Leaving Home by Mark Haddon: blistering memoir of a loveless childhood – review by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home.... It’s not a stretch, then, to note that the raw material of his upbringing is vitally important; specifically, a near-total absence of love or affection, his mother’s apparent withdrawal – to bed, or to drink – from family life, a continual thrum of undermining. What’s more fascinating is to consider the variety of modes he uses to achieve a kind of creative elasticity. Haddon’s work moves between strikingly plain reportage, as if to say 'this happened', and flights of fancy and fantasy, often rooted in classical mythology with its possibilities of shape-shifting and other mutations.... What, then, to do with the nostalgia – the sense of longing for the sights, sounds, smells and artefacts of the 1970s – that grips and confuses him? One answer is to put those thoughts and feelings into a work like this – an incredibly detailed, painful, funny, horrifying and exhilarating record of how to live beside what has happened."
The Colour of Home by Sajid Javid: from one hostile environment to another – review by Hanif Kureishi in The Guardian. "Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him.... The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and 'Run, Paki, run' taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.... The Colour of Home is an affecting study of Javid’s parents, particularly his indefatigable mother. Her illiteracy sits in counterpoint to her fierce commitment to her sons’ education: spotless uniforms, regimented homework and trips to Rochdale Library. Javid’s father is shown as a man of energy but limited luck: a bus driver who repeatedly launches small clothing businesses that almost always fail.... Politically, the memoir compels because it refuses to tidy away contradiction. Javid’s father moves from scepticism about Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his own life is crushed between property developers, debt and deregulated markets. Javid is clearly inspired by his father to rise through the Conservatives, but this sits disturbingly next to the book’s record of racism. In fact, reading his story in the context of the past decade of Tory rule illustrates how his party exploited the narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalised people who look like his parents.... Racist rhetoric and policy have now become defining features of mainstream British politics. Recent reporting about Nigel Farage’s time at Dulwich College underlines how little distance there is between the corridors of elite education, racist language and political success. Taken together with The Colour of Home’s scenes of playground racism, these testimonies show continuity rather than rupture: the same casual dehumanisation of Jews, black people and Asians. In this context, its portrait of a boy learning to survive and outthink that environment – and his insistence that education, solidarity and institutional self‑scrutiny are the only real antidotes – feels less like a nostalgic political origin story and more like an urgent warning about the Britain that comes next. Javid, cheerfully now in the 'Big House', can at times sound like an Uncle Tom: his narrative minimises structural barriers and suggests minorities simply need to work harder in order to succeed."
‘She worked like a maniac’ … meet the design genius who could even make roadworks look good – article by Catherine Slessor in The Guardian. "[Margaret] Calvert turns 90 this year and – in an extraordinary design and teaching career that began in the late 50s and still continues – has become the embodiment of a national treasure. She’s even been on Top Gear, hurtling down a motorway in a white Vauxhall Insignia with James May in 2010, discussing the technicalities of road signs, her graphic legacy to the nation. Anyone who has ever driven on a British highway will have encountered the sign system she designed with Jock Kinneir as part of the ambitious postwar modernisation and expansion of the nation’s road network, unifying and rationalising what had become a confusing and potentially hazardous array of lettering styles, colours and sign layouts. Lasting from the late 50s to the mid 60s, this was a colossal undertaking, but Calvert and Kinneir’s lucid, legible and eminently elegant signage has attained design-classic status. Officially implemented in 1965, and largely unchanged, it was 'a house style for Britain', embracing modernity with the aim of making everyday things better for everyone. Roads are safer, driving more pleasurable. Design historian Robin Kinross praised the project for highlighting 'the role design could play in public life'.... Aptly, Woman at Work is the title of a mighty new tome in which Calvert relates the intertwined story of her life and career. But it also stands as a history of postwar graphic design in Britain. The cover is a version of her famous 'men at work' pictogram, playfully altered to incorporate Calvert’s (still) bobbed hair and a skirt. Visually refined, insightful and wryly humorous, it is quintessential Calvert. Considering the longevity and brilliance of her career, it’s also long overdue – but she was happy to wait and pick her moment. 'I think the timing is absolutely right,' she says, 'because I’m still involved in interesting design commissions.'”
