Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?' Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: earthly paradise – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden [of her Georgian house] to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery'. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making. She is thinking here of the uncomfortable fact that many of England’s most sublime gardens, the sort that people pay to view at the weekend, are built on a 'grotesque' moral vacuum. She singles out nearby Shrubland Hall, whose stately vistas and tumbling terraces were funded by money derived from plantations on the other side of the world. Those brutal mono-cultures of sugar, cotton and tobacco depended in turn on the labour of enslaved people traded from west Africa like one more commodity. Other land crimes that Laing wants us to consider lie closer to home. She explains that many of England’s large estates would never have progressed beyond a modest manor house with a useful kitchen garden were it not for the enclosure movement of the 18th century. By a series of parliamentary acts, the peasantry was deprived of its ancient right to graze animals and collect kindling on the commons. In effect it had been turned into an agricultural proletariat, obliged to depend on a wage from the Big House.... In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
The Searchers by Andy Beckett: the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn – review by Jason Cowley in The Guardian. "This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.... But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn."
‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism.... every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating. There are plenty of hypotheses about why people believe these stories, but only one good way of answering the question. Talking to them.... The most disturbing episode in the BBC radio series Marianna in Conspiracyland featured Totnes artist Jason Liosatos.... He sounded like a monster. But when his name came up among friends, I was told, 'The weird thing is, he’s also a really nice bloke, always helping people and giving his money away, a pillar of the community.' The apparent opposite of the basement-dwelling misanthrope I had pictured. I was intrigued. How could someone walk both paths? How could they be prosocial and kind, yet spread the most antisocial and cruel falsehoods? He seemed the obvious person to talk to if I wanted to learn why and how these fictions spread.... I asked Liosatos about the scandals I mentioned at the start of this article: Post Office, Windrush, VIP lane, Cambridge Analytica, Panama and Pandora Papers. In every case, he told me he didn’t know enough about them. 'It seems to me,' I told him, 'that you focus on the things that aren’t true, and not on the things that are true.'... He seemed so dismayed and outraged that I began to wonder whether I was persecuting him.... in her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, 'but often get the feelings right'. I would add a couple of thoughts. I see conspiracy fictions as a form of reassurance. This might sound odd: they purport to reveal 'the terrifying truth'. But look at what they’re actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are unfounded.... Conspiracy fictions also tell us we don’t have to act. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely Other – rather than a system in which we’re deeply embedded, which demands a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. They free us from civic responsibility. This may be why those who take an interest in conspiracy fictions are so seldom interested in genuine conspiracies."
So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch – article by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe 'Imperial Measurement', a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative. If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA.... It is a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh. But enter the business and trade secretary and aspiring Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who took it upon herself to endorse this IEA 'research'. She told an audience of financial services bosses at a conference in London: 'It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.' [According to her,] it was 'free markets and liberal institutions' that drove the Industrial Revolution and economic growth thereafter. [However], while they were certainly part of a cocktail of reasons for Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence, they were only part. Take innovation, and the correctly celebrated inventions – James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny of 1764/5, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, introduced in 1778/9 – that together made it possible to harness the delicate but tough Barbadense cotton and manufacture it at scale.... As Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write in their brilliant Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, it was no accident that this all began a few miles from Europe’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Or that fine Barbadense cotton flourished in Britain’s slave plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. Or that much of the finance for investing in these expensive, but highly profitable, innovative machines came from Liverpool merchants whose own fortunes originated in transatlantic trade."
The Guardian view on YA literature: an adventure for teenagers, a comfort blanket for adults – editorial in The Guardian. "Research released last week, which suggested that 74% of YA readers were over 18 years old – and that 28% were over 28 – is worthy of attention. The report puts the continuing appeal of YA down to reading for comfort, as a defence against the stresses and strains of 'emerging adulthood', among a generation that is taking longer to reach 'adult' life. Nearly a third of the readers were aged between 18 and 22, thus falling well within the new parameters of adolescence suggested by advances in brain science. Another third were aged 23 to 34, so benefited from the boom years of child and YA fiction, when the unparalleled success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series inevitably distorted the picture.... Older readers may not only be reading YA novels for different reasons to younger ones, such as solace rather than exploring their identity, but also may be embracing a significantly different body of literature. Nostalgia can buttress older titles against the caprices of the market. What is undeniably true is that books discovered in adolescence often stay with readers, becoming part of their emotional and intellectual scaffolding. The important thing at any age is not so much what you read, however, as having access to all the benefits of being a reader."
