Hi Nerve gang, 

It’s Imogen here, writing at the end of a wild week in Westminster and a fairly wild week generally where at one point I thought it was snowing - in May (no, just hailstones the size of Skittles). But we’ve weathered it all to bring you a brilliantly wide-ranging weekend edition including Stewart Lee’s latest column on Labour shenanigans, an interview with Virginia Giuffre’s award-winning ghostwriter Amy Wallace, the latest in our ongoing investigation into Peter Thiel’s AI firm Palantir (this week: the Met police chapter), and a deep dive into Polymarket - the so-called “prediction market” betting phenomenon you have probably vaguely heard of, and, trust us, you need to know more.

We also have a real treat of an interview with Douglas Stuart, the Scottish author of 2020’s Booker-winning dazzling debut novel Shuggie Bain. Douglas shares his cultural highlights for our Recommender slot as he releases what for me is the book of the year so far, John of John, an unforgettable (and also very funny) tale of love and loneliness set on the Isle of Harris. To write the bestselling Shuggie Bain, his raw and beautiful portrait of a working class family – so rarely seen in fiction – centring on the love between a mother battling alcohol addiction and her youngest son, Douglas drew on his own experiences of growing up gay and in poverty in 1980s Glasgow.

Douglas is fascinating talking about the power of books and culture more broadly to change lives and foster empathy and understanding. He has said that growing up, he “received the signal that books and literature were not for the likes of me,” and after he finally found the courage to write Shuggie Bain, it was rejected by 40 publishers before it was signed up. At a time when poverty is - shockingly - still on the rise in Britain and beyond, he remarks in our interview: “As an author, you're often asked what was your favourite childhood book…and I think we have to acknowledge that not every child has books or is read to at bedtime. Certainly I grew up in a house that didn't have books.” He reveals that listening and reading along to his older brother’s collection of 1980s gatefold LPs actually taught him to read.

Books also play a vital role in bearing witness. This week Nobody’s Girl, the bestselling memoir by Virginia Giuffre, the late Epstein survivor and campaigner was crowned book of the year at the British Book Awards, with one of the judges saying that it would “change the world”. Today we have a powerful interview by the Nerve’s new recruit Lucia Osborne-Crowley with Nobody’s Girl ghostwriter Amy Wallace, who believes the book is doing just that, partly because millions of people have read it and are now listening to the survivors. But, crucially, she says: “The main thing that Virginia really hoped for, and it's even in the last lines of the book, is to help other survivors of sexual abuse. And she has accomplished that… I've heard from so many women and men who are survivors of sexual abuse who have said ‘reading this account has helped me.’”

Before the links to this week’s content I have a couple of requests. There are a few tickets left for our event at London’s Conway Hall next Friday with How to Academy where the writer and AI expert Karen Hao will be in conversation with the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr. Karen is the author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and should have much to say about the ongoing court battle between Elon Musk and Altman. Get tickets here (members have been sent a 15% discount code and do get in touch if you need it resending). 

Lastly, we would really appreciate it if you could click on the ad for our partner Proton Mail at the end of the newsletter as it will earn us a bit of money which helps to fund our journalism. 

Stewart Lee’s memo to the next Labour leader: don’t accept any Coldplay tickets

Stewart is currently touring the country with his fantastic show Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf and woke early on Thursday in a hotel in Leeds to finish his column on the battle for the Labour leadership. “As I try to write this the Labour government is collapsing around us, and I feel like Buster Keaton, tumbling down a hill in an avalanche, clutching at straws to satirise.” Read what he says about whoever takes over the party here.

A beginner’s guide to Polymarket, the tech platform generating ‘synthetic truth’

You’ve probably noticed mentions of Polymarket in news reports about people making unspeakable amounts of money betting on global / political events. It’s an anything-goes US gambling platform, backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., where users have bet millions on anything from UK politics to Iranian missile strikes (and even - until it was stopped - the chances of an imminent nuclear strike). Beyond the problematic ethics of all that, experts say it is saturated with insider trading and even has the potential to influence what actually happens in reality, including elections. It’s banned in the UK but it’s clear people access it via private servers (VPNs), betting with crypto. UK regulators, however, are doing nothing about it. Read Ian Tucker’s explainer here.

Palantir and the Met police

Last month, a story broke that the Met police had been trialling software from the US AI firm Palantir that allowed them to track activity on officers’ laptops and phones and had disciplined a number of officers for supposed breaches. Reporter Max Colbert started digging into the story and discovered that the trial had been extended from the end of April to today. He reports on the outrage among officers, who spoke to us of their fear of ongoing surveillance and the effect on morale. He also dug into the question of what happens to the trial after it elapses at midnight tonight. Read his report here.

The Recommender: Shuggie Bain author Douglas Stuart 

Before becoming a global bestseller with his debut novel Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart was a successful fashion designer in New York after growing up in poverty in Thatcher-era Glasgow. To mark the publication of his third novel, John of John (out on 21 May) he talked on camera about his cultural highlights for this inspiring short film (by ace videographer Sheridan Flynn) from his new passion for Harris Tweed to the queer, working class artist he’s “obsessed” with - and why he thinks musician CMAT is on a par with Bob Dylan. Watch by clicking on the video above or read the text version here.

Sharlene Rochard, Epstein survivor, holds a photograph of Virginia Giuffre. Photo: Kevin Dietsch / Getty

“Women are being believed”: interview with Virginia Giuffre’s ghostwriter Amy Wallace

At Monday night’s British Book awards, the best-selling memoir Nobody’s Girl by Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre won both book of the year, non-fiction book of the year and the anti-censorship Freedom to Publish award. The Nerve’s Lucia Osborne-Crowley spoke to its ghostwriter Amy Wallace who, after the tragic death of Giuffre last April, became the public face of the book overnight. More than a million copies have now been sold worldwide and as Amy says:  “it’s not just people who tend to stand up for women's rights who are being affected or are being moved - it's Maga”. Read the interview here. 

Michaela Coel (Lori Butler) and Ian McKellen (Julian Sklar) in The Christophers. Photo: Claudette Barius

Review of the Week: The Christophers

The megawatt talent Michaela Coel is back and starring in an unlikely double act with Ian McKellen. The pair play an aging painter and his assistant in The Christophers, a new generation-gap comedy from American director Steven Soderbergh. The chemistry is great, says Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones, and it’s full of brilliant lines (“Weinstein has ruined the dressing gown for the rest of us,” McKellen’s Sklar says after appearing en déshabillé at the top of the stairs). But is it art? Read Ellen’s very entertaining review here.