‘They’re taught that showing feelings is shameful’: eight reasons men don’t go to therapy, and why they should – article by Stephen Blumenthal in The Guardian. "Why are men still so reluctant to talk? [As a clinical psychologist,] here are the issues I see again and again. Men are primed for action rather than words. Historically, men’s roles centred on work and provision; women’s on caregiving, looking after the home and raising children. Today, men still tend to be more action-oriented and task-focused. This is partially hardwired – boys tend to lag behind girls in verbal and emotional attunement; women speak more words in an average day. Action comes before the development of language; it is our mother tongue, and men tend to stick with this early way of communicating, which is shaped both by biology and the social context. When it comes to expressing distress, men find it more difficult to do so verbally. They are far less likely to say they are depressed or anxious; instead, they are prone to acting out when troubled. Without even realising why, they may find themselves driving too fast, getting into altercations, drinking or using pornography when they experience emotional difficulty. Therapy is 'feminised'... Services are often 'feminised' in design, with an emphasis on talking directly about feelings, which can be uncomfortable for men, who tend to respond better to 'shoulder-to-shoulder' conversations than face-to-face discussions. They often prefer group therapy for its sense of camaraderie and shared experience, allowing connection without being in the spotlight. Coaching and mentoring show promise as male-friendly approaches.... Showing vulnerability is risk in a hierarchy. I’m struck by how many men come to see me as a milestone birthday approaches – when they’re 39 or 49, say. Reflecting on a reunion with old friends, one middle-aged patient told me: 'What a relief – there was none of the competitiveness that made it so difficult to connect when we were younger. We can all relax now; we’ve got to where we’ve got to in life.' He said he could never have allowed himself to seek therapy earlier: 'It would have been like exposing my belly to my adversary without my armour on.' The drive to strive is deeply encoded in men, and can stop us getting help when we’re down. Showing weakness feels hazardous when your position in the pecking order matters, and yet concealing it ultimately leads to greater fragility. Men are acutely shame-prone when it comes to showing vulnerability, fearing it will lower their status in the eyes of others. The age-old go-it-alone mentality. From the 19th-century novel centred on the buccaneer living a solitary existence to the modern cult of the 'sigma male' (the online celebration of men who need no one), the legacy of 'men going it alone' casts a long shadow. Therapy, by definition, begins with the client admitting they can’t do it all alone.... What happens in the therapy room? Gradually, men begin to test out the possibility that connection isn’t weakness but nourishment. The development of an authentic, connected relationship with their therapist proves it. Emotional claustrophobia.... With men, the expression of strong emotion can often only be tolerated in bitesize chunks. They are often raised to approach difficulties mechanically: identify, act, solve. This is helpful when the problem is practical, but when it is emotional they can become unstuck. Therapy, which requires patience and uncertainty, doesn’t fit this template. It may be necessary to provide men with a practical framework, such as specific techniques to manage symptoms of depression, panic attacks or other problems with anxiety. They wait until crisis point.... On the whole, men tend to have less patience and want a quick fix. As a result, the threshold for action tends to be higher, and thus men will often allow things to fester and become worse before they seek help.... A shortage of role models.... We rarely see men discussing therapy as routine maintenance, the way we might talk about going to the gym or managing diet. Men are also considerably underrepresented in the psychological professions, including counselling and psychotherapy, which furthers the impression that these services are not suited to the needs of men and boys. Fear of what they may find.... The paradox is that therapy doesn’t strip away strength – it redefines it. It offers a space where control can loosen without consequence, where emotions can be named rather than managed. The real challenge is cultural: masculinity links worth with resilience, while therapy still signals fragility."
‘Christian pastors declared Pikachu to be a demon’: how Pokémon went from moral panic to unifying global hit – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "During the first wave of Pokémania in the late 90s, Pokémon was viewed with suspicion by most adults. Now that the first generation of Pokémaniacs have grown up, even becoming parents ourselves, we see it for what it is: an imaginative, challenging and really rather wholesome series of games that rewards every hour that children devote to it. Over the three decades since the original Red and Blue (or Green, in Asia) versions of the video game were released in Japan in 1996, Pokémon has earned a place among the greats of children’s fiction. Like Harry Potter, the Famous Five and Narnia, it offers a powerful fantasy of self-determination, set in a world almost totally free of adult supervision. In every game, your mother sends you out into the world with a rucksack and a kiss goodbye; after that, it’s all on you. Like The Simpsons, Pokémon is a kind of cultural shorthand for the millennial generation. More than Mario, Zelda or any other Nintendo creation, Pokémon brings people together. It was designed from the beginning to be a social game, encouraging (and indeed necessitating) that players traded and battled with each other to complete their collection of virtual creatures and train their teams up into super-squads. Today, the internet has entirely normalised the idea of video games as social activities, but in the late 90s this was a novel idea. You can’t play Pokémon without other people: in 1999, that meant huddling in the playground, using a cable to link your Game Boys together; later, in 2016, at the height of the Pokémon Go phenomenon, it meant hundreds of people converging improbably at the same park with their phones to catch a Gengar. Pokémon is often thought of as a turn-of-the-century fad, so it might be surprising to learn that it brings in more money now than it ever did at the height of its first wave of popularity. It has become the highest-grossing entertainment franchise of all time: between the TV series, the merchandise, the trading cards, the games and everything else adorned with the adorable faces of Pikachu and pals, the franchise has brought in north of $100bn, more than Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe."
