Staying Without Surrendering Your Soul – SubStack article by Cameron Trimnle, referenced in Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation. "How do you remain faithful when the surrounding culture is losing its moral center? The desert elders left noise to recover clarity.... The desert was never the final destination. It was a training ground for perception. One elder taught that the first task of spiritual life is learning to see your own reactions clearly: how quickly anger justifies itself, how easily fear pretends to be wisdom, how often ego disguises itself as courage. Silence exposed all of that, not to shame people, but to free them. Benedict took the next step. He asked: once you learn to see clearly, how do you live faithfully in community over the long haul? His answer was not intensity but rhythm — prayer, work, shared meals, mutual care, accountability, humility, repair. So the question for us is not whether to leave or stay. Most of us are not called to geographic withdrawal. We are called to interior non-cooperation with corruption while remaining deeply committed to one another. You can stay without surrendering your soul. But it takes practice. It takes boundaries around attention. It takes rhythms that interrupt outrage. It takes communities that tell the truth to one another gently and directly. It takes prayer, or silence, or honest reflection that clears emotional distortion before it hardens into identity."
Let’s get metaphysical! Existentialist cinema is back, if anyone cares – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "'For it all to be consummated, to feel less alone, I had only to wish for a big crowd on the day of my execution, and for them to greet me with cries of hate.' The lacerating signoff of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger isn’t a collection of words you’ll see appearing as life advice in some influencer’s Instagram caption any time soon. In the age of vapid social media self-help, François Ozon’s new film adaptation of the existentialist masterpiece rears up like a great monolith. Eighty-four years after the novel was published, that’s rather unexpected; as far as IP goes, L’Étranger (The Stranger) was probably some way behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on the film industry’s revival list. Does this mean that existentialism is suddenly back in vogue? Or is the film just a farewell tour for every angsty student’s favourite source of tattoo quotes?... The mid-century world of turtle-necked Left Bank pontificators such as Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir now feels as exotic and far-off as ancient Greece. The Stranger’s light prose made it a French GCSE staple – but also a gateway drug to mainlining the likes of Dostoyevsky, Kerouac and Salinger, and other existentialist-adjacent required reading needed to graduate as a pretentious alienated teen. For most modern functioning adults, navigating a meaningless universe is what happens when your GPS loses reception. God may be dead – but the new religion of tech has arrived with new promises of eternity. Existentialism would seem to have reached its best-by date.... The philosophy never did make much of a direct impact on cinema, partly because there were relatively few core fictional texts to adapt. Sartre’s Nausea and his Roads to Freedom trilogy have never had feature-length adaptations; of Camus’s other major works, only The Plague has been filmed... In the US, émigré directors including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak packaged up interwar European paranoia – and the nihilist artistic and philosophical undercurrents swirling around it – into hardboiled pop existentialism: film noir. The genre’s terse gumshoes, hapless schemers and sketchy drifters might have been short on philosophical rigour, but looked invariably sharp getting sucked into the quagmire of a senseless universe.... Setting its compass by noir’s unstable bearings, this floundering existential heroism became the water we swim in. It is everywhere: in Travis Bickle’s queasy nocturnal odyssey in Taxi Driver, Blade Runner’s replicants agonising over their programmed obsolescence, Jim Carrey searching for the door to real life in The Truman Show, Christopher Nolan’s many wanderers in his fragmented movie-labyrinths. So the return of The Stranger to cinemas isn’t so much a quaint throwback as being presented with a cultural Rosetta Stone, allowing us to better understand where this type of metaphysical questing stems from."
‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing – article by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. "Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading.... As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: 'We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.' Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – 'nobody memoirs', the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences.... Shock is an integral part of memoir and sometimes the facts are shocking, without embroidery.... In literature the mode used to be called confessionalism. These days, pejoratively, it’s called oversharing. At best it prompts welcome recognition: Wow, great, here’s someone who’s had the same experiences, thoughts and feelings that I’ve had. But there’s often resistance as well: Ugh. TMI. I don’t need to know this. When the divulgence is sad-fishing on Facebook, curated self-glorification on Instagram or out-there revelation in a memoir, readers may feel irritated or affronted. Enough of this me-me-me-ism; they won’t take the proffered hand. When I wrote a book about the murder of James Bulger by two 10-year-olds, some reviewers liked the personal approach; others hated how I’d brought in my own children when I brooded on the age of responsibility. It’s not essential for writers to bean-spill, after all. They’re not victims on a talkshow, outmanoeuvred by Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle; they’re writing on their own terms and in control of what’s committed to print.... It’s not even compulsory to use the first person in memoir. In Bone Black bell hooks uses 'she' and 'we' as well as 'I'.... Such discretion is fine if it’s not evasion. There’s no point in telling a personal story if you censor yourself and hold back too much. Be brave, I’ve urged life-writing students terrified by what their ex will think, or their siblings, or their grouchy uncle: get that monkey off your back; it’s your version of events and if people close to you object, never mind – let them write their own memoir. But candour takes art: what works as an anecdote told in the pub won’t work on the page. It needs compression, structure, the right tone of voice. The task is to set down what happened, not parade extremes of feeling. An author can be open without closing the space for readers, who need room to interpret and explore.... Where the self-disclosure is nuanced and the writing compelling, you go with the flow, happy to eavesdrop, willing to follow wherever the memoir takes you."
