my dire announcement at his grandfather’s bedside. I admire his courage and forbearance. I salute his parents for entrusting him with a task that many would not. And I hope that more of us will think about how to carefully but deliberately expose our youth to the realities of life and death that all of us must eventually face."

Count Binface represents the Silly Sausage Britain I know and love – article by Sofie Jenkinson in The Guardian. "Nigel Farage’s pointless byelection in Clacton, in which he will stand against Count Binface, has inadvertently pitted two versions of Britain against one another. In one corner we have those who will argue that we are divided, cynical and jaded, that Britain isn’t what it once was and there is little to celebrate. And in the other corner we have the lovers of nonsense, ready to bind us back together with the unifying force of laughter. Count Binface symbolises what I like to call Silly Sausage Britain. The Britain that has a laugh and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is underpinned by self-deprecation, our kindness toward each other and fairness. This is the Britain of comedians such as Victoria Wood and Bob Mortimer, Romesh Ranganathan and Daisy May Cooper, Elis James and Meera Syal. It’s the adverts for Yorkshire Tea, Tango and Irn-Bru and it’s the Liz Truss lettuce. It’s 2p arcade machines and queen of 'hun culture' Alison Hammond’s laugh.... Last year, I wrote about Mr Blobby Patriotism, describing the Britain I feel exists and that I’m proud of. This is not twee Paddington-style patriotism. Neither is it Reform’s top-down Rule, Britannia! patriotism. It is a patriotism of taking the piss out of yourself and your mates, but also rolling up your sleeves and helping someone carry a pram up the stairs. Being patriotic isn’t about Britain being perfect, it’s about loving a place because we see ourselves in it and making fun of it because it’s ours.... So as we laugh together over Count Binface’s plans to nationalise Adele, restore the price of 99 Flakes to 99p and reintroduce Ceefax, we are reminded of who we are as a nation. This is the kind and funny Britain I know exists and the one I want to live in."

Why do free speech debates make us so angry? – article by Matei Candea in The Guardian. "Free speech debates seem to be about abstract principles and rules: what should be allowed? When does it cross a line? Do we need more or less regulation? These disagreements are real – but they don’t explain why we get so deeply angry, upset and divided over freedom of speech. In reality, the free speech wars of recent years are not just about rules – they’re about what it means to be a good person. Notice how such debates are rife with caricatures of 'types' of people: snowflakes, trolls, cancel-culture warriors, edgelords, bigots, crybullies, incels and so on. What’s really driving these debates is a set of implicit judgments about character: what kind of person wants to regulate another person’s speech? What kind of person doesn’t care about the effects their words have on others?... On the European and US scene, almost everyone seems to agree that free speech is broadly a good thing. Yet we find people struggling over different visions of what kind of (good) person a free speaker is. I would argue that three such visions have been particularly prominent: the first casts the free speaker as a rational, measured citizen sharing ideas – perhaps the eloquent contributor on Question Time, the writer on a literary panel, the citizen in a town hall meeting. In the second, the free speaker is a passionate breaker of rules and conventions – think blasphemous artworks such as Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, or the 'souping' of the Mona Lisa by climate activists. The third sees the free speaker as a brave and honourable person standing up for the truth – classically, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor whose WeChat posts warned the world about Covid-19.... Once we see free speech debates as debates about ethics and character rather than rules and principles, we can understand why people might argue for free speech one minute, and denounce their opponents for what they say the next. Examples are all around us, including Maga activists engaging in cancel culture after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, or progressives who had previously defended campus speech codes denouncing their use against pro-Palestine protesters. This is often put down to 'double standards', confusion or insincerity. But if you start from character, a different picture emerges. Each of our three 'types' genuinely defends freedom of speech, but each also sometimes has good reasons to demand silence. The rational citizen endorses the limitation of speech through law, copyright or civility; the passionate activist might feel the powerful should be silenced to allow the weak to speak; the honourable truth teller demands respect for their values and reparations for insults to them or their friends."