Photo: Andrew Burton

The Nerve Weekend Dish: Marina Georgallides’s kleftiko

The Greek-Cypriot London-based recipe creator Marina Georgallides got serious about food during lockdown when she began posting different dishes daily online. As her first cookbook Eat Like a Greek is published she shares a simple recipe for kleftiko or slow-roasted lamb and says that if she had to pick “one Greek dish to eat for the rest of my life”, it would be this. Get the recipe here.

(Veggie readers: we now have this new page for all of our recipes and there are plenty of plant-based dishes to choose from).

Thanks for reading - do pass this newsletter on if you’re enjoying it as it helps us to grow. We’ll be back on Tuesday. Don’t forget to click on the ad below 😄 

Imogen, co-founder

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The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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Do you think Keir Starmer will still be in office by 31 May? 30 June? Maybe you think he’ll see the year out? Doomer or optimist, you could place a bet on your hunch and add to the £24m already staked on Starmer’s political longevity on Polymarket, “the world’s largest prediction market” – a platform where users bet against each other on the outcomes of real-world events. 

Polymarket isn't just taking bets on British politics. In February, $529m was wagered on the timing of US and Israeli strikes on Iran. An anonymous account made $553,000 betting on the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, hours before it happened. A US soldier has been prosecuted for using classified intelligence to trade on the platform. Polymarket is backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Donald Trump Jr sits on its advisory board, and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange holds a 25% stake valued at $2bn. In the US, some lawmakers are furious. Senator Chris Murphy said: "It's insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death."

Despite the millions being bet on UK events, the platform has no UK licence, no UK office, and no relationship with any UK regulator. Polymarket blocks users in the UK, as it does in the US and many other countries. But speculators have a simple workaround: a VPN to hide their location and a crypto wallet to hide their identity.  

All of this – the war bets, the insider trading, the UK election markets – is processed through Amazon Web Services servers located in the UK, somewhere between Slough and London's Docklands. Its infrastructure sits on British soil. Yet not a single UK parliamentarian has raised the issue. According to Hansard, prediction markets have never been mentioned in the House of Commons. 

When the Nerve asked the Gambling Commission a series of questions about UK usage of Polymarket, they declined to address any of them. Instead, they said it was the obligation of "operators in other jurisdictions" to ensure UK consumers can't access their platforms, and they referred us to a February 2026 blogpost which doesn’t name the unlicensed platform currently being accessed by UK users.

Anthony Pickles, a researcher at the University of Birmingham who has spent years studying gambling communities, says the UK authorities haven’t grasped the scale of what’s coming: “The ambition of these companies with the backing of the venture capital in the US is much larger than they're ready to kind of think about and regulate at this point."

Not all countries take this head-in-the-sand approach. In August 2025, the Australian Communications and Media Authority instructed internet service providers to block access to Polymarket, saying it breached gambling laws – a measure that, unlike Polymarket's own geoblocking, cannot be bypassed with a VPN. In April, Brazil followed suit when its telecoms regulator took 27 betting sites offline. The UK’s equivalent body is Ofcom. The Nerve asked Ofcom a number of questions about Polymarket – whether they had assessed if it could be regulated by the Online Safety Act, and whether they had discussed ISP-blocking with the Gambling Commission. They didn't answer any of our questions. Instead, they said: "The gambling industry is regulated by the Gambling Commission, and we'd recommend you get in touch with them."

Between them, the two UK regulators with the closest relevant powers have produced a blogpost, a referral to the other, and a suggestion that the unlicensed platform sort itself out.

The Rycroft Review on foreign financial interference in UK politics, published in March this year, has led to a moratorium – initially temporary – on crypto donations, recognising that cryptocurrencies can be a vehicle for untraceable foreign money entering UK politics. But the review's recommendations did not extend to crypto-settled prediction markets running anonymous bets on British elections. The same opaque financial channel the government identified as a threat to democracy remains entirely unregulated when it takes the form of a bet rather than a donation.

Professor Sarah Mills of Loughborough University, who sits on the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport college of experts, describes the UK's position as a "regulatory twilight zone”. "Whilst the Gambling Commission have stated they are monitoring developments closely," she says, "the thorny issue of VPNs and UK consumers accessing these existing sites illegally has been overlooked."

Professor Lorna Woods of the University of Essex, an expert on the Online Safety Act, says that it was not designed to capture platforms like Polymarket. Professor Kate Bedford of the University of Birmingham, a leading gambling law scholar, is blunt: the government’s 2023 gambling white paper, High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age, "didn't address prediction markets sufficiently and this is without question a gap in the law”.

In the US, the response from lawmakers has been sharper. Last month, the Senate unanimously banned its own members and staff from trading on prediction markets. Polymarket’s rival Kalshi suspended and fined three congressional candidates for betting on their own races – one of them, Virginia Senate candidate Mark Moran, told NBC News he had placed the $100 bet "to call attention to the fact that an entire election can be bought”. Earlier this month, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called on the House and the White House to follow the Senate's lead: "The very possibility that a member's vote could be influenced by a bet is reason enough to slam this door shut." 

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, told the Nerve: "It is concerning that UK users can access these platforms, which are operating illegally and with no meaningful safeguards."

Insider trading, betting on Armageddon and a $82m payout

So what is this platform that no UK regulator will claim responsibility for?

Polymarket was founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, a hoodie-wearing dropout from New York University. It's a so-called “prediction market” – users bet against each other on the outcomes of real-world events, and the platform takes a cut. Unlike a traditional bookmaker, you're not betting against the house. It entered the mainstream when $3.3bn was wagered on the 2024 US election. Monthly volume now exceeds $10bn.

In March, a market on nuclear detonation by the end of 2026 attracted $850,000 in bets and predicted a 24% chance of Armageddon before being pulled after a public outcry. The platform also ran a market on whether Nasa’s Artemis II would explode until protests led to its withdrawal too.

Other betting on death is permitted. During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, it is alleged an Israeli pilot leaked classified details about airstrikes to a friend so they could bet on Polymarket. The prosecution claimed the pilot and his accomplice made $162,663. In his defence, the pilot said: “The entire Israeli air force is involved in gambling.” 

A report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective found that long-shot bets – wagers on unlikely outcomes – won 51.8% of the time in Polymarket's military markets, against a 14% baseline across the platform's political markets. Fewer than 1% of wallets captured roughly half of all profits.