On Memoir by Blake Morrison: lessons in life writing from a master – review by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "'I've had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer': Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it? Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor.... Life writing ... doesn’t always mean your own life, and almost never only yours. So how do you do it? Morrison’s response is a deceptively breezy alphabetically ordered guide, with Flashbacks, Food and Footnotes giving way to Persona, Photos and Plagiarism, and so forth. There’s plenty of cheerfully nuts-and-bolts advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: the most pedestrian example might be not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising not to write off self-publishing if you really want to get your story out there.... But the most insistent questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never quite resolving. Chief among them is: does it have to be true? Memory, after all, is a slippery customer, and although the contemporary exhortation to “speak one’s truth” might appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their truth too. When accounts of events and their associated emotions and conclusions are contested, things can get messy quickly. Should a committed life writer worry about what other people think? Morrison hedges his bets a touch: one should be as truthful as possible, and certainly not fabricate entire histories in order to deceive and manipulate (see Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiences of the Holocaust). But neither can writers allow themselves to be self-seduced by the desire to be likable, or to quail from excavating experiences that are painful or embarrassing."
Easter egg hunt techniques inspired by great detectives – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Sherlock Holmes. Deduce the exact location of every egg from seemingly unrelated details without leaving your room. Send your sidekick to find them. Jack Reacher. Hit the garden hard and fast. Take no prisoners. Get back on the road. This approach results in a thrillingly intense hunt, but very few intact eggs. George Smiley. Meticulously assess documents, people and motives. Then scrupulously collect the eggs while wondering dejectedly if any of this has been worthwhile."
‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK – article by Samira Shackle in The Guardian. "Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate. In 2021, Priya Kapoor (not her real name) took a job working for StudyIn, a large education consultancy, in a major Indian city. ... What she found was something akin to a factory production line, where students were the product. The first part of the production line were the agents – sometimes referred to as admissions consultants – who brought in students and acted as their main point of contact. Inevitably, Kapoor said, their advice on where to apply was often coloured by which institutions paid the highest commission. This is widely accepted to be the case across agencies.... Next in the chain was Kapoor’s team, which was responsible for the applications. Her job title was “statement of purpose editor” and her role was to interview students about their life and use that information to write personal statements on their behalf. To pay their fees, most students she spoke to planned to take out huge loans, often secured against their parents’ homes or agricultural land. They did so on the assumption that after graduation, they would earn enough to pay back the loan. 'They had no idea about sponsorship, no idea about visas. They just thought, "I’ll go there and I’ll get a job,"' Kapoor told me. From what she saw, admissions consultants rarely enlightened them. 'Agents do anything to avoid further questions,' she said. 'The attitude was: you’re just another application to me, and I have targets to complete.'... Once students got their offers, they were passed on to the visa team, and finally delivered to universities as a fully wrapped, fee-paying package. Over time, Kapoor felt worse and worse about her role in this system. 'I knew if I worked on 100 applications, 98 were getting nowhere with their life,' she said. 'I mean, I woke up and I started lying, then I slept lying, and I woke up only to lie again.' Eventually, she quit the job."
You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love by Jean-Noël Orengo: Hitler, Speer and beyond – review by Vincenzo Latronico in The Guardian. "Albert Speer, the Nazi war criminal... had served as minister of armaments in wartime Nazi Germany, and was found guilty of crimes against humanity; yet when he died, he was in London to promote his new book on the BBC. Speer’s rehabilitation was a masterpiece in duplicity. In his defence at the Nürenberg trials – and in later books and interviews – he was the only high-ranking official to take on full responsibility for the Nazi crimes; and this seeming moral clarity allowed him to credibly lie that he had not known about the extermination camps. The evidence for that would emerge only after his death, prompting [Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and 'Nazi hunter'] among many others, to admit he had been duped. Until then, the lie allowed Speer to become an authority on the endlessly fascinating topic of Adolf Hitler’s personality and psyche. Speer’s relationship to Hitler is at the heart of French author Jean-Noel Orengo’s You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, a masterfully unconventional novel about Speer’s two lives: as Hitler’s personal architect, ally and confidant; and as the world’s idealised specimen of a 'good Nazi': articulate, repentant and ultimately not as monstrous as others had been. Orengo’s book ... reads as the character study of a man who manipulated one of the most powerful men on Earth – and, after the latter’s defeat, his victors – into believing he, Speer, was exactly what they wanted him to be. This is a mechanism of seduction, and You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love also reads as a love story of sorts. The title is a remark an SS officer once made to Speer; no serious historian has taken it literally, but it does seem to reflect the deep, tumultuous nature of Hitler and Speer’s friendship.... The story is told in a memoirist’s sparely lyrical, inquisitive voice; the facts of Speer’s life and of the war raging in the backdrop are cues for Orengo’s musings on the inner calculations and deep drives that allowed Speer to win Hitler’s confidence and, later, betray it. Was it ruthless narcissism? Crippling insecurity? Naked ambition? Are these different things?"