May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans: fake news rules… and that’s a fact – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "May Contain Lies is a wonderful litany of the myriad ways in which we can be deceived, and deceive ourselves, including sometimes well-known academic researchers as they try to stand up their theory. There are no sacred cows for Edmans. Whether it’s the authors of 2009’s famous The Spirit Level, which purported to show that inequality drives bad health outcomes, or the 1994 business book Built to Last, which influenced a generation with its apparent proof that visionary companies outlast their non-visionary peers, Edmans is unsparing.... Edmans is no less hard on himself. He tells the story of how he repeated for some years in his business school lectures the great Malcolm Gladwell statement that perfection requires 10,000 hours of practise. Then he inspected the data behind the statement and found that almost nothing did.... Given that we are increasingly engulfed by a sea of misinformation and bad public policy informed by self-deception, Edmans’s message could hardly be more timely. He urges us to follow Aristotle’s maxim: it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it. His advice is to stay open to the notion that you may be wrong, because you find the truth by testing your ideas against those who think differently."
The Last Caravaggio: a gripping and murderously dark finale – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Hunnish king is possessed by rage, his face fiery red, as furious as the lion on his bronze breastplate. He’s just shot the arrow at point blank rage. Ursula looks down, her face calm, at the shaft buried in her chest. There are no armies, no mounds of corpses as in earlier depictions. Instead, Caravaggio does what his contemporary Shakespeare did with Holinshed and Cinthio to create Macbeth and Othello: he extracts the human juice from the clattering narrative. This is a great drama played out in the depths of night – and the National Gallery stages it that way. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula hangs in a stark space with a handful of supporting documents and one other painting. It’s hypnotic. London theatre may be pricey but here’s a dumbfounding drama of rage, violence, death and maybe guilt, regret and acceptance – and you can see it for free.... The only person who’s fully lit is Ursula. Yet the light on her is pale and eerie. Although it comes from a single source, the light seems to have changed by the time it reaches her. The Hun leader is in a red glow as if lit by a campfire. But Ursula is in white moonlight, as she enters death – and heaven. For all this, the Hun chief is the painting’s emotional centre. His face, at first just savage, is full of contorted emotions. As Ursula stands there, still alive with his arrow in her, he sees the dreadful irreversibility of what he has done.... I’ve seen blockbusters that bored me stiff. This exhibition, dedicated to just one masterpiece, held me transfixed, just like Ursula."
The culture warriors have come for the National Trust. This is how we take them on, and win – article by Celia Richardson in The Guardian. "Too often, charities, public bodies and universities are becoming proxies in other people’s fights, and targets in other people’s schemes. It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it, and you can surprise people and grab headlines.... In 2021, a private company was set up to run paid-for campaigns to get its own often 'anti-woke' candidates on to the National Trust’s governing council. Parts of the media have been relentless in publishing a steady stream of stories about alleged problems with the trust. ... False stories are damaging. The public needs to be able to believe what they read about the institutions that serve them. The National Trust deals with sensitive, symbolic issues and must be open to public scrutiny, if only so we can be held to account when we make genuine errors, as will happen with all institutions.... So how does an institution deal with all this? We’ve had to be open and direct about what’s behind untrue stories wherever possible. We’ve answered all media questions, and consistently sought corrections.... Most importantly, we have listened. Just because you’re being unfairly treated by some, it doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, or is part of a conspiracy.... Sometimes we are wrong and change our approach; sometimes we need to respectfully disagree. Our director general is fierce in her insistence that everyone will be heard, and everyone must be served by the broader societal benefit that the charity delivers. In a previous role she was a cultural leader in Belfast, seeing first-hand the dangers of polarisation around culture and identity.... Independent research has shown that as attacks on the National Trust have increased, so has public trust in it. ... In a diverse country facing big challenges, it’s crucial that all generations and all communities can take part. The power and riches held in UK institutions belong to everyone, so public involvement is worth fighting for."
