‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI – article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. "In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one.... DeepMind was founded in 2010 by three men ... who believed that it must be possible to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI.... For the DeepMind founders, it was clear that such an achievement would have widespread consequences.... After starting at DeepMind in 2017, Gabriel was, for a time, the only active philosopher working at a frontier AI lab. He quickly discovered that his background in moral philosophy and political theory gave him an unusual perspective in an industry dominated by engineers. Over the past decade, he has assembled a body of work that tracked, and in many cases predicted, the ethical challenges created by the surprising success of large language models (LLMs).... More generally, Gabriel has been a leading advocate for the idea that the current wave of AI development demands not just new technical vocabularies but also new ways of thinking about our relationship to technology, and even to ourselves.... By the time Gabriel joined DeepMind, there were, roughly speaking, two distinct and often antagonistic approaches to questions about the social and ethical implications of AI. These approaches, sometimes classed under the headings of AI safety and AI ethics, were divided by a disagreement about the feasibility of the technology. Like the DeepMind founders, the AI safety contingent believed that human-grade machine intelligence was not only possible but imminent. The urgent task, as they saw things, was to make sure that AI systems didn’t go awry [which] became known as the alignment problem.... By contrast with the AI safety crowd, the academics and technologists associated with the AI ethics tendency ... took fairness, accountability and transparency as their watchwords and insisted that the dangers of technology could not be avoided by merely technical means. What was needed, they argued, were social, cultural and political solutions. A central concern of this latter tendency was algorithmic bias, of the sort that affected facial-recognition and predictive-policing software.... Gabriel’s first major research project at DeepMind was a 2020 paper that straddled the concerns of both camps. The paper took the alignment problem seriously, but it also insisted that alignment had ethical and political implications that went beyond the technical challenges. As difficult as it might be to get a machine to act in accordance with some set of values, Gabriel argued, it was much harder to choose those values in the first place. 'Given that we live in a pluralistic world that is full of competing conceptions of value,' he asked, 'how are we to decide which principles or objectives to encode in AI – and who has the right to make these decisions?'”
From card game to a tool of divination: the artistic history of tarot – article by Veronica Esposito in The Guardian. “It’s never been easier to get a [Tarot] reading … and the Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, Tarot!, capitalizes on the practice’s increasing popularity to lure in the curious and knowledgable alike. Tarot! starts by charting the cards’ evolution from Renaissance Italy up through the 21st century, then offers up the tarot-themed work of more than two dozen artists – among them Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as new art by the celebrated British painter Chris Ofili. According to Claire Gilman, who curated the show’s Modern Visions section, the tarot originated in 15th-century Italy not as a tool for divination, but simply as a card game. It was only as it moved into France in the 18th century that it began to take on occult connotations, and from there it migrated to the UK and eventually began to spread around the globe in the 20th century,… When the tarot first emerged, long before the advent of mass-produced decks, it was only used by those fortunate enough to afford hand-painted collection of the cards, done up by masterful artists in intricate detail. Tarot! offers a rare chance to see a sizable chunk of what remains of the oldest surviving deck – known as the Visconti-Sforza, for the family it was created for… When the tarot originated in Italy, its primary inspiration was Petrarch’s series of poems known as the Triumphs, which charted a life path from sin to redemption. However, by the time of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, introduced in 1909 and by far the most widely used deck in the world, the range of influences had gotten much larger. In illustrating the deck, Smith was given free rein to pour out her imagination on to the minor arcana, and she drew on such diverse sources as the Bible, her friends, the Art-Nouveau movement and contemporary British society, just to name a few. One of the Rider-Waite-Smith’s big innovations was to illustrate the minor arcana, which up to that point had seldom been given their own associated imagery. Gilman sees this as key to the unprecedented success of this deck. ‘It really enhances the mystery built into these cards, and also the accessibility,‘ she said, ‘because you could look at these cards and write this story into every single one. It really democratizes the cards and captures people’s fascination with them.’”