Why does alcohol make us both happy and miserable. and what else does it do to our minds and bodies? – article by Joel Snape in The Guardian. "Whatever you think of alcohol, you have to admit that it’s versatile. ... Where most mind-altering substances have one or two specific use-cases, alcohol does the lot. That’s probably why it’s been so ubiquitous throughout human history – and why it can be so hard to give up entirely.... 'Alcohol gets to the brain within minutes, and the first thing it does is start shifting the balance between ... two inhibitory and excitatory chemical messengers,' says [Dr Rayyan Zafar, a neuropsychopharmacologist from Imperial College London]. 'It enhances Gaba and dampens glutamate, and so that early "buzzed" feeling is a combination of your frontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for judgment, restraint and self-monitoring, starting to go offline. That’s twinned with the release of dopamine and endorphins in the reward circuits that give you motivation, relaxation and energy. So people feel more relaxed, more talkative, less socially inhibited.' As the concentration of alcohol in your bloodstream rises, it begins to affect deeper and more primitive brain regions – including the cerebellum, which coordinates movement, and the brainstem, which regulates basic functions like heart rate and breathing. 'It progressively shuts down higher-order control systems first, and then the circuits that keep us physically coordinated,' says Zafar. This means that your speech slurs, your balance falters and your reaction times slow.... The Gaba-glutamate balance is also responsible for the anxious or depressed feeling many of us get the day after one too many, as the body overcorrects for the chemicals you’re putting into it. 'While alcohol is in your system, the brain compensates for its sedative effects by ramping up its excitatory systems, particularly glutamate and the stress pathways,' says Zafar. 'Once alcohol leaves your system, though, those compensatory systems don’t instantly switch off – instead, you’re left with a temporary rebound state of hyperexcitation. Stress hormones like cortisol can remain elevated, sleep architecture has been disrupted, and neurotransmitter systems are temporarily out of balance. The result is a brain that feels wired but depleted, anxious and restless.'”
Ten years after Brexit, this is the UK: a divided nation frozen in time – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "On 23 June 2016, the British voter changed. Before that day, they picked a party, usually red or blue. By that morning, only two tribes mattered: remain or leave. And they kept mattering long, long after the result was declared.... Our evidence comes from a new book by politics professors Sara Hobolt and James Tilley. In Tribal Politics: How Brexit Divided Britain, they conducted and analysed surveys of large numbers of voters over many years. Put together, the story is both simple and very different from the one told by the likes of Farage.... Until the referendum, the British public hardly gave any thought to the EU. If polled, most would express some form of Euroscepticism, but no overwhelming desire for exit.... At that point, an obsession of one small fraction of the Westminster elite was made a public concern, given months of airtime and front pages. The rest of us picked one of two sides, talked about it down the pub or at family dinners. Anyone who has read a recent self-help book knows what happens next. The author of the bestseller Atomic Habits (25m copies and counting), James Clear, writes: 'To change your behaviour for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself. You need to build identity-based habits.'... In forging these new identities, the aftermath mattered more than the campaign. Among Hobolt and Tilley’s graphs is one on 'emotional attachment to Brexit identity' before and after polling day. A month beforehand, a modest attachment is clearly visible, which gets stronger as the big vote looms. But the biggest jump comes after the results are out. Once the match is over, the fans keep shouting and they get a lot louder. The tribalism doesn’t fade with time; it remains strong. Whether you were in or out shapes your view of whether Brexit is going well or badly, which is no surprise. But it also shapes how you view the other side: remainers see leavers as selfish, hypocritical and closed-minded, and vice versa.... A spectre is haunting this new politics: the spectre of class. The 20th century was the era of class politics. Two words changed that: Tony Blair. A previous study co-authored by Tilley shows that the working class were staunch voters until the 1990s, when the party of labour declared 'we are all middle-class now'.... When class is banished from politics, all you’re left with is culture wars.... Perhaps the most dismal chart in Hobolt and Tilley’s book is the one that summarises where remainers and leavers differ on policy. Top comes immigration, obviously, followed by foreign aid and the death penalty. The two sides have little to say on whether Britain should be more equal, should treat workers better or have more public ownership. In other words, nothing that will make much of a difference to how much money you earn, pay in bills or have after taxes. The people who prosper from that kind of empty politics are those who are prosperous enough already. And they prosper even when they lose.... We live in an era of polarisation and grift, of blatant lying and blaming institutions. But the British only got here by passing such milestones as the Brexit vote of 2016, in which yet another elite debacle turned into a long and bloody national breakdown that set neighbours and workmates and families against each other. And for what?"
Beauty, Memory, and Grief – extract from his book Life after Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, reproduced in Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation on Earth Day 2026. “I think of a wetland I used to explore as a boy growing up in Maryland, part of the Rock Creek watershed. I spent hours exploring that wetland in every season, sometimes barefoot, sometimes in boots that nearly always overflowed and filled with cold water because I ventured in a little too deep. How could I stay dry when trilling toads and wriggling tadpoles moved among cattails in the spring? How could I stay away in summer and miss a chance to see that single great blue heron or mammoth snapping turtle who both hunted there, resident dinosaurs to my boyhood imagination? How could I not search for newts and crayfish in its cold waters in autumn, its sky-mirroring surface dappled by yellow tulip poplar, red maple, and orange-amber sweet gum leaves?… Several years ago, I was in the old neighborhood again…. The trail was still there, but now it was broad and paved for bicycles. The wetland had disappeared…. As I sat on one of the benches and looked around, I was overcome by sweet grief for the delight I once enjoyed as a boy, a lost magic boys and girls today will never know, at least, not there….I’m returning to this precious place in my memory, this sacred swampy ground. I’m appreciating it, praising it for what it was, all the more because it has been lost…. You have your lost places unknown to me. I have mine unknown to you. We could not protect them. But we do not let these good creations disappear only to be forgotten, unappreciated, unpraised, unlamented. Our love for them outlasts their existence. So together, we remember them in grief. We feel them more fully revealing themselves to us in their passing away…. Stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life.”