Why is Britain’s mental health so incredibly poor? It’s because our society is spiralling backwards – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan). Mental wellbeing has plummeted in the UK further than in any comparable nation.... why has it happened? The Global Mind Project blames smartphones and ultra-processed food. They doubtless play a role, but they’re hardly peculiar to the UK. I think part of the reason is the sense that life here is, visibly and obviously, spiralling backwards.... The five giant evils identified in 1942 by William Beveridge, who helped design the welfare state, have returned with a vengeance. He called them 'want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness'. His paternalistic language translates today into poverty, morbidity, educational exclusion, wretched housing and crumbling infrastructure, and bad employment or an inability to work. As they come thundering back, the five evil giants have brought some friends to the party: environmental chaos, extreme political dysfunction and misrule, impunity for the powerful and performative cruelty towards the powerless, and state-sponsored culture wars to distract us from the rest of the horror show. There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism."
Jon Ronson: ‘A society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen’ – interview by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "None of his works has resonated quite so powerfully with audiences as the podcast Things Fell Apart... it traces the origins of a number of conflagrations in the so-called culture wars, but it ingeniously sews together these disparate events and disagreements, tying them all to the early days of lockdown, so that listeners don’t so much hear about, as be transported into, a complex world of outrageous claims and counter-claims.... The eight episodes are characterised by compelling interviews with culture warriors, conspiracy theorists and their targets, which were notable for their curiosity, restraint and understanding. Given that some of the people Ronson speaks to seem to have lost all contact with objective reality, his questioning comes across as an impressive feat of empathy and toleration.... 'I think it comes with maturity and realising your own biases and stupidities,' he says. 'I’m not very confrontational and sometimes you do need to be if someone is behaving in a way that is hurting people or doing something dangerous, like spreading medical misinformation. But in general, when does confrontation work?' One reason his technique is so effective is that the interviews are contextualised with Ronson’s reassuring, though often wry, factual commentary, which sounds like the fruit of deep research – unlike, it must be said, the vast majority of podcasts. How long did he spend on it? 'The series took me 10 months,' he says."
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a seriously fun sci-fi romcom – review by Ella Risbridger in The Guardian. "For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end.... Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, [is] a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about. Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in deference to character and plot. Billed as 'speculative fiction', it is perhaps more cheering to think of it as 50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom. The Ministry of Time is chiefly a love story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in 1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government hellbent on testing the limits of time travel."
The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley: ‘It was just so much fun’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "A time-travel romance cum sci-fi comedy set in near-future London, the novel fizzes with smart observations about the absurdity of modern life, while taking on the legacy of imperialism and the environmental emergency.... This time three years ago, [Bradley] had just started at Penguin but had yet to meet her colleagues because of lockdown. She took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. Cyber-stalking him later she was struck by a description of him as 'a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers'.... Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, 'quite a community, it turns out'. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in instalments for them: 'a nerdy literary parlour game' imagining what it might be like to have your favourite explorer – Gore – move in with you.... While the title might be a mashup of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, the guiding spirit behind the book is Bradley’s best-loved writer, Terry Pratchett.... Along with Gore, she chose four other 'expatriates from history' to be part of the British government’s 'experiment': a lieutenant from the battle of Naseby; a beautiful, foul-mouthed lesbian from the great plague of London; an unhappy aristocrat from the French Revolution; and a soldier from the first world war. Each of them is appointed a 'bridge', a contemporary character who helps them 'assimilate' to life in modern Britain. Gore’s bridge is a young British-Cambodian woman."
That yearning feeling: why we need nostalgia – article by Agnes Arnold-Forster in The Guardian, relating to her book Nostalgia: The History of a Dangerous Emotion. "Nostalgia was first coined as a term and used as a diagnosis in 1688, by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness.... Today, psychologists believe nostalgia is a near-universal, fundamentally positive emotion – a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits. It can boost self-esteem, increase meaning in life, foster a sense of social connectedness, encourage people to seek help and support for their problems, improve mental health and attenuate loneliness, boredom, stress or anxiety.... Its reputation as an influence on politics and society is not so honeyed. Populist movements worldwide are repeatedly criticised for their use and abuse of nostalgia. The images these movements paint of the past are condemned for being overly white and overly male. It’s also seen as the preserve of those who are retrograde, conservative and sentimental.... This tendency is as widespread as it is strange. Not least because nostalgia is a feature of leftwing political life, just as it is of conservatism and populism – think of the NHS, for example. It is also strange because, if you take present-day psychology seriously, everyone is nostalgic, pretty much all the time."
‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? – article by Francis Beckett in The Guardian. "In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.... But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime... The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons.... [And] he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR ... and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington... And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.... What possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game? Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system.... Was it because, as he once said, 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war. Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it. I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me.... Did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that."