‘People keep reinventing the same damn movie’: cinematographer Roger Deakins on 50 years behind the camera and his fears for film’s future – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. "Roger Deakins – cinematographer to the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese and Sam Mendes, whose work has earned him 14 Oscar nominations and two wins, five Baftas, a knighthood and a reputation for being the greatest practitioner of his craft alive – is struggling to explain just exactly what he does. 'Argh!' he exclaims, when confronted by the question: what is cinematography? 'Well, I started off trying to be a still photographer, someone like Don McCullin. And it’s been a whole arc through cinematography. Now what is cinematography? I don’t know. It’s very different from still photography. But the essentials are the same. You’re trying to tell a visual story. … I suppose I’m not answering your question, because actually I’ve got no idea,' he says. 'The cliche is visual storytelling, but it’s much more than that.'... A clearer picture emerges when speaking to his wife, James Ellis Deakins, who joins him today. The two met on set of the 1992 thriller Thunderheart, when she was a script consultant, and have since worked as a team on film sets, with James coordinating communication with the production team and other departments. 'But isn’t the cinematographer also thinking,' she adds, after Deakins admits to being lost, 'how can I tell the story visually in the frame?' To consider how to frame, light and compose a film shot so it will convey the requisite joy or sadness or fear. Say 'there’s a shot that makes you feel melancholy or afraid, and you don’t know why'. For James, a cinematographer has succeeded when their camerawork encapsulates the feeling of the story. 'Because it’s so visceral, people might not come out of the theatre and go: "That was great cinematography." They just think: "Oh, it’s a great movie; I was so scared." But they don’t know the cinematography helped that' A fuller picture of the craft emerges in Deakins’s new book, Reflections: On Cinematography. Co-written with James, it’s part memoir, part technical guide that takes readers behind the scenes of his projects throughout his career. In it, a cinematographer emerges as not only the director of camerawork, but also a sculptor of light; a watcher of the weather; a fleet-footed problem solver and illusionist; and, in Deakins’s case, a leader of a technical crew who have long become collaborators."
‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? – article by Gavin Francis in The Guardian. "According to modern psychiatric definitions, the 21st century is seeing an epidemic of mental illness.... We have developed a tendency to categorise mild to moderate mental and emotional distress as a necessarily clinical problem rather than an integral part of being human – a tendency that is new in our own culture, and not widely shared with others. Psychiatrists who work across different cultures point out that, in many non-western societies, low mood, anxiety and delusional states are seen more as spiritual, relational or religious problems – not psychiatric ones. By making sense of states of mind through terms that are embedded in community and tradition, they may even have more success at incorporating our crises of mind into the stories of our lives.... When I became a GP, I learned there was great freedom in how I conducted each consultation, and that it was necessary to vary my approach with each patient; how I engaged was intricately interconnected with outcome, and was part of the therapy.... Dr M was my first mentor. His consultations were impressive, filled with kindness, gentleness and a kind of tranquillity. He was unafraid to let silence fill the space of the consulting room. His great kindness meant that his clinics attracted more than an average share of people who were emotionally and psychologically distraught. No matter the dark territory that was being explored – abuse, neglect, addiction – Dr M always found a way to bring the consultation round to something redemptive, and each patient left happier than they’d come in. He asked me, after every patient I saw, to offer a summary of the presenting complaint, and to think about the unsaid motives each might have had in coming to the appointment. He also asked me how I felt after each one, and spoke to me about the reality of transference – how your patient can’t help but transfer their emotions into you, and that you can discern a lot about someone by examining how they make you feel. ... My subsequent supervisor, Dr Q, was very different ...Technically the 'job' was being done, but something about the manner of it was all wrong – focused on technical aspects, it had become drained of humanity, and her encounters lacked any sense of healing. A marker of the low esteem in which she held her own skills was that she seemed at a loss as to what to teach me, or what to help me get out of the session watching her clinic. In the end, she just told me which drugs I must avoid prescribing in order to keep within the practice drug budget. I worry that our models of mental healthcare are increasingly built for a world dominated by clinicians such as Dr Q, who approach mental-health consultations as an opportunity for tick-box protocols lifted from the DSM or the ICD, and the scoring of blunt and context-free online questionnaires. As pressure on the NHS grows, there’s precious little space left for the humanity, curiosity and humility of clinicians such as Dr M."
The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers – article by Lucy Knight in The Guardian. "California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university.... 'But something really switched in 2024,' Bowman, now 30, says.... 'I started to get clients coming to me and talking about AI,' she says – some even brazen enough to tell her how 'great' it was 'that we don’t need writers any more'. She was offered work as an editor – checking and altering work produced by artificial intelligence. The idea was that polishing up already-written content would take less time than writing it from scratch, so Bowman’s fee was reduced to about half of what it had been when she was writing for the same content marketing agency – but, in reality, it ended up taking double the time. 'I now had to meticulously fact-check every single thing in the articles. And at least 60% of it would be completely made up,' she says. 'I would just end up rewriting most of the article. So something that would take me two hours when I was writing it by myself now took me four hours, making half the money.'... By January 2025, Bowman was no longer able to afford her own health insurance, which hammered home what she had already begun to suspect: 'Writing is not going to work out for me any more.'...Bowman decided to take action and retrain, 'while I still do have a little bit of work', and is now back at university studying to become a marriage and family therapist.... Janet Feenstra, an academic editor turned baker based in Malmö, Sweden, also has mixed feelings about her career change, a choice she similarly made because of fears that AI would make her old job void. 'It’s complicated because, in a way, I maybe should be grateful to AI for prompting this change,' she says. Feenstra now works at 'a really cute bakery', where she and her colleagues 'roll out the dough by hand and it feels amazing'... Perhaps ... definitions of what counts as a 'good' or 'middle class' job will begin to change: a 2023 report on the impact of AI on jobs and training in the UK by the Department for Education concluded that: 'Professional occupations are more exposed to AI, particularly those associated with more clerical work and across finance, law and business management roles.' And, rightly or wrongly, Feenstra is not alone in deciding that learning a trade is a relatively safe bet. Angela Joyce, the CEO of Capital City College, a further education provider in London, says: 'We’re seeing a steady growth in students of all ages coming to us to do trades-based qualifications,' in subjects such as engineering, culinary arts and childcare. There is 'definitely a shift' away from traditional academic routes, she says, which she attributes to the high numbers of unemployed young people – and 'a good proportion of those are graduates', she notes. That shift towards seeking vocational training is 'in part linked to AI', Joyce thinks, because people are looking for 'jobs that AI can’t replace'."
Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert – article by Ian Sample in The Guardian. "[Michael] Wooldridge, who will deliver the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize lecture on Wednesday evening, titled 'This is not the AI we were promised', said a Hindenburg moment was 'very plausible' as companies rushed to deploy more advanced AI tools.... 'The Hindenburg disaster destroyed global interest in airships; it was a dead technology from that point on, and a similar moment is a real risk for AI,' Wooldridge said. Because AI is embedded in so many systems, a major incident could strike almost any sector. The scenarios Wooldridge imagines include a deadly software update for self-driving cars, an AI-powered hack that grounds global airlines, or a Barings bank-style collapse of a major company, triggered by AI doing something stupid. 'These are very, very plausible scenarios,' he said. 'There are all sorts of ways AI could very publicly go wrong.'”
Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong – article by Marcus Haraldsson in The Guardian. When Estrada-Belli first came to Tikal as a child, the best estimate for the classic-era (AD600-900) population of the surrounding Maya lowlands – encompassing present day southern Mexico, Belize and northern Guatemala – would have been about 2 million people. Today, his team believes that the region was home to up to 16 million. That is more than five times the area’s current population. This would mean that more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire – all crammed into an area a third of the size. A comparison between the classic Maya and ancient Rome is instructive in other ways. Some Maya cities were established hundreds of years before the founding of Rome, and they included significantly larger architecture that still stands. Both cultures developed sophisticated astronomy, mathematics, writing and agriculture, as well as elaborate trade arrangements across vast cosmopolitan lands. The ruins of Rome are today covered by a bustling world city where some of the most prominent elite families claim to trace their ancestry directly to ancient times. Many Maya ruins, in contrast, are now covered by more than 1,000 years’ worth of tropical forest while the descendants of the peoples who built those cities are some of the poorest people on Earth.... By the time the field of Maya archaeology began in the 19th century, most of the knowledge once held by local leaders was gone. Over time, some observers spread pseudoscientific stories claiming that Maya temples were more likely to have been built by aliens than by ancestors of local people. (Vikings, Mormon Nephites and other mysteriously vanished civilisations have also been dubiously credited with building the ancient sites.) [The archaeologist and Minister of Culture and Sports Liwy Grazioso] believes that these fantastical theories serve a political purpose. 'If we deprive the actual Maya of their glorious past, we don’t need to give them power today,' she said. 'Talking about collapse and aliens becomes a distraction from what is right in front of us.'”
A World Appears by Michael Pollan: a kaleidoscopic exploration of consciousness – review by Edward Posnett in The Guardian. "Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, [is] a fabulous and mind-expanding exploration of consciousness: how and why we are self-aware. ... In Pollan’s view, we have become imprisoned by such narratives, which have obscured the richness and complexity of human and non-human consciousness. Bridging both science and the humanities, Pollan mines neuroscientific research, philosophy, literature and his own mind, searching for different ways to think about being, and what it feels like.... Pollan likens the study of consciousness to cosmology: just as we can only examine the universe from within it, there is no way for us to position ourselves outside our own consciousness. You can almost sense his relief when he moves away from the reductionism of neuroscientists to consider the work of those who embrace their own subjective positions. William James appears as a guiding light; the pioneering philosopher and psychologist carefully noted the ambiguities of the human mind, its shifts and nuances. Like James, Pollan experiments on himself, sampling his inner experiences at random times of the day with the assistance of a social psychologist, but he quickly finds that what is going on in his own mind is often beyond the reach of language. The later chapters, which draw on everything from Buddhist thought to modernist literature, remind us of what is obvious if only we stop to notice: that our minds are constantly in flux, remoulding, shifting, flowing.... He cites the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who wrote: 'Technology can make us forget what we know about life.' I’d agree, though I’d add that to forget something, one needs to know it in the first place, and there may come a time when we are so divorced from the richness of our own minds that we will mistake the mere processing of information for consciousness, the machine metaphor for reality. That, perhaps, is the monster that stalks this book: our concern should be less about what kind of AI we might produce – whether a machine may one day experience love or hatred – and more what kind of a human will be fashioned by AI and our interactions with technology; whether we will settle for an impoverished conception of our own minds, or can be reacquainted with its wonders."
Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness? – article by Michael Pollan, extracted from his book A World Appears. "I’ve been going around with a beeper wired to an earpiece that sends a sudden sharp note into my left ear at random times of the day. This is my cue to recall and jot down whatever was going on in my head immediately before I registered the beep. The idea is to capture a snapshot of the contents of consciousness at a specific moment in time by dipping a ladle into the onrushing stream... The beeper exercise is part of a psychology experiment I volunteered to take part in. Descriptive experience sampling is a research method developed by Russell T Hurlburt, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; he has been using it for 50 years – which is to say, his entire career. To give you some perspective, beepers didn’t exist 50 years ago.... Hurlburt’s antipathy toward theory is key to understanding what he’s attempting to do, and why he was so gruff when I told him I was writing about consciousness. ('Good luck with that,' he grumbled.) He treats theory as an illness you might catch, and he strives to keep it out of his research – indeed, out of his mind – lest it infect his sampling process. Since that involves closely questioning volunteers about their inner experiences, the slightest theoretical taint to his questions could easily contaminate the reports of his volunteers and ruin their empirical value.... What he is after in his research is the 'pristine inner experience', by which he means a sample of human thought 'unspoiled by the act of observation or reflection'. Like James, Hurlburt acknowledges that the act of recalling and describing an experience is bound to alter it, but he believes that his method can get us closer to the uncontaminated ideal than any other.... Yet that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Moments in consciousness are not discrete, as James understood; they are often layered and coloured by other thoughts and sensations, as I discovered with my very first beep. It found me standing in line at the Cheeseboard, a neighbourhood cafe and bakery, at 9.24 on a Tuesday morning. I took out the little pad provided by Hurlburt and jotted down this thought: 'Deciding whether or not to buy a roll.' I know, not terribly exciting, but it seems very few of my mental contents are. I was thinking ahead to lunch and wordlessly deliberating whether to buy a fresh roll for a sandwich or do the responsible thing and use up the heel of bread I had at home.... Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are 'inner speakers'. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re 'likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought'. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true. But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of 'unsymbolised' thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images. The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling."
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind by Siri Hustvedt – review by Elif Shafak in The Guardian. "Drawing on insights from the humanities and the sciences, Hustvedt divides the book into three parts. The first section focuses on a range of male artists, extending from Picasso to Mapplethorpe and Almodóvar. In one of my favourite essays, she examines Pina by Wim Wenders, which is essentially an 'artist’s gift to another artist', a homage by Wenders to the fabulous Pina Bausch. It is here that Hustvedt delves into an analysis of art and perception, asking how we judge works of art and creativity. Our criteria changes constantly as we move from one culture to another or one historical period to the next and yet we tend to assume that what constitutes 'good art' is not only universal but also timeless and immutable.... Among the best essays are the ones in which Hustvedt skilfully weaves her personal stories (about her mother, her daughter, her own childhood) with the state of the world, academia and technology. With the advantage of her knowledge of psychoanalysis and fascination with the 'writing self', Hustvedt digs into the mother-daughter relationship, the journey from girlhood to womanhood, the construction of gender patterns and experiments in sexuality.... The book then digresses slightly as it moves on to inspect the delusions of certainty. Hustvedt inveighs against the dualistic framework of 'body versus mind', which has been a central teaching in western philosophy for many centuries.... It is the third and the last section of the book, partly composed of the lectures Hustvedt has given in different countries, where her voice once again reaches a wonderful intensity. Here is a writer who has much to say about the world to the world."
The big idea: this simple behavioural trick can help you get more out of life – article by Cass Sunstein and Tali Sharot in The Guardian. "Habituation [is] our brain’s tendency to respond less and less to things that are constant, that don’t change. As we get used to the pleasant aspects of our life, both big (a loving spouse, a comfortable home, a good job) and small (a great view, a tasty dish), we notice and appreciate them less. Unless, that is, you break up the experience.... A few years ago one of us (Tali) went on a work trip to a sunny resort in the Dominican Republic. Her mission was to find out what made holidaymakers happy and why. She interviewed people about their experiences and asked them to fill out surveys. When the data was in, she noticed one word that appeared again and again: first. Vacationers spoke of the joy of 'seeing the ocean for the first time', the 'first swim in the pool', the 'first sip of a holiday cocktail'.... Tali wondered if people had a better time at the start of their trips.... Crunching those numbers revealed that joy peaked 43 hours in. At the end of day two, after people had got their bearings, was when they were happiest.... This evidence suggests that you might benefit most from several small trips spread through the year, rather than one long escape. That way, you will maximise firsts and afterglows, not to mention the pleasure of anticipation, which you will experience more often. This applies much more generally than holidays, of course. For example, people who were given massages with breaks in between were found to have enjoyed it more than those who weren’t interrupted. Anything that is wonderful will become at least a bit less wonderful over time. Why not take a break, and enjoy it all over again?... What about unpleasant experiences? Should you divide those up too?... If you need to complete an unpleasant task it would probably be wise not to chop it up."