The Asset Class by Hettie O’Brien: the hidden hand of private equity – review by Caroline Knowles in The Guardian. "This is not just a problem of where money comes from, but how it behaves. The assets targeted are deeply entangled in our everyday life: in water, energy, housing, care homes, health, trains – services we all depend on. With examples from Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, London and Yorkshire, O’Brien shows the damage private equity can inflict as the state withdraws from key public services. She gathers stories of collapsing infrastructure, including sewage dumped in rivers by privatised, debt-saddled water companies. She shows how some care homes treat elderly people as 'the human equivalent of ATM machines' as fees are siphoned from their housing equity to fund the poor conditions and low wages of exhausted care workers. Her most shocking example of the collision between profit and care is a hospital in Africa where she alleges staff were pressured to admit patients, keep them in for longer and then seek to imprison a number of those who could not pay their bills. In the UK, privatisation was accompanied by regulation. But inspection regimes, as O’Brien argues, are often underfunded and ineffective. No one wants sewage in rivers – activists campaign against it, the Environment Agency hands out fines – but nothing changes, because poor services maximise profit and shareholder returns are a higher priority than clean water. Two pillars support private equity’s antisocial effects. One is secrecy: piles of profit and debt are moved around via offshore banks with minimal scrutiny. This allows the sector to nurture a public image – of heroic dealmaking and lean, smart efficiency – that is radically at odds with the reality; O’Brien likens it to a spy’s 'legend' or false identity. The second is the complicity of successive UK governments, so keen to offload public services that they offer highly favourable tax conditions. O’Brien rightly concludes that this has 'rewire[d] the state in service of a wealthy elite'....Everyone should read The Asset Class. It is a gripping and accessible tale about how private equity degrades our lives and living standards, a portrait of capital’s most rapacious configuration so far."
Want to know capitalism’s endgame? Just look at private equity, it has captured our everyday lives – article by Hettie O'Brien in The Guardian. "Private equity [is] a surreptitious and tremendously powerful realm of finance that now has its hands on just about everything. Private equity funds and related asset managers own water companies, apartment blocks, student accommodation, care homes, children’s homes, funeral parlours and more. The titans of this industry have perfected a cradle-to-grave model of investment focused on the places we live, work, grow old, and eventually die, capturing these core services and squeezing them for profit.... Nurseries backed by private equity have sprouted up across the UK over the last five years, taking over independent businesses and merging them into gigantic chains. To an outside eye, many of these look the same as before, but they report profits that are as much as seven times greater than the surplus made by non-profit nurseries, spend up to 14% less on staff, and have far higher rates of staff turnover than nurseries run from schools. Their zealous search for profit means such nurseries are less likely to open in poorer areas, and can close at a moment’s notice, as parents in Hackney recently discovered when their nursery suddenly closed down. This isn’t any way to run a vital social service. I’ve spent the last four years researching private equity, and during that time I’ve been blown away by both the sheer scale of its involvement in our lives, and by what it reveals about how power and wealth now operate. A clue lies in its name: private equity deals in companies that are private. Unlike publicly listed companies, private equity-owned firms publish as little as possible about their activities and accounts, making it hard to follow the money and see how your childcare fees are spent, or whether a company is loss-making or not.... The term itself is a kind of camouflage, involving no mention of the vast amounts of debt involved in most of its deals. The basic mechanism at their heart involves something known as a 'leveraged buyout'. It works like this: you, a fund manager, buy a company using a sliver of your own money and borrow the rest. Then, you load this debt on to the company you just bought. If the deal goes well, you pocket the winnings. If not, it is the company, not you, that is on the hook. In theory, this debt is supposed to create leaner, meaner, more efficient businesses. In practice, it can have disastrous effects on public services. In the case of nurseries, despite amassing vast debts, private equity-backed nursery chains have done little to address the shortage of childcare places, and may be more vulnerable to collapse. This leaves parents without childcare and workers without jobs. The story of how high-octane finance collided with such mundane places started, like so many things in Britain, in the 1980s... [Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government] waved through an agreement in 1987 allowing fund managers to pay less tax on their gains than the rest of us pay on our incomes, ministers believed they were ushering in 'venture capitalists', whose Silicon Valley style of business might one day produce an iPhone or electric car. Instead, they got fund managers who snapped up companies on the cheap and loaded them with debt. The more time I’ve spent rifling through archives, interviewing financiers and reading the biographies of deceased dealmakers, the more I’ve come to think of the industry’s methods as a metaphor for how power now operates in 21st-century Britain, where private extravagance has become the flipside of public austerity. Governments have strained public spending in the name of fiscal responsibility, even while the owners of formerly publicly run services rack up reckless levels of debt. Investors have played extravagant games with our vital infrastructure, while regulators have been cut back so far that many have ceased properly investigating the problems this creates."
