Cuttings: March 2026

The Price of initiative just collapsed – article by Martha Lane Fox on her Substack, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “We tend to tell the story of printing as if the press arrived and — boom — knowledge spread. That’s true but incomplete…. Even if you could get your hands on a printed Bible, you still needed literacy — and not literacy as we know it: with public schools, clear fonts, and the assumption that the words were for you. You needed the language, the time, and the permission to learn. The technology was astonishing. The interface, for most people, was not.… Gutenberg printed his Bible around 1455. England did not even begin legislating for a national system of elementary education until 1870 — four centuries later, after long arguments over who should learn and what they should be allowed to read. The machine was fast. Everything else — institutions, access, the will to distribute — was slow. Those who could read surged ahead; those who could not were quietly kept in place. [Today] we do not have four centuries to close the gap between technology and society. We may not even have four years. New releases from Anthropic, OpenAI and newcomer Openclaw have blown apart what’s possible in the last 3 weeks…. You only really notice the shift when you give these systems a job you’d normally hand to a competent colleague. Not party tricks, not poems — real work with consequences. The change isn’t that the machines have become mystical; it’s that they’ve crossed the threshold of usefulness. They can now hold context long enough to complete messy, multi-step work — coherent, continuous, close enough to done.… My main lesson? The price of initiative is collapsing. When the cost of trying falls, the number of attempts rises. More prototypes, more internal tools, more strange little experiments that used to die in the ‘too hard / too expensive / not worth it‘ stage. The optimistic version of the future is a broadening of agency: more people able to act on their ideas, not just talk about them. The less comfortable version is that advantage flows to those who adapt fastest — not because they’re smarter or better, but because they compound earlier. They redesign workflows first. They learn what to trust and what to check. They shrink the time between insight and execution. The laggards don’t get a soft landing; they wake up to find the baseline has moved beneath their feet.“

Teacher v chatbot: my journey into the classroom in the age of AI – article by Peter C Barker in The Guardian. "Two years ago, at the age of 39, I began training to be a school teacher. I wanted to teach English – to help young people become stronger readers, writers and thinkers, with a deeper connection to literature. After 15 years of working as a freelance writer and as a novelist, I felt confident that I had something to offer. But ... what to do about artificial intelligence?... Last spring I started spending 15 hours a week observing a veteran English teacher in a large school in a Chicago suburb... I witnessed all the disruptive effects you read about in articles about AI and the classroom: fully AI-generated papers; AI-hallucinated quotes; tense student-teacher conversations about what exactly was provable. I sat with [my host teacher Emily] while she marked papers and joined her in stressing over ambiguous cases, trying to sort student nonsense from AI nonsense, student improvement from AI-powered polish.... Emily told me that most of the reading she assigned now had to happen in class and that she read much of it aloud, especially toward the beginning of the year. I was shocked. Yes, I’d read countless newspaper features on the 'contemporary reading crisis' but it was still dismaying to encounter the diminished baseline state of teen reading in the wild.... But then I watched Emily read to the class and my spirits lifted.... Shortly after I’d arrived, the younger classes started All Quiet on the Western Front. Students began by expressing disbelief: We’re really reading another whole book? Then, with Emily’s help, they got their bearings: first world war, young German soldiers, trench warfare, the loss of innocence, the psychological toll of daily proximity to death, the disconnect from the home front.... At some point the students stopped complaining and started getting into it: expressing a desire to know how it all turned out, gasping at dramatic turns, wondering aloud, and with feeling, why characters were doing what they were doing. [Back in the UK,] when I devoted class time to reading, it felt great.... I spent a lot of time trying to come up with outside-the-box writing assignments that were so well constructed – so damn interesting, so not the rigidly formulaic essays of yesteryear – that students would feel no desire to skip them... I loved reading these assignments. I loved learning how students understood what we were reading. I loved hearing their music. I loved learning about their relationships to gender, their cultural backgrounds, their neighbourhoods, making notes about my responses. But this love didn’t stop me from worrying.... On my last day of student teaching, I stayed late, grading a pile of my younger students’ work. We’d spent several weeks reading short stories on the complicated relationships we humans have with our teachers, mentors and role models. In place of essays, I’d asked them to write short stories where they plucked characters from across the unit and came up with original scenarios that brought them together in ways that reflected the unit’s themes. ... Overall, I was delighted by the inventiveness and quality of my students’ stories, and the depth of understanding of other authors’ work that they demonstrated.... The hours I spent reading those stories were a joy, and mostly uncomplicated by the AI anxieties that had colonised my mind for so much of the semester. The biggest threat to this joy was the steady stream of solicitations from the ... digital assignment-management tool. Did I want the machine to give me notes on my students’ stories? To grade them for me? To put them in categories based on similarities it detected among them? I didn’t. I wanted to read what my students had written.... Did I clock every single instance of AI cheating? I’m sure I didn’t... But I felt surprisingly at peace.... I picked up my pen, grabbed the next story from the pile, and began to read."

I’ve turned AI into my therapist. The results were pretty disquieting – article by Rhik Samadder in The Guardian. "‘I’ve become a carer to my 82-year-old mother,’ I write. ’Every day brings new problems. I help with hospital appointments, finances, gardening, shopping, home repairs, the council, insurance companies, letters, emails, endless IT problems …’ I’m using ChatGPT as a therapist. Nothing says ’modern mental health’ like crying into a chatbox, after all. Plenty of people are now doing the same – but can it really replace human support? I hope so. I had to stop seeing my therapist because I fell in love with her…. Halfway through its answer, I start crying. It comes up with a seven-point care plan for me, a triage system to prioritise tasks (with categories including medical, admin, shopping, tech and house) and ways to allocate time between them (which are urgent, and which can wait?) It suggests helpful mental reframings, and tips to lower the emotional temperature of interactions. Best of all, it makes me feel seen. ’You’re not failing,’ the AI told me. ’You’re carrying a load that would flatten most people.’ My feelings? Validated. I feel ambivalent about this, however…. Is therapy just about information? This feels like CBT. Incredibly helpful, but incomplete. In my experience, there are more profound therapies that lead to healing. In my experience, that involved a non-judgmental relationship of witness, with an empathetic professional over longer time. I often hear my therapist’s voice in my head; I’ve internalised her wisdom. I think that happens more easily, and more responsibly, between humans…. I have reservations that I can’t shake. A worry about wedges, and thin ends. I think there are processes, certain unbearable pieces of news, forms of loneliness, that should be held in human time and relationship; that should not be addressed in four seconds on a screen. AI does not have thoughts, let alone wisdom. Categorically, mental health should not be in the hands of pattern-predicting software with no accountability or oversight, that could potentially steer someone very wrong. And yet, unfortunately, my experience of being therapised by ChatGPT has been wonderful. Calming and instructive, with a veneer of caring. I think I’m in love.”