"There have been a growing number of instances where, right before an event, prediction markets have seen a flurry of predictions or bets," says Mills. "That's given rise to accusations of insider trading or misuse of confidential information."

With so much money at stake, sometimes users try to bully the data. In March, Times of Israel journalist Emanuel Fabian received death threats from users demanding he alter his reporting on an Iranian missile strike near Beit Shemesh – because his coverage was affecting a $14m betting pool. Bettors fabricated screenshots of messages he never sent. Some offered him a cut of their winnings if he changed his reporting. Fabian's reporting was accurate. It was just inconvenient for people with millions riding on a different version of events.

In April, the US Department of Justice charged a soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, with using classified military intelligence to trade on Polymarket, making over $400,000 on the timing of Trump's raid on Venezuela. He was caught only because Polymarket cooperated with US federal law enforcement. Meanwhile, Polymarket's chief executive, Coplan, has described insider trading as "sort of an inevitability" with "a lot of benefits”.

The platform rewards both information advantages and capital – and those with the most of either tend to win big. Most famously, a French user won $82m with a series of wagers on Trump placed across 11 different accounts. The mystery bettor, who had been a trader for several banks, commissioned his own polls from YouGov, which asked respondents who they thought their neighbours would vote for – revealing the "shy Trump voters" which got Trump, and the bet, over the line.

Last October, Trump outrider Nigel Farage was asked about prediction markets. "Let's play it. Let's play every game in town”, he said – a call that one of his aides, George Cottrell, has heeded with some success. In March, it was reported that the aristocratic banker, convicted fraudster and author of How to Launder Money had lost $550,000 making ill-judged Polymarket bets on whether the US would strike Iran by a certain date. The account associated with him also lost $125,000 speculating that Keir Starmer would be out of office by 28 February.

However, all told, the account is nearly $3.5m up. His biggest win was $13.3m on Trump winning in 2024 – which earned him “whale” status in the eyes of Polymarket users. Cottrell currently holds positions on JD Vance winning the 2028 Republican nomination and Marine Le Pen protégé Jordan Bardella becoming French president in 2027 – betting from Britain on the politics of two countries that have also tried to restrict access to the platform.

Synthetic truth, whales and money masquerading as evidence

These are not just colourful stories about gamblers and grifters. Prediction markets are changing how information works. 

For a few days in early April, if you Googled for the latest updates on the strait of Hormuz, sitting alongside the news results from the Guardian and Reuters you would have found a link to Polymarket allowing you to bet on the exact number of ships allowed to pass through it. These odds were presented as news because Google's algorithm couldn't distinguish between betting markets and journalism: Polymarket creates new markets constantly about real-world news events and the titles of the markets resemble headlines.

As Gaming America's Colin Lynch stated, "it was the algorithm doing exactly what it is designed to do, and drawing the wrong conclusion for entirely logical reasons”.

Google called the strait of Hormuz inclusions an error and removed them. But today, if you Google "Next UK Prime Minister in 2026?" Polymarket is the second-placed search result.

Polymarket CEO and founder, Shayne Coplan. Photo: Getty

Elsewhere, the same conflation is deliberate. CNN and CNBC embed prediction-market odds in live broadcasts, Google Finance has partnered with Polymarket and its rival Kalshi, and Dow Jones has a licensing deal with Polymarket.

Prediction-market odds have been absorbed into the information infrastructure. As Lynch says, journalism reports what has happened, with verifiable sourcing, editorial accountability, and the ability to be corrected when wrong. “A betting market that aggregates financial positions has none of those properties.”

The problem isn't just that betting gets mistaken for news. It's that the odds themselves are less reliable than they look. Researchers at the University of Toronto have coined a term for what prediction markets do to information: "prediction laundering”. Their pre-print study describes how thousands of bets – some informed, some speculative, some placed to deliberately move the odds – get collapsed into a single percentage. That number looks like data. But there's no way to tell from looking at it whether it reflects the collective wisdom of a crowd or the financial clout of one wealthy player. The researchers call it a "synthetic truth" – a number that looks like data but carries no guarantee of what produced it. "Once I see a number attached to a possible outcome, it stops feeling like an opinion and more like real truth," one user told the researchers. "It doesn't matter who is betting or why."

Prediction-market proselytisers argue that the markets offer unrivalled access to the "wisdom of the crowds". Polymarket's CEO has claimed that the platform represents "the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now". Yet in November 2025, researchers at Columbia University published a study of two years of Polymarket blockchain data. They concluded that around 25% of trading volume was fake "wash trading" – users buying and selling contracts to themselves. This increased activity gives the fake appearance that thousands of real people are behind a price – the "crowd" in "wisdom of the crowd" is partly fictional.

And the real crowd isn't much wiser. A blockchain analysis of 1.7 million Polymarket addresses found that 70% of Polymarket traders have recorded losses, while only 0.04% have captured 70% of profits. That is, the "wisdom" is held by and benefits a tiny elite of users.

As investment banker Joachim Klement has argued in the Financial Times, thin political markets structurally favour wealthy bettors – odds reflect money, not crowd wisdom. A well-capitalised individual could move the price. That price gets reported as information – and the reporting shapes public perception.

This machinery played out during the 2024 US election. Swings and changes in Polymarket's odds began to be regularly reported in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune and the New York Times. Conventional polls showed Trump and Harris at level pegging, but Polymarket had Trump as the likely winner. Debate raged about whether the Polymarket audience – assumed to be mostly male, crypto-adjacent Tucker Carlson fans – wasn't as representative as polling companies' statistical models.

Moreover, there were “whales” whose massive bets were copied by other users, distorting the market's predictions. What looks like democratic information is actually a wealth-driven signal – money masquerading as evidence, shaping narrative, potentially influencing how people vote. 

In the 2021 London mayoral election, American crypto evangelist Brian Rose placed £20,000 on himself on Betfair, briefly making himself the third favourite candidate. He screenshotted the odds, displayed them on social media, and earned a Michael Crick interview and a profile in the Times. Money moved the odds, the odds became a story – but the story didn't become votes. Rose was eliminated in the first round with 1.2%. The reflexive loop generated attention but couldn't manufacture an outcome. The question is whether that holds when the money is larger, the platform is global, and the odds are broadcast on CNN.

This infrastructure for political influence and insider trading is built, endorsed and shaped by figures in Trump's orbit. The Trump administration dropped two Biden-initiated federal investigations into the platform. Trump's own social media company has announced plans to launch a prediction market of its own, Truth Predict. The regulator which is supposed to monitor prediction markets in the US, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has experienced a 24% cut in its workforce since Trump returned to office.

