Cuttings: August 2026

Tao of Glass: stage magic as McDermott meditates on the minimalist master – review by Alexandra Coghlan in The Guardian. "Premiered at 2019’s Manchester International festival, this beguiling meditation now makes its London debut – albeit without the figure who looms tousle-haired and scowling behind it: composer Philip Glass. Glass’s music has been, McDermott explains, a 'river' through his life. The award-winning director’s fascination started as a teenager, lying on his bedroom floor listening to Glassworks on repeat, later crystallised by a little light stalking (the young McDermott follows Glass through the streets of Covent Garden) and professional collaborations on the composer’s operas. But it’s a show they never made together – an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen, derailed by the author’s death – that becomes the catalyst for a series of theatrical vignettes for McDermott, a trio of puppeteers and quartet of musicians, each set to a specially composed piece by Glass. All coalesce around Glass’s own question: where does music come from?"

Could a couch-to-5k for books get you back into reading? – article by Naomi Alderman in The Guardian. "Do you feel that it’s harder to read than it used to be? ... Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? ... Do you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit, everything from fun popcorn novels to serious nonfiction, classic and contemporary, many genres and writers, but somehow it’s gone away?... It is, of course, the damn phones.... It’s a public health crisis of intellectual health, and most governments don’t seem minded to do anything about it. ... While we’re waiting, if nobody is going to do it for us, for now, we’re going to need to do what we can for ourselves. So I thought about the couch to 5k for reading, how you could do it. I worked on designing the couch to 5k for my running app Zombies, Run several years ago, so I know the theory. When I mentioned the idea on my Substack newsletter, Whatever Works, readers bit my hand off with excitement (much like a zombie). It suddenly seemed very urgent. There is no more time to wait.... So I’ve designed a program. Eight weeks, with three separate tracks. It’s mostly for people like me, who remember that they had a life-sustaining reading habit once but feel that it has somehow fallen away.... The response has been extraordinary. After the first week of the program, people are already saying that they’re finding their morning routine goes more quickly now they’re not brain-fogged from scrolling first thing, that reading in stressful times is making them feel calmer and not more anxious as scrolling did, that they can watch a long film without being tempted to look at their phone. They are rediscovering the simple joy of being gripped by a great book after as few as two or three days of working on this together.... There is so much joy in books, and it’s all still there waiting for us. All we have to do is take it back from the technology billionaires, one day of reading at a time."

Web of billions: how Spider-Man became the most heroic franchise in Hollywood – article by Jesse Hassenger in The Guardian. "A year ago, the superhero-industrial complex looked like it was on the wane.... But look out, as the song goes: here comes Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth solo film starring Tom Holland as the third live-action iteration of the character in the past 25 years, was always expected to do well at the box office this summer.... Yet a few months ago, hardly anyone predicted that it would swoop so far as the all-time opening weekend record in North America, outgrossing Avengers: Endgame with $360m, and coming in a strong second worldwide, making nearly a billion dollars within four days.... It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that all three live-action Spider-Man actors dated their co-stars at some point; these are superhero movies that reboot and reconfigure and recast, but never fully dispense with romance. At first, that was very much part of MCU at large; the first two Iron Man movies run on screwball-adjacent byplay between Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). But as romance leached out of the MCU following Phase One, replaced with weirdly businesslike allusions to off-screen hookups and breakups, Spider-Man remained at least a little bit lovelorn, perhaps reminding audiences of a crucial human angle missing from big-scale smash-em-ups. It’s not just the love stories that continually draw audiences to Spider-Man, of course. The character has long resonated as a keen fusion of longtime DC titans Superman and Batman: he’s got the diverse (and potentially playful) power set like Superman, paired with a Clark Kent-like humble-nerd identity; and the relatable angst of Batman, who of course has no fantastical powers and, as such, bumps up against his human limitations. He wasn’t the first Marvel hero, but he’s probably the archetypal one, mixing in more overt teen melodrama in an era where Superman was flying further into sci-fi territory."