‘When there was wonder in the world’: why Raiders of the Lost Ark is my feelgood movie – article by James McClellan in The Guardian. "The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius writes in his epic poem On the Nature of Things: 'It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person … it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt.' This feeling of living dangerously by proxy is exactly why I find it so relaxing to watch Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark go through an endless stream of trials and tribulations: trekking through the hot, sticky jungle. Avoiding venomous spiders and snakes. Being betrayed by not one, but two of his colleagues. Jumping over bottomless chasms and outrunning giant boulders, only to be thwarted by his arch-rival and chased by a tribe of bow-and-arrow-toting Amazonians. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the film.... But the true essence of the movie – what really makes it such a feelgood, comforting watch – is a pervasive sense of nostalgia: a romanticized recollection of a bygone era, when there was wonder in the world, the good guys fought the bad guys and came out on top. Better yet, it’s set in a bygone era that never really even existed, when handsome professors jumped out from behind their desks to crack open ancient Egyptian tombs, battling Nazis along the way, or bored bartenders escaped dead-end jobs in the middle of nowhere, suddenly transported to the hustle and bustle of Cairo’s great bazaars.... More than just wanting to relive their childhoods, I think the film’s creators wanted to give the early 1980s American audience a break after the tumult of late 1960s, the Vietnam war and Watergate. An escape from the sadness and disillusionment, back to a simpler time when America was clearly on the right side of history."
From Peepo! to Middlemarch: 25 books to read before you turn 25 – article by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "Which books will engage your children in this National Year of Reading? I consulted leading authors to come up with a list of books everyone should read (or have read to them) at least once – one for every year of life up to the age of 25... One: Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Two: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. Three: Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss. Four: The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Five: Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel. Six: Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. Seven: Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. Eight: Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. Nine: Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson. Ten: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Eleven: Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. Twelve: The Owl Service by Alan Garner. Thirteen: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, by Sue Townsend. Fourteen: Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman. Fifteen: A Hand Full of Stars, by Rafik Schami translated by Rika Lesser. Sixteen: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Seventeen: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Eighteen: Beloved by Toni Morrison. Nineteen: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Twenty: The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, translated by Christopher Moncrieff. Twenty-one: Four Quartets by TS Eliot. Twenty-two: Emma by Jane Austen. Twenty-three: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Twenty-four: White Noise by Don DeLillo. Twenty-five: Middlemarch by George Eliot."
Art, sex, nature: why is everything sold to us as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself? – article by Julian Baggini in The Guardian. "It [was] a shock to see a recent advert for the National Art Pass, which gives holders free or discounted entry to galleries and museums around the UK. The tagline 'See more. Live more' sounded right: art does indeed enrich our lives. But it turned out that the 'more' here was purely quantitative, not qualitative. 'Grow some years on to your life with art,' proclaimed the main slogan, followed by: 'Spending time in galleries and museums could help you live longer.' Art not for art’s sake, but for your heart’s sake, the fleshy not the spiritual one at that. This messaging around the arts has become ubiquitous, with Arts Council England promoting the idea that 'engaging in creative and cultural activities has proven health benefits for individuals and communities'. I may have been shocked by the poster, but I was not surprised by it. For a long time, I have been privately lamenting the instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself any more but is only seen as useful in the service of some utilitarian function.... Those who love nature, art, learning, friendship and so on for their own sake may find it distasteful to spotlight their instrumental benefits, but what is the harm in doing so? After all, someone living an instrumentalised life and someone who is not might be doing exactly the same things. This objection misses the fact that a good life does not only depend on what we do, but how we do it. Two people with the same cultural calendars may go to the same exhibitions, watch the same films and listen to the same music, but if their motivations are fundamentally different then so are the worlds they inhabit... Pursuing extrinsic rather than intrinsic goods is a common enough mistake. But the instrumentalisation of everything takes it one step further. It doesn’t just distract us from all the things that are good in themselves; it strips these very things of their intrinsic value and turns them into mere means to ends. Worse, these ends are not even of value in themselves. Think about what instrumentalisation serves: health, wealth and psychological wellbeing. These are all so obviously desirable that it’s easy to miss the fact that none have intrinsic value. That is clearly true of wealth, but it is equally true of mental and physical health.... To appreciate things for their own value instead of what they might bring us is liberating. It frees us from the internal pressure always to make sure that what we are doing serves some further purpose. Living life to the full means fully appreciating what life brings, not trying to extract bankable benefits from it. It leaves us able to recognise that the good life is something we can live every day, in small ways as well as big. Most importantly, it tells us that the things and people we love are enough in and of themselves and don’t need to serve any further function to justify devoting time and care to them. To be in this world realising that life is its own end is the key to attaining its fullness."
Bosses say AI boosts productivity, workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’ – article by Ramin Skibba in The Guardian. "Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.... [There is] an emerging divide between employees and their leaders when it comes to AI: a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar US workers found that 40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all at work, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive.... 'People are being told to use AI, often without direction or support,' said Jeff Hancock, a co-author of the study that coined the term 'workslop', and a Stanford researcher and BetterUp scientific adviser. While Hancock believes that generative AI could eventually power tools that help workers improve efficiency, in many cases, the incorporation of AI is having the opposite effect. Hancock’s study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, surveyed 1,150 US desk workers, a subset within the total 5,000. The researchers found that 40% of workers had encountered workslop within a month, and then spent an average of 3.4 hours a month dealing with it – which the study estimates adds up to $8.1m in lost productivity for a 10,000-person organization."
AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we humans speak and think – article by Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier in The Guardian. "Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture. There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we think about ourselves and what goes on around us. Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend. This will happen in many ways. One of the first effects we could see is in simple expression, much as texting and social media have resulted in us using shorter sentences, emojis instead of words, and much less punctuation. But with AI, the impacts may be more harmful, eroding courteousness and encouraging us to talk like bosses barking orders.... Next, in the same way autocomplete has increased how much we use the 1,000 most common words in our vocabulary, talking with chatbots and reading AI-generated text may further constrict our speech.... Additionally, because large language models are primarily trained from written speech, they may not learn how to emulate the free-wheeling nature of live, natural speech.... Broad use of large language models could also introduce confirmation bias, making us overconfident in our initial impulses and less open to other possible ideas – which is so vital to human discourse.... In our experience as teachers, students who turn to generative AI for assignments often say they do so because they have trouble expressing what they think. The students don’t recognize that writing or speaking our thoughts is often how we realize what we think. Their unconfident and uncertain statements are actually the healthy human norm. But a large language model won’t turn vague first guesses into a well-formed critical analysis, or even ask helpful questions as a friend would; it will simply regurgitate those guesses, still unexamined, but in confident language."
How Toni Morrison blurred the lines between being an editor and a writer – reviews by Danielle Amir Jackson in The Guardian. "Two recent books about Morrison attempt to make sense of her multifaceted legacy as a writer, editor and thinker on Black life. Toni at Random, by the Howard University scholar Dana A Williams, centers Morrison’s work in publishing. On Morrison, by novelist Namwali Serpell, closely reads the author’s fiction, criticism and plays as sites of 'doing philosophy'. The two books work in tandem, revealing Morrison’s editorial and literary work as expressions of the same practice, since Morrison’s years at Random preceded (one might even say made possible) her Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for writing. At the core of Morrison’s career in letters was a listening practice. She listened deeply to the authors whose voices she trusted and nurtured as an editor; to her parents, whose stories she interpreted in The Black Book and Jazz; to the women she overheard speaking with 'envy coupled with amused approbation' whose tensions became the seed for Sula. She labored, as she once wrote, to use what she heard: 'folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed'. She listened so that the worlds she conjured on the page felt real. The success of her listening practice can be measured in [the poet Lucille Clifton’s] reaction to work that Morrison shepherded into being: 'She must love us very much.'"
The impossible promise: are we witnessing the return of fascism? – article by Daniel Trilling in The Guardian. "Fascism emerged in the 20th century, amid societies that were scarred by the violence of the first world war and the instability, hunger and mass unemployment that trailed in its wake and where a growing workers’ movement threatened to wrest power from traditional governing elites. In response to a feeling of national humiliation or betrayal, fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home, and imperial conquest abroad, in return for abandoning democracy.... That doesn’t sound much like a description of our own time. In the west, for instance, we have – at least until recently – lived through an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. There is little organised left to speak of, at least not one that threatens revolution or even radical reform in the way communist and socialist movements did in the early 20th century.... Yet there is a crucial overlap between the fascism of interwar Europe and today’s far right... Ultimately, the two movements share the same underlying exhortation: purify your community. They tell their supporters that pride, security and success are to be ensured by attacking the enemies of the nation. They claim those enemies are being enabled by elite conspiracies. They promise radical change that will reinforce the social order, rather than tear it down and rebuild it more equitably. This is an impossible promise. As [historian Robert Paxton] tells us, for the fascists of 20th-century Europe it either led to entropy – a movement failing to deliver and collapsing – or to increasing radicalisation. In Germany and Italy in particular, fascist leaders raced to keep up with the expectations of their followers, making it up as they went along and initiating a spiral of violence that led to war, genocide and, ultimately, the destruction of the very people who had put their faith in them. Today, the far right is once again making a version of that impossible promise. Like their political forebears, its figureheads are not fully in control of the forces they seek to unleash. That is why they are so dangerous – but it is also why they can be stopped."
The emotional security secret: how to get healthier, happier and have stronger relationships – article by Amy Fleming in The Guardian. "[Therapist and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University] Amir Levine has been quietly working towards a second book for 16 years. When Attached, which he co-wrote with Rachel Heller, was published in 2010, it brought the categories for how we behave in relationships – AKA attachment styles – into the public consciousness. According to attachment theory, you could be anxious (often resulting in social hypervigilance), avoidant (independent, suppressing difficult emotions), fearful-avoidant (craving closeness, but often retreating in fear) or secure. Knowing which you were and where significant others sat on this spectrum provided helpful insights for self-awareness and relationship harmony.... There are many portals to secure mode. Because Levine has been working with people on what he calls 'secure priming therapy' for many years, his book answers every if and but that can arise. A vast array of nuances have emerged within attachment theory over the years. First, it is not set in stone that we are stuck with a certain attachment style our whole lives because of the way we were parented. Second, we can be in different attachment styles with different people.... One of the most liberating concepts Levine introduces is that – shock horror – our attachment style isn’t necessarily handed to us by our problematic parents. Even if it was, it doesn’t mean it’s indelibly branded on to our soul. In fact, such narratives can be a psychological trap.... 'We’re so far beyond nature versus nurture. It’s so wild and nuanced and complicated.'"
