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."

Cuttings: June 2026

The Reality of AI and the Crisis of Meaning – address by Matthew Harvey Sanders to the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, 23 April 2026, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I want to start with the deepest pastoral fear many of you may already have, because it’s the right fear and it deserves a direct answer. The fear isn’t that AI is stupid. The fear is that AI will be trusted as if it were wise. The fear is that a thirteen-year-old girl with a conscience-burdened question will take that question not to a priest, not to her mother, not even to her friend, but to a chatbot. The fear is that a lonely widower in Portsmouth will pour his grief into an app whose business model is to keep him talking.... The problem in front of us isn’t, in the end, computer science. It’s an assault on the face and the voice. It’s an attempt, at industrial scale, to engineer substitutes for the two things that make a Catholic sacramental life possible: the human face, and the human voice.... With all of that in view, four things these systems simply cannot do. (1) They cannot know you. They have no interior life. (2) They cannot love you. Love is the willing of the good of the other. A machine has no will. (3) They cannot forgive you.... (4) They cannot accompany you. They can only be in the room.... Your parishioners aren’t in danger of believing the machine is God. They’re in danger of forgetting that they aren’t machines.... The great crisis of our century won’t be scarcity. It will be despair. A Universal Basic Income can’t fill a hole in the soul."

I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them? – article by Ioan Marc Jones in The Guardian. "A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the Guardian’s new list of the 100 best novels. I nearly collapsed with smugness. I’d read 68 of the books and decided on the spot to read the remaining 32.... I found my concentration lagging. I kept checking the football scores and I don’t really care about football.... Have we all changed? Or was it just me?... The page makes few demands. It is linear and monologic, allowing us to focus on a single task. The page has no pop-ups, no calls to action, no ads clamouring for attention. But screens, according to research by psychologist Gloria Mark, compel us to switch attention, push us towards new shiny things. We focus on interfaces, ads, dialogic elements, rather than the content. Online, according to research by Chartbeat, one in three readers spend less than 15 seconds on any given article. Many who started reading this piece will have not made it this far.... Screens have altered the way we read. They promote a shallower reading experience, encourage skimming and scanning. Reading on screen has undermined reading in general. And our dependence on screens has led to a form of text fatigue.... Work exacerbates the problem. More of us now occupy managerial rather than manual roles, according to the National Readership Survey. We spend days staring at screens, drowning in instant messages, emails and work slop. People do not want to spend their leisure time reading Victorian classics, after all that bad reading.... In less than a decade, I’d lost the ability to read some of the best books ever written. I had no idea how that had happened. The experts I spoke to told me, over and over again, that classics require patience and practice. A good reader needs to learn or relearn how to read them. So how do I practise the classics? The most common bit of advice: start small. Katie Garner, a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, advocates the 'Read like a Victorian' strategy: 'Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.'... You can break a book into chunks, or simply pick smaller books.... More recent classics tend to ease the reader into reading.... Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new.... Audiobooks improve accessibility and we should welcome anything that helps people read.... Supplementary materials improve accessibility.... It is perhaps best to end with some words of wisdom from Virginia Woolf, the one writer to appear on the Guardian’s list five times: 'The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.'”

‘The CGI would have cost millions. I spent $2,000.’ Is Dreams of Violets AI slop, or the future of film-making? – article by Cath Clarke in The Guardian. "Next week a breakthrough 75-minute drama about the brutal crackdown in Iran on anti-government protesters in January will premiere at the Tribeca film festival in New York. It is called Dreams of Violets and is based on journalism, video footage and eyewitness accounts. 'I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,' says its Iranian-British director Ash Koosha. But Dreams of Violets is a work of fiction, not a documentary: a drama following a group of strangers caught up in the protests, who meet by chance in an alleyway. How on earth has Koosha managed to pull together a drama about the killings in less than six months? The answer, it turns out, is by using artificial intelligence. Every image and character in Dreams of Violets is AI-generated. Koosha says he created the characters by describing their physical appearances, using people he has known in the past as references. It would be too dangerous to base characters on living people in Iran, he says. 'Because of the security issue, it would not be safe for the characters to even remotely resemble someone.' Where Dreams of Violets is breaking new ground is that it is the first fully-AI live action feature accepted at a major film festival. ... Koosha says that Dreams of Violets would be '100% impossible' to bring to the screen in the traditional way. 'If you wanted to do it in CGI, it would cost millions. I spent under $2,000.' He also points out the difficulties in raising finance and pre-production. 'It would take probably a year or two to get this right. The notion of making films at the speed of news itself is something I’m super interested in.' He also sees a role for AI in producing movies that look like massive studio productions at a fraction of the cost – removing the barriers for independent film-makers. 'An indie film-maker mind is often a lot more fresh and creative than an industrial film-maker mind. In my view most stories that are told with $100m should be told through the lens of an indie film-maker.'”

Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong? – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. “It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future…. In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a ‘transhuman’ future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves. … The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.… How should society intervene? Does our political system provide the tools to help steer the process in a pro-social direction?… The Trump administration has shown little interest so far in resisting the tech oligarch’s fantasy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the valley oligarchs’ project of techno-domination is inevitable. Misgivings are emerging among the Maga base…Other signs of trouble are brewing for the AI project – from college graduates booing commencement speakers who extol AI, to Trump’s brief moment of concern over the potential criminal capabilities of Anthropic’s new Mythos model before deciding not to regulate the thing after all.… Perhaps the most forceful, pro-human position has come from the Holy Father himself. On Monday, Pope Leo published the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, pushing back against the unfettered development of AI at the expense of jobs and social equity. ‘This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,‘ he added…. One might also take comfort in the fact that the oligarchs’ dreamscape is so far-fetched. … Forget the part where human consciousness is rendered in digital form, merged with AI and beamed across the galaxy. The ostensibly more down-to-earth proposition that conscious AI is not just possible but around the corner is in fundamental tension with our tenuous grasp of what consciousness is. Even more mundane objectives, such as getting artificial intelligence to train itself, keep getting pushed forward into the event horizon.… Maybe the transhuman project will give way to a more or less recognizably human future with some cool new AI plugins. Maybe it can even be achieved in a way that serves our long-forgotten dream of equitable prosperity. So far, though, our technological visionaries are pushing for something else, a future marked by vast concentrations of wealth and power, indifferent to the humdrum aspirations of the unwashed many.“

The Traveller by Andrea Wulf: an 18th century explorer far ahead of his time – review by Nick Bartlett in The Guardian. “At a time when racism pervaded public opinion as well as the philosophical texts of luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Forster moved brazenly to critique and correct them… It is unusual to devote almost half a biography to only three years of a subject’s life. But the decision tells us something about the weight the author places on the time Forster spent travelling the world as the assistant naturalist on board Captain James Cook’s HMS Resolution, beginning when he was just 17. Unlike the ship’s crew, Forster was concerned by how the expedition’s presence in the Pacific islands would damage social relations and disrupt local economies. In his diary, he wrote that the people who received them had every right ‘to look on our men as a set of invaders‘. He deplored the ‘vengeful‘ nature of his fellow sailors and spent his time with the Indigenous people they made contact with, among them the Māori, Easter Islanders and Tahitians. He admired the Tahitians’ unique conception of property and their absence of class distinctions. Towards the end of the journey a man from Bora Bora, named Hitihiti, voluntarily joined the crew, and he and Forster became close friends, teaching one another words from their respective mother tongues…. Despite his departures from mainstream opinion, Forster was lauded for his intellect and daring spirit, invited to address King George III and regularly called on by foreign envoys and European royals. In his celebrated account of the expedition, A Voyage Round the World (1777), he condemned the violence committed by the crew against Indigenous people and espoused what he termed ‘the general rights of mankind‘. The appeal to what we’d now call human rights was unprecedented and radical for its inclusion of everyone, regardless of race.“

The Children by Melissa Albert: intriguing fairytale of creativity’s dangers – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. “Children’s writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged.… The Children’s protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, who as a grown woman is trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children’s portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as the named protagonists. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were becoming as famous as Christopher Robin – with all that implies. In the present day of the novel, grown-up Guin is the custodian of her mother’s literary legacy. She is releasing a ghostwritten and somewhat saccharine memoir about the years that she and Ennis spent running wild in rural isolation while Edith wrote the books that were to define their lives. But the truth, as Albert’s sometimes unwieldy triple time scheme lets us know bit by bit, is darker than Guin’s memoir suggests…. In the present tense of the novel,… Edith and Llewellyn have died in a fire that consumed the house; the sixth and last book in the Ninth City series never got written; and Guin and Ennis, once so close, have been on nonspeakers for two decades. A conceptual artist who builds uncanny installations, Ennis has always refused to talk about his childhood and the Ninth City books – but just as Guin is publicising her memoir, he announces a new show called Mother. The now of the story tracks Guin’s panicky peregrinations as we count down to its opening day and the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, a third time strand fills in Guin’s experiences between the death of her parents and the present…. One of the pleasures of The Children is that you’re quite some way through it before you figure out what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a haunted house story, or a dark fairytale? We’re certainly closing in on a secret, or rather a whole passel of them.”

