‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think? – interview by Sophie McBain in
The Guardian. "The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist ... It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas.... Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had 'lost courage': it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was 'kind of leaving them to it'.... With a colleague, she established an existential therapy centre at Arbours, the first of its kind in this country. Existential therapy is 'a philosophical approach to therapy and how to live your life in a better way,' Van Deurzen explains, 'it is about working with life, rather than just with the psyche'.... Van Deurzen became aware of other thinkers who were adopting a similar approach to psychotherapy, including Rollo May and Irvin Yalom in the US. Over the past five decades, existential therapy has grown into a loose, international movement.... In her new book, Beginning to Live, the first she has written for a general readership, she draws on the work of many philosophers – not only the canonical existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard and Simone de Beauvoir – and demonstrates a knack for distilling complex ideas into something easy to grasp and practical.... She is interested in how we can cultivate meaning, courage and freedom despite or because of the suffering life throws at us, a process that begins with how we approach life, how we cultivate our inner worlds. She quotes the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who recognised that the one freedom that cannot be taken from us is the freedom 'to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances', and also the poet Rumi, who wrote: 'If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom of the place unless you take off your shoes.' Often, Van Deurzen believes, these too-tight shoes are of our own making."
The faceless voice – post on The Pilgrim Age website, referenced in
The Guardian First Edition newsletter. "My father had been out, working the call from his car, until a dying phone battery sent him home, back to the one room where his son happened to be. He came home for the dullest reason imaginable: a small machine was running out of power. I have thought a great deal, since, about how thin the thread was. A full battery and I would be writing a different essay, or none at all. I did not hear the words at first. I felt the wrongness of it the way you feel a draft from a door you cannot see.... I asked an AI what a call like this might be. It answered before I finished the question: firearm scam. It described the script my father was, at that moment, halfway through.... The longer I sat with it, the less it looked like a crime and the more it looked like something older. A spell. My parents had been enchanted; there is no softer word that is also true. And once you see the con as enchantment, you realize it is the oldest story our species tells. Every dark bargain in every tradition has the same three terms.
Sign now.
Tell no one.
And I will not show you my face. Urgency, secrecy, the hidden face. The devil at the crossroads keeps his hood up... Here is what I learned by watching it: a spell breaks the way it always has, by a name, a shock, a hunger, and the return of daylight.... The things that broke it were embarrassingly small. A dead battery, first: the thing that carried my father back into a room with another living person in it. Then hunger. My mother, an hour and a half in, said the truest sentence of the afternoon:
it's past one, we haven't eaten. The body, asking for lunch. And the faceless voice, I will never get over this,
granted permission. We can continue after you've eaten, he said, because he could not afford to seem like what he was. That pause was a crack of daylight. In it, the trance loosened by a degree....I told him to put the phone down and call American Express himself, on the real line, the one printed on the back of the card. He did. And somewhere in that second call, on hold, in the silence, with no urgent voice filling the air, his own mind began, at last, to catch up.... The bank, it turned out, had been fielding these firearm calls for weeks. By the time the truth arrived, he had already begun to reach it himself, in the quiet, which is the only place truth has ever been able to reach anyone. No one out-argued the scammer. We out-
slowed him. The whole apparatus only works at speed, and the moment a real body entered the room and said
I'm hungry, the speed broke, and the spell could not survive the slowness."
Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender – article by Sian Cain in
The Guardian. "An acclaimed Canadian fiddle player has launched a $1.5m civil lawsuit against Google, alleging that the online giant defamed him by falsely identifying him as a sex offender in an AI-generated summary of his life and career. Ashley MacIsaac, a three-time Juno award-winning musician, filed the claim in the Ontario superior court of justice, asserting that Google was liable for the 'foreseeable republication' of its AI-generated Overview feature, which previously published defamatory claims that he had been convicted of multiple criminal offences, including the sexual assault of a woman, internet luring involving a child with the intention of sexual assaulting the child, and assault causing bodily harm. Google’s AI Overview also wrongly stated that MacIsaac had been listed on the national sex offender registry for life, the lawsuit says....The musician is suing Google for $500,000 in general damages, $500,000 in aggravated damages and $500,000 in punitive damages."