My patients use ChatGPT for therapy. Now I use it too – article by Sarah Darghouth in The Guardian. "'Chat told me I should break up with him.' I instructed my face to remain therapist-neutral, but I must have smirked. The truth is, I was annoyed. We had been discussing the viability of this relationship for weeks, and in an instant AI had brought the answer. 'How do you feel about it?' She said this had been her gut feeling all along. The following session, her relationship was over.... As patients increasingly bring AI into sessions, I sometimes don’t know whose voice I am hearing, whose emotion, whose gut feeling. I deal with this, along with the creepy annoyance and competition it brings up in me, by moving us towards what feels like safer grounds, re-asserting the 'IRL' world.... AI can be dangerous, I warn my patients; I do not recommend you use it. Then I go home and I know that part of me is hiding: because when my nine-year-old had a tantrum at 7.20am on a Sunday morning, I did not write in a diary to bring to my therapist next week. What I actually did was, gulp, reach for Chat.... Was the therapy help fake? Yes. But it worked. So does it matter?... What, if anything, is worth salvaging about human therapy that AI will not replicate? I wonder whether human therapists will ultimately lose when it comes to technique or interpretation.... My patient leaves, and I have no idea if she will come back next week. On my walk home, I ruminate. I remember a grad school professor saying that therapy is like sorting through a messy closet: everything has to be taken out, your room has to look like a tornado hit it, and only then can things be sorted through. My patient and I were in the chaos of the tornado. And then I think: what if it’s the mess in therapy that is its most prized possession? This can look like many things: conflict. Hesitation. Stalling. Changing directions. Making the wrong decision. Strong emotion that explodes all words. Sometimes, we have to stay patient with the chaotic unknowns, the slow emergence of an idea, or a loss so deep it cannot be touched by therapy, week after week after week. We want to escape it at all costs, because who wants to sit in the middle of a tornado? Yet mess is often a signal that we are getting at something important.... Because not knowing is anathema to everything AI stands for, the tech-pushed sense of desire for an immediate response may be hard for many to resist. I am guessing the future will see a sizeable number of people swept up by the powerful current of AI-like therapy. I also wonder if a minority will remain seekers of human therapy: I imagine a small yet significant counter-movement of determined people who, either by conviction or trend – and likely with money – will resolve to stand up again and again in the moving sand, refusing the pull of the AI waves. They are those who will seek the flawed human therapist who will, I guarantee you, frustrate them and whom they may annoy too, but who will feel genuine happiness when a small good thing has happened in their life.... My patient comes back. We continue to work through jagged emotions and unfinished pain. One day, she comes in and says: 'It was how you laughed at my joke as I was leaving the room last time that made me feel better.' What? So it had nothing to do with what I had seen as the rich therapeutic dialogue we had? I didn’t even remember the joke. But I went with it, not really understanding, humbled, and feeling pretty happy being a human."

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard – article by Emily Hauser in The Guardian. "If the Odyssey is clear that it’s all about that complicated man, Odysseus, then Nolan is just as preoccupied with the complex hero – albeit in a different way from the Odyssey. Homer’s Odysseus is cunning with an edge of pride, a liar and a storyteller, with the smarts to wile himself out of any situation and a determination at almost any cost to get his homecoming. Those costs are spelled out many times by the poet before they’re tossed away.... Nolan’s Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) makes gestures to complexity too, but here is a modern-day Hollywood hero who learns remorse for the atrocities he commits and spends much of his time trying to excuse having lost all his men, and retrospectively (with a final journey, not in Homer, to pay homage to them) earning their forgiveness.... There’s another layer that Nolan adds: his Odysseus is riddled with trauma and guilt, not only for the deaths of his men, but for the death and destruction (and, at one brief point, the assault on women) he caused in Troy. A regular refrain in the film is the lament for the death of 'our age of bronze'....Odysseus’s crime and atonement in Nolan, then, is not only for the loss of his crew, but also for the death of a civilisation.... Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped).... So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices.... Because, yes, the Homeric epic is about Odysseus, and it’s about his journey home; it’s got gods and monsters, a father-fixated teenage son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and a loyal wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). But it also has an Odysseus who ruins his companions’ homecoming because of his hubris when he brings a curse down on them all (omitted in Nolan’s film); who returns to Ithaca and slaughters a bunch of defenceless men (Homer’s Odysseus locks up the suitors’ weapons; Nolan gives them arms); makes his teenage son hang a group of enslaved women (Nolan inexcusably turns Penelope into the executor of her enslaved woman, Melantho, and has Penelope actually push her into the slaughter); and then (also not in Nolan) almost starts a civil war. This is the root of the story from which Nolan’s film branches: a complicated man who isn’t a straightforwardly moral modern leader, but who makes choices that are vexed and troubling and often unclear. That’s true for many of Homer’s other characters, too – including the women. Female characters such as Calypso (Charlize Theron), the goddess with whom Odysseus spends seven years of his return, aren’t straightforward villains to be blamed for Odysseus’s multi-year absence from Ithaca (Nolan makes her drug Odysseus with the infamous lotus so he 'forgets' his home). Nor is Penelope, in Homer’s epic, ready to admit that the beggar who has wandered into her household and executed most of the local nobility is actually her husband. Where is the challenge we see in Homer to whether she really wants him home or not?... Turning the Odyssey into Odysseus’s troubled journey to become an empathic leader of men and a reluctant agent of the onward march of history isn’t just a Hollywood reorientation to the kind of flawed genius we’ve seen in Oppenheimer – it fundamentally tells us what Nolan sees, and wants us to see, as a hero. For audiences who are looking for a box-office smash with stunning visual action, epic proportions and a hero at the heart of it all, they will get it."

Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "Like many of the wise women in her books, Sharon Blackie lives miles from anyone. Hers is the only house on the road winding through a valley deep in the Yorkshire Dales.... It seems an appropriate setting for an author who is on a mission to bring fairytales to modern readers. Blackie runs spiritual retreats and workshops at the nearby Broughton Sanctuary and publishes a popular Substack called The Art of Enchantment. Her books, including word-of-mouth hits such as If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, are a beguiling mix of memoir, mythology and eco-feminism – manifestos for a better way of living. 'The world which men have made isn’t working,' is how Blackie opens her 2019 memoir, If Women Rose Rooted. 'To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are.' By immersing ourselves in old stories, she argues, we will discover archetypes that will help us not only understand but rewrite our own. Plato, Baba Yaga and Jung all rub shoulders in her impassioned call for women to rediscover their lost power and connection to nature. Blackie’s books are something of a secret among a growing, largely female, readership across the world (as evidenced by rapturous quotes on the covers). But the spiritually averse need not be alarmed. In person, there is nothing wafty about this steely but softly spoken 65-year-old former academic and psychotherapist, who is clearly more used to asking the questions.... Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the 'wise old woman' to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – 'raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men' – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. 'I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,' she says. 'Why does nobody know about them?'”

‘Most people don’t know we’ve set up a doomsday system’: physicist Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies – interview by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "What is it that we should all know? Well, she says, the average person’s experience of space is about to change. If, so far, that has been 'looking at the stars and being full of wonder, full of connection with the universe', perhaps noticing the occasional streaking object that was not a shooting star, now 'there are plans for tens of thousands more satellites, which would really change your relationship with what you see in the sky'. SpaceX, specifically, has just applied to a federal regulator for permission to launch up to 1m of them. Grego ...has an unforced warmth and urgency, and a lack of self-aggrandisement in striking contrast to the gung-ho attitude that seems to accompany so much discussion of space. She became a physicist when she arrived at university ... then she became an observational cosmologist, which she found she loved. This merged with her other life as an activist ('anti-war, workers’ rights, racial justice – all the things important for a better society') when she became research director of the Global Security programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The union, founded at the height of the Vietnam war by American scientists horrified by their government’s misuse of science, aims to direct research energies toward solving environmental and social problems instead.... No country has yet destroyed another country’s satellite intentionally, Grego continues: 'That’s been a line we haven’t crossed. But most of the big spacefaring countries, which also happen to be nuclear countries, are testing weapons that you could use against other satellites.' Avant-garde space defence now looks for ways to sidle up to opposition satellites.... And finally, there is the nuclear vulnerability. When, last autumn, Kathryn Bigelow’s Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite had 22m views within three days of its release, [and a Pentagon memo insisted that] the movie’s depiction of a US [Golden Dome] system with under 60% accuracy was ... untrue, Grego was asked about the memo live on BBC TV. The movie is in fact correct, she said; just over half of tests have failed.... Where it was [especially] realistic, she adds, was in the timelines.... 'The worry is somebody will pre-emptively attack [your] ICBMs and leave you without them to retaliate, which would upset the balance of mutually assured destruction. [So] once you see anything headed in, you can quickly launch those missiles before they’re destroyed on the ground. It’s kind of: use them or lose them.' The thing is, the whole ICBM trajectory only lasts half an hour, and 'you’re compressed by detection, communication. So a president would have less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch ICBMs or to wait it out … the system is built so that question gets asked right away. And it creates this intense time-pressure' – and on imperfect people, with incomplete information. She adds: 'If the president decided to launch a counterattack, even if the initial attack was launched by accident, certainly the adversary is going to retaliate. That’s a civilisation-ending day – or an afternoon.' I’m so taken aback I laugh out loud. 'I know,' she says. 'I’m sorry. I’ve had many years to acclimate to this. But most people haven’t. Most people don’t know we’ve set up a system that is essentially a doomsday system. And we can dismantle it. We just have not.'”