I’ve taught thousands of people how to use AI: here’s what I’ve learned – article by Tom Hewitson in The Guardian. "Training teams to use AI at work has given me a front-row seat to a new kind of professional divide. Some people hand everything over to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all. But there’s a third group. They learn to work with AI critically, treat it like a bright, enthusiastic intern that needs to be managed and supported to do their best work. The difference? It’s rarely technical ability. It’s curiosity. A willingness to experiment, get things wrong, and figure out what AI is actually good at. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. (1) Most people fail with AI because they don’t understand what it actually is.... (2) The people who get the best results treat AI as a skill, not a shortcut.... (3) AI needs direction, feedback and correction – just like people do.... (4) You shouldn’t outsource your judgment to AI – or give it sensitive data.... (5) Ignoring AI won’t stop its impact.... (6) The pace of AI’s evolution leaves no room for slow decisions..."

The left is missing out on AI – article by Dan Kagan-Kans on Transformer website, referenced by John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “'Somehow all of the interesting energy for discussions about the long-range future of humanity is concentrated on the right,' wrote Joshua Achiam, head of mission alignment at OpenAI, on X last year. 'The left has completely abdicated their role in this discussion. A decade from now this will be understood on the left to have been a generational mistake.'... As a movement, it appears the left has not been willing to engage seriously with AI — despite its potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in ways that would normally make it just the kind of threat, and opportunity, left politics would concern itself with. Instead, the left has, for a mix of reasons good and bad, convinced itself that AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore.... 'Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all,' argued Tyler Austin Harper, the self-described 'leftist, sort of Marxist-skewing' former professor, now The Atlantic staff writer, last summer.... As with many left ideas these days, the autocomplete view of AI is a popular adaptation of the views held by critical academics... In 2023, when chatbots were more toy than tool, AI-as-autocomplete was maybe a defensible position. But now?.. The properties of scale do not often enter the left conversation. Nor do several other factors. Factors such as the likelihood that training a system to predict across millions of different cases forces it to build representations of the world that then, even if you want to reserve the word 'understanding' for beings that walk around talking out of mouths, produce outputs that look a lot like understanding.... Given all this, the fraction of meaning in the autocomplete view of current AI is alarmingly akin to the random, not always incorrect observations about temperature cycles conservatives used to throw around in debates about climate change. In both cases, a debatable description of mechanism is mistaken for proof of (in)significance.... There are many costs of the left-intellectual world not taking AI seriously, and they will be paid by many quarters — with the left first in line.... More concretely, not taking AI seriously might blind the left to its political uses.... Then there are the costs beyond the left — costs to the public and policy. The left’s current stance leads to a focus not on dealing with AI by regulating it wisely or preparing for it but on popping the economic bubble, which here is a baked-in fact of history and not a possibility of the future.... So it’s probably not ideal that just before what might — or might not — be the moment of greatest job dispossession in history, or of democratic dispossession, or worse, or better, part of the group historically most concerned with such things is plugging its ears. What should it be doing instead?... On the near future, Dean W. Ball, until recently one of the White House’s key AI policy writers, is adamant that by not taking AI abilities seriously, the left is going to miss important ways of improving government.... Bores thinks AI offers an opportunity to speed the US to cleaner energy. 'We desperately need to upgrade our electric grid,' he said. 'Now we have a system where you have basically unlimited private capital willing to invest in our electric grid, but the incentives right now are to turn on or buy power privately from old coal or oil places, because it’s just quicker to get approval for that than it is to hook up a renewable source.' As for the far or more exotic futures: what’s the best shape to universal basic income if it’s needed? What if it’s wanted? Can treaties be designed to slow a race to superintelligence and reduce the risk of a catastrophe? What is the ethical view of post-humanism? Hardly any on the left is considering these questions in ways worth agreeing or disagreeing with. Aaron Bastani, the hard left British journalist, is one exception. His 2019 book Fully Automated Luxury Communism envisions the ways technological development could eventually abolish material scarcity and free humanity from toil."

Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu: a powerful memoir of postcolonial unease – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. "[Chigidu] tells two interlinked stories: Zimbabwe’s brutal war of independence, and his own search for belonging in the years that followed. It is a wide-ranging, restless book, passing through Uganda, Rwanda, Ireland and Mexico City. Yet at its centre are Zimbabwe and Britain, 'former colony and metropole', and the unfinished business between them. Chigudu’s parents, who became part of the growing post-independence black middle class, enrol him in elite private schools. There, he acquires what he calls a 'delicate, papery accent', plays 'white people’s sports' and learns the codes of respectability that promise safety but not belonging. He comes to appreciate early on that to be black is to be defined by others. Black Zimbabweans dismiss him as a 'salad' for his adopted white habits (such as eating salad). White Zimbabweans call him a soutpiel, or 'salt penis'; for having one foot in Africa, one in Europe, his genitals '[dangling] in the Mediterranean Sea'. In Britain, a student labels him 'the whitest black man' they know.... Later chapters explore his arrival in Oxford, where he eventually becomes one of about seven Black professors. His private education has equipped him to perform well there, and for a time he does. But after the Rhodes Must Fall movement (which demanded the removal of statues of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes) reaches Oxford, he abandons the role of the compliant academic. His politics harden after he takes part in a farcical debate on colonialism on local news, during which he was accused of spouting 'victimhood drivel'. 'This was my turning point.' Of the Oxford statue of Rhodes targeted by protesters, he declares: 'I now wanted that motherfucker taken down.' Chasing Freedom is an elegant exploration of how political liberation does not always bring freedom for oneself. Chigudu is a Zimbabwean Briton who writes with clarity and authority about the entangled histories of the two nations, his account all the more poignant because it speaks directly to a generation of Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, weary of inherited dogma but unwilling to surrender history to colonial revisionism. It asks what it means to stand up to the past without being trapped by it, and whether a different kind of freedom might still be possible."