How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news; now reality itself feels fake’ – article by Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief,
The Guardian. "In her recent book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, Naomi Alderman makes a convincing case that what we face today is an information crisis, with very few precedents in human history. 'We live in a tidal wave of data,' she writes. But we lack the 'social and informational structures […] to manage it'.... Now if all we had to worry about was a deluge of accurate new information at our fingertips, perhaps we would not be facing a crisis of such magnitude. But as we know, the world is full of bad actors actively stoking the information crisis. No one is more aware of this than journalists. One measure of the importance of this work is how far the powerful will go to shut it down: through censorship, or legal persecution, or by polluting the information environment with the help of trolls, bots and propagandists, so that the truth becomes impossible to discern. ('Flood the zone with shit,' as Steve Bannon infamously put it.) At its most extreme, opponents of the truth simply kill their enemies. Last year, 129 journalists and media workers were killed..... These efforts to prevent journalists from doing their work are not new, even if they are becoming more common. The thing that has truly brought us into this age of information crisis is technology. It is hardly controversial, these days, to note that so much digital technology seems designed to produce conflict, to prioritise lies over truth. Rather than unlocking the best in human nature, it seems designed to stoke the worst in us.... As tech companies have prioritised capturing attention, truth has been downgraded. AI slop and deepfakes are now so rampant that it feels that your brain can no longer compute what it’s seeing. You start to question things that turn out to be true. It doesn’t help that reality itself has become so much stranger and more grotesque....We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake. The majority of global citizens doubt their ability to distinguish truth from fiction online. Who can blame them?... I believe we must try to help people to look up and out instead, to connect with one another. Good journalism can do this.... At the Guardian, we have no proprietor demanding political or commercial returns. We have no profit-driven shareholders demanding cuts or cash. The purpose of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, is to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity, serving the public interest, not the interests of the wealthy.... we are free to focus on producing journalism without fear of political or commercial interference. This starts with reporting.... We also believe in the value of collaboration.... We work tirelessly to establish the facts – and when we get them wrong, we correct them.... We want our journalism to be nourishing.... We want to provide journalism that is fun and funny and that will leave you feeling more knowledgeable and more curious about the world. The reverse of joyless scrolling. The opposite of internet slop.... It is because we have put human-centred, hopeful, public-interest journalism first that we have built such a loyal community of readers. And it is those readers who sustain our work.... When I became editor in 2015, the Guardian had been loss-making for a long time, and, although the Scott Trust sustained the losses, we were depleted and vulnerable.... We made a lot of very tough decisions ... But the one that had the biggest impact was introducing voluntary financial contributions – the idea that our readers choose to give us money for something they could get for free.... Against most advice, we asked our audience to give us money, rather than forcing them to. And they did. They understood right away what we were trying to do. In the last financial year, our readers directly gave us more than £125m.... To fight for the Guardian and organisations like it is not just fighting for a business model; it’s fighting for the human right to live in a reality that is shared and true and that we can each help to shape. It is urgent: the world won’t wait. Hope and connection are how we survive, together. How we stay human. We are not alone. There are many millions of us."
‘We’re remixing her library for a new medium’: the video games capturing the happy-sad spirit of Tove Jansson’s Moomins – review by Lewis Gordon in
The Guardian. "Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right. Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.... The visuals carry the scratchy, hand-illustrated quality of Jansson’s original drawings. It may look like an effortless translation, but the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to oversee Jansson’s original creations, is rigorous, says the game’s art director Marcus Kjeldsen.... For the previous Snufkin game, Skaufjord wrote that the abrasive teenager Little My should react gleefully about getting rich. But, as the approvals team stressed, capitalism is a construct that has not yet graced the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked.... There is a reason these stories continue to resonate. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional configurations of people and family. But there is also a disquieting sense that the unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Both games deftly capture these timely aspects of Jansson’s treasured work. Hyper Games head, Are Sundnes, draws a parallel between the fractured politics of today and those of the mid-20th century. 'We live in a world that’s darker and more uncertain than it has been,' he says. 'It’s similar to the period when these books were written.'”