‘You’re treated like this is the end’: Meet the dementia rebels, diagnosed and determined to change people’s minds – article by Anne Karpf in The Guardian. “People diagnosed with dementia are still routinely being advised to disengage from life as they know it and prepare to die – something that Kate Swaffer, an internationally known Australian dementia campaigner, calls ‘prescribed disengagement‘ – or given a bunch of leaflets, without any genuine support beyond groups in which many people living with dementia feel patronised. After diagnosis, Swaffer immediately lost her job…. [She is one of a number of] dementia activists, people living with dementia who are angry about the stereotypes surrounding the condition and the lack of support after diagnosis. It is a hybrid of ageism and ableism that combine, they believe, to perpetuate fear and anxiety. Instead of disengaging, they choose to engage even more vigorously: all four have thrown themselves into dementia activism, establishing new groups…

Project a Black Planet: spits out dreary academic theory where it should sing – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “The exhibition does not sing. It spits out theory instead. Every section is framed as an essay, with artworks chosen to illustrate an argument: one bay is based around the ideas of sociologist Stuart Hall, which the works don’t seem to illustrate anyway. This is a show that wants to conjure up a utopian place, Panafrica, and make it real, which would be a powerful piece of political enchantment. To do that it needed to be put together with artistic flair. Instead the curators approach their poetic fiction with leaden prosaicness. Rather than carrying you away to Panafrica on wings of imagination they keep stopping to recalibrate their academic echo-location machine. As a result the huge mix of art, from mid 20th-century sculptor Ronald Moody to a Marlene Dumas painting via a poster for Do the Right Thing, becomes an incoherent, often tedious stew. And there’s worse. This exhibition is so in thrall to theoretical musings around Panafrica it loses sight of … Africa. While this utopian dream of an imaginary continent was being constructed across the 20th and 21st centuries what was happening, you wonder, in Africa and to people worldwide of African descent?“

Young, ambitious and out of work: ‘I’ve gone from Oxford to zero jobs. It’s a bit of a fall’ - article by Sammy Gecsoyler in The Guardian. “Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a ‘humiliating’ weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals…. Like all of the young people interviewed for this piece, Thomas has been unemployed for more than a year. He is one of 82,000 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the same grim predicament. Thomas, who lives in Warrington, gets £311 a month in universal credit. After his bills are paid and his dog’s food is accounted for, he has about £25 for the month. He is hardly lazy, having worked since he was 16. But this changed in October 2024 when he lost his job as a pub manager. Despite applying for about 2,000 jobs since, he’s had no luck.… Sadly, Thomas’s experience is the new normal for many young people across the UK.… Alan Milburn’s report on young people and work … says that about 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training (Neet).”

‘A poisoned chalice’: will Doctor Who survive Russell T Davies’s exit? – article by Martin Belam in The Guardian. “The announcement that the BBC has abandoned the planned Doctor Who Christmas special, and is ending its partnership with showrunner Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf production company, will not have come as much of a surprise to many fans…. Viewing figures [have dipped] to the lowest in the show’s history – although the current streaming landscape makes it difficult to make like-for-like comparisons with previous eras….When 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner suspected the show faced cancellation, he and script editor Andrew Cartmel carefully left the series open ended. Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred walked off into the distance with a monologue from him that became fandom lore…. Davies and Bad Wolf, conversely, have left the show on a series of cliffhangers that are unlikely ever to be resolved. Why did we suddenly get flashing psychic messages from the Doctor’s granddaughter in the middle of the Interstellar Song Contest? Why did the Doctor appear to regenerate into the face of a former companion? The 2005 revival worked because Davies threw away the continuity baggage, only gradually reintroducing old elements. Assuming a new production company wants a clean slate – a new showrunner, Doctor, companions and a reimagining of the concept – the end of The Reality War and the lingering question of: 'Is or isn’t Billie Piper the new Doctor?' feel like a poisoned chalice. Part of the problem remains that the BBC is unclear as to what it wants the show to be. It is a valuable franchise and a British cultural touchstone, but it lacks the global reach of Star Wars or Marvel, despite having to compete against them for attention. At the same time, the BBC still thinks it can use it on Saturday linear TV to unite a family audience that probably no longer exists. Putting the show out to tender suggests they are looking for somebody else to square those circles.“