My mother was an excellent care worker. Why did she end up marching with the EDL? – article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. “It was 2013 and [Nicola Wilding’s] mother – a 59-year-old care worker, who for most of her life had voted Labour – had just attended her first march with the English Defence League…. ‘I thought: “Oh, Mum’s just being daft. She’s having an adventure. She’ll get over it.”’ But instead, ‘the anger stayed’, more marches followed – and Wilding started to wonder what personal and political forces had led her family to this place. Thirteen years on, her family memoir, These Wild English, tells the story of three generations, from her grandparents’ farm in Cumbria to the scrapyards, banger race tracks and care homes of Kent. It is shot through with her family’s ‘bootstrap fatalism’ – ‘this sort of hopefulness in the absence of hope’ – and fizzes with all the family love, joy and ‘crazy energy’ of a souped-up Darling Buds of May. But there is violence too, less cash and a lot more alcohol…. Her mother’s third husband, whom Wilding steadfastly calls ’the soldier’, was a corporal in the British army. Sandra and Wilding’s three siblings had followed him from Kent to Cyprus, Colchester and County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. The murder of [Lee Rigby by Islamic extremists in 2013] felt personal. ‘For the last 10 years, she had been living in barracks … This idea that you could be hated and murdered in your own country, it really triggered her.’ She went on her first march a few weeks later.… ‘We think about the 1950s, 60s and 70s and all these great institutions: the NHS and hundreds of thousands of council houses built for the working class by the working class – and all that’s been stripped away,’ Wilding says. ’Now we have a globalised economy. The working class have been uncoupled from a national story … on what it means to belong. So we have to work out what that story is and include the working class. That’s my big picture.‘”
These Wild English by Nicola Wilding: explaining a mother’s drift to the far right – review by Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. "Inspired by the puzzle of her mother’s late-life activism, These Wild English is a heartfelt and evocative memoir of Sandra who, up until her death in 2024, endured poverty, upheaval and abusive partners, as well as a heart condition leading to two rounds of surgery. 'How did my mum, this proud tough woman who had brought up four kids pretty much alone, end up marching alongside far-right extremists chanting "No more refugees"?' Wilding asks.... 'Was it us? Did we do it to ourselves? Or was it something else – something bigger than us?' The 'us' in this story is important. Wilding, the eldest of Forsyth’s children and one of the few in her family to find stability through education and a career, is a TV documentary maker specialising in poverty and rural working-class communities, though here she is no dispassionate observer. She also has an eye on the bigger picture, noting how wider events and the social and economic decisions taken in Westminster can affect the lives of vulnerable individuals and communities. For the Forsyth family, these have included the winter of discontent, mass unemployment and Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme in the 1970s and 80s; the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the financial crisis in the 2000s; and the Tory austerity programme, Brexit referendum and resurgence of the far right in the 2010s. Wilding isn’t the first author to examine the alienation of the British working classes and the ways they have been exploited, pilloried and misunderstood... In our social media-fanned, post-Brexit discourse, the white working classes are often cast as aggressors waging vicious war on immigrant communities, having been manipulated by self-interested politicians deliberately stoking division. Wilding has little time for such one-dimensional depictions, despite her clear dismay at her mother’s flirtation with the far right. Instead, writing in thoughtful and elegantly understated prose, she digs into the roots of Sandra’s dissatisfaction, telling a story that spans three generations, starting out with her early life in the 1960s on her father’s farm in Eden Valley, Cumbria, where she was tasked with looking after her siblings during the recurring periods when her own mother did a runner."
On the Mark by Florence Hazrat: a fascinating history of punctuation – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Florence Hazrat notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels pencilling in triplets of them into a speech for Hitler. The modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described here as believing that ’slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order’. At the same time she derides male scholars who have complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf on the grounds that it feminises the hero. What Hazrat really believes about exclamation marks, alas, may be inferred from her ultra-liberal use of them. ‘No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!’ runs one joke-badged parenthesis. ‘Let nobody claim punctuation wasn’t sexy!’ … The happy corollary to the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is no mere wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots & Leaves sort; it is an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries. After a brief prehistory about ‘interpuncts‘ (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide people through the rhythm and tone, and so the sense, of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: ‘Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.’ Hashtag life goals…. The book ends in the all-too-liquid present, when ’it is tech giants who choose our writing tools’, and when ending a text message with a full stop comes off as rude.… Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies afforded by punctuation, with his Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and his creative use of scare quotes either to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was ‘our lovely “stay“ in Iran’).”
How AI is changing language – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "Vast amounts of AI writing are now being published every day – from advertising copy to academic abstracts and fiction. At the same time, it looms ever larger over our lives via auto-generated email suggestions, 'AI overview' search results, and the responses to our chatbot queries. At this level of exposure, it’s no longer a question of whether AI is changing language, both the way we speak and the way we write; the question is how. And should we resist, or embrace it?... The evidence that aspects of LLM-speak have escaped into the 'real' world, changing the way humans use language when AIs aren’t around, is now rolling in. One study analysed thousands of unscripted conversations and found that words like 'delve' and 'boast' spiked after ChatGPT was released. Another showed the frequency of 'delve' in academic abstracts actually dropping after it was singled out on social media, in a sign that AI’s influence might play out in complex ways..... Does any of this matter? Language changes all the time – words come in and out of fashion, and new technology has always been one of the forces behind this. AI does seem to be generating particularly high levels of anxiety, though. Why? 'I think where it scares people is that idea of encroaching into sentience, of becoming the new human,' [says Claire Hardaker, Professor of forensic linguistics at the University of Lancaster]. Since 2023, she’s expanded the Bot or Not project into speech and music, and has noticed just how viscerally people react when a song they’ve enjoyed turns out to have been composed and performed by a machine.... One much feared effect of the mass use of LLMs is that they act as a flattening force – smoothing away the variety and idiosyncrasy of human language into a kind of beige goo. That’s a legitimate concern, as far as it goes, though it’s not a new one. People have long angsted about the homogenising effects of American film and television on accent and vocabulary, and there are subgenres of language – political euphemism, customer-service prattle, therapy-speak – that have spread further from their home territory than many might like. The crucial thing, though, is that their influence tends to generate a backlash – and there’s no reason to think things will be different this time. In fact, our capacity for innovation might ultimately be the thing that truly distinguishes human writing – particularly the literary kind – from AI."