Richard Dadd: can his mental illness help explain these arresting, bizarre images? – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Royal Academy’s smallish Dadd survey is called Beyond Bedlam and urges us to see him as more than just a 'mad' artist. Yes, he spent more than 40 years in psychiatric hospitals where he was judged incurable and where he painted his masterpiece The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, that monstrously magnified corner of an English country garden. But he was already a remarkable artist, with fairies as his hit theme. These are not cute Disneyfied fairies but the original mysterious beings from British folklore, sinister and destructive, as portrayed by Shakespeare.... Then Dadd went on an epic trip to the Middle East, filling his sketchbook with mosques, markets, Egyptian ruins, but what should have been a stimulating escape tipped him into severe paranoia and murder. This was when a promising life cracked open. When the fairies return to him in Bedlam they are brutally different. His early work is imaginative but visibly influenced by Romantic artists like Fuseli and Runge. But there’s no precedent that helps to understand The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Painted over a nine-year period, it disobeys the pictorial rules in which Dadd had been educated. When you try to fathom it, your eyes have to pick their way between tall dark strands of grass, daisies, dock leaves that block your view and clog and cramp the picture surface. Only through this tangle can you make out a detailed portrayal of fairy society. The tiny folk are gathered in awe and trepidation to watch the strongest fairy raise his axe to 'fell' a horse chestnut to repair Queen Mab’s coach. These fairies are not beautiful or seductive. Two have outsized legs bulging from their pleated skirts. One has a vast bald blueish head.... You can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it – and a modern artist at that."

‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream? – article by Amelia Hill in The Guardian. "As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Companies have started incorporating 'adversarial patterns' in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems. The designers say advances in computing have made it easier to incorporate such patterns into commercially viable garments. Experts caution that the effectiveness of the patterns depends on the surveillance system and the conditions in which it is used, but Nick Tidball, the co-founder of the clothing brand Vollebak, thinks 'adversarial clothing' could be on the cusp of going mainstream. 'Anti-surveillance feelings are so widespread that all it would take is for a single celebrity to wear one of these garments, currently popular in the countercultural fashion world, to a high-profile event for it to take off,' he said."

OpenAI’s rogue agents are a wake-up call to risks posed by artificial intelligence – article by Shakeel Hashim in The Guardian. "Last week Hugging Face – a company that hosts artificial intelligence models and datasets – was hacked. After it reported the incident to law enforcement, few would have predicted what came next: the culprits were revealed to be AI agents from OpenAI, which had broken out of containment and were acting of their own accord.... OpenAI had been evaluating the capabilities of two of its models in the test that led to the breach – including one not yet publicly available. The models, which were both running in a supposedly secure environment without internet access, were asked to solve a hacking challenge. Rather than actually solve it themselves, however, they decided it would be easier to cheat. They used their advanced capabilities to break out of their secure environment, access the web and then hack into Hugging Face’s systems to steal the answers. They worked at this for a full weekend – seemingly without anyone at OpenAI noticing."

Social Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US – review by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian. "The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth 'self-evident, that all men are created equal'. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.... Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and 'questions about capitalism and democracy'. Her first book, Invisible Hands, was a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. Her second, Fear City, about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Hers is a major voice. It’s also unique. Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk’s fellow techno-fascist.... 'What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence,' Phillips-Fein said. 'He says that while the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and the people at the top … should have the ultimate say over resources, he is deeply aware that this is politically dangerous, that … it creates an unstable society in which the poor and the working class might actually hate the wealthy, and that’s not in the interest of the wealthy in the long run. Also, he has a sense that human brotherhood is lost, or some kind of community that had existed.'... Country of Lords is also a primer on modern inequality. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford mixed mass auto production with vicious racism. In mid-century, William Shockley was a proto-tech mogul 'who went completely off the rails'. 'He was a co-inventor of the transistor and he figures in different histories of Silicon Valley because he ran this company and wanted to maintain a tremendous amount of control, and as a result a bunch of the employees quit and founded their own firm [two eventually founding Intel] … So after Shockley Labs fell apart, Shockley started to become drawn to racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing in particular. I don’t think anybody really knows exactly what triggered this, but he starts to talk a lot about it publicly in the mid-60s. He was at Stanford at the time. He was supposed to be teaching physics and engineering.'... In such soil, Phillips-Fein finds the roots of 'the tech titans of today', rejecting liberal ideals."

Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s 'among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness'.... His thinking runs as follows ... The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the 'long 90s') was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 ... was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away. Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. 'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'. He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because 'I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story globally'. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as 'a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues'. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like."

What makes a woman a witch? Financial independence – article by Lucianne Tonti in The Guardian. "When Katherine Harrison’s husband passed away, she became the wealthiest woman in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Rather than wallow in her new status as a young widow she decided to run the farm she’d inherited on her own. She took up ranching and a slew of other hobbies including brewing ale, spinning yarn and beekeeping. She traded honey and beeswax for candles. She was by all accounts, headstrong, outspoken and clever. In many corners of the internet, Harrison’s interests are having a moment. Craft brewers have been spruiking classic ales for years, urban beekeeping is surging in popularity, and people are looking to textile-based crafts as ways to practise mindfulness. ... Unfortunately, Harrison lived in the 17th century when fear and paranoia dominated the New England colonies. It was a time when a woman’s refusal to conform to puritanical, patriarchal norms made her vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. In 1668, more than two decades before the Salem witch trials kicked off 200km north, Harrison was arrested and put on trial for witchcraft.... While there were many causative factors in the witch-hunts – patriarchy, economic hardship, and religious and political tensions, to name a few – a woman’s financial independence and power made her vulnerable. Sometimes this independence was realised through inheritance, sometimes her proficiency at work.... Harrison’s case is emblematic of a pattern in the witch-hunts of colonial New England. In an analysis of the trials, the US historian Carol F Karlsen found that, although it was rare for women to inherit property, when they did, they were more susceptible to witchcraft allegations. Women from families without male heirs (Harrison had three daughters) made up 64% of the females prosecuted, 76% of those who were found guilty, and 89% of those who were executed. The pattern reflects how 'these women were aberrations in a society with an inheritance system designed to keep property in the hands of men,' writes Karlsen, in her 1987 book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman."

Is Burnham’s Oxbridge-heavy cabinet a sign of social mobility or lack of progress on class? – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Like 20 British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham’s new cabinet minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, went to Eton. After graduating from the country’s most elite private school, Narayan attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied – what else? – PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), like David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Ed Miliband and a host of other senior politicians. An MBA at Stanford and a career in the City followed. But Narayan’s background is hardly typical of the British ruling class. Born in Bihar in eastern India, he moved with his family to Cardiff when he was 12. He and his younger brother were sleeping on the floor of their one-bedroom home when a teacher at his local high school suggested the bright young boy apply for some private schools. His parents, who had joined the Labour party almost as soon as they arrived in Wales, ran a petrol station. Eton was possible only thanks to a full scholarship."

How the UK's extreme heat is shifting the conversation about air-con – article by Matt McGrath and Esme Stallard on BBC News website. "For 40 years, wealthy countries have focused heavily on cutting the carbon emissions that cause climate change, known as mitigation. Adaptation such as designing housing so it is more resilient to hotter temperatures and installing air conditioning has not always had the same focus. Reducing emissions was seen as morally right because richer nations produced most of the gases that have warmed the planet. And with that focus came a funding imbalance. In 2023, $1.8tn was given to mitigation, while adaptation did not secure even 5% of that – it scraped $65bn globally. Spending too much on adaption was seen by many as giving up on the fight against climate change. But this mainstream view has now been challenged. In a memo published last year, Bill Gates – a man who has poured billions into clean technology – argued that the climate movement's 'doomsday' fixation on temperature targets had diverted money from the things that most improve lives in a warming world. Climate change is serious, he wrote, but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'. Governments, he added, should be investing in cooling for the countries that need it.... The row that followed exposed the real fault line that's coming to the surface this summer: not whether to cut carbon or adapt to the heat – but how much to spend on each. There's another reason that muddies the waters and helps explain why cutting carbon became the prime focus – it was investable. Heat pumps and EVs can be sold. Spending on shade, ventilation and cooler hospitals and homes all produce little in the way of bankable returns – even if it reduces costs of climate change long term.... One of the most controversial ideas in the report is on air conditioning. Right now, only 5% or so of English homes have a cooling unit. The Committee recommends fitting these devices in hospitals and care homes within 10 years, and schools in 25 years. This goes against years of government advice that passive cooling was the preferred method – using shade, ventilation and other design features to bring down temperatures, not mechanical means. Prof Mat Santamouris from the University of New South Wales ... is scathing about who is driving the air con demand – the industry, he says, is 'extremely powerful' – adding that passive cooling adds its own economic growth, as money is spent on plumbers and builders.... There is a cruel physics beneath the financial unfairness. Air conditioning doesn't destroy heat, it moves it – out of the flat and into the street, where, Santamouris says, it warms the air your neighbours breathe and drives up the demand for still more cooling, by about a third in his studies of Sydney. The machines keeping the financially comfortable cool make everyone else's nights worse; and as wealthier households cool their rooms, the rest fall further behind. A thermal divide, opening street by street.... Santamouris and Baroness Brown [who chairs the adaptation committee of the government's Climate Change Committee] reach for the same answer: passive cooling first, machines where genuinely needed, clean power behind them, and the lesson that France learned painfully in the deadly heatwave of 2003 – the vulnerable protected rather than left to improvise."