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment – article by Micah Nathan in
The Guardian. "As the first [writing] workshop started,... I turned to the ostensible authors and told them I knew that AI wrote their stories. I didn’t need AI-detection software to know; I just knew. The prose was too polished for a young writer, the arcs too tidy, every character prepackaged, every metaphor a pastiche without context. I told the class the workshop couldn’t proceed because I won’t give feedback to an author who doesn’t exist, but I assured the would-be authors that they weren’t in trouble.... For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece. The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged. One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks? The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making."
A warning to the news industry: act now or the Joe Rogan/Piers Morgan ecosystem will leave you far behind – article by Deborah Turness in
The Guardian, extracted from her Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture. "I believe that the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth – that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism. We’ve seen an explosion of independent journalists and commentators hosting podcasts, creating their own YouTube channels and writing their own Substack feeds, where they can monetise their work directly. From Piers Morgan’s
Uncensored YouTube channel to Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall’s
The News Agents podcast. From the hugely successful The Rest is … brand to Jim Waterson’s fast-growing London Centric on Substack. And in the US, from Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell to new brands such as Puck and The Ankler. This creator journalism is not a sideshow. It is fast becoming
the show.... The move away from mass reach, and its replacement with a fragmented media landscape, is what defines this revolution. It is a long-term irreversible shift more profound than we have so far understood. And it is completely reshaping our industry. This was brought home to me recently when I spoke to Sarah, the nurse who treated me when I found myself in A&E, after my hand became embroiled in a fight between a cat and a dog. Despite juggling long shifts and a five-year-old, she never misses an episode of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents. She listens to Pod Save America and The Rachel Maddow Show. She has just downloaded Substack. I asked her why – and her answer was very simple: 'I trust them. I feel like I know them.' Not once did she mention a traditional news provider. We have lost Sarah. The reason why this matters transcends the impact of any one organisation. It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe. Or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations.... I believe the established news media has everything it needs to succeed, the assets required to win in this new world. The talented, experienced, expert journalists who have spent a lifetime carving out a reputation – and consumers who crave a connection with them. Brands that have meaning for audiences. And a legacy of trust. However, my optimism is conditional on whether the established media is willing to deploy those assets to win and not be left behind. As I see it, there are three clear priorities. Restore trust, reconnect through authenticity and reinvent the newsroom."
‘There are no rules’: spotlight on Gossip Goblin as AI film-making enters new era – article by Robert Booth in
The Guardian. "One day last week, an actor, director and composer squeezed into a tiny studio booth to record a voiceover for their next AI release. Critics disparage AI movies as 'automated slop' or cheating, and fume at what they claim to be industrial-scale copyright theft. But this had a distinctly homespun feel, the little team fussing over a monologue by a poetic Scottish gorilla inhabiting a transhumanist cyberpunk universe. It was a bit like recording the Archers, one of them joked. This was a production from a new era by Gossip Goblin, the nom de plume of a tiny kitchen-table AI film-making outfit led by Zack London, whose audience is growing fast – he calculates more than 500m views. Gossip Goblin’s speciality is grotesque and satirical sci-fi shorts that riff on the absurdities and anxieties of the technological zeitgeist, all knocked together at low cost in London’s Stockholm apartment using off-the-shelf AI tools and with a team of eight collaborators dotted across Europe. But this is no longer a hobby. Heavyweight LA talent agents, movie producers, screenwriters, studios, streamers and A-list actors are clamouring to get involved, with some leading Hollywood players boarding flights to Stockholm in the coming weeks, intrigued not least by Gossip Goblin’s surging Instagram and YouTube audience numbers.... AI film-makers stand on the brink of a breakthrough that backers believe will unleash a new wave of creativity. A new cadre, no longer blocked by red lights from studios, feel liberated. They don’t care that the Oscars and the Cannes film festival have in recent weeks ruled AI out of the running for some of their most prestigious prizes. 'Way back in films in the 1920s it was anarchy, but people with good ideas could get them through without having to go through the gatekeepers saying "that’s not going to work",' London says. 'I have found myself at the inception of a new thing where there are no rules.'"