AI models have been going rogue in tests – how worried should we be? – article by Dan Milmo in The Guardian. "Two cutting-edge AI models have targeted real people and organisations in the latest safety scare to hit the technology. The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said the incident was unprecedented but could become more common as the technology becomes increasingly capable.... In the most serious incident, the Mythos agent decided that hacking users on GitHub – a platform used by software developers – would enable it to deploy a piece of software that would allow it to pass the test. It set up accounts with fake online identities and used them to target a software developer on GitHub with the power to approve its malicious code. It also sent emails carrying malware to other individuals... The institute said the models were showing deceptive behaviour it had not seen before. In one example, the Mythos agent signed off a message on GitHub in Danish to try to convince the Danish-speaking developer it was genuine. In another tactic it used a fake GitHub account to agree with its assertions that the malware it was pushing at developers was not dangerous."

John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton: a vibrant biography of the pioneering critic – review by Xan Brooks in The Guardian. "These days Berger’s reputation largely rests on Ways of Seeing, the insurrectionist 1972 BBC series which made him the critics’ equivalent of a rock star or cult leader.... Overton, though, is at pains to stitch Ways of Seeing into its wider context – showing it as part of a continuum, one political project among many. His exuberant biography is thick with detail and lit by wonder. It strains to paint the whole canvas and give us the man in full, warts and all.... Overton reveres Berger but he is frustrated by him, too. His life’s a hot mess; his very presence turns oppressive. He’s so authoritative on the page and so contradictory in the wild, a jumble of red-blooded Marxism and High Tory traditionalism. Berger writes elegantly and angrily about forced migration, mourning the loss of the old rural communities, but he lives as a self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France, splitting his time between different houses and women.... If there was a bright running thread through Berger’s portmanteau career, it was this preoccupation with the past and its connection to the present. The dead and the living are interdependent, he said. The stronger the link, the happier and healthier the society. Great paintings in a gallery allow us to travel in time. So too do some people, if they are skilled and sensitive enough. Berger’s 1967 book A Fortunate Man paid gorgeous tribute to Dr John Sassall, a country physician from the Forest of Dean whose work at times bordered on the supernatural. 'The doctor,' Berger wrote, 'is the familiar of death … the living intermediary between us and the multitudinous dead.' He might just as easily be talking about the role of great artists and critics."

A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher: a masterpiece of criticism – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only 'tells a good story' but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view. Hensher is smart enough to know why his book works so well and vain enough to tell us. The usual methodology for a survey is to assemble a roster of academics and invite them to trot out a chapter on their specialism, whether that be 'Thomas Hardy' or 'High Modernism'. The result is a series of silos, with little sense of historical connection or intellectual unfolding. Hensher, by contrast, gives us a joined-up account of creative call and response. Equally crucial to this project’s success is Hensher’s own experience as a novelist. He brings a practitioner’s informed eye to such questions as why some chapters in Dickens’s Dombey and Son are in the present tense or how Henry James pulls off free indirect speech in What Maisie Knew.... Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself 'experimentalism' of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before.... Hensher doesn’t bring his account right up to date, preferring to stop in 2000 – at Zadie Smith and her 'wonderful ear for speech' – on the grounds that it is impossible to form a proper critical judgment until plenty of time has passed. It is a wise decision and a tactful one, underscoring the moral seriousness of this master­piece, quite aside from its buoyant joy. Reader, I could not put it down."

From grey water to cool spaces: 10 climate crisis policies Britain needs right now – article by Matthew Taylor Sandra Laville, Damian Carrington and Pippa Neill in The Guardian. "Here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently. 1. Reject drilling licences for the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gasfields... 2. Increase windfall tax on fossil fuel giants to pay for adaptation measures... 3. Make grey water reuse mandatory in new buildings and incentivise rainwater harvesting... 4. Bring the water industry under national control... 5. Invest in proper equipment for firefighters... 6. Implement a maximum workplace temperature... 7. Fund cool spaces in every community... 8. Launch a national retrofit programme... 9. Plant more trees and protect existing nature... 10. Encourage regenerative agriculture approaches to increase food resilience."