Bright and beautiful? The man causing millennial rapture with his school hymn singalongs – article by Fergal Kinney in The Guardian. "James B Partridge’s Primary School Bangers is the hit show that is storming UK arts centres, originally a viral video that has become a defiantly IRL phenomenon. 'It just brings back memories of primary school, sitting in the hall,' enthuses Hayley, 40. She is one of many teachers attending tonight. 'We don’t sing in primary schools much any more,' mourns Katie, 33. She is right: in the 2010s, funding cuts, Conservative policy and a crisis in teacher retention caused an ongoing fall in music at primary level. At her school, children sing just once every three weeks. Some of tonight’s pull is communal. 'You go to a show and you have to sit and watch,' says Frank, 61, 'but you’re actually participating in this, that’s the big difference.' On a stage decked out with gym equipment and blackboard, Partridge – who, in Warwick, the crowd greet in unison with a cheery singsong 'good evening Mr Partridge' – sings and plays the keyboard. He plays on their memories, too, with a tightly scripted show built on reflective interludes about school discos and Sunday night homework.... Partridge is intrigued that below-the-line commenters [for BBC News's TikTok of his Glastonbury performance] were unable to place it on the political spectrum. Some, he says, damned it as 'lefty woke nonsense. Others said it was all the Tories at Glastonbury. You can project whatever you want on to this, if you want to.'.. From the 1970s to the 1990s, he argues, 'people had the same experience in primary schools'. His show is about 'the last era where we grew up without constant access to the internet'.... 'People are going to church less,' observes Partridge, of a show that is 'not religious, but has songs that tell religious stories'. He pitches Primary School Bangers as part of a lineage that includes the BBC’s long-running Singing Together – though that was aimed at children, not their mums and dads. In fact, Partridge’s show is straightforward nostalgia, with broad callbacks to Panda Pops or S Club 7. And despite the show’s professed nostalgia for the overhead projectors that displayed the lyrics (you can buy T-shirts of them), here they are found via QR code. The glowing faces in the audience provide an easy metaphor for nostalgia mediated by phone use."

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI – article by Alice Speri in The Guardian. "American degrees often cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and result in decades of debt, and recent years have seen a freefall in public confidence in US higher education. With the potential for AI to increasingly substitute independent thought, a pressing question becomes even more urgent: what exactly is a university education for? The Guardian spoke with more than a dozen professors – almost all of them in the humanities or adjacent fields – about how they are adapting at a time of dizzying technological advancement with few standards and little guidance. By and large, they expressed the view that reliance on artificial intelligence is fundamentally antithetical to the development of human intelligence they are tasked with guiding. They described desperately trying to prevent students from turning to AI as a replacement for thought, at a time when the technology is threatening to upend not only their education, but everything from the stock market to social relations to war. Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. 'It’s driving so many of us up the wall,' one said. 'Generative AI is the bane of my existence,' another wrote in an email. 'I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.'... Some caution that the humanities will survive – but as a province of the few.... Several professors spoke about concerns that AI will exacerbate a widening divide in US higher education and that small numbers of elite students will have access to a more traditional, largely tech-free liberal arts education, while everyone else has a 'degraded, soulless form of vocational training administered by AI instructors', said [Dora Zhang, Professor at Berkeley]..... Much organizing against AI remains informal and via word of mouth, with faculty-led initiatives like the website Against AI, which offers resources to those trying to shield students from the intellectual ravages of outsourcing elements of their education to a machine.... Several professors noted that they have also begun to see mounting discomfort from students against the technology – and technology’s dominance in their lives overall.... 'I think the current crop of gen Z students are seeing that they are the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment,' said Zhang."

Tech oligarchs reshape humanity while billionaires of old seem quaint – article by Eduardo Porter in The Guardian. "When Bill Gates became the first modern IT mogul to reach the apex of wealth and power in 1992, the world was a very different place. Gates joined the top 10 on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list alongside Japanese, German, Canadian, South Korean and Swedish billionaires, including those with family fortunes from Britain and America. A broad mix of industries was on the list: Retail and media, property management and packaging, an investment firm and a couple of industrial conglomerates. Their fortunes almost added up to $100bn – equivalent to about 0.4% of the US’s GDP that year. The oligarchy has changed drastically since then. Bernard Arnault, of French luxury group LVMH, Amancio Ortega, the Spanish clothing mogul, and Warren Buffett, the US investor, were the only old-school billionaires among the top 10 in 2025. The rest largely made their money from high-tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 amassed over $16trn, which is about 8% of US GDP. This evolution offers a startling reminder of how fast new technologies have revolutionized the world economy over the last quarter-century, and how narrowly this brave new world is sharing the fruits of its prosperity. It raises a critical question: what happens when a narrow clutch of oligarchs at the helm of the technological revolution, sitting at the apex of wealth and power, get to determine the direction of humanity?... Consequential questions, [such as the future direction and effects of AI, being decided] not... through public deliberation or democratic choice [but by this] tight knot of people ... is problematic not just because they are billionaires, untouched by the daily concerns of most humans. Their worldview is embedded in a belief that technology offers the best solution to all of humanity’s challenges, whether social, political, economic, demographic, biological, psychological, environmental, or whatever other dimension one might think of. Their preferred AI-laced future has little space for the humdrum concerns of the all-too-real people who populate the present. It has no patience for slow, messy democratic governance, especially if said governance slows down the path to utopia.... I find myself nostalgic for the billionaires of yore. They seem so harmless from our perch in the present. They made Tetra Paks and sold real estate in Japan. They owned supermarkets. The guys at the helm of our economy today are way scarier. And they aim to transform human civilization as fast as they can."