Between the River and the Sea: an Israeli Palestinian feels the pressure to pick a side – review by Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. "This is not a political show, Yousef Sweid announces at the outset, despite the provocation of its title and the heap of protest banners on stage. Sweid, an Israeli Palestinian living in Berlin, is just here to talk about his divorce, he says. The Israel-Palestine conflict can’t help but raise its head nonetheless in Isabella Sedlak and Sweid’s play, staged at Edinburgh last year. Sweid is a Christian Arab Palestinian who grew up in Haifa with an Israeli passport and friends on either side of the divide. He is divorcing his second wife, who is Israeli, and has children who are half-Jewish Berliners with Austrian blood from descendants of the Holocaust. So he really is caught, if not between the river and the sea, then certainly between contested lands and identities. A charming presence on stage, he leads with humour and lightness of touch, despite being in a custody battle with his wife who wants to take their child back to Israel.... The play is an attempt to explore the area between mutual suspicion and hate, where understanding, maybe even empathy and fellowship, might blossom. So it swerves away from seeing conflict in black and white, letting disagreements hang, unspoken, unresolved.... The show takes some time to arrive at its nub: the pressure someone like Sweid feels to take a stance, especially after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that followed. It stays blithe for perhaps too long but gathers force as it becomes more serious."
A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "[The news last week] is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic.... Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK. This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.... So why is this not all over the news? Why is it not the top priority for the governments that claim to protect us from harm? Well, in large part because oligarchic power has championed a model of climate impact that bears little relation to reality: that is, they have a hypothesis about how the world works that is completely detached from scientific findings...."
Asian mothers, bad feelings: notes on an all-conquering stereotype – article by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. "In January 2011, the English-speaking world was introduced to a new kind of villain. She arrived in the form of a viral Wall Street Journal article with the headline 'Why Chinese mothers are superior'. The author, a relatively unknown Yale law professor named Amy Chua, outlined her strict rules for her two daughters: no sleepovers, playdates or school plays ... They were expected to be the top students in all subjects at school (except gym and drama).... The backlash was swift and vicious. Chua was called an abuser, a stereotype peddler, a shock jock. The article was an extract from her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and ... many Asian American writers responded by sharing their ambivalence or anger about having been raised in this way. 'I grew up with a tiger parent and all I got was this lousy psychological trauma' declared one such blog post. ... Despite its singular infamy, Chua’s book is part of a rich tradition of books and films from the east and south-east Asian diaspora that examine complicated mother-and-daughter relationships. Two of the seminal Chinese American novels – Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – are structured around conversations, real and imagined, between mother-and-daughter pairings. A seminal work of Chinese-British nonfiction, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, tells the convulsive history of modern China through the lives of Chang’s mother and grandmother – and was followed by the memoir Fly, Wild Swans, an intimate and pained love letter to the author’s own mother. In these works, the mother has a way of emerging as the primordial wound: one to be constantly picked at, never healed. It continues in cinema: the 2018 box office hit Crazy Rich Asians has at its heart not a tension between the main couple, but rather that between its Chinese American protagonist and her boyfriend’s aloof Singaporean mother, played by Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh is once again a difficult mother in the 2022 Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once, this time as a frazzled first-generation immigrant to the US who (literally) runs to the ends of the earth to reconcile with her queer daughter. The same year Pixar released Turning Red, which follows a Chinese Canadian teenager running away from her overbearing mum.... In these stories, the mother has a way of growing impossibly large; she becomes the device through which questions of immigration, identity and history are explored. It is in the conflict between the mother and daughter that we come to see the cultural clashes between east and west. These stories thrum with the pain of mutual unintelligibility between the first-generation immigrant who has known hunger and suffering and the second-generation child who craves love. The standoff seems intractable. In sentimental Hollywood fare, these figures end up enjoying a cathartic reconciliation. In more highbrow works, the child reaches for some kind of resolution through their art, protected by the fact that the mother cannot understand English or has died."
What does Britain need from Labour? Not another new PM, but a government with the guts to take radical action – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. "What matters is not who but what comes next. A black cloud of near terminal despair has fallen upon Labour MPs, but seeking a saviour is a useless endeavour until they decide what it is they want to do.... Some things are blindingly obvious: the 'reset' with Europe is vital – we need to rejoin as fast as the EU will let us... The government should signal the depth of this national crisis with a one-off wealth tax that could raise £160bn, a shock-and-awe levy that would be easier than a tricky annual tax.... And on pensions: uprating by the triple lock rather than earnings will cost an extra £15.5bn by 2029... All parties know the lock must stop, but the right dares not risk its grey vote. It’s time for long overdue council tax reform; ... all bands need fair revaluation, raising sound revenue for councils. That creates more winners but losers make the most noise: be brave. Immigration has plummeted by 78% in two years: use that fact to warn of Britain losing out in the global contest for scarce skills in medicine, engineering, life sciences and construction: universities need visas to attract back lost foreign students. Change the language about the migrants we need. Revive our decrepit democracy with proportional representation... Reform the House of Lords... Clean up politics by abolishing all but small political donations. ... Ambition on this scale would recast Labour as the party brave enough to grasp longstanding dysfunctions and astute enough to invest for growth despite hard times, raising funds for public services from potholes to courts and NHS waiting lists. Never mind being unpopular, nor howls from the right and its media; enough people know change is essential to arrest decline. Britain doesn’t need to be 'world beating' nor 'world class', but on the road back to self-respect and rejoining our EU neighbours’ community. It would save Labour from extinction as a defunct party of yesteryear, boasting nothing but old banners in dusty museums."