Baldy Man, Gold Blend flirters and mash-mad Martians: TV’s golden age ads – article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Hanging over the toilet in the gents’ loos at the History of Advertising Trust’s archive in deepest Norfolk is a photograph of Ian Botham. It’s not just the cricketing great’s mullet that tells you this is 1986, but the fact that Beefy is smoking a cigar.... If the past is a foreign country, then the history of advertising is a whole alternate universe, one in which excitable metallic martians induced us to buy Cadbury’s powdered potatoes with the slogan: 'For mash get Smash.' It’s a place where bowler-hatted chimps dressed as removal men wooed us into buying PG Tips tea, while legions of sports stars energetically advertised carcinogenic smokes.... You may think that an archive devoted to advertising is frivolous nonsense but you would be wrong. Ever since Walter Benjamin started collecting advertising posters from 19th-century Paris for his masterwork The Arcades Project, such ephemera have been key to any understanding of modernity and how willingly people will buy often eminently body- and soul-destroying stuff.... Advertising today is facing an existential crisis. Algorithms have destroyed the charm, such as it was, of the craft. 'Advertising today has lost a bit of that kind of emotional storytelling,' says [deputy director Alistair Moir]. 'It’s become a bit more formulaic and data-driven. Brands and agencies are often obsessed by return on investment rather than doing big campaigns that really draw people into a story and connect with emotion.' The fear is that advertising won’t be as creative or as enjoyable – just much more diabolically effective at making us buy things."
At a dying man’s bedside, I see something much rarer than grief: the courage to include the young – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "When [the grandson] hands me his phone, the screen is split into four windows. Important family meetings shouldn’t be held on FaceTime but, given the alternative of no meeting, it will do.... I don’t know what the family knows and the margin for error is small, so my explanation is layered. The operation was not intended as a cure; the idea was to reduce the burden and tackle the rest with chemotherapy. But his type of aggressive disease doesn’t respond well to chemotherapy, with the patient experience heavily balanced towards toxicity, making many past patients question its value. And now, the whole idea of chemotherapy is academic and I want to guide them through the next steps. When I stop, the first thing the patient’s daughter says is that, in a few lines, I have told them more than they ever knew or had been advised to think about. If this is true, I feel bad.... His daughter concludes that the prognosis looks grim and says there is no point in keeping him in hospital. I stay silent just long enough for her brother to ask if their father will live weeks or months. I can’t help feeling grateful that he is making this easy for me.... I gently say to hope for months but prepare for weeks. The family exhales, giving me my first opportunity to look up from the screen. And it’s then that I realise the grandson has been holding his grandfather’s hand and crying. Now, he hastens to wipe his face but his one soggy tissue is not equal to the task. It is a picture of bewilderment and love and mourning. This is the sight that trips me up.... Stepping forward, I touch his free hand. 'I am sorry you were all alone; you are very brave.' He sniffles. I ask if he has questions but can see that he’s just a boy who wants his mother. So I depart and leave his mum to do the hard work.... In my anxiety to get the job done, did I neglect to shield the young man from bad news? At least I could have given him the option to leave. But I also remember that, as the conversation turned heavy, he chose to stay, displaying both love and duty towards his vulnerable grandparent.... Well-meaning parents naturally want to spare their children and youth trauma but, in truth, we are just avoiding the realities of physical and cognitive decline. In a digital culture that glorifies 'looksmaxxing', the hospital forces a reckoning with incapacity, vulnerability and co-dependency.... When we spare our youth a window into the indignities of ageing, and the universal reality of death and dying, we might be prolonging their innocence. But then we just postpone to middle age the struggle to reconcile with these issues.... It’s daunting to think that the grandson will always remember my dire announcement at his grandfather’s bedside. I admire his courage and forbearance. I salute his parents for entrusting him with a task that many would not. And I hope that more of us will think about how to carefully but deliberately expose our youth to the realities of life and death that all of us must eventually face."
Count Binface represents the Silly Sausage Britain I know and love – article by Sofie Jenkinson in The Guardian. "Nigel Farage’s pointless byelection in Clacton, in which he will stand against Count Binface, has inadvertently pitted two versions of Britain against one another. In one corner we have those who will argue that we are divided, cynical and jaded, that Britain isn’t what it once was and there is little to celebrate. And in the other corner we have the lovers of nonsense, ready to bind us back together with the unifying force of laughter. Count Binface symbolises what I like to call Silly Sausage Britain. The Britain that has a laugh and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is underpinned by self-deprecation, our kindness toward each other and fairness. This is the Britain of comedians such as Victoria Wood and Bob Mortimer, Romesh Ranganathan and Daisy May Cooper, Elis James and Meera Syal. It’s the adverts for Yorkshire Tea, Tango and Irn-Bru and it’s the Liz Truss lettuce. It’s 2p arcade machines and queen of 'hun culture' Alison Hammond’s laugh.... Last year, I wrote about Mr Blobby Patriotism, describing the Britain I feel exists and that I’m proud of. This is not twee Paddington-style patriotism. Neither is it Reform’s top-down Rule, Britannia! patriotism. It is a patriotism of taking the piss out of yourself and your mates, but also rolling up your sleeves and helping someone carry a pram up the stairs. Being patriotic isn’t about Britain being perfect, it’s about loving a place because we see ourselves in it and making fun of it because it’s ours.... So as we laugh together over Count Binface’s plans to nationalise Adele, restore the price of 99 Flakes to 99p and reintroduce Ceefax, we are reminded of who we are as a nation. This is the kind and funny Britain I know exists and the one I want to live in."