‘Charismatic and extremely confident’: how to recognise, and handle, a psychopath – article by Emile Saner in The Guardian, on the publication of her book Poisonous People. "In her consulting work, [Leanne Ten Brinke, professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia,] was brought in by a financial advisory company to help assess which hedge fund managers it should trust with its money. 'I was particularly looking for signs that they might be lying, which certainly the company would want to know before handing over millions of dollars. But we were also looking at the personality traits of these individuals.' Several stuck out. At one investor conference, Ten Brinke watched in fascination as one CEO demeaned colleagues and potential clients – which can be a sign of a dark personality. 'Everything had to revolve around him, all attention on him, no one else could get any praise.' He would constantly interrupt people. 'What was so interesting is that the audience was actually really into that. His behaviour seemed to validate perceptions of what kind of personality would succeed in this role, even though our research suggests that these traits actually lead to decreased returns.'... Recognising dark personalities can help us make more informed choices in many areas of life, says Ten Brinke. 'It can be either a "detect and avoid" or a "detect and manage" type of situation, depending on the circumstances.'... It’s important to remember that someone’s personality is a pattern, she says – 'first impressions will only get you so far' – but there are broad behaviours to watch out for. 'If someone interrupts often, but gets really angry if they are interrupted; if they ignore and push personal and professional boundaries.' They can be charismatic, and charming. In romantic relationships, "love bombing" at the start is often a feature.... People with dark personalities can be skilled at deception, but we tend to be quite bad at detecting this... It’s unrealistic, she adds, to avoid everyone with dark personality traits. Instead, for those with lower levels of psychopathy and other negative traits, you can usually manage them.... Having rules – and writing them down or saying them out loud – makes it harder for the person to break or test them, whether this is in a family or work setting.... Rewards can be key.... 'We know that people, especially with psychopathic personalities, are very reward-motivated. Punishment really doesn’t hit them very hard. So you can help to shape their behaviour by rewarding when they do something good.'... It may be wise to look at ourselves – the world does not need more people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits. 'I do think that recognising that we can all become a little bit less manipulative, a little bit more caring, and that all of these things will add up across people and across time, is a hopeful message.'”

How the US far right bought into the myth of white South Africa’s persecution – article by Eve Fairbanks in The Guardian. "There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa – a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities – that has become perhaps the most scrutinised place on earth, given its size.... No people of colour are allowed to live in the town, called Orania.... Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison. Understanding that Mandela’s liberation meant that white-minority rule was coming to an end, the founders trekked into the desert, bought a disused mining town wholesale and established a colony.... Could people of European descent live in South Africa without relying on people of colour to do manual labour, pump their petrol and clean their houses? In Orania, they stressed, white residents would do such work. Orania’s founders also foresaw a brutal race war, predicting that the population of the town would grow to 10,000 and its ideals would spread across an entire nearby province, drawing in hundreds of thousands.... Lately, the fascination with Orania has spread to the right wing outside South Africa. Starting in the mid-2010s, as Donald Trump was muscling his way on to the political stage, Australian, European and, especially, American conservative commentators began to talk about the town. They, too, portrayed it as thriving – because of the enormous threat they claimed white people faced in the rest of South Africa.... Although it may have been immoral, these South Africans’ story went, white-minority rule had created safe, stable and happy lives for white people. After losing influence, white South Africans became increasingly subject to discrimination, violence and even a so-called white genocide by citizens of colour bent on pursuing revenge.... The problem is that the tale peddled about white South Africans’ historical trajectory isn’t true. They are not, as a group, subject to violent persecution on the basis of their skin colour. As of 2023, white households’ average income remained four and a half times that of Black households. Although South Africa’s devastatingly high crime rate victimises all the country’s inhabitants, white South Africans are overall less likely than Black citizens to be victims of crime. And to many white South Africans, the warped way their country is depicted abroad isn’t even the most important distortion. Spend some time speaking to some of the estimated 4.5 million white people who still live in South Africa – a number that has remained nearly steady since the late 1990s – and most will tell you that they are better off than they were under the white regime that was purportedly designed to protect them."

Fifty years of sexing up tech: Apple’s epic hits and misses – article by Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian. The hits: Apple II (1977)[,] Macintosh (1984)[,] iMac G3 (1998)[,] iPod (2001)[,] iPhone (2007)[.] Misses: Apple III (1980)[,] Macintosh Portable (1989)[,] Newton MessagePad (1993)[,] Apple Pippin (1996)[,] Apple Vision Pro (2024).

I wrote a book about theft and deception, and now AI scams are flooding my inbox – article by Walter Marsh in The Guardian. "My latest book had been out for less than a month when the emails started to arrive. One came from 'Elena', with the tantalising subject line, 'When history flutters its wings and reveals a crime too beautiful to ignore.' Then followed a long, florid message about how it was 'one of those rare true stories that makes you question everything you thought you knew about history, museums, and human obsession. What’s more, she said I had written with 'prose that feels like chasing a butterfly through time graceful, deliberate, and a little dangerous' I don’t know what it says about me that my gut reaction to such gushing praise is suspicion. There were other red flags. A reverse image search of Elena’s profile picture revealed that this smiling woman dressed in white, raising a coffee cup to the camera, was in fact a widely circulated stock image.... As a journalist I’m used to an inbox filled with spam and cold-call pitches. But these emails seemed tailored to me and my work, despite their language and tone bearing the je-ne-sais-quoi-fakeness of a learning language model. Authors like me are being targeted by AI-powered accounts promising exposure and fake reviews – even though my book is about theft and fraud... Scams tend to have a few things in common. First, they play to our emotions. Writing a book is an incredibly emotional undertaking; all that time and effort with no guarantee that anyone will read it, let alone care. Second, they’re a numbers game – you send enough phishing emails and unsolicited phone calls and you’ll eventually snare someone. Where these scams hit differently is the use of language models to customise each email to its mark. This grabs our attention in a way that would have been far too laborious before. I’m lucky to have a publisher, a publicist and enough genuine interest from readers that these emails immediately stick out as inauthentic guff. But I know there are many aspiring authors out there who aren’t in that position, for whom an out-of-the-blue email from someone not only engaging with their work, but wanting to help, is a tempting hook."

Surely if you rule the manosphere, you can be your own boss? These influencers aren’t even that – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "Who wouldn’t want to be an influencer? You’re famous and maybe even rich, just for doing what you’d be doing anyway: working out at the gym, hanging out with your mates and mucking about on the internet. You get paid to say what you think (or are at least sent free stuff), and no one’s telling you what to do. Surely only a sucker would do anything else.... Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary reveals the catch. Though focused on the misogynistic online manosphere, it is equally compelling as a grim look behind the curtain of influencer production, revealing it to be at best shabby and at worst soul-destroying....Going behind the scenes, you see what is absent from the social media highlights and edgy viral clips: life as an influencer is often banal and just as much of a trap as the standard nine-to-five. It is also much harder to get out of. Even the manosphere, characterised in the mainstream as a hotbed of dangerous misogyny, might more accurately be characterised as a large-scale grift, as Theroux told the Guardian.... For many in the manosphere, the misogyny seems almost besides the point. Like racism, homophobia or antisemitism, it serves only as a button to press to generate attention and profit."