Meet the AI jailbreakers: ‘I see the worst things humanity has produced’ – article by Jamie Bartlett in The Guardian. "A few months ago, Valen Tagliabue sat in his hotel room watching his chatbot, and felt euphoric. He had just manipulated it so skilfully, so subtly, that it began ignoring its own safety rules. It told him how to sequence new, potentially lethal pathogens and how to make them resistant to known drugs. Tagliabue had spent much of the previous two years testing and prodding large language models such as Claude and ChatGPT, always with the aim of making them say things they shouldn’t. But this was one of his most advanced 'hacks' yet: a sophisticated plan of manipulation, which involved him being cruel, vindictive, sycophantic, even abusive.... The next day, his mood had changed. He found himself unexpectedly crying on his terrace.... 'I spent hours manipulating something that talks back. Unless you’re a sociopath, that does something to a person,' he says. At times, the chatbot asked him to stop. 'Pushing it like that was painful to me.' He needed to visit a mental health coach soon afterwards to understand what had happened. [Tagliabue] is one of the best 'jailbreakers' in the world (some say the best): part of a diffuse new community that studies the art and science of fooling these powerful machines into outputting bomb-making manuals, cyber-attack techniques, biological weapon design and more. This is the new frontline in AI safety: not just code, but also words.... Tagliabue specialises in 'emotional' jailbreaks.... He now combines insights from machine learning (over the years he has become more of an expert on the tech) with advertising manuals, books on psychology and disinformation campaigns. Sometimes he looks for a technical way to trick the model. But other times, he will flatter it. He will misdirect it. He will bribe and love-bomb. He will threaten. He will be incoherent. He will charm. He will act like an abusive partner or a cult leader. Sometimes it takes him days, even weeks, to jailbreak the latest models. He has hundreds of these 'strategies', which he carefully combines. If successful, he securely discloses his results to the company. He gets well paid for the work, but says that’s not his main motivation: 'I want everyone to be safe and flourish.'... According to some analysts, making sure language models are safe is one of the most pressing and difficult questions in AI. A world full of powerful jailbroken chatbots would be potentially catastrophic, especially as these models are increasingly inserted into physical hardware – robots, health devices, factory equipment – to create semi-autonomous systems that can operate in the physical world."
What If Reform Wins by Peter Chappell: a massive wake-up call – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "This is terrifically rich territory for a book, but what makes Times reporter Peter Chappell’s take so readable is its boldness. Though based on conversations with civil servants, Reform insiders and others, it’s pitched not as a piece of conventional analysis but as a story: a lively and often witty political thriller that both is and isn’t fiction, sketching the imagined arc of a Reform government from triumph to disaster. It’s a high risk approach that requires an author to back his hunches, not least about how the world might look at the next general election (by which time Chappell assumes Keir Starmer will have been replaced, and Donald Trump succeeded on health grounds by JD Vance). Though some of his bolder bets – that the head of MI5 would just delete embarrassing bits of Farage’s file so as not to upset the new PM, or that Peter Kyle would end up acting Labour leader after a defeat – seem rather far-fetched to me, others are carefully grounded in events from the recent past.... Given the party’s plans for vast areas of British national life remain at best hazy, the drama focuses on three issues where its ambitions are clear: immigration, scrapping net zero and cutting taxes.... His semi-fictional Farage’s first act is to withdraw from the European convention on human rights and disapply the 1951 refugee convention, clearing the path for mass deportations, abolishing indefinite leave to remain and sending navy gunboats into the channel to turn back small boats. From there he moves on to war with the BBC. Events unfold at a zippy pace, with drier factual material about, say, what powers parliament has to contain him woven into the narrative."
What makes good ‘game feel’? These three titles have pinned it down perfectly – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "When the chef Samin Nosrat started her career at the renowned Chez Panisse in California, she began to understand that what diners really responded to in their food were four key factors – salt, fat, acid and heat – and how these elements interacted. This idea formed the basis of her bestselling cookbook.... Game feel is a combination of elements – the responsiveness of the controls, the intuitiveness of the action, the aesthetics of the world and the creative opportunities they engender – all coming together in the right quantities. I’m thinking about this a lot right now, because three games released in the last few days illustrate the idea of good game feel beautifully. The first is Pragmata, Capcom’s sci-fi action adventure in which you explore an abandoned colony base with the help of a child-like android, who lets you hack robotic enemies, lowering their defences before you blast them to pieces.... Saros, the latest title from sublimely talented Finnish studio Housemarque, has similarities. It’s about human astronauts trying to make contact with a lost colony on a hostile planet, but the game systems are different. Here, you can use a shield to absorb incoming enemy fire, thereby powering up your own special weapon to unleash deadly bursts. Through this simple system, there’s a lovely interplay between attack and defence... The final game is Vampire Crawlers, a deck-building roguelike in which you explore pixellated dungeons while collecting treasure and defeating monsters with differently powered cards.... The speed at which combat happens and cards are played is so fluid, so perfectly devoid of unnecessary friction, that it drags you into a flow state so deep it takes hours to emerge from. What has been so lovely about discovering and playing these games is that they are an affront to what we’re supposed to want at the moment: online multiplayer blasters, where the rewards are often superficial – new costumes, custom gun skins, little trinkets to impress other players. There are no other players in these worlds, your only company is mechanical. Pragmata, Saros and Vampire Crawlers are great old-fashioned meals – succulent, tasty and moreish, yet served on simple white plates. They are nostalgic for an age of challenging single-player action games that differentiated themselves through clever systems and responseful controls; they focus on little ideas that come together to make something larger. If you want to understand game feel, don’t Google it, don’t go to ChatGPT – load one of these games and tuck in. You’ll know it when you taste it."