Why do free speech debates make us so angry? – article by Matei Candea in The Guardian. "Free speech debates seem to be about abstract principles and rules: what should be allowed? When does it cross a line? Do we need more or less regulation? These disagreements are real – but they don’t explain why we get so deeply angry, upset and divided over freedom of speech. In reality, the free speech wars of recent years are not just about rules – they’re about what it means to be a good person. Notice how such debates are rife with caricatures of 'types' of people: snowflakes, trolls, cancel-culture warriors, edgelords, bigots, crybullies, incels and so on. What’s really driving these debates is a set of implicit judgments about character: what kind of person wants to regulate another person’s speech? What kind of person doesn’t care about the effects their words have on others?... On the European and US scene, almost everyone seems to agree that free speech is broadly a good thing. Yet we find people struggling over different visions of what kind of (good) person a free speaker is. I would argue that three such visions have been particularly prominent: the first casts the free speaker as a rational, measured citizen sharing ideas – perhaps the eloquent contributor on Question Time, the writer on a literary panel, the citizen in a town hall meeting. In the second, the free speaker is a passionate breaker of rules and conventions – think blasphemous artworks such as Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, or the 'souping' of the Mona Lisa by climate activists. The third sees the free speaker as a brave and honourable person standing up for the truth – classically, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor whose WeChat posts warned the world about Covid-19.... Once we see free speech debates as debates about ethics and character rather than rules and principles, we can understand why people might argue for free speech one minute, and denounce their opponents for what they say the next. Examples are all around us, including Maga activists engaging in cancel culture after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, or progressives who had previously defended campus speech codes denouncing their use against pro-Palestine protesters. This is often put down to 'double standards', confusion or insincerity. But if you start from character, a different picture emerges. Each of our three 'types' genuinely defends freedom of speech, but each also sometimes has good reasons to demand silence. The rational citizen endorses the limitation of speech through law, copyright or civility; the passionate activist might feel the powerful should be silenced to allow the weak to speak; the honourable truth teller demands respect for their values and reparations for insults to them or their friends."
My patients use ChatGPT for therapy. Now I use it too – article by Sarah Darghouth in The Guardian. "'Chat told me I should break up with him.' I instructed my face to remain therapist-neutral, but I must have smirked. The truth is, I was annoyed. We had been discussing the viability of this relationship for weeks, and in an instant AI had brought the answer. 'How do you feel about it?' She said this had been her gut feeling all along. The following session, her relationship was over.... As patients increasingly bring AI into sessions, I sometimes don’t know whose voice I am hearing, whose emotion, whose gut feeling. I deal with this, along with the creepy annoyance and competition it brings up in me, by moving us towards what feels like safer grounds, re-asserting the 'IRL' world.... AI can be dangerous, I warn my patients; I do not recommend you use it. Then I go home and I know that part of me is hiding: because when my nine-year-old had a tantrum at 7.20am on a Sunday morning, I did not write in a diary to bring to my therapist next week. What I actually did was, gulp, reach for Chat.... Was the therapy help fake? Yes. But it worked. So does it matter?... What, if anything, is worth salvaging about human therapy that AI will not replicate? I wonder whether human therapists will ultimately lose when it comes to technique or interpretation.... My patient leaves, and I have no idea if she will come back next week. On my walk home, I ruminate. I remember a grad school professor saying that therapy is like sorting through a messy closet: everything has to be taken out, your room has to look like a tornado hit it, and only then can things be sorted through. My patient and I were in the chaos of the tornado. And then I think: what if it’s the mess in therapy that is its most prized possession? This can look like many things: conflict. Hesitation. Stalling. Changing directions. Making the wrong decision. Strong emotion that explodes all words. Sometimes, we have to stay patient with the chaotic unknowns, the slow emergence of an idea, or a loss so deep it cannot be touched by therapy, week after week after week. We want to escape it at all costs, because who wants to sit in the middle of a tornado? Yet mess is often a signal that we are getting at something important.... Because not knowing is anathema to everything AI stands for, the tech-pushed sense of desire for an immediate response may be hard for many to resist. I am guessing the future will see a sizeable number of people swept up by the powerful current of AI-like therapy. I also wonder if a minority will remain seekers of human therapy: I imagine a small yet significant counter-movement of determined people who, either by conviction or trend – and likely with money – will resolve to stand up again and again in the moving sand, refusing the pull of the AI waves. They are those who will seek the flawed human therapist who will, I guarantee you, frustrate them and whom they may annoy too, but who will feel genuine happiness when a small good thing has happened in their life.... My patient comes back. We continue to work through jagged emotions and unfinished pain. One day, she comes in and says: 'It was how you laughed at my joke as I was leaving the room last time that made me feel better.' What? So it had nothing to do with what I had seen as the rich therapeutic dialogue we had? I didn’t even remember the joke. But I went with it, not really understanding, humbled, and feeling pretty happy being a human."