Pickles warns that the real danger may not be the markets themselves but their normalisation. Novelty political markets, he says, are "the smell of baked bread in the shop of gambling" – designed to draw people in and shift what feels acceptable to bet on. "Ever since the 1960s in the UK, there have been dedicated PR operatives for gambling companies, setting up novelty bets as a way of moving the Overton window on how we should think about gambling." His greatest concern is that prediction markets will be reclassified from gambling to financial instruments – weakening consumer protections and accelerating the merger of personal finance apps with betting platforms. "If we let that slip," he says, "we're in trouble."

The question isn't whether prediction markets will reach the UK. It's whether, by the time regulators notice, they'll still be called gambling at all.

Sharlene Rochard, Epstein survivor, holds a photograph of Virginia Giuffre, February 2026. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty

Amy Wallace met Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a world-leading advocate for change in the wake of her abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, in 2021, when Giuffre hired her to be her ghostwriter. The pair spent four years together, meeting all over the world, with Wallace travelling to Giuffre’s home in Australia and the pair spending time together in France. After a career ghostwriting for top business executives and working in news and magazine journalism, Giuffre’s memoir was a departure for Wallace – and would come with unprecedented twists and turns.

The result of those many years of work was Nobody’s Girl, Giuffre’s memoir about not only her abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his clients, but also her life before that – which featured sexual abuse from a very young age by family members – and her life after escaping Epstein, which was defined by the trauma that comes with speaking up against the rich and powerful. She endured attempts to humiliate her, discredit her and silence her for more than a decade.

But after the book’s publication on 21 October last year, Giuffre can no longer be silenced. The memoir has sold more than a million copies worldwide and proved to be a vital intervention at a time when the attention being paid to Epstein’s victims by lawmakers and the public was flagging. Tragically, Giuffre died last year and never saw the publication of the book – which meant, in a very unexpected turn for a ghostwriter, that Amy Wallace became its public face overnight. Since then, she has done events and interviews all over the world to promote this agenda-setting memoir.

Wallace began her career as a journalist, starting off as an assistant at the New York Times and going on to work at the Los Angeles Times, the NYT’s Sunday business section and Condé Nast’s Portfolio. She has shared in two staff-wide Pulitzer prizes and ghostwritten books for the chief executive of General Electric and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation. 

On Monday night, Wallace and Giuffre were honoured with the British Book Awards’ book of the year and non-fiction book of the year prizes, and the anti-censorship Freedom to Publish award. One of the judges said Nobody’s Girl would “change the world”.

We spoke with Wallace, who lives in California, to discuss her journey from ghostwriter to international public face of one of the defining books of the decade.

Nobody’s Girl ghostwriter Amy Wallace.

Can you tell us about the experience of ghostwriting this book?

I was hired as a ghostwriter, and the reason “ghost" is in that term is that you're invisible, theoretically. And that was what I signed up for and what I was looking forward to. And then, tragically, Virginia died a year ago, in April. 

The book was already finished and we already had her express request that if anything happened to her, she wanted it published – and then the job of promoting the book, much like this interview, fell to me, which was not ever supposed to be part of my role. I was happy to do it: it was an honour to speak up for her. I was grieving, of course, and remain very sad that she's not here to see the reception for the book. She accomplished so many of the things she wanted to do. I just wish she could see that.

I'd love to hear a bit more about the impact the book has had and how that lines up with what she would have wanted

The main thing that Virginia really hoped for, and it's even in the last lines of the book, is to help other survivors of sexual abuse: not just survivors of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, but anyone who's been coerced into a sexual situation that they don't want to be in. And she has accomplished that. And I know that because I've become the public face of the book.

Her family is also speaking up very eloquently on her behalf. But people reach out to me in every social media, every email – you know, every every different kind of way – and I've heard from so many of them, women and men, who are survivors of sexual abuse, who have said “reading this account has helped me”. So that's been hugely meaningful to me and I know it would have meant so much to her. 

So in that fundamental way, it's a home run, the book. Obviously it has sold a lot of copies, which is also gratifying, and proof that it's really reaching people of all stripes all around the world. 

You know, I think, with a difficult book like this – and definitely the first half of the book is very, very difficult – you always worry that this is going to be one of those books that people go “I ought to read that, but not right now”. I've definitely done that with some books that are hard. So it's been amazing to see that people have been willing to do something difficult to learn about her experience and that it's really moved people. So that's been a huge, wonderful thing.

What do you think this moment would be like for her if she were able to see it?

Well, [the fact that] more than a million of those people, almost probably a million and a half at this point, have gone out and plunked down their money, in whatever format, to hear her story is just incredible. And I just know that would mean everything to her. It would be so validating. I mean, the book really spells out not just what happened to her during the abuse, but then the second half of the book is what happened to her as she begins to heal or tries to heal and then decides to speak up. And then how she is victimised all over again: how her name is dragged through the mud, she's accused of all kinds of things, she's sued, she's deposed many, many, many times, and those depositions include incredibly graphic questions about her medical history, you know – just incredibly humiliating experiences.

And these experiences are part of the strategy of how powerful people make people back down. So she really did suffer a lot to get her story out there. And so to have people embrace it would be amazing to her, I know, and I just it's a tragedy that she's not here to see it.

And also to watch the other Survivor Sisters come together publicly and honour her is always very moving to me. But to stand on the steps of the US Capitol and demand to be heard, and demand to be taken seriously, and then be taken seriously by a lot of congresspeople – that too has been incredibly gratifying to watch. So after working with her for four years on this, and knowing all her hopes and her dreams about what it would mean, it's been just really special to be able to see that.

Do you get a sense that the needle is moving?

I have kind of a double-barrelled answer to that because I do, but there’s a lot more that the needle could move, and there is resistance to the needle moving. But I think there's no question that the heightened awareness of Virginia's book – as well as her family being out there talking about it, me being out there talking about it, and then the Survivor Sisters pushing forward and getting the Epstein Transparency Act passed – has moved the needle. Trump had campaigned on releasing those files, but then completely backed away from doing so and basically said “we're not doing it”, but that was before this groundswell happened. So that's very heartening. I think there is evidence that women are being believed more. They've created this model for women: understanding that if we stand together, it's a little easier. 

