© Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Whether it’s bloodshed at Glastonbury or starving people on benefits, their ‘irony poisoning’ seeps obscene ideas into the range of the possible
Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, “Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?” The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right.
The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would “just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.” The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, “Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.”
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
On Tuesday 16 September, join George Monbiot and guests as they discuss the forces driving climate denialism, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at Guardian.Live
Continue reading...
© Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
© Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
© Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
Internet Watch Foundation verified 1,286 AI-made videos in first half of year, mostly in worst category of abuse
The number of videos online of child sexual abuse generated by artificial intelligence has surged as paedophiles have pounced on developments in the technology.
The Internet Watch Foundation said AI videos of abuse had “crossed the threshold” of being near-indistinguishable from “real imagery” and had sharply increased in prevalence online this year.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Viking North at Yorkshire Museum features UK’s largest exhibition of Viking-age artefacts, including era’s ‘cheap’ jewellery and evidence of slave-owning
When Anglo-Saxons buried their jewellery in an attempt to keep it safe from marauding Vikings, it is unlikely they envisaged their treasures would be dug up a millennium later and studied by their descendants.
Nor would they have expected the items to sit alongside everyday objects owned by their Scandinavian oppressors as part of the largest exhibition of Viking-age artefacts in the UK, aiming to tell the story for the first time of the invaders’ power base in the north of England.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
This year’s French photo extravaganza showcases stunning images from across Latin America. There’s also selfie addicts, anonymous fetishists and a pharmacist taking pictures of his customers without their consent
Artists have always been fascinated with imagining the invisible – but few have taken it quite as far as Musuk Nolte. The 37-year-old Mexican photographer has spent a decade working with the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon region – and found inspiration there by taking ayahuasca with a shaman called Julio.
Nolte tells me he first took ayahuasca when he was five years old – with his mum, an anthropologist who studied the psychedelic brew. The powerful hallucinogenic visions he experienced while with the Shawi community in their ancestral homeland, the Paranapura basin, have been translated into a series of images titled The Belongings of the Air, presented as small suspended light boxes, glowing like fireflies in a darkened room. They are unconventional documents, not showing the Shawi directly but reflecting the Shawi cosmovision. Pulsating with flashes of bright white light, the images have an allegorical tenor: we move with quickened breath from the intimate to the epic, from a woman and child washing clothes in a river to a closeup of a man’s ear, to the blazing eyes of a big cat, to a dazzling constellation of blurry silver flecks. This latter image was created by photographing rows of candles lit for forcibly displaced relatives whose whereabouts remain unknown. The feeling it stirs is one of the universe melting.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Afonso Pimenta
© Photograph: Afonso Pimenta
© Photograph: Afonso Pimenta
The British Beer and Pub Association calls for help to cut pub costs with 378 pubs in England, Scotland and Wales likely to call time this year
British pubs will close down at the rate of one a day this year, the industry’s trade body has warned, blaming high business taxes. At the same time, the hospitality sector has called on ministers to tackle “eye-watering” costs.
The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), which represents more than 20,000 pubs in the UK, said it expects 378 to close this year in England, Scotland and Wales, at a cost of 5,600 jobs.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
© Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Not many salads come with a byproduct that can be transformed into a delicious cooling drink
It is the time of year when the fruit syrups get moved to a more accessible shelf at our local supermarket. They have a range of eight to 10 flavours, but the two that dominate are mint and orzata, luminous green and cloudy white syrups respectively, that need diluting with fizzy water and maybe topping up with ice. I have mentioned orzata here before, how popular it is in Italy and how the name means a drink made from orzo (barley), and also how at some point the barley was replaced by almonds; then, at another point, the almonds were replaced by deacidified benzoin, which is a balsamic resin obtained from trees of the genus Styrax from south-east Asia. Deacidified benzoin is actually delicious and I become dependent on orzata at this time of year, and the sound of the ice clanking against the side of the glass as I walk my cold, cloudy drink back to my hot desk is the sound of summer.
However, I have always wondered what orzata made with orzo is like. And finally an opportunity presented itself when, having lifted cooked barley out of the pan with a slotted spoon, I was left with a pan of cloudy water at the back of the stove. I would have thrown it away, if I hadn’t had a glass of orzata on the go. Straight from the pan, the barley water tasted like milk diluted with water, thin porridge and a mouthful of soapy bath water. Undeterred, I consulted Mrs Beeton, who has it in her cooking for invalids section and suggests adding just lemon zest. Then I looked at the ancient Roman guide Apicius, who suggests boiling it with prosciutto and adding pepper. I found my answer on an Italian website called Agrodolce and drained the water, strained it, sweetened it with caster sugar, added a strip of lemon zest, then, for an aesthetic transformation, poured the whole, cloudy lot into an Ikea glass bottle with a stopper. A few hours later, I mixed 50% barley water with 50% fizzy water and added ice and, I have to say, it was fantastic. Yes, ever so slightly soapy still and reminiscent of porridge, but above all like barley, barley sugar and lemon drops, soft, cold and clinking.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
© Photograph: Rachel Roddy/The Guardian
I worked for the author of The Talented Mr Ripley in her final months. She was so mean and secretive, I imagined she wanted to kill me
I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the autumn of 1994. I was 20 and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organised in chronological order. Pat was 73 and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumoured, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasised that she might try to kill me.
The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modelling since I was 17. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. Anna’s husband, Daniel – or Dani, as we called him – was a book editor and the founder and owner of Diogenes Verlag, a Zurich-based publishing house that was (and still is) a major publisher of European fiction. He was brutally honest but had kind eyes and piles of books that he used as furniture.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock
© Pool photo by Alberto Pezzali
Connexion