TV set is most popular way to watch YouTube in UK, study finds – article by Michael Savage in The Guardian. The television has replaced laptops, tablets and smartphones as the most common device for UK viewers to watch YouTube at home, according to data confirming the platform’s place as a living room mainstay.... The findings, from a Barb Audiences review, found that YouTube viewing is still skewed towards children.... However, TV sets became the first-choice device for YouTube viewing for over-55s in October 2023, for those between 35 and 54 in April 2024 – and finally for 16- to 34-year-olds in December 2024. Despite YouTube’s rise, the Barb data suggests traditional television viewing is far from dead. It found live TV still made up 45% of all identified viewing on TV sets in December 2025.... 'Commentary about television is too often based on a binary premise: nobody watches live any more, young audiences have vanished and platforms have replaced programmes,' said Justin Sampson, Barb’s chief executive. 'What emerges from the evidence is not a paradigm shift, but a rebalancing. Live viewing remains a substantial part of the mix, even among younger audiences. 'YouTube, too, resists easy categorisation. It is neither simply "TV" nor something entirely separate from it … What is true is that the TV set is now the primary way YouTube is watched in homes around the country.'”
‘Populism’: we used to know what it meant. Now the defining word of our era has lost its meaning – article by Oliver Eagleton in The Guardian. "Among the only confident claims we can make about the populist phenomenon is that it places an enormous stress on language. Indelible slogans, silver-tongued leaders, a direct address to 'the people': these were common elements in the otherwise disparate range of electoral projects that surged after the great recession of 2007-2009, rejecting bromides about 'unity' and 'consensus' for the hard semantic distinction between 'us' and 'them'... But while 'populism' was a useful summation of these electoral strategies, it was less able to delineate what such leaders hoped to do once they were in government. In the US, for example, Bernie Sanders was clear that his aim as president would be to harness the state to reactivate the labour movement and disempower the corporate sector. The cabal around Donald Trump also has a considered plan to reorient state policy by centralising authority in the executive and weaponising it against racialised groups. Although populism may have been the means, the ends were more extensive. By thinking of Sanders and Trump solely in terms of their campaign methods, commentators sidestepped a more thorough analysis of their governing projects: radical social democracy or hardline neo-nationalism. Over the past decade, one of these projects has continued to accrue power – not only in the US, but also in Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Britain, France and elsewhere – while the other has mostly been marginalised. It turned out that when the left and right battled on the terrain of discourse, with politics often reduced to a series of sales pitches, the odds were in favour of the right, not least because a partisan media was willing to diffuse its message. The upshot is that Sanders’s social democracy remains merely an idea, while Trumpian neo-nationalism is increasingly a reality.... The primary feature of our politics is no longer underdog candidates using this toolkit to capture the state; it is the left trying to reconstitute itself after the failure of that enterprise, while much of the right consolidates its success. Socialists have realised that populism, as a political practice, is not strong enough to resist an onslaught from the most powerful institutions in society: state ministries, centrist parties, legacy papers, the business lobby, the courts. Reactionaries, meanwhile, have learned that they can win elections on a populist platform, but they are still working out exactly what relationship to cultivate with these institutions. Post-populists on both sides are defined by how they approach such fortresses of the elite: not only in their rhetoric, but in their actions."
Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore: could we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump? – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands. If you think this idea sounds intriguing and refreshing, you might love Politics Without Politicians, Hélène Landemore’s argument for radically extending citizen power.... Landemore now lectures at Yale but was born and raised in France, and has worked closely with two citizens’ assemblies set up by Emmanuel Macron following the gilets jaunes street protests of 2018, ostensibly triggered by rising fuel tax.... But she also examines examples from Iceland after the banking crash, Belgian local government and the widely praised Irish assembly convened to lead the country through the process of legalising abortion, which gave voters ownership of a sensitive decision in a way that bound everyone to it. The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular.... Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished."
Another World by Melvyn Bragg: portrait of the broadcaster as a young man – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.... Fortunately for the student Bragg, but less fortunately for this book’s narrative jeopardy, he fits right in at Oxford.... There is still the class system to negotiate, evident in subtle variations in the dress code (cavalry twills are the giveaway for the toffs) and the rooms allocated in college. One day Bragg bumps into the future TV dramatist Dennis Potter, who declares in his ripe Gloucestershire tones: 'They say there’s three real working-class men here. There’s me. And you. Where’s the other bugger?'... Another World is at its best when viewing the university with the outsider’s eye of an amateur anthropologist. For this Oxford truly is another world, before the great university expansion of the 1960s, when the word 'student' was not even much used. Bragg is an astute reader of the semiotics of his rooms overlooking the quad, and of the weekly tutorial, where he reads an essay out loud to [his tutor Lawrence Stone] and awaits a reaction, like 'the versicle and responses in medieval prayer'. The book would have been better for sticking to this anthropological impulse throughout, instead of turning, as it does, into another volume in the autobiography of Melvyn Bragg. Digressions on the subsequently stellar careers of his peers blur the focus. Still, the young Bragg is a winning protagonist, who presents much like his older self: thoughtful, open and generous in celebrating his contemporaries’ talents, while forgiving their foibles."
Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy – article by Francis Spufford in The Guardian. "There’s a compelling origin story for fantasy as a genre – you can find it brilliantly and subtly analysed in Adam Roberts’s recent Fantasy: A Short History... With its kings and quests and chosen ones and battles and powers of earth and air, it lets back all the things we miss in the world of science, contract, employment, regularity, but don’t want to return all the way. Roberts identifies the turning point as the first world war, giving a generation of young men such as Tolkien and CS Lewis an experience of modernity as utter mechanical savagery, and brewing in them the desire for a literature in which the old stories of myth – with the space in them for individual human agency – came back, remixed, in modern form. We like to dream of having enormous muscles like Conan, when office life makes seven-stone weaklings of us all; we like to think of ourselves as the singular and remarkable Chosen One, when really we form a pixel in a crowd. But having picked these dreams up, we want to put them safely down again... Hence (runs this argument) our packaging of the fantastic in trilogies that end, and books that close. But there’s another story of fantasy that needs telling.... Here it exists because it is (paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way. I’d argue that, as well as expressing our frustrations with the disenchanted world, it’s also our best means for capturing the ways in which the world remains enchanted, for all our strenuous buffering. I read and write fantasy because it’s the literature that sees the recurrent unearthliness in human experience. That knows we’re hopelessly metaphorical creatures, who find meaning by tying together patterns of resemblance that might as well be spells. That knows there are some struggles where the stakes really are overwhelming, and good and evil in something like their pure forms really do pivot on human choices. Fantasy understands that to undertake the risks of love is to venture beyond safety, into landscapes strange to you, on perilous and wonderful journeys."
If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat? – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. "How will we be fed? That’s the biggest question not seriously being addressed amid all this talk about whether or not artificial intelligence will end up taking over all of our jobs.... Even if AI generates enormous economic prosperity, its distribution will remain a political challenge. This juncture calls for a serious, open debate about how the fruits of this prosperity will be apportioned among humanity. Addressing the question has two parts. The first is about how to design a technically efficacious system to redistribute the fruits of the economy as machines take over and labor’s share of income drops eventually near zero. The more important question, though, is about how this economic reorganization will restructure power. Who will decide what to tax once AI destroys labor income, which provides the main source of government revenue in most advanced countries? Who decides how much everyday people who do not have an equity stake in the AI revolution get to consume? How will society be organized in a world in which machines generate most or all economic output and a few dozen techno-billionaires get to decide what share of the world’s resources – money, energy, minerals – should be allocated to further expand superhuman intelligence? Who else gets a say on whether to direct more resources to, say, healthcare or agriculture, or education instead?"
The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’ – article by Robert Reich in The Guardian. "Business leaders are rhapsodizing about how AI will free their employees to take more time off.... Elon Musk pushes the idea to the extreme (as he does everything else): 'In less than 20 years ... the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional.' Even better: 'There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,' says Musk. 'There will be universal high income.' All of this is pure rubbish. Even if AI produces big productivity gains ... it’s far from clear that workers will see much, if any, of the benefits.... Here’s the truth: the four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on. So, as AI takes over their current work, most workers will probably get poorer or have to take additional jobs to maintain their current pay.... Rather than creating an age of abundance in which most people no longer have to worry about money, new technologies have contributed to a two-tiered society comprising a few with extraordinary wealth and a vast number of people barely making it. AI is likely to further widen inequality.... The distribution issue can’t be ignored. When more can be done by fewer people, who gets paid what? It comes down to who has the power. Unless workers have the power to demand a share in the productivity gains, profits will go to an ever-smaller circle of owners – leaving the rest of us with less money to buy what can be produced."
‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets – article by Aisha Down and Dan Milmo in The Guardian. "US stock markets have been hit by a further wave of AI jitters, this time from yet another viral – and completely speculative – warning about the impact of the technology on the world’s largest economy.... Citrini’s scenario begins now and ends in June 2028, with US unemployment cresting over 10% and an Occupy Silicon Valley movement setting up camp outside OpenAI and Anthropic’s offices. In the interim, a series of events triggered by the widespread use of AI agents guts software companies and ripples outwards, hitting private credit and mortgages, and leading to an unchecked downward spiral.... (1) AI agents remove a 'friction' in the economy.... (2) Mass white-collar unemployment.... (3) Ripples out into the broader economy.... (4) Downward spirals.... (5) Occupy Silicon Valley and Ghost GDP."
The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone, and why you should – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. "Forget 'public speaking'. What a lot of people don’t like at all any more is 'speaking to anyone in public'. Many reasons are cited: state-of-the-art don’t-talk-to-me headphones, mobile phones and social media generally, the rise of working from home, the introduction of touchscreens in takeaway restaurants so you barely interact with a human, the death of third spaces, the pandemic. In the end, the biggest excuse becomes 'social norm reinforcement'. This is the idea that if no one talks to you, you don’t talk to anyone either.... This goes deeper than adolescent angst or personal preference. And possibly deeper than our overreliance on phones. We are losing a basic human skill. The ability to speak to others and understand them is being compromised. Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on speech, has warned that gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform the previous generation on cognitive measures. And Dr Rangan Chatterjee, a bestselling author and father of two teenagers, said in an interview this month: 'I think we’re raising a generation of children who have low self-worth, who don’t know how to conduct conversations.'... It’s only natural to fear rejection, humiliation, giving offence or overstepping a boundary when we initiate a conversation – or even when we respond to someone else’s attempt. But according to a study by the University of Virginia (Talking with strangers is surprisingly informative), we overstate these fears in our minds: 'People tend to underestimate how much they’ll enjoy the conversation, feel connected to their conversation partner and be liked by their conversation partner.' The key is to lower the stakes. Make it less of a big deal. Don’t focus on what could go wrong. Also, don’t focus on how amazing this could be. You are just saying, 'It’s cold today, isn’t it?'... Small talk may not profoundly alter your life. But its absence will profoundly alter human life as we know it."