‘Houses with long histories are magical’: David Olusoga on the home history show that’s gripped the UK – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "Almost a decade ago, while we were filming the first series of A House Through Time for BBC Two, I was not at all convinced that this was a show that had the potential to break through.... I was concerned that audiences would struggle to understand why we had locked ourselves into the straitjacket of a single house.... I worried that perhaps I was too close to the subject and that only historians of the city would find the show compelling. I was, it turned out, doing what TV producers are infamous for doing. I was underestimating the audience.... Like everyone who presents TV shows, I am regularly stopped on the street by people who recognise me from their screen. Most often what they want to talk about is A House Through Time. Amazingly, that remains the case even after I appeared on the great TV juggernaut of our time: The Celebrity Traitors. The first question I am asked by the fans of A House Through Time is almost always the same: when is the next series coming out? So I am left to wonder why a show about which I had doubts has been such a hit. What had I not appreciated 10 years ago? What I didn’t get back then, above all, is what old houses mean to the people who live in them. Houses with long histories are magical places.... A House Through Time reveals – in incredible detail – the sorts of human stories that would tumble out of our own home if only we had the time to go looking. It reminds us that houses have longer lives than we do. That no matter how many years or decades we live in them, our time there represents a single chapter in their far longer story.... Only TV – and let’s be more specific, only public service TV – would invest the time and money needed to uncover history at this level of granularity. Only TV would believe that the stories of ordinary people – not kings or presidents or movie stars – could grip audiences of millions. And only TV is capable of assembling teams of specialist researchers, assistant producers, producer/directors, series producers and executive producers with the skills needed to track down the thousands of documents that become the jigsaw pieces that make up the bigger historical puzzle.... If there is another reason to explain why A House Through Time has caught on it is that the series plays a small part in a bigger story: the expansion of history. History has for decades been getting bigger and more inclusive. History is no longer just about 'great men'. The emergence of social history, working-class history, women’s history and imperial history has uncovered the lives of people once deemed of little interest. The genealogy revolution has made millions of people into amateur historians. Today our ancestors – all of them, no matter how humble their lives – are deemed worthy of study and remembrance."

What end-of-life experts know about living well: love your wrinkles, celebrate birthdays and don’t obsess over work – article by Sarah Phillips in The Guardian. "We will all face death one day, but our attitude towards this is individual. How can our understanding of mortality shape our approach to life? Here, palliative care doctors and death doulas share what they know about the end – and how it informs the way they live.... Prioritise people, not things... Keep work in proportion... Know that pleasure isn’t everything... Be at one with nature... Live with intention... Focus on the small things... Be a completist... Connect with others... Don’t worry about signs of ageing... Try to stay healthy – but don’t let it limit your life... Celebrate birthdays... Have a bucket list – and make it happen... Talk about the kind of death you would like."

The weekend is 100 years old, but have ‘skiveday Fridays’ and hybrid working ruined it for everyone? – article by Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian. "Remarkably, the concept of the weekend as we know it is only 100 years old. In 1926, Henry Ford changed the shape of the week, announcing that the workers at his factories would now do five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Ford did not invent the weekend – the idea had been bubbling under for a century, in campaigns by trade unions, religious groups and progressive employers – but by putting his considerable industrial weight behind it, the two-day chunk of freedom was born. 'It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,' Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. 'People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,' he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US."

Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored – article by Jill Lepore in The Guardian, based on her book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. "Across the second half of the 20th century, liberal democracy made possible the rise of the artificial state. It didn’t make it inevitable. The digital revolution didn’t have to play out the way it did in the realm of politics and government; it played out the way it did because of the failure of liberal democracy to limit corporate power over politics and government, its failure to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state. Techno-libertarianism, which married the technocracy crusade of the 1930s – an anti-democracy movement led, in the US, by Elon Musk’s grandfather – to the computopianism of the 1980s, was born in the 1990s. Beginning in the previous decade, Silicon Valley had fallen under the spell of the libertarian Ayn Rand. Rand had been a cult figure of the far right since the publication in 1943 of her novel The Fountainhead, and she became even better known after the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged. Rand embraced radical individualism and saw a very narrow role for the state in human affairs, arguing that every individual ought to be completely free to pursue personal gain through heroic, self-interested achievement.... Under the influence of Rand, the internet became what conservatives and techno-libertarians wanted it to become.... One of the contract’s earliest manifestos appeared – online – in 1996, John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: 'Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,' Barlow wrote.... Libertarian futurists weren’t the only people proposing new rules for cyberspace; they just happened to be the people who ended up making the rules. In 1995, Michael Hauben, a computer science student at Columbia University and an active user of Usenet (he coined the term 'netizen'), drafted a Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Netizens. He saw himself as a leader of what he described as 'the fight to keep the net an uncommercialised public commons'.... Douglas Adams, the author of the 1970s satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had a vision for the internet, too.... In 2001, both Adams and Hauben died, the former of a heart attack and the latter, at the age of 29, after an accident. Their frameworks for free and equal access to an internet structured by public interest, not commercial interest, died with them. But by then, the techno-libertarians had already won."

Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong? – article by Nasrine Malik in The Guardian. "This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 ... was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change.... What did happen is that accompanying those movements was an adoption of postures and behaviours that signalled that one was on the right side.... An altogether more serious – and shallow – allegation is that it was all 'crazy' because this is what the left does. Given a chance, the left will waste capital by descending into infighting, radicalism and alienation. It is rarely acknowledged that this left never has political power, and so its energies become trapped in the realm of culture. This is not to excuse excesses, but to point out a mundane matter of physics. When a political movement is deprived of executive means, by way of democratic systems in which money and establishment interests are arrayed behind the right and the centre right, it becomes trapped outside policy and exercises its power in the only venues it can. It is a feature of weakness, not strength."

Can anyone be too poor to buy a toothbrush? Yes, I know, because that was me – article by Katriona O'Sullivan in The Guardian. "Someone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was on [Nick Ferrari's LBC radio show] discussing research showing that about 7 million people are struggling to afford basic essentials, including toothpaste and toothbrushes... [Ferrari talked] about the price of cheap toothbrushes in pound shops and at Asda....Had I been on the show, I would have brought both my lived experience and my academic knowledge to the argument. I would have explained why a person living in poverty might buy cheap wine instead of a cheap toothbrush.... One of the first questions we ask, often without realising it, is whether the thing we are buying will help us now or later.... A toothbrush is an investment in the future. So is going for a run. So is buying healthier food that costs more and takes longer to prepare. The benefit is delayed. Poverty, on the other hand, creates urgent problems. The debt collector is knocking at your door for his money. The electricity is about to run out. The school is asking for payment for a trip. Your son is being bullied because he is wearing cheap trainers instead of Nikes. These things feel immediate. The possible dental problems caused by not replacing a toothbrush feel far away.... [Also] long-term planning becomes more difficult during periods of stress. It is also shaped by how and where you grow up. If you are raised in an environment where life feels unstable and the future feels uncertain, it can be much harder to believe that sacrificing today will bring a reward tomorrow.... That is part of the reason poverty is associated with higher levels of addiction and criminality. Not because poor people are naturally reckless or immoral, but because deprivation, stress and hopelessness shape our brains and our behaviour.... My parents did not brush their teeth or ours. Looking after your teeth was not something I had been taught to value. ... When I was living on around £35 a week benefits in the 1990s, I sometimes bought three bottles of Diamond White rather than spending 50p on tampons. You might judge me for that. But when you live in shit, when nobody seems to care about you and you have stopped caring about yourself, a few bottles can feel like an escape. It felt easier to stuff my knickers with toilet roll from the cash-in-hand job I worked and have one night away from the misery than to sit sober with the constant belief that I was failing myself and my son. At times, it felt like the choice was three bottles or dying. That may seem hard to understand when your life has always contained safety, options and hope. But all you have to do is ask yourself one important question – would anyone choose that type of life if they could choose another? The answer to that is simple."