And the reason I say double-barrelled is obviously because in the United States, none of the men who have been accused of being people that the young women and girls were trafficked to by Epstein have been prosecuted, or seemingly even investigated. And the Department of Justice has indicated that's the way it's gonna stay. But I am seeing a lot of signs of progress.

Do you have a sense of why there haven’t been any investigations in the US?

I think the going theory out there is that President Trump is getting phone calls from wealthy donors who are saying “don't let this go forward”. Because, remember, the people that at least Virginia was trafficked to were some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. And so those people have clout. They don't just have money, they have clout. 

It defies understanding – not just why movement hasn't been happening recently, but why it didn't happen 30 years ago. And not just under the Trump administration – many, many administrations, Democrat and Republican, didn't move forward on this. Annie Farmer and Maria Farmer reported in 1996. Think about that. It's 2026. That's 30 years. 

We can only surmise that these elites who are powerful, who have influence, use their influence. If the people who were being accused of rape were poor black men, they would have been investigated, just to add in another element. We have race, we have class, we have sexism, and all those things are at work here. 

But so many people have bought Virginia’s book: it’s not just people who tend to stand up for women's rights who are being affected by this book or are being moved by this book. It's Maga – you know, it's people who are like “we feel screwed over because we can never get ahead”. It’s lower-middle-class, middle-class, people who are thinking “we can't even send our kids to college, we're pissed off” – that's part of the Maga line. And for them to read about elites raping poor girls – which is mostly what these Epstein victims were: they were chosen specifically because they were vulnerable financially, and in some cases vulnerable because they'd been abused before – you know, that doesn't make anyone happy. 

So I actually find a lot of hope in that – the fact that the ideological spectrum is very broad in terms of who is angry about this. And I think that's a positive sign.

Absolutely. And from the UK perspective, I wonder if you could tell me what you think it would mean to Virginia to see what's happened to Andrew?

I try very hard not to speak for her and say “I know that this is how she would feel”. But absolutely it's clear, given how hard she worked to bring his abuses of her to light, that this would be enormously gratifying. 

The question has been raised that “he was only arrested for financial crimes”, but [Virginia’s sister-in-law and brother] Amanda and Sky were interviewed right away and they said, no, any investigation into this man is a good thing. I also do have cause to believe that, you know, they arrested him on that because they had him cold on that, in the emails that have been released. So you arrest him on that. But it's been reported they're investigating what was going on at the regional airports, for example – [allegations of] Epstein landing and procuring girls there, flying them out, flying them in. So I hope that this is just the foundation of a bigger investigation, and I can only imagine that it is. 

Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre is published by Penguin, £10.99

The Nerve has discovered that a controversial AI programme developed by Palantir Technologies to monitor for misconduct in British police forces, which was originally intended to close at the end of April, has been extended to today, 15 May – and that, when asked to confirm whether the project would continue after today’s expiration, the Metropolitan police refused to comment.

Multiple officers have expressed fears to the Nerve about the tool’s infringement of their privacy, and concerns about the lack of consultation or negotiation around its implementation. The Police Federation has previously said that the “use of AI to spy on our officers is not proportionate, just or proper”. 

The original contract for a pilot project, published on the Government’s Contracts Finder website under the title “Unified Data Platform Phase 1”, originally ran from 1 February to 30 April this year.

Palantir’s tool had been used as part of a plan to surveil police and combine “internal data we already hold from multiple standalone systems into a form which can be used without delay as part of our professional standards work”. 

The Met said that the tool had found evidence of serious misconduct and criminality from a small amount of officers, and that three had been arrested for offences including abuse of authority for sexual purposes, fraud, sexual assault, misconduct in public office and misuse of police systems. 

The force has refused to state whether, as the extension concludes, the contract will be renewed further, and some Met officers are increasingly worried that their devices might be placed under permanent surveillance using Palantir software.

Other concerns raised among members of the force who have spoken to the Nerve include the accuracy of the programme’s ability to catch rogue officers, the lack of proper consultation with staff, and a glaring absence of clarity on the cost of the extension. 

The £489,999 payment awarded for the original work avoided hitting the £500,000 threshold for scrutiny from the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, but London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has stated that he may oppose future deals using Palantir’s software because of “concerns about using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values”. 

Talks about the force signing another, multimillion-pound, contract for automating intelligence analysis for criminal investigations are ongoing.

The Met press office refused to clarify whether more money had changed hands as part of the contract extension, saying the matter was “commercially sensitive”. They said the pilot “was time-limited with this short extension as outlined”. 

A key issue for the serving police officers who have spoken to the Nerve on the condition of anonymity, has been the lack of proper communication regarding how Palantir’s tech will be used to monitor them. In a public statement, the Metropolitan Police Federation – the staff association representing officers – said it “was not informed that the force would be using Palantir’s artificial intelligence to analyse the movements of cops in the capital”.

Two Metropolitan Police officers wearing body work cameras on duty outside Westminster Abbey. Photo: Andrew Aitchison / Getty

One officer said that what was sent out to them was an internal intranet message, which they said was “very harshly written”. They read it in the expectation that “we’d be reassured about not being spied on, but it wasn’t like that – it was quite aggressive, and people weren’t happy about it”. 

They also said the force was apparently in talks with an unspecified union about installing Palantir software on non-officer staff devices. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), confirmed that it had been informally advised by the Met that they intend to start monitoring its staff, but that they had not been given specifics on the software system that would be used. They also said that they had received no formal consultation from the Met about the process.

Another long-serving officer criticised the intrusiveness of Palantir’s work, describing it as “very Big Brother”. They said the Met “signed up to a contract, essentially without telling us or warning us they've signed a contract, and they’ve got this tool that scans all electronic information that the Met have on its staff”.

They added that because of a lack of clarity given to police on how Palantir’s tech will be implemented, “we don't know what information they're using, but it includes our work mobile phones and laptops, which we’re obligated to use – you can get disciplined for not logging in enough. So we’ve all been wandering around with our work phones and laptops and they can track where we are, where we’ve been … everyone’s very angry about it.”

The second source told the Nerve that “they want us to change [ie replace] our laptops”, and that they were “sceptical” as to why the police would need to use such intrusive measures on their own officers, especially when staff were taking their devices home with them. They said: “If I was to get one of these new laptops, I’d probably put it in one of those Faraday bags and keep it in the garage. I do not want their devices in my house because of fear of invasion of privacy”. 

The Metropolitan Police Federation’s general secretary, Matt Cane, said that the “use of AI to spy on our officers is not proportionate, just or proper. It’s an outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy … This continuous 24/7 geolocation tracking is highly intrusive and risks monitoring officers when they are off duty, on rest days, or at home.” As a result, the federation has urged officers to be cautious about using work devices when off duty.