The world can't wait – Guardian supporter email by Jonathan Watts, Global environment editor, 18 March 2026. "Having been a foreign correspondent in China, Japan and Latin America for more than 20 years, and now an environment editor based in the Amazon rainforest, I can see how the degradation of truth and nature are so closely entwined.... Extreme weather is causing extreme politics. It is at the roots of rampant inequality and migration pressures which are being weaponised by far-right demagogues.... Meanwhile, tech billionaires, who once promised the internet would usher in a bright new era of super-informed electorates, are now helping would-be dictators push the world towards a new dark age.... Meanwhile, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post – the paper that uncovered the Watergate scandal – has gutted its editorial staff, shutting numerous overseas bureaus, and is laying off at least 14 of its climate journalists.... It is no coincidence this is happening at exactly the same time that the US administration is trying to shut down or dramatically curtail the world’s leading climate science institutions... Meanwhile, the White House continues its strategy of diverting attention away from scandals by 'flooding the zone' with fabricated controversies.... I believe this wider assault is happening because those with power and money fully understand the world is in very great danger of a climate and nature apocalypse. Despite denials of the scientific proof, the actions of Trump and the coterie around him are consistent with people who realise destructive change is underway. That is why they want Greenland and Canada. That’s why they are building up the military and raising walls. That’s why they are trying to prevent people from realising what is happening by attacking science and journalism. And it is why they are distracting the public by ramping up hate campaigns against migrants."

A bookplate for every genre – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Five cut-out-and-keep bookplates. Sci-Fi: Nanotechnology tracks the book, monitors its condition and summons a retrieval drone if necessary. Horror: An ancient curse creates feelings of unease, rising to appalling abject horror unless the book is returned. Romance: Acts as an invite to the county's grandest ball, but revoked if not returned in a polite and timely manner. Crime: Tailed by a dishevelled gumshoe, who seems cynical, but loves books more than dames and bourbon. Fantasy: A fellowship of heroes lead the borrower on an epic quest to return the book to its rightful shelf."

Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them by Liam: a surprisingly original prescription – review by Andy Beckett in The Guardian. "At first glance, the former New Labour minister Liam Byrne is not the ideal person to explain the rise of rightwing populism in Britain and beyond, and how it might be stopped... Across the west, actual and potential populist voters are often motivated by myths: for example, that immigration to Britain is rising, when in fact it is falling. Suggesting, as Byrne does here, that centrist parties can win back these voters with policies that accept some of the populist worldview – rather than seeking to challenge its fantasies and prejudices – feels at best optimistic, and at worst dangerously naive. And yet, as his book gallops along, it soon becomes clear that in between its unconvincing stretches are others in which populism is considered with more rigour and originality. Byrne neatly lays out the movement’s paradoxes and hypocrisies. It’s against elites, but led and funded by the rich. It presents itself as a mass uprising, but relies on low turnouts for much of its electoral success. It talks a lot about freedom, but its policies are authoritarian. It promises a glorious future, but its social vision is 'soaked in the brandy of nostalgia' – one of several rich and irreverent images with which Byrne decorates his chapters.... A particularly free-ranging and useful chapter looks at the language and themes of populism’s public messaging.... Byrne is refreshingly interested in the world beyond Westminster orthodoxies. Although only up to a point. Without explicitly saying so or explaining why, the book treats populism as an essentially rightwing phenomenon. Leftwing populism barely features despite its promise and achievements, from Zohran Mamdani in New York to Zack Polanski’s rising Green party. Nor does Byrne consider whether the radical left in general has a part to play against rightwing populism – by mobilising on the streets, for example. Britain has seen large and regular anti-racist and anti-fascist protests since Reform began its current surge. These blind spots are revealing. Leaving the left out of the story enables centrists, even relatively open-minded ones such as Byrne, to downplay the role of increasing inequality in populism’s rise – an inequality that centrist governments and their corporate allies have done little to challenge, or actively worsened. Seeing populism as driven by traditional patriotism, cultural conservatism and anger at the decline of 'left behind' places is not wrong, and Byrne explains these factors well. But this perspective conveniently minimises its economic causes, which are more uncomfortable for mainstream political and business elites to think about, because they are still invested in the economic status quo."

The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism – article by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian. "Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary. I’ve lived through dozens of them over the decades, and there’s been a fresh flurry over the past few years. These death announcements are mostly based on two dubious assumptions. One is that we’re at the end of the story, the point at which a verdict can be rendered and a moral extracted. In this version, 60 years on from the great 1960s surge of feminism, the process should be over, and if feminism has not won, surely it has lost. In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime. The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism. Three popular recent candidates are the overturning of Roe v Wade in June 2022, #MeToo, and the Epstein files. Let’s first remember that the US is not the whole world. There have, for example, been countless obituary writers proclaiming that #MeToo is over or failed, and I’m not sure what that is based on – the assumption that all sexual abuse should have ended and, if not, feminism of the #MeToo subcategory did not succeed? Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved.... Things change. They change for the better because we make them change, or for the worse because we don’t show up or lose the battle. But if you forget the sheer profundity of the changes of the last several decades, you can mourn what the right is trying to do to pretty much everything from the climate to women’s rights without seeing that what they’re really trying to do is change things back, to return to their version of the good old days that for a lot of us were the bad old days. That’s a reminder that we changed a lot of things, and the fact that they’re not happy about it should feel like confirmation that these changes matter.... Don’t stop now."

Talk is precious: in the age of communication collapse, Jürgen Habermas’s message remains vital – article by Eva von Redecker in The Guardian. "Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school [but] a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the 'thumbs down' or 'blocking' exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it. Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation.... As his early writings make clear, Habermas was faithful to the Marxist endeavour of finding progressive forces in history as it was actually unfolding. But he did not think that technological development or growth in production held any residues of reason, something that his teachers, too, had already started to suspect. Habermas thus settled for a human capacity other than productive labour, namely communication.... Whatever it takes to redeem history has to be right there, within it. Perhaps our age of nihilism, disinformation and AI slop lends new credibility to that idea. If communication breaks down, there is little left other than the proto-fascist 'might is right'. And Habermas was anything but blind to the possibility of such breakdowns. One of his major, two-volume works, the 1981 Theory of Communicative Action, maps in thorough detail how systems mediated by non-verbal powers – such as the market and bureaucratic rationalisation – can override the negotiation possible in what he calls the 'lifeworld'. Only the lifeworld – family, civil society, education – is at least in principle organised in a communicative way, and can thus answer to moral demands.... At least according to Habermas, we misunderstand what communication is if we do not accept that besides all strategic aims, it also seeks to establish a certain shared understanding. And that understanding, again more in principle than actuality, can be described as a non-coercive consensus. The test for morality is whether it could achieve such approval by anyone concerned. Most actual utterances fail the test, but if language lost all aspiration to reach understanding, communication would break down, even if words kept being uttered. Maybe it has. And yet, dear reader, aren’t we still communicating?"

Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026): A Critical Appreciation – article on Explaining History Podcast website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Habermas’s ... The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) ... reconstructed the historical emergence of a 'bourgeois public sphere' in eighteenth-century Europe. In coffee houses, salons, and literary societies, private individuals gathered to debate matters of public concern, subjecting state authority to rational criticism. This sphere was not a place but a practice: reasoned debate among participants bracketing social status, oriented toward consensus rather than strategic advantage. The public sphere, Habermas argued, mediated between civil society and the state. It transformed subjects into citizens by creating a space where public opinion could form through rational-critical debate.... The book then traced this sphere’s decline in the twentieth century. Mass media, corporate power, and the interventionist welfare state transformed the public from active participants into passive consumers.... Theory of Communicative Action (1981) ... distinguished two fundamental forms of action that correspond to different dimensions of social life. Instrumental action concerns manipulating the objective world to achieve goals. It follows technical rules and strategic calculation. This is the logic of work, technology, and what Habermas called 'systems'—most importantly, the market economy and state bureaucracy. Systems coordinate action through impersonal media: money and power. They operate independently of participants’ conscious intentions, following their own logic. Communicative action concerns reaching understanding with others. It operates in the 'lifeworld'—the shared background of cultural meanings, social norms, and personal identities that makes mutual understanding possible. When we engage in communicative action, we raise implicit validity claims: that our statements are true (corresponding to facts), right (appropriate to normative contexts), and sincere (expressing genuine intentions). Successful communication depends on these claims being accepted, at least provisionally.... Pathology arises when system logic 'colonizes' the lifeworld—when money and power replace understanding as the medium of social integration. A family governed by market calculation ceases to be a family. A citizen treated as a consumer of state services ceases to be a citizen. Social movements, from feminism to environmentalism to regional autonomy movements, can be understood as resistance to this colonization: attempts to defend ways of life against bureaucratic and market imperatives. This framework gave Habermas a way to diagnose contemporary social conflicts without reducing them to class struggle or irrational backlash. It also preserved the critical impulse of Marxism while abandoning its economic determinism and revolutionary teleology.... Any serious assessment must acknowledge substantial critiques of Habermas’s work that have accumulated over decades. From within critical theory, some argue his 'linguistic turn' abandoned the earlier Frankfurt School’s focus on material domination and economic structure. By privileging consensus and mutual understanding, he may underestimate irreconcilable social antagonisms. Class conflict, racial hierarchy, and gender oppression are not resolvable through better argument alone—they are built into the structure of society and require structural transformation, not just improved communication."

Restraining and sedating dementia patients ‘routine’ in hospitals in England, study finds – article by Tobi Thomas in The Guardian. "People with dementia are being subjected to restraints and non-consensual sedation while in hospitals in England, according to the first study of its kind. These restrictive practices were found to be an embedded aspect of routine ward care', according to the analysis, with such examples including dementia patients having their bedside rails raised, doors and pathways blocked by furniture, experiencing verbal commands to sit down or go back to bed, and physical interventions such as non-consensual sedation. The report, by academics at the University of West London, involved analysis of 225 days of ethnographic observation across nine NHS wards in England alongside more than 1,000 interviews with healthcare professionals. They also found that many hospital staff did not see these practices as being restrictive due to their routine use throughout NHS wards, with staff questioning how else they could care for patients with dementia to keep them safe without harming themselves or others."

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’ – article by Ashifa Kassam in The Guardian. "The video’s opening shot shows a man hiding under a bed snipping in a hole in someone’s sock. Seconds later, the same man uses a saw to shorten a table leg so that it wobbles during breakfast. 'My job is to make things shitty,' the man explains. 'The official title is enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine and I make them worse.' The video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the 'enshittification', or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.... Coined by author Cory Doctorow, the term ... refers to the deliberate degradation of a service or product, particularly in the digital sphere. Examples abound, from social media feeds that have gradually become littered with adverts and scams to software updates that leave phones lagging and chatbots that supplant customer service agents. In late February, in a campaign that is believed to be the first of its kind, the publicly funded Norwegian council joined forces with more than 70 groups and individuals across Europe and the US, including trade unions and human rights organisations."

A photo of Iran’s bombed schoolgirl graveyard went viral. Why did AI say it wasn’t real? – article by Tess McClure in The Guardian. "The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll. But is it real? Ask Gemini, the AI service powered by Google, and the answer you receive is no – in fact, Gemini claims the photograph is from two years earlier and more than 2,000km (1,240 miles) away.... Like Gemini, Grok will breezily assure you the photo is not from Iran at all – although it lands on a different date, disaster and location.... In both cases, the AI answers sound sure: they don’t equivocate, and even provide 'sources' for the original image, should you choose to check them. Follow the thread to examine those, however, and you’ll begin to hit dead ends: either the image doesn’t appear at all, or the link provided is to a news report that doesn’t exist. For all their impression of clarity and precision, the AIs are simply wrong. The cemetery image, it turns out, is authentic. Researchers have cross referenced the photo of the site with satellite images that confirm its location, and it can be cross-referenced again with dozens more images taken of the same site from slightly different angles, and again with video footage – none of which experts say show signs of tampering or digital manipulation. The 'factchecks' by Gemini and Grok are just one example of a tidal wave of AI-generated slop – hallucinated facts, nonsense analysis and faked images – that are engulfing coverage of the Iran war. Experts say it is wasting investigative time and risks atrocities being denied – as well as heralding alarming weaknesses as people increasingly rely on AI summaries for news and information."

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying – article by Kevin T Baker in The Guardian. "On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target.... Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.... The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about... The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility.... But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At 1,000 decisions an hour, nobody was going to. ... In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does. It has also occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an 'AI problem' gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide."