This is Rambert: 100th birthday knees-up is a big leap forward – review by Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian. “Britain’s oldest dance company is celebrating its 100th anniversary but this celebratory tour is decidedly no exercise in nostalgia. As the title, This is Rambert, makes clear, it’s a mission statement, a manifesto, and all about the present moment. So no harking back to the company’s beginnings in the early years of British ballet, or the deliberate shift into modern dance in the 1960s. The Rambert brand has gone through some chameleonic changes across the last century, settling for a while into a pattern of reputable, reliable, something-for-everyone shows. Current artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer wants to shake things up, to prove there’s nothing geriatric about this centenarian…. What does [the programme] say about Rambert’s mission, then? To move fast, but not necessarily break everything. To continue commissioning new choreography and keep a stunning set of dancers in forward motion. This is all very good, and everything tonight is good, even if only some of it really thrills – that’s the necessary risk of new work. Let’s hope they’re still dancing in another 100 years.”

‘Once, Mandela was seen as the devil incarnate’: the TV show laying bare the true struggle against apartheid – article by Emine Saner in The Guardian. “We tend to look back at the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, says Peter Hain… ‘as one of the great success stories of protests and Nelson Mandela as a global icon, and rightly so. But Mandela was considered the devil incarnate. He was denounced as a terrorist by Margaret Thatcher only a few years before his release. We were vilified.’ It was nothing compared to what Black people in South Africa faced, he stresses, but still he was targeted…. Dali Tambo grew up expecting the worst would happen to his father, Oliver Tambo, the ANC president in exile who had brought his family to London in 1960. Other activists who had left South Africa had been assassinated… In London, the ANC offices were bombed.… The British anti-apartheid movement was hugely significant, says Hain. ’Of course newly independent African countries were expressing solidarity, and the US [movement], particularly the Black community, which itself was suffering from enormous racism. But the British anti-apartheid movement [became] the centre of the international anti-apartheid struggle.’ Both Hain and Tambo harnessed sport and culture. Hain led the protests against the 1969 Springbok rugby tour of Britain and Ireland, and succeeded in getting the South African cricket tour cancelled the following year. ‘The sports campaign brought to millions of sports fans a sudden awareness: what’s apartheid about?’ Hain later became an MP, cabinet minister and now sits in the House of Lords.“

Free Nelson Mandela: this gripping documentary pulls no punches – review by Phil Harrison in The Guardian. “Nelson Mandela died in December 2013 but he had long before been canonised as a secular saint. Many people – particularly on the political right – found it convenient to forget that for decades they had regarded him as a terrorist. He had become the world’s grandad: an icon of spiritual generosity and reconciliation. This three-part series directed by James Rogan ends in 1994, when Mandela became president of South Africa and that process of sanctification was under way. It’s gripping, it’s revelatory and it pulls no punches. It evokes the grim reality faced by Mandela and his allies during their decades-long struggle against apartheid. It’s a world of white South Africans suggesting their Black compatriots had ‘only just come down from the trees‘. Of British young Conservatives with their ‘Hang Nelson Mandela‘ posters. Of physical violence, emotional torment and awful economic unfairness…. As Mandela and other ANC leaders languished in captivity, the series tracks the diasporic face of the resistance. Musicians Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela went into exile abroad but relentlessly spread the word. Via disrupted sporting events and street protests, the likes of Peter Hain engaged in activism in Britain. Inside South Africa, ANC fighters, such as James Mange were at the sharp end. Mange eventually ended up on Robben Island, where Mandela was startled by the movement’s new militancy. But events recorded in history books are barely half the story. This telling brutally emphasises the personal cost of Mandela’s resistance. He lost his mother and son in consecutive years and mourned them remotely. His wife Winnie, meanwhile, is a complex figure about whom the series is wisely nonjudgmental. If, eventually, her radicalism became incompatible with her husband’s gentle pragmatism, it is made clear that she had every justification for her rage…. [Mandela’s] three-way release negotiation – with the ANC, his fellow prisoners and the South African authorities – remains a miracle of diplomacy. It was helped … by a world waking up to South Africa…. The reminder of the BBC’s decision to screen Mandela’s 70th birthday concert in 1988 in the face of legal threats from Conservative MPs is poignant in the light of the BBC’s apparent unwillingness to interrogate hard right, anti-immigrant tropes. As Neil Kinnock puts it: ‘In the Commonwealth, South Africa’s only friend and defender was Margaret Thatcher.‘ Given the flux of the world in 1990, Mandela’s release seemed inevitable at the time. This series shows that it wasn’t, and demonstrates how much could have gone wrong. The conclusion alludes to the Truth and Reconciliation process that took place in South Africa through the 90s but steps away at this point – Mandela’s post-prison life is worthy of another series in itself.“