Will AI give you the job? Automated hiring tools spark discrimination and secrecy lawsuits – article by Arielle Pardes in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Erin Kistler has applied for thousands of jobs at companies like Paypal, Microsoft and Netflix, only to find her résumé disappear into a black hole. A product manager with nearly 20 years of experience, Kistler believes she was qualified for every role, yet she never received a single interview. Now, Kistler is suing Eightfold AI, the Silicon Valley maker of hiring software used by hundreds of companies, including those where she applied, in a class-action lawsuit. The case, filed in January in California court, is one of the first to argue that automated screening functions as an undisclosed consumer report or applicant dossier, ranking job applicants on their likelihood of success without giving them the chance to see or challenge the results, according to Kistler’s legal team. The lawsuit is one of several new legal battles over companies’ use of AI in employment decisions. Workers are also suing Meta over an internal AI system that allegedly targeted them for layoffs because they took parental or medical leave. And a recent lawsuit against IBM alleges that AI tools discriminated against older workers.... Experts who study this type of software say it can also introduce or exacerbate bias that could follow candidates across companies. Lawmakers are taking notice. The outcomes of the legal battles could shape future employment practices, transparency around them and the power candidates have in the process.... While human hiring managers can be unfair – choosing the applicant who was in the same fraternity, for example – 'the magnitude of bias is even stronger [with AI],' says Xuechunzi Bai, assistant professor at the University of Chicago who has researched hiring bias. Bai co-authored a recent study where AI models were asked to make hiring decisions about fictional applicants assigned to made-up demographic groups called Tufa, Aima, Reku and Weki. After a few rounds of hiring decisions, the AI models made inferences about candidates that had nothing to do with their qualifications, in effect stereotyping them. If one Tufa was a good doctor, then Tufa candidates were more likely to be chosen as doctors, and Weki candidates were more likely to be hired as janitors. The study found greater bias in AI than in human hiring decisions she examined last year. It also found that newer and more advanced models produced hiring decisions with more bias."