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government – article by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "Minutes after [Trump's inauguration] ceremony began, programmers working for Doge requested access to the computer systems of the US Office of Personnel Management. Within half an hour, they had taken possession of files with information about millions of federal workers. Days later, they also gained the authority to send out an email to all federal employees from a single address. They used this power to make the same offer in the same language (subject line: fork in the road) that Musk had made at Twitter years earlier: quit with paid leave or face the likelihood of getting fired.... The logic of deletion was clearest in zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the method that Musk embraced at both Twitter and Doge. Invented in the 1960s, ZBB forced every department to justify each expense anew rather than carrying budgets forward. Long dismissed as unworkable, by 2024, Silicon Valley firms were claiming that new technology had finally made ZBB feasible. Manually analysing and justifying each budget item was terribly time-intensive. But with large language models (LLMs) and AI accounting tools, this process could be performed automatically. Budgets could be rebuilt by bot.... Zero-based budgeting rarely succeeds in cutting costs. Its real effect, in Musk’s hands, was the concentration of power. His approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data – whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff or illegitimate people – could simply be deleted. What Doge sought to automate, the media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was 'not paperwork but democratic decision-making'. Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.... The kind of total digital unification envisioned by Doge was unprecedented. It found its most ambitious expression in the attempt to make all taxpayer data – including names, addresses, social security numbers, tax returns and employment information – accessible from one portal.... Doge’s endpoint was governance by AI: the state not as a space of deliberation but as lines of executable code. Musk reinforced the conceit with a 'tech support' T-shirt at cabinet meetings, presenting his role in apolitical terms. But the project was deeply political. Doge’s dream of data omniscience went beyond cost-benefit analysis or software modernisation – those had been mantras of earlier administrations. For Doge, the hunt for 'waste, fraud and abuse' blurred seamlessly into the hunt for illegitimate people: irregularities to be deleted. Muskism was not just about trimming budgets. Scaled to society, it meant purging those deemed out of place... Seen one way, Doge exposed the limits of Muskism as a mode of governance. Companies can treat workers as disposable units because the surrounding state guarantees their basic existence. Musk had ruthlessly deleted workers at his own companies and made deft use of labour law’s loopholes, but in seeking to make real cuts at Doge, he collided with the fragile contract at the core of American life – misleadingly called 'entitlements', but better understood as the survival infrastructure for many millions of people. As Americans vented their anger at feared or actual loss of access to social security and Medicare benefits, Musk’s reputation suffered. Musk had imagined Doge as the realisation of the dream of reactionary technocracy, in which engineers disciplined society like a factory floor. But society is not a factory. It encompasses children, elderly people, disabled people, the geographically stranded – the very categories of life that markets define as surplus. In trying to impose a cyborg logic of optimisation, Musk discovered that humans were not programmable units, and that the public sector’s role is precisely to provide goods that the private sector can’t or won’t. The conflation of codebase, company and state didn’t work."

Solidarity by Rowan Williams: what does it really mean to stand by someone? – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "You don’t need to scroll far down a social media feed to find someone expressing 'solidarity' for the victims of cruelty or injustice. A show of solidarity feels more emphatic than expressing support or sympathy. As Rowan Williams argues, it can act as 'a moral intensifier', positioning us squarely alongside the victim. It can also be a declaration of innocence, a way of distancing ourselves definitively from the perpetrators and their guilt. Williams wants to move us beyond this idea of solidarity as unequivocal identification. He has some sharp things to say about 'empathy' as a modern solve-all, when it too often serves the needs of 'a clamorous self' that 'cannot bear the idea of a real stranger'. True solidarity, he argues, is less a virtue to be cultivated than a human condition to be acknowledged. It requires us to accept two stubborn truths: first, that we can never identify completely with someone else, because we are inescapably separate from them in mind and body; and second, that we are innately social beings, linked to each other by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity. For Williams, then, solidarity is hard work. It takes time and emotional labour to recognise our fellow humans, in both their implacable otherness and their commonality with us."

‘We don’t tell the car what it should do’: my ride in a self-driving taxi – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Riding in a self-driving car for the first time is a little like your first flight in an aeroplane: borderline terrifying for a few seconds, then reassuringly unremarkable. At least, that is my experience. By the time I step out, 20 minutes later, I’m convinced Wayve is a better driver than most humans – better than me, anyway. Other Londoners will soon be able to judge for themselves, because these robotaxis are coming to town. Since the passage of the Automated Vehicles Act in 2024, the UK government has been working to approve self-driving taxis by the end of next year. Wayve, in partnership with Uber, will be at the starting line, as will the US giant Waymo and the Chinese company Baidu, among others. London may never be the same again.... Wayve aces our driving test.... When a man with a walking stick approaches a zebra crossing, the car slows to a halt before he steps on to it. 'We don’t tell the car what it should do; it learns the body language,' [say Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve,] as we sit and watch. Several other people walk past the crossing, but the car can see that they’re not going to cross. This is how Wayve’s AI differs from other versions, Kendall says as we start moving again. 'It’s got a sense of being able to predict how the world works, how to predict risk and safety. It’s actually understanding the dynamics of the scene.' London’s roads throw everything they can at us: confusing double roundabouts; narrow roads with cars coming in the opposite direction. When another driver flashes their lights, our car understands they’re letting us go first. Kendall never touches the steering wheel or any other controls, but, for now, there has to be a human behind the wheel."

Chain of Ideas by Ibram X Kendi: anatomy of a conspiracy theory – review by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "The central thesis is that the ideological origins of what Kendi terms 'our authoritarian age' lie in the so-called 'great replacement theory'. This is defined as 'a political theory that powerful elites are enabling peoples of colour to steal the lives, livelihoods, cultures, electoral power, and freedoms of White people, who now need authoritarian protection'.... Crucially, great replacement theory is not a single concept but a chain of interlocking ideas. The idea that racism against peoples of colour is over is connected to the idea that anti-white racism is on the rise, which is connected to the idea that insurrections against democracy protect the nation and so on. These ideas are easily challenged when looked at in isolation; it is their interconnectedness that gives the great replacement theory its emotional resonance.... One interesting aspect of modern politics is how many prominent people from marginalised or minority identities are at the helm of rightwing parties.... 'The more the sexism, homophobia, and racism of their parties turns off voters, the more great replacement parties will turn to women, gay people, and people of colour to lead their parties – for proximity denial.' Great replacement theory, you see, presents itself as reasonable and respectable. It goes to great pains to cast off accusations of extremism."