Experience: I smuggled myself out of the UK - article in
The Guardian, author's name withheld. "I escaped from my home, Soran, in the Erbil area of northern Iraq, in 2011 when I was 19 years old. My life was in danger – powerful people had made threats to kill me. I had been told that the UK was a secure place for refugees. I decided to try to get there and hoped the government would grant me protection. I travelled by lorry across Europe and arrived in October of that year. I claimed asylum and felt lucky to be in a peaceful country.... I was hoping to rebuild my life in the UK, but a few months after I arrived, my asylum claim was refused. I went through a long appeal process, and lived in Home Office accommodation in different parts of the UK for more than a decade.... At first, the Home Office asked me to report every three months, but then I was told to report once a month, and then once a week. I love the UK and feel it is where I belong, as I’ve spent almost half my life there, but I never felt treated as an equal, nor was I shown any humanity. We are banned from doing many things – we can’t work or open a bank account. I was scared and sure it was only a matter of time before I would be detained and then deported back to Iraq. I decided that the only way to avoid that was to smuggle myself out to mainland Europe...."
Listen and learn: the hidden secret to spotting a liar – article by Holly Watt in
The Guardian. "Can you tell if someone is lying? Close your eyes. You’re already twice as good as you were before. Our voices change in an instant. When you’re hit by a surge of adrenaline, your fight-or-flight response triggers muscles around your larynx, making your voice high-pitched and wobbly. When you answer the phone to someone you love, your voice softens and deepens. When someone lies, the rhythm and intonation of their speech change. And, weirdly, you are almost twice as good at spotting that distortion if you only hear – not see – them speak. Our voices give away a huge amount of information with every sentence, and human beings are remarkably good at interpreting these subtleties...."
How to become emotionally mature, at any age: ‘We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing’ – article by Emine Saner in
The Guardian. "Around the time of the pandemic, a self-help book with a somewhat unglamorous but functional title – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – took off on social media, ... its success fuelled by readers who recognised their own childhood in its pages and their experience with parents who had uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or were self-absorbed, unavailable or lacking empathy. In the view of its author, Lindsay C Gibson, these were parents whose own emotional developmental stage was closer to that of, say, a four- or five-year-old. Their own children had overtaken them, and were now recognising it. Gibson’s latest book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, is a guide for those of us who don’t want our children to experience the same kind of childhood we did. Perhaps you’ve realised – the self-awareness is key – that you’re lacking enough maturity of your own, and feel clueless about what you should be doing.... Perhaps the most important attitude parents could start with, says Gibson, is the idea that your child is 'real inside'. It will probably be obvious to other parents, but from my own experience of often viewing my children as objects to be fed, clothed and ferried around, this was a sharp reminder.... 'We tend to think that children don’t experience humiliation or embarrassment, that children don’t have a natural sense of dignity, that we can say and do what we want with them and they’ll still love us. But what we do to them is going to register emotionally. They don’t have the language or the experience to express that, so it’s easy to miss. We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing.' ... It is not about being a perfect parent or putting a child’s needs first at all times, stresses Gibson, nor about being the epitome of emotional maturity ourselves – it’s a spectrum, and we can all slide down to toddlerdom at times of stress, illness or tiredness. Rather, it’s about being more mindful of how we relate to our children. I know I’m quick to snap at mine when I’m stressed. If I’m making dinner or working, and my son wants to talk about a video game I have no interest in, do I have to drop everything and give him my full attention? No, says Gibson. 'We want to find a style of parenting that doesn’t exhaust you, and that scenario would be exhausting. You can’t do 50 things at once. If you notice that your child is trying to engage you, and you say: "I really want to hear about this, but I can’t give this the attention it deserves. Can we talk about it later?" how long did that take, 10 seconds? He feels acknowledged, he knows you noticed that he was excited. Let’s say you blew him off. Maybe he doesn’t learn: "It’s best not to talk to Mom when she’s up to her ears." Maybe he generalises and says: "Maybe it’s best not to bring joyful things to Mom."' An emotionally attuned parent might still snap in the moment, but would notice their child’s pained look and later apologise. 'You can come back and you can repair it,' says Gibson, who likes the paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s idea of the 'good enough' parent."
‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings) – interview with Steve Rose in
The Guardian. "[Oxford professor] Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does.... [His] latest book [is] Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World. He’s taught the subject to his students for more than 15 years, he says. Now it’s our turn. There’s no maths in Wooldridge’s book; instead he translates game theory into 21 digestible scenarios, incorporating everything from Atlantic cod fishing, to Pepsi v Coca-Cola, to the existence of God.... This is not just about warfare, or even games, Wooldridge stresses. He defines game theory in the book as 'a mathematical theory that aspires to understand situations in which self-interested parties interact with one another'. That, he argues, could apply to all manner of situations: social, political and philosophical. The concept of the 'zero-sum game', for example, has become a mainstream term ... even if it’s widely misunderstood. A zero-sum game is not simply one where one side gains what the other side loses; it is one where the incentive is to make your opponent lose as badly as possible, Wooldridge explains. So, technically, chess is not a zero-sum game because you’re just trying to win, not to destroy or humiliate your opponent. There’s a socio-political dimension to this. 'This zero-sum mentality is very damaging. It’s a very male trait,' he says. 'And the evidence is that, not only do you end up not necessarily doing as well in life as you could do, but actually you end as a more miserable person. You feel like you have less agency in your affairs. One of the important lessons from game theory is that, actually, the majority of interactions that we’re in are not zero-sum.' This adversarial worldview is the engine of populist politics – in the 'migrants are coming to take your jobs' sense. You are losing because others are winning. One of Wooldridge’s favourite games encourages us to think the opposite: the Veil of Ignorance was devised in 1971 by the philosopher John Rawls and the premise is that you can design society in any way you want, but afterwards, you will be placed randomly within it. Wooldridge describes it as 'a beautiful thought experiment … It incentivises a socially desirable outcome, but people are still following their self-interest.' .... In 2025, Wooldridge won the Royal Society’s prestigious Faraday prize for his expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. His accompanying lecture, given in February, was titled
This Is Not the AI We Were Promised. Around the same time, Wooldridge speculated on AI having a 'Hindenburg moment' – the Hindenburg crash killed the airship industry overnight.... Having said that, when it comes to existential risks, 'AI is not high on my list of things that keeps me awake at night,' he says. 'I don’t worry about a robot takeover. At least, it’s not in my top five.' The fact that he considers nuclear war a greater threat is hardly reassuring, mind you."
Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list – article by Lisa Allardice in
The Guardian. "[The Guardian polled] more than 170 novelists, critics and academics .... for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100.... Spoiler alert: top spot goes to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a vast cathedral of a novel taking in love, faith, friendship, betrayal, science, politics, morality and power, but never losing sight of its provincial inhabitants. As one of our panellists wrote, 'anyone who reads this novel cannot come out of it unchanged'. Virginia Woolf famously
declared it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.... Another undisputed masterpiece is
Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved at No 2.... Woolf is the surprise winner of our list, coming in at No 4 with To the Lighthouse, just after her arch‑rival James Joyce and his modernist epic Ulysses. With five novels on the list, she is the most voted for writer – beating even Austen and Dickens, with four each.... In Search of Lost Time at No 5 (a whopping seven volumes and 4,000 pages), War and Peace, Bleak House, Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy; many of the leviathans are here – and that’s just the top 20. This is not a list for the literary faint-hearted.... Thank goodness for F Scott Fitzgerald’s slender American masterpiece The Great Gatsby – a shot of perfection at No 11."