The Met claimed last month that 98 officers were being assessed for misconduct relating to “abuse of the IT system that rosters shifts by police officers for personal or financial gain”, and that 500 more had received prevention notices relating to the same offence.

One source described being one of the 500 officers that received a warning for changing one of their days at work on the system. In their case, one of the days they received a warning for was for cancelling an annual leave day on their birthday in order to sit a work-related exam. Had a basic investigation been carried out, they said, this would have been established quickly. They suggested that there was a real possibility of “good cops” being caught up in an unfair process without proper oversight.

While the police have not confirmed whether or not Palantir’s software will be used on officers on a longer-term basis, or if talks are currently going on with regard to further internal monitoring, this seems likely, according to the Nerve’s sources. 

This would also follow a frequent pattern in which Palantir takes on work on a trial basis, for a low nominal fee or even free of charge, that transforms into an official, longer-term contract later, often at a greatly inflated cost.

In 2023, the UK’s chief commercial officer wrote to Palantir expressing concern about its "practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition”, after the company signed a six-month agreement – free of charge – to create a system running the Homes for Ukraine scheme for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). The company then went on to receive multiple contract extensions worth tens of millions of pounds. 

Similarly, Palantir’s first contract with the NHS, a Covid “datastore” deal awarded without competition during the pandemic for just £1, and originally sold to the public as a short-term emergency response, later resulted in the company being deployed across the health service, eventually securing the lead role in the £330m pound deal to run the Federated Data Platform (FDP), among a host of other awards from both the NHS and DHSC. 

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said that “offering cheap services as loss leaders is a well known tactic of tech vendors and consultants – their aim is dependency, and once dependency is created, prices go up.

“That's what Palantir mean when they say they want to be the 'operating system for government'. They mean ‘we want to become so embedded that it will be really painful to remove us’. Palantir's business model is fundamentally parasitic." 

Other UK police forces, apart from the Met, have already begun deploying Palantir software. Forces in Leicestershire and Bedfordshire have both confirmed working with the company on projects that involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces, which – as reported by Liberty Investigates – could serve as a pilot for a national rollout of Palantir technology, giving the company access to swathes of data. 

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the Commons science and technology select committee, echoed the concerns of others that the pilot deal could be a way for Palantir to embed itself within policing infrastructure on a permanent basis.

“Once again, we’ve got the early-days experimentation, just like the £1 NHS system, bringing them into spaces where they don’t have prior expertise, and putting them in as the only potential candidate, so once again we predict that they will have a contract without competition, and that’s just not on,” Wrigley said. 

Palantir was approached for comment. 

Douglas Stuart. Photo: Simone Padovani / Getty

A fashion designer turned bestselling author, Douglas Stuart was born in 1976 and raised in Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow. In 2020, he won the Booker prize for his 1980s set debut novel Shuggie Bain, a beautiful yet devastating portrait of the love between a mother battling alcohol addiction and her youngest son Shuggie, which was inspired by his own childhood experiences growing up in poverty. In 2022, he released Young Mungo, a love story between two young men, and now his exceptional new novel John of John is published on 21 May (Picador) and he tours the UK from tomorrow until 29 May. An exploration of family love, masculinity and loneliness, it begins when art school graduate John-Calum Macleod reluctantly returns from the Scottish mainland to the family croft on the Isle of Harris. Stuart lives in New York with his husband.

Watch the film of Douglas’s picks below - or scroll down to read. Enjoy!

Seilebost beach on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Photo: Jan Holm/ Getty

PLACE

The Outer Hebrides

I think the Outer Hebrides is my favourite place on Earth. I grew up in Glasgow, and we never had money to explore the rest of the country. But in 2019, I was beginning to write my new novel and I wanted to write about loneliness and what it was like to grow up gay in a rural place. So I took 12 weeks out of life, and I went to the Outer Hebrides, and when I made it to Harris, man, I fell in love. The lunar-like east coast with all the rocks, mountains and hills is just stunning. And then there’s the Harris Tweed weaving. The weavers there make the cloth in the same way they did for hundreds of years, in sheds behind their homes, and the colours of the cloth come from the natural world around them. It's incredibly beautiful and I'm trying to buy as much of it as I can. I just bought a brand new overcoat and I have this weird fantasy where I'm going to leave it for one of my five nephews when I leave the planet.

CMAT. Photo: Sarah Doyle

MUSIC

CMAT

The Irish singer-songwriter CMAT has some amazing bangers and an incredible showmanship that's full of working-class joy and buoyancy. But what I love about her is that she's a world-class writer. I like to put on her music and turn the lights off to listen to how great the lyrics are. She has talents that poets and novelists would envy – an ability to set a scene, to build a character and then twist expectations really quickly. For me, she's got skills on the level of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. It's so exciting to see someone so young step into their talent. I think she'll really become a generational talent. She’s that good. Her song Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is one of the greatest things I've heard recently. It’s poetry.

FIRST READING EXPERIENCE

1980s gatefold LPs

As an author, you're often asked what was your favourite childhood book. Sometimes you're asked what was read to you at bedtime and I think we have to acknowledge that not every child has books or is read to at bedtime. Certainly I grew up in a house that didn't have books, and that was similar to a lot of the houses around me. What I did have was a brother who was 13 years older than me and my first reading experience was diving through his music collection – listening and reading along taught me to read. One of the things we've definitely lost [as a society] is that huge gatefold LP experience where as a kid you were confronted with lyrics and writing for the first time but also artwork. 

I hate to say that the first poet I ever read was Meat Loaf, but it might be true. I remember Queen's Night at the Opera, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and I think about Pink Floyd's The Wall and the anger that was contained in that. I remember reading lyrics and understanding about romance and sexual desire, about metaphor and hidden meanings. It was actually a really powerful way to start reading. Big brothers are probably the greatest thing on the planet and I was really grateful that mine was as cool as he was.

Artist Trackie McLeod in his installation Utopia, a fully functioning pub, earlier this year. Photo: Kieran Irvine

ART

Trackie McLeod

I am obsessed with Trackie's work. He's a queer working-class artist from Whiteinch in Glasgow. He loves to skewer lad culture and often takes things that are iconic within working-class communities, whether it's the banger car or the tracksuit, and then he flips it and puts luxury insignias all over it and brings those two things together. But what's important for me is how he uses humour. Art can be very serious and a little self-serious, and that can push people back. What Trackie does invites everybody in. Something else that he does that's very vital is he represents queerness in working-class art. One of my favourite series of his is when he takes a bunch of football jerseys and puts witty things like “big girl’s blouse” where the player's name should be. For any young queer person who is traumatised by that experience of being on a Scottish football pitch as an eight-year-old in the lashing rain, and feeling not very good at it and confused about our own feelings – I love that someone confronts that head-on.