Young people are longing for the low-tech 90s, and so would I, if I could only remember them – article by Emma Beddington in The Guardian. "'People have to start going 90s,' according to the content creator Mike Sheffer. In other words: leave your phone at home. 'In the 90s no one had cellphones,' Sheffer explains, helpfully, on a reel I saw on Instagram, in which he describes how he and his friends do this, using it as a challenge to be in the moment and invite serendipity. 'Things just happen,' he says. 'There’s a different energy.' Ah yes, the serendipitous 90s energy of arranging to meet someone 'under the clock at M&S' and hanging around for 40 minutes when they didn’t show, of trudging dangerous miles home late at night thanks to transport fails (several comments on Sheffer’s reel highlighted the safety angle), or of forgetting your keys and spending hours locked out... You can see this nostalgia for a time they didn’t know as a depressing indication of how unpalatable the future looks, but a counterargument says it might be future-facing. 'Perhaps they are productively focusing their nostalgia on a technological era before they were alive,' theorised the social psychologist Dr Clay Routledge in the New York Times, citing research that indicated gen Z were 'mining the past to enrich their present lives – especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living'.... I don’t remember the 90s. Not because I partied like it was 1999 ... but because I’m a confused, hormonally depleted husk, addled by overexposure to a digital culture my analogue brain struggles to process. I need a diary reminder to put on deodorant; obviously I have no idea what 1992 was like.... Ah well. Isn’t memory just a story you tell yourself, anyway? I’ve concluded that 'the 90s' has become an imaginative construct, and that means it can be as much gen Z’s as ours. So good luck to kids vibe-mining our forgotten youth for 'going 90s' inspo: Mandela and the macarena; CDs and landlines; discovering stuff without algorithmic prompting; things just happening; having the freedom to screw up unobserved."

I have stage four cancer, there will be no cure, but death isn’t necessarily imminent: this is how it feels to live in the long middle – article by Janis Chen in The Guardian. "I am not a 'survivor' in the triumphalist sense of the word, nor am I imminently dying. I occupy the long middle – a rarely charted territory where the body remains fragile, treatment constant, and life does not so much move forward as stubbornly persist. This liminal state is a distinctly modern byproduct of a medical revolution.... While median survival is now measured in years rather than months, we are seeing the emergence of 'super-responders' navigating their second decade post-diagnosis. As a psychologist, I view this not just as a medical victory but as a profound existential shift: we have replaced the suddenness of the cliff with the tenuous permanence of the high ridge. Such a progression has inadvertently birthed a new demographic: the 'chronically terminal'. We occupy an interstitial space, standing in the spectre of what is destined to take us, yet still burdened with the responsibility of being within the world. This surreal duality compels us to face our finitude while tending to the unsentimental task of deciding which relationships are still worth the oxygen they require. There is a dark incongruity to this way of living. We know our horizon with terrifying clarity, but we are still subject to the same randomness as the healthy – the theoretical bus that might strike tomorrow. But for those of us in the long middle, that bus is already idling in the driveway.... We rarely speak of the psychological tax of persistence, of the unseen labour required to carry on when the tank is empty. Viewed as such, my illness is a visible manifestation of a universal struggle: the constant, weary negotiation between what the body can endure and what the world demands. Living with stage four lung cancer has taught me that strength is not a metric of productivity or a narrative of 'recovery'. It is found instead in staying present within a life that no longer fits the frantic success stories we are sold. In a culture that fetishises the loud 'bounce-back', choosing to live gently, attentively and on one’s own terms is an act of quiet defiance. The long middle is not a waiting room, nor a preamble to a finish line; it is a demanding, vibrant and profoundly human place to be alive."

Cambridge offers botany course that inspired Darwin after rare archive uncovered – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin and qualified him to work as a naturalist on HMS Beagle have been unearthed from an archive in Cambridge and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany. The fragile specimens, ink drawings and watercolour illustrations of plants belonged to Darwin’s teacher and mentor, Prof John Stevens Henslow, and have been stored in Cambridge University’s herbarium for nearly 200 years... When Darwin arrived in Cambridge in 1828, he became one of the first students to attend Henslow’s groundbreaking five-week course....Henslow took Darwin and his fellow students on 'herborising excursions' into the Cambridgeshire fens and taught them how to identify, categorise and collect plants, while systematically observing the adaptations of different plant species to their environment. This formed Darwin’s introduction to the scientific study of botany and the insights that rigorous collection of empirical data could offer about the natural world. He later described Henslow as having 'influenced my whole career more than any other'. [Cambridge University Botanic Garden (CUBG)] is reviving the spirit and content of Henslow’s teaching by launching a four-week summer course in botany aimed at internal and external undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic researchers and professionals working in ecology, horticulture, conservation or related fields. During the course, students will be taught about botany using the original teaching materials and hands-on techniques Henslow used to teach Darwin in the 1820s, as well as field excursions to the kinds of habitats Darwin visited in the Cambridgeshire countryside. 'Botany has all but disappeared as a stand-alone undergraduate degree in the UK, and that creates a real gap in how people are trained to understand plants,' said Prof Sam Brockington, CUBG curator. 'Even in plant science laboratories, we increasingly find otherwise talented students who don’t have the language or conceptual framework to describe plant form and diversity.'”

What AI Hypists Miss – article by Francis Fukuyama on the Persuasion website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20 percent per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone. I happen to know something about the latter issue. I’ve been teaching cases over the past decade on why South Asian cities like Hyderabad and Dhaka have struggled with providing municipal water. The reason isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems. And this points to a central conceit that plagues the whole AI field: a gross overestimation of the value of intelligence by itself to solve problems.... Many of the enthusiasts hyping AI’s capabilities think of policy problems as if they were long-standing problems in mathematics that human beings had great difficulties solving, such as the four-color map theorem or the Cap Set problem. But math problems are entirely cognitive in nature and it is not surprising that AI could make advances in that realm. The people building AI systems are themselves very smart mathematically, and tend to overvalue the importance of this kind of pure intelligence. Policy problems are different. They require connection to the real world, whether that’s physical objects or entrenched stakeholders who don’t necessarily want changes to occur.... AI may move faster on a cognitive level, but it may not be able to solve implementation problems more quickly than in previous historical periods."