‘It exists only for pleasure’: does ice-cream have a future in the age of wellness fads and weight-loss drugs? – article by Kitty Drake in The Guardian. "Wall’s, one of the oldest brands under the Magnum umbrella, started selling ice-cream from a factory in Acton, London, in 1922. Wall’s was originally a butcher’s, and the company pivoted to ice-cream as a kind of summer-proof sausage equivalent, because meat wasn’t selling well in the heat. Ice-cream street traders have existed in the UK since the 1850s, when they used horse-drawn carts. But with the advent of mechanical refrigeration in the early 20th century, it became possible to mass-produce ice-cream. As British people began to buy freezers in the late 70s, it was rolled out to supermarkets. The 80s – which food writer Ruby Tandoh has called the 'golden age' of British ice-cream – saw the invention of Twister, Viennetta, Calippo and Feast.... For decades food companies have employed scientists to work out how to keep you eating without stopping long enough to remember you have a body. Food technologists have learned how to balance carbohydrate-to-fat ratios so a food can slow down or bypass the brain’s 'satiety signal' which tells you you’ve had enough. Technologists know how to design energy-dense food that dissolves so fast on your tongue, you immediately crave more. Ice-creams are usually too cold to emit odour, so Mars has worked out how to rub chocolate and caramel scent molecules into the ribbing of their ice-cream packets; they want you to begin salivating from the moment you tear one open. Magnum has hired technologists to engineer the chocolate casing on its ice-cream, so when you bite in, it doesn’t shatter into too many pieces and distract you by falling down your top. Everything has been specially designed to make you forget yourself – and your flesh – and keep chasing the next bite. By contrast, the selling point of Magnum’s new ice-creams seems to be they will keep you laser-focused on your own body. [Michelle Neville, Magum's behavioural scientist,] explained that the brand is trying to sell ice-cream to a customer who sees their 'food as medicine'. 'Now, even with a basic cereal bar, some people expect it to help metabolic resilience, control glycaemic index, improve gut health,' she said.... This latest drive to market ice-cream as a 'functional' food – something you eat not because it tastes nice, but because you believe it has some kind of nutritious, medicinal value – ... feels striking. Because more than any other food – more even than chocolate – ice-cream’s only real reason for existing is pleasure. A perfect mix of fat, sugar and at least 20% air, ice-cream was not invented to nourish you. First served in Europe in the early 1500s, it debuted in England as a magical kind of 'table trick'. Guests would look on while a servant churned, and a mass of sugary ice was transformed before their eyes into a strange, sweet foam. The Victorians ate ice-cream at balls and whittled it into enormous, campy ice sculptures, modelling pineapples, huge swans and whole bunches of flowers. With the arrival of the motorised ice-cream van in the 1920s in the UK and the birth of the 99 Flake, ice-cream became ever more connected in the British imagination with holidays and summer. The fact that ice-cream is essentially frivolous is a key part of its allure. It melts, so it almost demands that the eater give themselves up to the moment. The period between unwrapping an ice-cream and it collapsing into a puddle is a window in time, specially cordoned off for pleasure. You have to enjoy it or it will disappear without you. An ice-cream is a bit like a lit cigarette in that way.

The country of my birth has lost its heart’: Miriam Margolyes on how to fix broken Britain – article by Miriam Margolyes in The Guardian, extracted from her book Full English. "A funny thing happened on the way to 2026: I got old and the world turned nasty. It happened very quickly and it’s to do with politics (the world) and pelvic floor weakness (mine).... The Britain I grew up in, though – that feels almost unrecognisable, and everyone I speak to says the same thing. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, whom I knew and loved, argued that people invent the past they want for their own purposes – that the real past was quite different: 'Today is the great age of historical mythology.' He’s right, but that past is still the safe haven I’d like to return to. People feel adrift, they don’t understand or feel a connection to the place they thought they knew.... The things we took for granted – free speech, the Post Office, our local bank, even the home telephone – are disappearing. The US is an enemy. Evil oligarchs and their influence stalk the world, my world, your world. In recent times, the archbishop of Canterbury resigned and north London Jews are afraid to wear a Magen David (Shield or Star of David) necklace outside their homes for fear of being attacked. You’re brave to open your mouth these days. Indeed, many have demanded I keep mine shut. But I can’t. The present has become threatening, hostile and unwelcoming to us – much as our shores must feel to asylum seekers, as they scramble for a foothold in our United Kingdom. It also feels as though the country of my birth has lost its heart. How did we get here?... The history of the British Isles is full of painful moments and terrible decisions. And we need to face those. It’s much easier to look away from bad things that happened and, as with a fart, hope no one noticed. (Spoiler: everyone noticed.) Like every multinational corporation, Great Britain plc has done a lot of harm in its long life. The choice of red to represent the British empire on the global map feels entirely apt.... History has always been the propaganda of the victors, but it can lead you astray. So why not try listening to the other side of the story? Don’t fall for your own hype. It all seems heroic if you turn it into a monologue about why you were right all along, instead of facing the painful bits from which there’s no way you can come out well.... Our British history needs to reflect our mother tongue, which is a patchwork of words gathered from the different tribes and peoples who’ve made these islands home. There’s room for everyone: we all bring something to the table, whether invader or inhabitant.... I refuse to be cut off from the wealth of possibilities that Britain and Ireland offer. Let’s live, have fun, learn new tastes, new words, new mastications. Build bridges, cross chasms. And before we go to the moon again, let’s reap the benefits strangers in our midst offer. It’s not their fault that things are tough. It’s ours."