‘Why would you put a toxic product into the hands of a young child?’: director turned activist Beeban Kidron on why big tech needs its ‘tobacco moment’ – interview by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, on the publication of her book Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back. “The book Kidron has written ... isn’t simply furious. In parts it’s gossipy, even unexpectedly funny, as her old celebrity life as the director of movies such as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason collides with her new political mission…. But the woman in front of me, makeup free and with her hair bundled up in a clip, is no Hollywood luvvie. Her expertise dates back to 2012, and a documentary she made when her own son and daughter were teenagers about how smartphones were changing childhood. That led to her founding the charity 5Rights Foundation, which campaigns for children’s rights online, and a search for solutions taking her from Silicon Valley boardrooms to the Vatican and many places in between. The book is an impassioned cri de coeur against an industry she sees as out of control, though she says it was written partly to show that we’re not powerless to put it back in its box: that in an attention economy, individuals have the ultimate sanction of withholding our attention from the platforms desperate for it. But it’s also an ‘absolute cry of rage against the political class’ for what she sees as successive governments’ failure to protect not just children but adults whose lives have also been reshaped by tech. ‘Come for the children, stay for humanity,’ she says drily.”

How To Read A Novel – SubStack post by Steven Johnson, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Last week, I happened on a tweet from Patrick Collison [asking] why we should read classic novels… I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events.… But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters…. Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers…. In Middlemarch, the key events of the narratives are all deeply influenced by forces existing at at least seven distinct bands of the spectrum: MIND (Dorothea’s emotional and sexual attraction to Ladislaw; her drive for intellectual autonomy) FAMILY (The possibility of having children; the impact on her choices on her father and sister) CAREER (Dorothea’s active oversight over the Lowick estate, and the social impact of 'improving' Lowick) COMMUNITY (The town gossip, which is effectively its own character in the novel) ECONOMY (The financial consequences of relinquishing Causabon’s fortune) TECHNOLOGY (The chaos of the railroad; the productivity of the new agricultural techniques.) POLITICS (The reform movement that catalyzed the events of 1832; Ladislaw’s political ambitions within that movement.)… Bleak House added a new band to the spectrum, one that becomes central in 20th-century classics like The Trial, 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: the bureaucratic state, most famously the Court Of Chancery with its endless litigations and a whole comical troupe of nascent knowledge workers churning through ‘bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense.’ … why should we read these books? To me, the answer comes down to this: getting your brain to accurately assess the full spectrum takes effort, but it’s a valuable skill to have in life. If you over-index on one layer at the expense of the others, you’ll end up making less nuanced choices, both personally and professionally, because your mental model about what is actually happening at a given crossroads of your life will be too narrow. And so we should embrace any opportunity to practice thinking across scales, in part because most educational environments are deliberately designed to keep you specialized in one part of the spectrum. So in a way, I’ve come to think about books like Middlemarch or Bleak House—using the language of deep learning—as a source of training data for full-spectrum thinking. They are trial runs that prepare you for the real thing.“

‘Wow, it really worked!’: the 70s TV show that’s causing worldwide panic, 50 years later – article by Phil Tinline in The Guardian. “On 20 June 1977, an edition of Anglia Television’s Science Report was broadcast on ITV. It set out to investigate the ‘brain drain‘ of British scientists to the US. But it emerged that some of these scientists had vanished completely, while others had died in strange circumstances. The journalists had stumbled on something huge. As the host, former ITV newscaster Tim Brinton, solemnly explained, the greenhouse effect would soon make the Earth uninhabitable, and this had forced the powerful to choose between terrible alternative solutions. The American and Soviet governments had decided to work together in secret to implement ‘Alternative 3‘: building a launch base on the moon, and from there a ‘human survival colony‘ for the elite on Mars. The missing scientists had been co-opted to play their part; the dead ones had threatened to leak the plan. As you probably guessed, the ‘documentary’ was a drama – as signalled by end credits listing the actors who played the horrified reporters and terrified scientists. Science Report did not exist; the whole thing was invented by a screenwriter named David Ambrose.… The show was meant to be broadcast on April Fools’ Day, but fatefully, it had to be moved back, and went out on 20 June. Ambrose says he ‘intended to cause a flap’ – and he did. While those end credits did begin with a dateline saying 'April 1st', many people took the show seriously. ITV was hit by a barrage of calls from viewers – some protesting, others seeking reassurance the programme was fiction.… Ambrose’s fiction escaped its British origins to take up residence in the strange dreamscape of American conspiracy theory. As the political scientist Michael Barkun traces in A Culture of Conspiracy, the show’s notion that the elite was plotting to abandon Earth keyed into existing visions of imminent apocalypse.… Alternative 3’s afterlife really took off in 1991, when the conspiracist Milton William Cooper included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse. The book’s paranoid tales of secret government evil, 'evidenced' by fictions like Alternative 3, influenced not just paid-up conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones, but everything from the UFO-obsessed, nothing-is-as-it-seems world of The X-Files to an array of hip-hop stars…. Cooper fused Alternative 3 with theories about Aids, depopulation and the Kennedy assassination, while insisting that Science Report was a real series. Another influential theorist, Jim Keith, wrote Casebook on Alternative 3, complete with a chapter on 'Missing Scientists'. The book begins by acknowledging the story appears to be a hoax. But what if that claim is just an elite trick? Meanwhile, other conspiracists were worrying about who would get to go to Mars: just how senior a Freemason did you need to be?“