The patient who loves buying lettuce for his daughter-in-law, and what his case teaches us about shared decision-making in medicine – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "My patient hates the notion of an 'intruder' in his body. 'I just want it gone,' he says. I reassure him that this is understandable but we should discuss in some depth his decision to undergo surgery. The patient balks, his son is eager to talk. I explain that his risk of any complication is high and even reversible events such as delirium, infection and electrolyte imbalance can cause prolonged difficulties. Patients often worry about 'dying on the table' but that’s rare – it’s the aftermath that matters. The surgeon and I estimate the early cancer is unlikely to cause problems during his lifetime. I say we are not opposed to the surgery itself, rather we want to make sure he understands its ramifications. But by now, the patient has tuned out. 'I know you’re tired, so here’s a simple question,' I try. 'At this point in your life, what matters to you?' His face lights up. 'Meeting my friends. And buying salad leaves for my daughter-in-law.' The son is visibly surprised by this beautiful sentiment. 'And if you were no longer able to do this independently?' 'Then it’s not a life I would want.' This one articulation becomes the turning point that allows an honest discussion about what he values and the perceived cost of lost independence. I can’t help but notice that the patient who engages in this more personal conversation is entirely different from the patient who had lost interest in a generic discussion of the benefits and risks of an operation. I ask the pair to reflect on our talk. Later, when they cancel surgery, their explanation is telling – making a fast initial decision, even the inappropriate one, had relieved the distress of indecision. But once the patient had voiced what mattered to him, the right decision was clear. I recalled this encounter as I heard a thoughtful talk at a conference about shared decision-making in healthcare.... How should patients better advocate for themselves when it comes to important healthcare decisions? Spearheaded by a geriatrician, an Australian website contains a plain-language (and translated) guide designed with the patient for the patient. A one-page 'before your appointment' sheet contains questions every patient or carer should consider. I routinely recommend it to my family. The clinician section has nuanced questions that all doctors can learn to ask. I use it myself to keep me on track. Another useful site comes from the NHS in the UK."

Alive by Melanie Challenger: a maverick study of what it means to have a body – review by Edward Posnett in The Guardian. "Challenger notes that her book was born out of 'wild curiosity', and a sense that the 'stories we were telling ourselves … were both presumptuous and unconvincing'. For her, our focus on souls, genes or minds is a distortion of reality, and we should instead direct our attention to our bodies, which have been marginalised, perhaps because they remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality. It is not that Challenger denies the importance of genes; what she questions is the lens through which we read the world. Throughout the book she vividly presents a range of different organisms, from slime to squid, exploring the ways in which they relate and respond to the world around them. Among other things, Challenger is a poet, and her descriptions are often beautiful. She describes glacial ice as 'blue sheened like an eyeball' and a Humboldt squid as 'a lozenge of silver'. By denigrating or ignoring bodies, she argues, we are blinded to the sophistication of other life forms, and do not afford them the respect that they deserve; we mistake machines for consciousness and our own consciousness for machines; we destroy habitats with little regard for the non-human life that resides there.... I struggle to think of a book for whose subject I have felt more sympathy and excitement: its turn to the body, its trenchant critique of scientific reductionism and misguided metaphors."