A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard – article by Emily Hauser in The Guardian. "If the Odyssey is clear that it’s all about that complicated man, Odysseus, then Nolan is just as preoccupied with the complex hero – albeit in a different way from the Odyssey. Homer’s Odysseus is cunning with an edge of pride, a liar and a storyteller, with the smarts to wile himself out of any situation and a determination at almost any cost to get his homecoming. Those costs are spelled out many times by the poet before they’re tossed away.... Nolan’s Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) makes gestures to complexity too, but here is a modern-day Hollywood hero who learns remorse for the atrocities he commits and spends much of his time trying to excuse having lost all his men, and retrospectively (with a final journey, not in Homer, to pay homage to them) earning their forgiveness.... There’s another layer that Nolan adds: his Odysseus is riddled with trauma and guilt, not only for the deaths of his men, but for the death and destruction (and, at one brief point, the assault on women) he caused in Troy. A regular refrain in the film is the lament for the death of 'our age of bronze'....Odysseus’s crime and atonement in Nolan, then, is not only for the loss of his crew, but also for the death of a civilisation.... Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped).... So this is about uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a product of his own choices.... Because, yes, the Homeric epic is about Odysseus, and it’s about his journey home; it’s got gods and monsters, a father-fixated teenage son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and a loyal wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). But it also has an Odysseus who ruins his companions’ homecoming because of his hubris when he brings a curse down on them all (omitted in Nolan’s film); who returns to Ithaca and slaughters a bunch of defenceless men (Homer’s Odysseus locks up the suitors’ weapons; Nolan gives them arms); makes his teenage son hang a group of enslaved women (Nolan inexcusably turns Penelope into the executor of her enslaved woman, Melantho, and has Penelope actually push her into the slaughter); and then (also not in Nolan) almost starts a civil war. This is the root of the story from which Nolan’s film branches: a complicated man who isn’t a straightforwardly moral modern leader, but who makes choices that are vexed and troubling and often unclear. That’s true for many of Homer’s other characters, too – including the women. Female characters such as Calypso (Charlize Theron), the goddess with whom Odysseus spends seven years of his return, aren’t straightforward villains to be blamed for Odysseus’s multi-year absence from Ithaca (Nolan makes her drug Odysseus with the infamous lotus so he 'forgets' his home). Nor is Penelope, in Homer’s epic, ready to admit that the beggar who has wandered into her household and executed most of the local nobility is actually her husband. Where is the challenge we see in Homer to whether she really wants him home or not?... Turning the Odyssey into Odysseus’s troubled journey to become an empathic leader of men and a reluctant agent of the onward march of history isn’t just a Hollywood reorientation to the kind of flawed genius we’ve seen in Oppenheimer – it fundamentally tells us what Nolan sees, and wants us to see, as a hero. For audiences who are looking for a box-office smash with stunning visual action, epic proportions and a hero at the heart of it all, they will get it."
Hagitude author Sharon Blackie: ‘At 60 I wasn’t ready to give up, I was just starting’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "Like many of the wise women in her books, Sharon Blackie lives miles from anyone. Hers is the only house on the road winding through a valley deep in the Yorkshire Dales.... It seems an appropriate setting for an author who is on a mission to bring fairytales to modern readers. Blackie runs spiritual retreats and workshops at the nearby Broughton Sanctuary and publishes a popular Substack called The Art of Enchantment. Her books, including word-of-mouth hits such as If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, are a beguiling mix of memoir, mythology and eco-feminism – manifestos for a better way of living. 'The world which men have made isn’t working,' is how Blackie opens her 2019 memoir, If Women Rose Rooted. 'To change the world, we women need first to change ourselves – and then we need to change the stories we tell about who we are.' By immersing ourselves in old stories, she argues, we will discover archetypes that will help us not only understand but rewrite our own. Plato, Baba Yaga and Jung all rub shoulders in her impassioned call for women to rediscover their lost power and connection to nature. Blackie’s books are something of a secret among a growing, largely female, readership across the world (as evidenced by rapturous quotes on the covers). But the spiritually averse need not be alarmed. In person, there is nothing wafty about this steely but softly spoken 65-year-old former academic and psychotherapist, who is clearly more used to asking the questions.... Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the 'wise old woman' to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – 'raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men' – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. 'I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,' she says. 'Why does nobody know about them?'”