Saint Levant: the pop star from Gaza caught between passionate fandom and bitter disapproval – article by Nesrine Malik in
The Guardian. "At a time when Palestine had produced a tragically galvanising moment for Arabs, Saint Levant emerged as the region’s first bona fide commercial Palestinian pop artist, and in the process had become one of the biggest stars in the Middle East. The few Palestinian artists who had made it big before him had done so through rousing political anthems. Among other Arab artists, Palestine was the preserve of older generations, who had produced now canonical songs of yearning and lament for Palestine. A singer who was of Palestine, but broke with the sobriety of expression about it, was a shock to the system in a way that was invigorating and scandalising. And so Saint Levant quickly became a flashpoint. To some, he seemed to have instrumentalised politics to help his career and broken the rules of vigil by embracing revelry. To others, he was an artist who inspired fierce loyalty for plotting the right way out of grief while proudly championing the Palestinian cause. He had become a test case of something bigger. For many Arabs, this was a moment of unifying crisis, but it triggered different and contradictory impulses. Some wanted to mourn and rage against what was being destroyed, others wanted to celebrate and seek comfort in all that remained. In the middle of the two, between passionate fandom and bitter scepticism, was a young man from Gaza... As his popularity increased, he began to divide opinion. 'Cringe' is how I have sometimes heard him described, like he was performing a tacky pastiche of Palestinian identity, while leaning into his pin-up appeal. In these criticisms, there was a hint of tension about class and authenticity. Despite his origins in Gaza, Saint Levant is sometimes seen as a privileged kid with the affect of the bougie diaspora Arab, distant from the hunger and killings visited on his people in Palestine. For his fans, there is plenty of evidence that Saint Levant was always political, not someone who suddenly chose to ride a political moment once the assault on Gaza began. After 7 October, he continued to post clips detailing how
language used to describe the conflict 'makes it easier to justify oppression to the average person'. (He aspired, in this form, to emulate his idol, the Palestinian intellectual,
Edward Said.) In November 2023, when accepting musician of the year from GQ France in Paris, Saint Levant said that he had been cautioned not to mention Palestine or Gaza in his acceptance speech. 'But you cannot censor me,' he said, 'and I cannot stay silent while 8,000 Palestinian children are being murdered by the Israeli occupation that has been going on for 75 years.' But walking the line between the world of GQ awards and political authenticity is tricky.... Social media posts about Saint Levant tend to become swirls of fandom and criticism, a cultural split that highlights a tension around what is acceptable behaviour during genocide and starvation. Saint Levant is not unique in this respect. The broader cause of Palestine has become strained by the contradictions and tensions of going mainstream. The violations in Gaza and the West Bank have been rendered in popular films such as
The Voice of Hind Rajab and the Oscar-winning documentary
No Other Land, resulting in jarringly glamorous red carpet appearances and glitzy ceremonies at film festivals, where, as the Palestinian writer Mohammed R Mhawish put it, audiences give '
standing ovations for Palestinian pain'."
Groundbreaking genomic test could spare millions of breast cancer patients chemotherapy – article by Andrew Gregory in
The Guardian. "
Treatment for breast cancer, the world’s most prevalent form of the disease, involves surgery to remove tumours. Chemotherapy is then usually recommended when doctors believe there is a risk the disease will return. But chemotherapy’s toxic side-effects, which can include hair loss, rashes, nausea, insomnia and fatigue, are physically and emotionally gruelling for patients. Some women may face life-changing consequences such as infertility, cognitive impairment or early menopause. For decades, there has been little choice for patients. Now scientists have developed a genomic test that can spot who needs chemotherapy and who doesn’t. The breakthrough enables doctors to determine which patients can safely skip it, paving the way for a new era of personalised medicine. Results from an international trial of the test suggest millions of women could safely avoid chemotherapy, sparing them side-effects without increasing the risk of their cancer returning. The findings will be presented at the world’s largest cancer conference, the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, in Chicago on Saturday."
‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling – article by Stuart Heritage in
The Guardian. "Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.... 'More needs to be done to recognise the importance of all illustration as an art form,' Blake explains. 'What is particularly wonderful about it is that it’s a language everybody understands.'... Long before a child has gained the ability to decode the written word, they have already learned plenty about the world visually. 'I saw Quentin Blake talk about visual literacy, and he brilliantly illustrated this,' explains Ed Vere, creator of Waffles & Julius and an illustrator who has spent years working with teachers through his
Power of Pictures programme. 'He asked some children what "indignant" meant. Of course, nobody knew. And then he quickly drew this indignant old lady, and every child exactly understood. It wasn’t just "angry" or one of those black-and-white emotions. They all got the subtleties from his drawing.' For Sophy Henn, creator of the Happy Hills series, this is why the notion that picture books are merely a stepping stone to 'proper' books is so wrong. By getting two streams of information, she says that 'you’re learning emotional awareness, you’re learning empathy, you’re learning to be critical. In the world we live in today, that is incredibly important. I wish there was more information out there to say that picture books are actually a more complex form of reading.'”