‘We’re losing accessibility’: America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim. But the era of the 'pocket book' is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.... While paperback books existed earlier, the revolution truly began in 1935 with Allen Lane’s Penguin Books in Britain, purportedly inspired by his frustration at finding nothing decent to read at a railway station. He introduced colour-coded genres such as orange for fiction, green for crime and sold them through non-bookstore outlets like WH Smith newsstands and tobacco shops. The format migrated to the US in 1939 with Pocket Books, and took off during the second world war when the US military distributed millions of 'Armed Services Editions' to troops. This programme fostered a massive increase in literacy and an appetite for the format among returning veterans. Postwar paperbacks, often called 'pulps', were known for their lurid, racy cover art to attract commuters and casual shoppers.... The distribution model was key. Unlike hardcovers, which lived in bookstores, mass-market paperbacks were treated like magazines. They were stocked by wholesalers who replenished racks in tens of thousands of non-book outlets. This ubiquity meant that books were suddenly available to people who might never cross the threshold of a literary establishment.... The writing is on the wall. The airport retail company Hudson began phasing out mass-market books from its convenience stores last year, limiting them only to a few dedicated bookstore locations. Even major properties such as the Bridgerton series are no longer being replenished in the mass-market format; once current stock is exhausted, they will only be available in trade paperback or hardcover form."
What our analysis of MPs’ speeches tells us about the shift to right-wing rhetoric – article by Aamna Mohdin in Guardian First Edition newsletter. "In the UK, the past two decades have been an unusually volatile period for political attitudes toward immigration. The Guardian’s analysis shows that positive sentiment in parliamentary debates reached an all-time high in 2018 – possibly marking a moment of quiet following Brexit, as well as national support for the victims of the Windrush scandal – before falling sharply. Our data projects and data science teams, first began thinking about the project to measure this in 2023. The investigation required careful planning to measure political language both comprehensively and accurately.... The Guardian’s data projects team worked closely with its data science team, and members of University College London, to build a machine learning model capable of analysing a century’s worth of parliamentary speech, looking specifically at immigration references, an extraordinary undertaking that took nearly two years. 'We realised you can’t simply take an existing sentiment model and apply it to parliamentary debates about immigration,' [says Carmen Aguilar Garcia, Guardian data projects editor]. 'So we built a completely bespoke model designed specifically to measure sentiment toward immigration in parliament.' To build the model, the team first gathered all debates from the House of Commons and broke down debates into fragments of roughly five-sentences each that could be analysed individually. Then, there was an extensive process of annotations of the fragments that were considered to be about immigration. This process involved using a Large Language Model and a team of 12 people manually classifying the fragments as positive, negative or neutral. This expanded dataset was used to train the supervised machine learning model. The model was trained to understand things such as when MPs were quoting views that they then went on to disagree with, or using sarcasm.... The result, she says, was an 'extraordinary piece of work' – a tool built specifically to measure something many think cannot be measured: rhetoric. 'One striking thing was reading fragments from 20, 30, even 40 years ago that sounded completely contemporary,' Carmen says. 'If you removed the date, you could easily believe they were spoken last year.'” See details of findings https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/feb/25/how-rightwing-rhetoric-has-risen-sharply-in-the-uk-parliament-an-exclusive-visual-analysis.
Tech legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and his extraordinary life: ‘We don’t need to passively accept our fate’ – interview by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing.... In light of his epic life, Brand’s latest project hinges on what sounds like the most mundane topic imaginable: maintenance. It is 'not automatically an exciting concept,' Brand readily admits, but once he started thinking about it, he realised you could view just about everything in terms of it, and a lot could be revealed by doing so: 'Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.' His new book is titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It is the first of a planned 13 instalments, Brand explains, and it deals with the most literal, material forms of maintenance. Subsequent instalments will investigate everything from buildings to communities, institutions to the human body, plus planetary and environmental maintenance. So perhaps not such a departure after all in terms of long, big thinking.... To his critics, Brand paved the way for the neoliberal, libertarian mindset of today’s Silicon Valley. But he was also a community-focused idealist and a lifelong environmentalist. That technology v nature tension persists – hence his apparent affinity with tech figures such as Bezos and Musk. He’s still ambivalent: 'Finding anything that is an absolutely unmitigated benefit is pretty rare,' he says. But 'I would say the benefits of personal computers and smartphones and the internet vastly reached beyond, in good terms, what we imagined at the time.'"