‘Most people don’t know we’ve set up a doomsday system’: physicist Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies – interview by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "What is it that we should all know? Well, she says, the average person’s experience of space is about to change. If, so far, that has been 'looking at the stars and being full of wonder, full of connection with the universe', perhaps noticing the occasional streaking object that was not a shooting star, now 'there are plans for tens of thousands more satellites, which would really change your relationship with what you see in the sky'. SpaceX, specifically, has just applied to a federal regulator for permission to launch up to 1m of them. Grego ...has an unforced warmth and urgency, and a lack of self-aggrandisement in striking contrast to the gung-ho attitude that seems to accompany so much discussion of space. She became a physicist when she arrived at university ... then she became an observational cosmologist, which she found she loved. This merged with her other life as an activist ('anti-war, workers’ rights, racial justice – all the things important for a better society') when she became research director of the Global Security programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The union, founded at the height of the Vietnam war by American scientists horrified by their government’s misuse of science, aims to direct research energies toward solving environmental and social problems instead.... No country has yet destroyed another country’s satellite intentionally, Grego continues: 'That’s been a line we haven’t crossed. But most of the big spacefaring countries, which also happen to be nuclear countries, are testing weapons that you could use against other satellites.' Avant-garde space defence now looks for ways to sidle up to opposition satellites.... And finally, there is the nuclear vulnerability. When, last autumn, Kathryn Bigelow’s Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite had 22m views within three days of its release, [and a Pentagon memo insisted that] the movie’s depiction of a US [Golden Dome] system with under 60% accuracy was ... untrue, Grego was asked about the memo live on BBC TV. The movie is in fact correct, she said; just over half of tests have failed.... Where it was [especially] realistic, she adds, was in the timelines.... 'The worry is somebody will pre-emptively attack [your] ICBMs and leave you without them to retaliate, which would upset the balance of mutually assured destruction. [So] once you see anything headed in, you can quickly launch those missiles before they’re destroyed on the ground. It’s kind of: use them or lose them.' The thing is, the whole ICBM trajectory only lasts half an hour, and 'you’re compressed by detection, communication. So a president would have less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch ICBMs or to wait it out … the system is built so that question gets asked right away. And it creates this intense time-pressure' – and on imperfect people, with incomplete information. She adds: 'If the president decided to launch a counterattack, even if the initial attack was launched by accident, certainly the adversary is going to retaliate. That’s a civilisation-ending day – or an afternoon.' I’m so taken aback I laugh out loud. 'I know,' she says. 'I’m sorry. I’ve had many years to acclimate to this. But most people haven’t. Most people don’t know we’ve set up a system that is essentially a doomsday system. And we can dismantle it. We just have not.'”
Richard Dadd: can his mental illness help explain these arresting, bizarre images? – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Royal Academy’s smallish Dadd survey is called Beyond Bedlam and urges us to see him as more than just a 'mad' artist. Yes, he spent more than 40 years in psychiatric hospitals where he was judged incurable and where he painted his masterpiece The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, that monstrously magnified corner of an English country garden. But he was already a remarkable artist, with fairies as his hit theme. These are not cute Disneyfied fairies but the original mysterious beings from British folklore, sinister and destructive, as portrayed by Shakespeare.... Then Dadd went on an epic trip to the Middle East, filling his sketchbook with mosques, markets, Egyptian ruins, but what should have been a stimulating escape tipped him into severe paranoia and murder. This was when a promising life cracked open. When the fairies return to him in Bedlam they are brutally different. His early work is imaginative but visibly influenced by Romantic artists like Fuseli and Runge. But there’s no precedent that helps to understand The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Painted over a nine-year period, it disobeys the pictorial rules in which Dadd had been educated. When you try to fathom it, your eyes have to pick their way between tall dark strands of grass, daisies, dock leaves that block your view and clog and cramp the picture surface. Only through this tangle can you make out a detailed portrayal of fairy society. The tiny folk are gathered in awe and trepidation to watch the strongest fairy raise his axe to 'fell' a horse chestnut to repair Queen Mab’s coach. These fairies are not beautiful or seductive. Two have outsized legs bulging from their pleated skirts. One has a vast bald blueish head.... You can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it – and a modern artist at that."
‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream? – article by Amelia Hill in The Guardian. "As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Companies have started incorporating 'adversarial patterns' in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems. The designers say advances in computing have made it easier to incorporate such patterns into commercially viable garments. Experts caution that the effectiveness of the patterns depends on the surveillance system and the conditions in which it is used, but Nick Tidball, the co-founder of the clothing brand Vollebak, thinks 'adversarial clothing' could be on the cusp of going mainstream. 'Anti-surveillance feelings are so widespread that all it would take is for a single celebrity to wear one of these garments, currently popular in the countercultural fashion world, to a high-profile event for it to take off,' he said."
OpenAI’s rogue agents are a wake-up call to risks posed by artificial intelligence – article by Shakeel Hashim in The Guardian. "Last week Hugging Face – a company that hosts artificial intelligence models and datasets – was hacked. After it reported the incident to law enforcement, few would have predicted what came next: the culprits were revealed to be AI agents from OpenAI, which had broken out of containment and were acting of their own accord.... OpenAI had been evaluating the capabilities of two of its models in the test that led to the breach – including one not yet publicly available. The models, which were both running in a supposedly secure environment without internet access, were asked to solve a hacking challenge. Rather than actually solve it themselves, however, they decided it would be easier to cheat. They used their advanced capabilities to break out of their secure environment, access the web and then hack into Hugging Face’s systems to steal the answers. They worked at this for a full weekend – seemingly without anyone at OpenAI noticing."