The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren: can the ideal society ever exist? – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek ‘eu-topos‘, meaning good place, and ‘ou-topos‘, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both. In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic… Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where ’nothing is private’, and so ’the common affairs be earnestly looked upon’. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war… Inasmuch as utopias are primarily ‘organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought’, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s ’anarchist utopia’ of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans…. The best utopian fiction ... ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself.”

Cross purposes: how the England flag got caught in a tug-of-war between rightwing nationalists and football fans – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. “We’re gearing up for a summer of both exciting international football and ugly far-right protests and riots, as recent events in Belfast and Southampton have shown. The England flag will be a prominent fixture of both – great news for flag sellers, but a confusing and anxious time for the rest of us. How did England’s national symbol come to evoke such mixed feelings and carry such contradictory meanings? … Our politicians have been as uncertain about this as everyone else. That became clear last summer, when England flags and union jacks suddenly began to appear on lamp-posts in towns and cities across the country. …The initiative was pushed by groups such as Raise the Colours, a self-described ‘grassroots movement‘ that proclaimed it was campaigning ‘to cover Britain in symbols of unity and patriotism‘ – but it clearly generated local support too… In the Southey Green area of Sheffield on Monday, every lamp-post along the main street still has both a St George’s cross and a union jack on it. One lamp-post at the top of the hill sports six flags: two St George’s crosses, a union jack, the Welsh and Scottish national flags, and a remembrance flag with poppies and planes…. Talking to people in the area – which swung from Labour to Reform in the recent local elections – most appear to be either in favour of the flags or indifferent to them. ‘There’s a lot of people who say: “Ooh, it’s racist.“ How is it racist?’ asks Danny, a 37-year-old white man, from the porch of a house draped in several England flags.… To him, he says, the flag simply means: ‘We’re proud of this country. And we want to be proud of his country again because in all fairness it’s gone to shit.‘ He is not racist, he says, but he’s opposed to ‘the ones that are coming across and getting everything for nowt‘. He claims to know of eastern European migrants who laugh and joke about different benefits and student grants they are getting from the government…. Many of the locals I spoke to evoked military patriotism in relation to the flags, saying they had relatives in the armed forces or had served themselves. There was a lot of national pride but also a sense of wounded pride, perhaps, mixed with nostalgia…. The line between flagging as a ‘grassroots’ initiative and as a provocation by the organised far right has begun to evaporate. Scarf and Hope Not Hate have both identified Raise the Colours figures as former members of far-right groups such as the English Defence League, the National Front, Britain First and the UK Independence party (which is now a Christian nationalist group). Many former members of Raise the Colours have reportedly left the organisation as it has become more extreme and anti-migrant… According to recent research by British Future, a non-partisan thinktank concerned with issues of integration, migration, identity and race, 62% of people in England agreed that: ’I would like to be able to fly an England flag without appearing to support the far right.’ And 81% of people in England, and 74% of ethnic minorities, saw the flying of England flags to support the country’s football teams in major tournaments as ’a healthy expression of English national pride’.”

Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate – article by Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. “In 2024, the buy-now-pay-later company Klarna announced that it would cut hundreds of customer service roles and begin using an artificial intelligence chatbot instead. The move was expected to save the company millions. But a year later, after customers complained about the degraded quality of customer service, Klarna began to recruit human customer service agents back. At first glance, the reversal appeared to be a victory for human workers in the age of AI. The reality was more complex. Instead of bringing on full-time customer service agents, [instead] an AI chatbot continues to handle most of customers’ basic queries, while a growing number of gig workers handle the more advanced ones.… Consider this a glimpse into one of the ways artificial intelligence is poised to transform work…. The optimistic interpretation of this is that AI will take on more of the menial tasks from human workers, freeing them up to do higher-level work. The cynical interpretation? As companies increasingly integrate AI, they will use it to hire fewer full-time employees, shifting toward a fragmented workforce that resembles the gig economy. ‘Gig work’ refers to flexible, short-term or on-demand work. The term originally comes from the music industry, like a band playing a ‘gig’. It’s now commonly used to describe workers on platforms like Uber, DoorDash or Taskrabbit. These jobs give workers some autonomy to choose when and how much to work, but they also lack most of the benefits afforded to full-time workers: paid time off, health insurance, workers’ compensation, overtime or even a minimum wage. ‘One of the things we talk about as sociologists who study work is this idea about work moving from the career to the job to the gig. And AI makes it even easier to do that,’ says Alexandrea Ravenelle, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… This transformation is hitting white-collar desk workers hardest as companies strive to show efficiency gains from adopting AI.… ‘We are going to see it in every industry,’ says Ravenelle. ‘I don’t believe there’s any industry that’s safe from this.’”

‘You can’t make billions without hurting people’: Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk, the AI bubble and bosses’ cruel fantasies – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "A 'centaur', in automation theory, is a person assisted by a machine, and a 'reverse centaur', hero of Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, is a 'human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine'. Every warehouse worker who ever had to urinate in a water bottle because they couldn’t otherwise meet the fulfilment targets set by an algorithm is a reverse centaur. Reaching into the future, everyone who has to sit in a self-driving truck to make sure it doesn’t crash, presumably on minimum rather than truck-driver wages, is a reverse centaur; as is every lawyer no longer on lawyer’s money checking Gemini’s command of precedent, every indie band scraping a living doing covers of AI-generated hits, and so on. That, anyway, is the promise: AI is coming for your job, and it is coming for your kids’ jobs, and there is no point fighting it because the future’s already here.... [Doctorow] came to mass attention as a tech writer with his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It; it’s hard to believe it was only published last year, and impossible to remember what we did without that word. People now use 'enshittification' for everything, from the degradation of public services post-austerity to climate-crisis-related chaos events, when in fact Doctorow’s proposition had quite a specific use regarding tech: giant platforms lock you in and then make your experience worse on purpose. 'I’m not frustrated by that at all. I think it’s glorious. My first two languages are English and Yiddish, languages that don’t have language academies, where dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, where words change meaning.'... Why, he wonders, are capital allocators allocating so much capital to [AI]? It’s because of a promise as old as the loom: that bosses will be able to replace their workers with machines. This isn’t just about money – often, when the machine is ultimately not as good as a human, or needs so much supervision from a human that it becomes more expensive, there’s still tremendous appetite for automation. 'The one thing a boss does not want is co-determination. Bosses are haunted by the knowledge that even though they fancy that they’re driving the car, if they don’t show up, everything continues to work. Whereas if the workers don’t show up, everything shuts down. And so perhaps they’re in the back seat with a toy steering wheel. AI is the promise of wiring that toy steering wheel directly into the drivetrain of the car. It’s products without product designers. Workplaces without workers, screenplays without screenwriters, movies without actors, hospitals without doctors and nurses. This is the promise.... Do you not remember when they said cryptocurrency would replace all of the world’s financial systems? They told us that the metaverse would be the default, that we wouldn’t have tourism or sex any more,' Doctorow says, with vaudeville outrage. 'We have such poor object permanence!' (This is fancy, child-development vocabulary for 'really bad memories'.) ... Whenever an exercise in automation fails and is abandoned – you may remember Amazon’s staff-less grocery stores, which actually required three people to be constantly watching each shopper on CCTV and guessing what they were putting in their baskets – it never dents the AI cheerleaders’ confidence that they’re speeding towards a post-worker world; nor, so far, the enthusiasm of investors. It’s got to the point where it’s more important to keep the narrative afloat than to consider whether it’s realistic.... Fundamentally, this is a Marxist analysis, I suggest: that labour and capital are elementally at odds, and the latter will exploit the former even if all value is lost in the process. 'I don’t necessarily disagree, but that’s not the argument I’m making. The argument I’m making is that bosses resent and work relentlessly to end co-determination as a class.' But that’s the same, I insist, and he shrugs, as if to say: we can bicker about Marx after we’ve stopped this runaway train."