The big idea: the simple trick that can sabotage your critical thinking – article by Amanda Montell in The Guardian; see her book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. "Since the moment I learned about the concept of the 'thought-terminating cliche' I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the phrase describes a catchy platitude aimed at shutting down or bypassing independent thinking and questioning;... expressions such as 'It is what it is', 'Boys will be boys', 'Everything happens for a reason' and 'Don’t overthink it' are familiar examples.... Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the 'illusory truth effect' – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times.... There’s really no way to prevent or combat it, says [decision scientist Tobia] Spampatti, as 'even raising awareness of this risk does not lower its effectiveness'. To compete in the marketplace of thought-terminating cliches, then, our best bet might be to take what we know about illusory truth and harness it to spread accurate information.... It doesn’t only have to be shameless disinformers who exploit the power of repetition, rhyme, pleasing graphics and funny memes. 'Remember, it’s OK to repeat true information,' says Fazio. 'People need reminders of what’s true,' such as the fact that vaccines are safe and climate change is driven by our actions."
Catland by Kathryn Hughes: paws for thought – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "'Catland', as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other 'Catland', the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth. For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.... This is a darting, hobby-horsical, hugely interesting book with the feel of a passion project rather than a sobersides work of history. But its ease and authority come from how Hughes as a historian is completely at home in the era under discussion, offering feline sideways glances at class, economics, urbanisation, eugenics, gender politics and much else besides."
‘Although she was dead, I felt as if she was my friend’: what it’s like to perform the last rites for an organ donor – article by Ronald W. Dworkin in The Guardian. "The patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation.... When told of my upcoming case [as an anaesthetist], I had mixed feelings. On one hand, being in perfect health, unaccustomed to suffering and therefore easily disconcerted by the thought of death, I was horrified.... Yet on the other, the case also aroused in me a feeling of relief. Simply put, there was no risk of malpractice, as my patient was already dead.... After we moved her from the gurney to the operating table, the doctors and nurses, so used to taking care of living patients, stared at one another stupidly, as if not knowing why they had come together or why they were standing around the table. For a brief moment, each one of us perhaps had the same supernatural vision, how for the past six hours, after being declared brain dead, this woman had lain under the measureless power of death. Six hours she had been officially dead. Now she had re-entered the world of the living. I would support her blood pressure and pulse. I would make her blood bright red with oxygen. Indeed, she might even wake up and look at us, I fantasised. Ghoulish thinking, yet I do not write about this case to be ghoulish.... My purpose is more practical. Today, artificial intelligence looms over medical practice. Although unlikely to replace doctors completely, AI makes some medical activities especially ripe targets for takeover, including the harvesting of organs from brain-dead donors.... Yet this impersonal, nonhuman method of organ retrieval may discourage people from becoming organ donors, or from letting dead relatives become so, thereby exacerbating the current organ shortage. People will see pictures of organ retrieval being carried on by inanimate machinery in a room completely abandoned by human beings. Bodies will be brought in and sent out, while the invisible, sleepless work of the machines goes on. 'Please, tell me this is not my end,' people will fret privately. And they will resist consenting to organ donation."
What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh: making sense of senseless violence – review by Tom Sperlinger in The Guardian. "Shehadeh’s short book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, is a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. It is divided into two chapters. The first asks simply, 'How did we get here?', reflecting on key events since 1948, while the second analyses the last six months. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer and winner of the Orwell prize for political writing, traces the factors influencing an Israeli society that ... accepts the devastation of Gaza: the failure of the Oslo accords; the hardening of an occupation of the Palestinian territories that is by all the evidence 'permanent'; increasing fractures in Israeli society, for which a common Palestinian enemy can be a balm; and the growing dominance of extreme rightwing elements in Israel.... Nonetheless, Shehadeh admits he was shocked by the recent war. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, declared at the start: 'There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed' and Netanyahu boasted he would 'turn Gaza into a deserted island'. Shehadeh reflects: 'I reasoned that political leaders usually speak with such bravado … Yet as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty.'... Yet Shehadeh continues to reflect on a question that he asks about Elor Azaria [the Israeli army medic who shot a wounded Palestinian in the head]: 'Who would help this young soldier regain his humanity?' His searching analysis offers insights for readers coming new to the situation and others who wish to face it afresh.... 'What if this war should end, not by a ceasefire or a truce, as in other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict?'”
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