Social Darwinists to tech bros: tracing the long fight against equality in US – review by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian. "The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth 'self-evident, that all men are created equal'. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.... Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and 'questions about capitalism and democracy'. Her first book, Invisible Hands, was a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. Her second, Fear City, about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Hers is a major voice. It’s also unique. Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk’s fellow techno-fascist.... 'What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence,' Phillips-Fein said. 'He says that while the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and the people at the top … should have the ultimate say over resources, he is deeply aware that this is politically dangerous, that … it creates an unstable society in which the poor and the working class might actually hate the wealthy, and that’s not in the interest of the wealthy in the long run. Also, he has a sense that human brotherhood is lost, or some kind of community that had existed.'... Country of Lords is also a primer on modern inequality. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford mixed mass auto production with vicious racism. In mid-century, William Shockley was a proto-tech mogul 'who went completely off the rails'. 'He was a co-inventor of the transistor and he figures in different histories of Silicon Valley because he ran this company and wanted to maintain a tremendous amount of control, and as a result a bunch of the employees quit and founded their own firm [two eventually founding Intel] … So after Shockley Labs fell apart, Shockley started to become drawn to racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing in particular. I don’t think anybody really knows exactly what triggered this, but he starts to talk a lot about it publicly in the mid-60s. He was at Stanford at the time. He was supposed to be teaching physics and engineering.'... In such soil, Phillips-Fein finds the roots of 'the tech titans of today', rejecting liberal ideals."
Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "It is perhaps not surprising that Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, is being read by Labour watchers and leftwing thinkers. As the New York Times wrote, it’s 'among the best and most dazzling efforts to model the political present in all its maddening strangeness'.... His thinking runs as follows ... The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the 'long 90s') was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 ... was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away. Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. 'On the surface,' Jäger writes, 'the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.' As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative phrase 'bodies without organs'. Modern political movements, he writes, are 'concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism'. He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because 'I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story globally'. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as 'a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues'. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like."
What makes a woman a witch? Financial independence – article by Lucianne Tonti in The Guardian. "When Katherine Harrison’s husband passed away, she became the wealthiest woman in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Rather than wallow in her new status as a young widow she decided to run the farm she’d inherited on her own. She took up ranching and a slew of other hobbies including brewing ale, spinning yarn and beekeeping. She traded honey and beeswax for candles. She was by all accounts, headstrong, outspoken and clever. In many corners of the internet, Harrison’s interests are having a moment. Craft brewers have been spruiking classic ales for years, urban beekeeping is surging in popularity, and people are looking to textile-based crafts as ways to practise mindfulness. ... Unfortunately, Harrison lived in the 17th century when fear and paranoia dominated the New England colonies. It was a time when a woman’s refusal to conform to puritanical, patriarchal norms made her vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. In 1668, more than two decades before the Salem witch trials kicked off 200km north, Harrison was arrested and put on trial for witchcraft.... While there were many causative factors in the witch-hunts – patriarchy, economic hardship, and religious and political tensions, to name a few – a woman’s financial independence and power made her vulnerable. Sometimes this independence was realised through inheritance, sometimes her proficiency at work.... Harrison’s case is emblematic of a pattern in the witch-hunts of colonial New England. In an analysis of the trials, the US historian Carol F Karlsen found that, although it was rare for women to inherit property, when they did, they were more susceptible to witchcraft allegations. Women from families without male heirs (Harrison had three daughters) made up 64% of the females prosecuted, 76% of those who were found guilty, and 89% of those who were executed. The pattern reflects how 'these women were aberrations in a society with an inheritance system designed to keep property in the hands of men,' writes Karlsen, in her 1987 book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman."
Is Burnham’s Oxbridge-heavy cabinet a sign of social mobility or lack of progress on class? – article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Like 20 British prime ministers before him, Andy Burnham’s new cabinet minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, went to Eton. After graduating from the country’s most elite private school, Narayan attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied – what else? – PPE (politics, philosophy and economics), like David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Ed Miliband and a host of other senior politicians. An MBA at Stanford and a career in the City followed. But Narayan’s background is hardly typical of the British ruling class. Born in Bihar in eastern India, he moved with his family to Cardiff when he was 12. He and his younger brother were sleeping on the floor of their one-bedroom home when a teacher at his local high school suggested the bright young boy apply for some private schools. His parents, who had joined the Labour party almost as soon as they arrived in Wales, ran a petrol station. Eton was possible only thanks to a full scholarship."