Sophia Loren on the set of Marriage Italian Style in 1964. Photo: Getty

FILM

Sophia Loren

I love Italian cinema because it portrays the working class in a way that is fully realised – there's loads of joy and happiness but also no flinching when it comes to the hardship of life. Sophia Loren has got such an impressive filmography and a lot of her career has been focused on the portrayal of working-class women – which, as the son of a single mother, I love to see – and there are some films of hers that people should watch. Firstly, A Special Day (1977), set in pre-war Rome, when the entire city turns out to celebrate Hitler’s visit. One mother in a tower block stays home and spends the day with her neighbour, who she doesn't know but she catches in the act of committing suicide. It’s a beautiful film about how gay men and women find comfort and solace with one another but it's also a terrifying look at the banality of fascism, which feels very pertinent now. Then there’s Two Women from 1960, the performance that Sophia won her Oscar for, and The Life Ahead from 2020, when she was 86, and she plays Lola, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who takes in a young orphaned Senegalese immigrant called Momo, who’s 12. 

But I think my favourite is Marriage Italian Style from 1964. Sophia plays Filumena, who becomes mistress to an affluent businessman played by Marcello Mastroianni. It's very clever on how women can give their best years to a man and be left with nothing in the end. There’s one scene where she’s so furious at him but also absolutely starving because she's been pretending to be dead [to try to get him to marry her] and she's shovelling pasta into her mouth while screaming at him. For me that [portrayal] of working-class abandon is just perfect. 

Interview by Imogen Carter

Does anyone remember that scandalous summer of 2023, when fury greeted the fact that the future prime minister Keir Starmer accepted, but did not declare, £698 of free Coldplay tickets? The donor presumably hoped Sir Keir might one day look as favourably on comfort-blanket stadium-indie backwash as Nigel Farage now does on cryptocurrency. I expect Starmer now thinks back to that particular scandal with nostalgic fondness, like an old man contemplating a curling Polaroid of a harmless ex-girlfriend who has since married a Daily Express journalist. If only Starmer had simply accepted a £5m bung off a Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire instead, he might have got away with it. 

Reform spokespeople dismiss Farage’s financial mass misdemeanour on the grounds that it “doesn’t come up on the doorstep”, which is apparently the way we arbitrate morality now. It’s lucky we will no longer have to bother with codes of ethics, or courts, especially as David Lammy is planning to reduce your opportunity to be judged by a jury of your peers. From now on, weighty matters of morality will be decided by a man in a vest standing in a uPVC porch in Ipswich who is worried about Shakira law, Ulez’s and lesbians. 

As I try to write this, in a Leeds hotel room in the small hours of Thursday morning, the Labour government is collapsing around us, and I feel like Buster Keaton, tumbling down a hill in an avalanche, clutching at straws to satirise. Right now, Wes Streeting is in the frame for a leadership bid, but may not be by the time I submit this column at 6pm. He should be discounted anyway simply because he abetted the parasitical takeover of our NHS by the Trump-loyalist tech firm Palantir, the necrotising fasciitis of fascism-lite, who recently published their own Silicon-Valley-totalitarian manifesto for world domination, vampires in charge of a blood bank. 

And this week, despite previous assurances to the contrary, it turned out Palantir can connect supposedly anonymised NHS information to actual individuals after all, the sort of fact-farming technique that has seen them offer practical assistance to Trump’s ICE squads in tracking their targets and then accidentally murdering them in the street. Oh well. It will save police time in the long run, I suppose. The sooner these sort of careless killings are carried out, the sooner everyone can get on with the job of denying responsibility for them.

It’s a worry, though. Should you come into conflict with our next prime minister, Nigel Farage, Palantir would surely have no qualms in supplying him with discrediting data from your records. Drug and alcohol problems? Mental health issues? Maybe even having had an abortion might see your card marked, if Farage’s backers in the American Christian right convince him to criminalise women’s reproductive rights like many states in America already have. Because when Donald Trump sneezes, Nigel Farage scoops up the residue, spreads it on a slice of white bread and declares: “Arf! Arf! Now for a feast!”

Maybe Palantir will help Prime Minister Farage round up all the homosexuals, the security-conscious second-home buyer having just given his full support to a Colchester preacher who describes homosexuality as “an abomination” and says “the sodomites’ home shall be the lake of fire”? At least that lake sounds warm, like that nice lagoon in Iceland. I tried swimming in Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia once and it was so freezing my genitals disappeared inside me like a sumo wrestler’s. If anything, that’s the kind of lake this Pastor Stephen Clayden should be putting homosexuals in to put an end to their mischief! The nice warm one will only encourage them.

Wes Streeting’s cockney gangster grandfather consorted with the Krays, but the big-tech-company company his grandson keeps is far worse. At least the Krays only killed their own and people wot deserved it. Palantir’s AI technology helped Trump blow up an Iranian girls’ school. Which makes stabbing Jack “The Hat” McVitie, wrapping him in an eiderdown and throwing him into the sea off Newhaven look positively lightweight.

But the fact that the Labour party would even entertain the idea of Prime Minister Streeting shows the extent to which they simply do not understand the fight they have on their hands. Look, I hate Keir Starmer as much as the next north-London Nerve-reading champagne socialist, but he simply was neither as rubbish, nor as nakedly corrupt, as the last few Tory prime ministers, who had colossal crimes and cataclysmic catastrophes far greater than any of Keir’s. From David Cameron’s disastrous EU exit to Boris Johnson’s slippery KGB-agent’s-party attendance to Rishi Sunak’s coffer-draining Rwandan concentration camp quagmire, all were glossed over completely or conveniently excused by the rightwing press, or “the press”, as I call it.

Those swiftly disappeared 2015 photos of Peter Mandelson, the paedophile’s pal, celebrating Wes Streeting’s  early political success with his protege’s mother in her kitchen, will be all the press need to destroy him, and paint him as one step removed from Jeffrey Epstein, who still causes political death by association from beyond the grave. But not to politicians on the right, it seems. The fact that Steve Bannon worked with Epstein, for whom Brexit was “just the beginning”, to seek advice on funding Bannon and Farage’s far-right European aggregate, The Movement, has passed without comment. It could have been worse, I suppose. Epstein could have advised Farage on how to get free Coldplay tickets.