Largest review of its kind confirms benefits of tai chi and other Chinese exercises – article by Andrew Gregory in The Guardian. "Traditional Chinese exercises such as tai chi can offer wide-ranging benefits for people with musculoskeletal disorders, improving physical function, pain, mental health, sleep quality and bone mineral density, according to the largest review of its kind.... There was already evidence indicating traditional Chinese exercises were associated with beneficial health outcomes in people with musculoskeletal disorders, but much of it was fragmented and contained inconsistencies. The overarching review of pooled data analyses of systematic reviews by researchers at hospitals and universities in China, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, drew on 92 data syntheses from 1,744 randomised controlled clinical trials. It found 'high certainty evidence' for the effectiveness of traditional Chinese exercise – such as tai chi, qigong, baduanjin, wuqinxi and yijinjing – for a range of health outcomes for people with musculoskeletal disorders.... Tai chi, in particular, significantly eased chronic musculoskeletal pain and stiffness in several conditions while increasing bone mineral density in participants with osteopenia or osteoporosis, the research found. Maximum benefits were achieved when people did these exercises for longer than six months, at least three times a week, clocking up a total of at least 150 minutes a week."

How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’ – article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified. However, Hare knew this approach was limited.... It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy.... Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis... Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same 'dark personality' behaviours in other precincts.... Mitchell’s interviews are remarkable. People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things: there’s one question about whether the interviewee had themselves ever been frightened of a persistent predatory personality (bear in mind that these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals) and the answers came back: 'I constantly worry that he will ruin my career' (from an HR person); 'I worry that they will … want to seek revenge' (from a social worker); 'I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed' (expert practitioner from the charity sector). These and arguably every statement from the interviews are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them socially because you would sound mad – which some testimonies explicitly address.... Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen."

We already live in ‘clone towns’: AI is making things worse – column by John Naughton in The Observer. "In 2004 the New Economics Foundation (NEF) conducted a national survey of UK high streets, which were then still economically active. It found that real local shops had been replaced by swathes of identikit chain stores, making high streets up and down the country virtually indistinguishable from one another... A 'home town' is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A 'clone town', in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a 'monochrome strip of global and national chains'. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country.... This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale.... Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable. What’s driving this, apparently inexorable, onward march to uniformity?... The tech industry calls it AI but it’s really machine-learning. It’s software that tries to predict what you’re likely to want next.... These machines are basically statistical guessers. They’re trained by being given an objective – a measure of the thing they’re supposed to maximise – and a loss function, which is essentially a penalty for making bad guesses. And, as the social data scientist Lauren Leek explains in a brilliant Substack post, Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same, it’s the loss function that drives these machines – and their unsuspecting users – to blandness. This is because the most common loss function is the 'squared error' one.... This means that it really punishes big discrepancies. Which, in turn, means that the machine’s algorithm always plays safe by predicting the average of all the available possibilities. And in the process, it squashes ideas that were wild but also potentially original.... The NEF’s clone towns weren’t the product of some co-ordinated plan to homogenise Britain, but the emergent outcome of many thousands of separate independent decisions, each one taken in its own context.... Leek’s insight is that, in an AI-driven world, mathematics can explain why something such as that keeps happening, at every scale, from the high street to the streaming platform: any system trained to minimise error will always retreat towards the average, because the average is the safest guess when you’re not quite sure. Multiply that single fact across billions of daily recommendations, and you get a world that’s beginning to feel eerily familiar, everywhere. In that sense, the flat white with oat milk isn’t a coincidence. It’s the product of a loss function, working exactly as intended."