How the UK's extreme heat is shifting the conversation about air-con – article by Matt McGrath and Esme Stallard on BBC News website. "For 40 years, wealthy countries have focused heavily on cutting the carbon emissions that cause climate change, known as mitigation. Adaptation such as designing housing so it is more resilient to hotter temperatures and installing air conditioning has not always had the same focus. Reducing emissions was seen as morally right because richer nations produced most of the gases that have warmed the planet. And with that focus came a funding imbalance. In 2023, $1.8tn was given to mitigation, while adaptation did not secure even 5% of that – it scraped $65bn globally. Spending too much on adaption was seen by many as giving up on the fight against climate change. But this mainstream view has now been challenged. In a memo published last year, Bill Gates – a man who has poured billions into clean technology – argued that the climate movement's 'doomsday' fixation on temperature targets had diverted money from the things that most improve lives in a warming world. Climate change is serious, he wrote, but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'. Governments, he added, should be investing in cooling for the countries that need it.... The row that followed exposed the real fault line that's coming to the surface this summer: not whether to cut carbon or adapt to the heat – but how much to spend on each. There's another reason that muddies the waters and helps explain why cutting carbon became the prime focus – it was investable. Heat pumps and EVs can be sold. Spending on shade, ventilation and cooler hospitals and homes all produce little in the way of bankable returns – even if it reduces costs of climate change long term.... One of the most controversial ideas in the report is on air conditioning. Right now, only 5% or so of English homes have a cooling unit. The Committee recommends fitting these devices in hospitals and care homes within 10 years, and schools in 25 years. This goes against years of government advice that passive cooling was the preferred method – using shade, ventilation and other design features to bring down temperatures, not mechanical means. Prof Mat Santamouris from the University of New South Wales ... is scathing about who is driving the air con demand – the industry, he says, is 'extremely powerful' – adding that passive cooling adds its own economic growth, as money is spent on plumbers and builders.... There is a cruel physics beneath the financial unfairness. Air conditioning doesn't destroy heat, it moves it – out of the flat and into the street, where, Santamouris says, it warms the air your neighbours breathe and drives up the demand for still more cooling, by about a third in his studies of Sydney. The machines keeping the financially comfortable cool make everyone else's nights worse; and as wealthier households cool their rooms, the rest fall further behind. A thermal divide, opening street by street.... Santamouris and Baroness Brown [who chairs the adaptation committee of the government's Climate Change Committee] reach for the same answer: passive cooling first, machines where genuinely needed, clean power behind them, and the lesson that France learned painfully in the deadly heatwave of 2003 – the vulnerable protected rather than left to improvise."
The patient who loves buying lettuce for his daughter-in-law, and what his case teaches us about shared decision-making in medicine – article by Ranjana Srivastava in The Guardian. "My patient hates the notion of an 'intruder' in his body. 'I just want it gone,' he says. I reassure him that this is understandable but we should discuss in some depth his decision to undergo surgery. The patient balks, his son is eager to talk. I explain that his risk of any complication is high and even reversible events such as delirium, infection and electrolyte imbalance can cause prolonged difficulties. Patients often worry about 'dying on the table' but that’s rare – it’s the aftermath that matters. The surgeon and I estimate the early cancer is unlikely to cause problems during his lifetime. I say we are not opposed to the surgery itself, rather we want to make sure he understands its ramifications. But by now, the patient has tuned out. 'I know you’re tired, so here’s a simple question,' I try. 'At this point in your life, what matters to you?' His face lights up. 'Meeting my friends. And buying salad leaves for my daughter-in-law.' The son is visibly surprised by this beautiful sentiment. 'And if you were no longer able to do this independently?' 'Then it’s not a life I would want.' This one articulation becomes the turning point that allows an honest discussion about what he values and the perceived cost of lost independence. I can’t help but notice that the patient who engages in this more personal conversation is entirely different from the patient who had lost interest in a generic discussion of the benefits and risks of an operation. I ask the pair to reflect on our talk. Later, when they cancel surgery, their explanation is telling – making a fast initial decision, even the inappropriate one, had relieved the distress of indecision. But once the patient had voiced what mattered to him, the right decision was clear. I recalled this encounter as I heard a thoughtful talk at a conference about shared decision-making in healthcare.... How should patients better advocate for themselves when it comes to important healthcare decisions? Spearheaded by a geriatrician, an Australian website contains a plain-language (and translated) guide designed with the patient for the patient. A one-page 'before your appointment' sheet contains questions every patient or carer should consider. I routinely recommend it to my family. The clinician section has nuanced questions that all doctors can learn to ask. I use it myself to keep me on track. Another useful site comes from the NHS in the UK."
Alive by Melanie Challenger: a maverick study of what it means to have a body – review by Edward Posnett in The Guardian. "Challenger notes that her book was born out of 'wild curiosity', and a sense that the 'stories we were telling ourselves … were both presumptuous and unconvincing'. For her, our focus on souls, genes or minds is a distortion of reality, and we should instead direct our attention to our bodies, which have been marginalised, perhaps because they remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality. It is not that Challenger denies the importance of genes; what she questions is the lens through which we read the world. Throughout the book she vividly presents a range of different organisms, from slime to squid, exploring the ways in which they relate and respond to the world around them. Among other things, Challenger is a poet, and her descriptions are often beautiful. She describes glacial ice as 'blue sheened like an eyeball' and a Humboldt squid as 'a lozenge of silver'. By denigrating or ignoring bodies, she argues, we are blinded to the sophistication of other life forms, and do not afford them the respect that they deserve; we mistake machines for consciousness and our own consciousness for machines; we destroy habitats with little regard for the non-human life that resides there.... I struggle to think of a book for whose subject I have felt more sympathy and excitement: its turn to the body, its trenchant critique of scientific reductionism and misguided metaphors."