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow: the real price of artificial intelligence – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.... AI’s public image has fallen to earth: it’s now widely seen as a job crusher, a fact mangler, a slop maker, a privacy invader, a climate trasher and a general pain in the neck. Never before has a new technology been rammed down our throats with such speed, determination and complete disregard for public opinion. Cory Doctorow’s book pithily explains why.... Doctorow, who has written several science fiction novels, cites one of the genre’s defining messages: 'The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.' Just as the Luddites weren’t angry with machines per se, most anti-AI sentiment is really anti-capitalist rather than anti-tech. Doctorow uses a framework a 19th-century socialist would recognise: the bosses will pull every trick to avoid paying workers more unless workers unionise to fight back. The problem with the AI business is the same thing that drives enshittification. The improbable price-to-sales ratios of tech companies are based on the promise of future growth, hence high-stakes bets like the Metaverse or the failed social media platform Google+. The AI sector’s colossal valuation derives largely from the salaries of the human workers it aims to replace – Morgan Stanley predicts it will add almost a trillion dollars a year to the S&P 500. And because the net worth of tech bosses is tied to stock value rather than actual profits, they have a personal incentive to keep investors excited: today AI may be a money pit, but just you wait.... One thing to give anti-AI hardliners pause is Doctorow’s suggestion that the industry is deliberately juicing outrage about things like AI-generated art as a form of hype: if people are this scared and angered, then the promise of replacing human labour must be real. In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: 'To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.'”

‘It’s where the poetry is written in cinema language’: the female editors behind cinema’s masterpieces – article by Bethany Elliott in The Guardian. "Behind every great director, to coin a phrase, is a great editor – and as the tributes paid earlier this month to the late Marcia Lucas, Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI, and former wife of creator George Lucas, reminded us, that editor is often a woman. In a historically male-dominated industry, this familiar Hollywood dynamic is a phenomenon that is worth investigating. It goes back decades. During the supermacho Hollywood new wave era, Dede Allen worked with Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) and Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), and Thelma Schoonmaker edited Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and GoodFellas for Martin Scorsese (and much else besides). David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia may have contained no female speaking characters, but it won Anne V Coates an editing Oscar. Anne Bauchens was nominated for Cleopatra in 1934, when the Oscars’ editing category was created, and became its first female winner in 1940 for Cecil B DeMille’s North West Mounted Police. The received wisdom is that women came to occupy the editing suite while being excluded from other creative roles as it was assumed that editing was monotonous, unskilled labour and, as the male-dominated studio system emerged, editors were subordinate to the producer and director. This, however, may not be the full story. 'During the studio system, editing was not considered unskilled labour,' says JE Smyth, professor of history at the University of Warwick. 'Women were the best editors in the studio system; many had musical backgrounds which helped them with finding a flow.'"

‘Emotional and horrific’: volunteers ‘live’ as Somerset animals to study wildlife risks – article by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian. "What does a kestrel make of the dog sniffing in the long grass below? Why does an exhausted salmon pause before a weir? How will an otter experience the rumble of a passing train? Eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in our human-dominated landscape.... In the pioneering study – conducted by the University of the West of England and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), funded by the Ecological Citizen(s) Network – participants were given a detailed scientific briefing about the sensory powers of their chosen animal collaborators' and trained to undertake exercises in the wild. Encouraged to use a single key sense, they were advised by social anthropologists on the research team not to interpret, explain or evaluate, but simply to describe their experiences. By 'de-centering' human understanding, they were told they might allow another understanding to come through, before they reported their oral testimonies back to researchers.... The project reflects a growing interest in the rights of nature movement and the burgeoning More-Than-Human Life programme, and follows innovative thinkers such as Charles Foster, whose pioneering book Being a Beast documented him living as a fox, red deer, badger and swift."

For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music: it’s amazing that this staggering show exists – review by Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. "The consensus seemed to be that [documentary series like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man] – huge, cerebral, expensive – would simply not get made today, unless it was dumbed down and cut-price and rebranded ... So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Cosmic Shambles Network’s new documentary series, For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, takes its title as seriously as it does.... I assumed, naively, that the series would largely be about the sort of music that was popularised in the 20th century, with a nod to classical along the way. Nope. The first 15 minutes are spent discussing the soundwaves produced by the Big Bang, explained via interviews with astrophysicists and theoretical cosmologists.... Then we learn what sound actually is, with digressions about how the size, shape and texture of a room can affect acoustics.... It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for. It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for... Still, this isn’t an alienatingly brainy series. Its trump card is its host, Charlotte Ritchie.... She is a vital presence, because the show has a lot of very big ideas that it needs to link together.... To reiterate the scale of the endeavour, by the end of the first episode we are still only at about 800BC. That leaves close to three millennia (the ones containing all the music that any of us will be familiar with) to get through in just eight episodes. Apparently No 2 will largely revolve around the ancient Mesopotamian use of Pythagorean tuning. I wouldn’t miss it for the world."