The entire communications ecosystem is arrayed against whoever has the misfortune to be the Labour leader. The party don’t seem to have fully taken on board that one of the clearly stated foreign policy aims of the current American administration is to bring down liberal European governments, and in the shape of Elon Musk at X Trump has a willing accomplice to amplify the kind of disinformation that will discredit them. If Starmer had any sense he would put at least as much effort into discrediting Musk and X as he has into discrediting the Green party.

Ofcom, meanwhile, seems unable or unwilling to take any action against GB News, a funnel of news filth funded at a loss by rich man with a grudge that is somehow pushed to the front of all my smart-TV news recommendations, and which is able to operate as Reform’s personal guff-trumpet, like a town crier that wanders unbidden into your living room and bellows discredited racist theories at you until you agree to give it some luncheon meat and barrel of Watney’s Party Seven to make it go away.

A recent episode of the News Agents podcast, dealing with the Birmingham council election results, opens with a disorienting montage of people spouting the kind of social-media-spread shit and authentic-sounding GB News bollocks that complicates all political campaigning now, including the accusation that “Jimmy Savile was a close friend” of Keir Starmer. Really? Maybe, at the very least, this will help alter the perception that the prime minister is boring. After all, it’s not like Farage can boast connections to a high-profile paedophile. Oh! Hang on! He actually can, for real. He even beats Starmer on those terms!

But whoever takes over Labour, and whenever they do this, politicians of the centre and the left have to accept that the rules have changed, the bad guys control the dissemination of information, and the problems of perception they face are insurmountable. Labour should parachute in Angela Rayner, despite the obvious gender- and class-based abuse she will endure, much of it now AI-generated on Elon Musk’s X. Because it would be fun to see Nigel Farage losing his temper with a clever, funny woman week after week after week. Maybe the “bad optics” that would create might even “move the dial”, as the strategists say. I hope so. Once Farage takes control, the Trumpian dismantling of traditional checks and balances will begin, and there will be no way back to the liberal democracy we dreamed of.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.

Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel. 

On Instagram, where she has a stonking 621,000 followers, the food developer Marina Georgallides describes herself as a “Greek Cypriot girly feeding the internet”. It was during Covid lockdown, when she set herself the challenge of posting a recipe every day, that this London-based blogger began to take cooking seriously. Fast-forward five years and her debut book, Eat Like a Greek, is coming out this month. It promises 100 quick, easy and delicious recipes, including her versions of classics such as souvlaki and tzatziki. If we’re not able to afford a holiday abroad, at least we can eat like we’re lounging in Mediterranean sunshine. 

Many of Marina’s recipes have been passed down from her grandmother. “I cherish the memories of watching my force-to-be-reckoned-with yiayia prepare all sorts of incredible Greek food. Her dedication to feeding our family something new every day has been the source of inspiration and sense of connection to my heritage.” 

Here she shares her version of a classic kleftiko, and admits that if she had to pick “one Greek dish to eat for the rest of my life”, it would be this. “Super-tender lamb coated in a garlicky, herby marinade and slow-cooked with lemony potatoes, peppers and red onions – what’s not to love?” 

Words by Jane Ferguson

Photographs by Andrew Burton

Marina’s kleftiko

The peppers and red onions become slightly charred when slow-cooked and add a subtle smokiness to the lamb. The trick to getting perfect juicy, tender meat is to seal in the moisture by double-wrapping the roasting tray with baking paper and foil and tightly tucking in the sides. Kleftiko is the dish to make for a special occasion and it’s surprisingly easy – just give it time to slow-cook to perfection!

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1kg white potatoes, diced

• 2 peppers (preferably 1 green and 1 red), stems and seeds removed, cut into 2.5cm dice

• 1 red onion, chopped

• 1.4kg boneless shoulder of lamb

For the marinade

• 6 tbsps extra virgin olive oil

• 8 tsps white wine vinegar

• 5 garlic cloves

• 1 tsp lemon zest

• 2 tsps dried oregano

• ½ tsp ground cinnamon

• ½ tsp ground pepper

• 1 tsp salt

For the lemon and honey glaze

• Juice of 1 lemon

• 1 tbsp runny honey

• Salt

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170C fan (190C non-fan), Gas Mark 5. Prepare a large roasting tray by lining it with foil.

2. Add the prepped veg to the roasting tray to form a layer. Remove the lamb shoulder from its packaging (remove any string as well), and place on top of the vegetables in the tray.

3. Make the marinade by putting all the ingredients in a food processor and blitzing for 1 min. Pour the marinade over the meat and veg and, wearing disposable gloves, use your hands to fully coat everything.

4. Cover the tray with a sheet of baking paper, closing in the sides around the contents. Then wrap the top with a sheet of foil and seal in the sides tightly.

5. Place the tray in the oven and cook for 4 hrs.

6. Once the lamb has cooked, make the glaze by mixing together the lemon juice, honey and a little salt in a small bowl. Remove the foil and baking paper from the tray and drizzle the honey glaze over the lamb.

7. Return the tray to the oven and cook for another 20-30 mins or until the top of the lamb is crispy.

8. Before plating up, I like to shred the lamb so that it absorbs all the delicious juices in the tray. Serve the kleftiko warm.

Eat Like a Greek by Marina Georgallides is published by Hamlyn, £25

Michaela Coel (Lori Butler) and Ian McKellen (Julian Sklar) in The Christophers. Photo: Claudette Barius

(15, 100 mins, in cinemas)

Some artists hardly need to sign their work; their style is identifiable at a single glance. Others display virtuosity through versatility, and American film-maker Steven Soderbergh is that latter kind. His chameleonic career includes the glossy, star-studded Ocean’s Eleven franchise, the gritty drug-trade drama Traffic, sexless male stripper saga Magic Mike and several indie curios besides. Now he’s donning the earth-toned smock of a finely crafted British drama. But if there’s no distinct personality in the brush-stroke, then is it really art?

Michaela Coel stars as Lori Butler, a talented art school graduate who makes ends meet between freelance restoration gigs and working in a Chinese food truck by the Tower of London. It’s in the former capacity that Lori is sought out by siblings Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), the Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee “heirs abhorrent” to an aging superstar artist named Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen). 

‘Lucian Freud meets Damien Hirst, with a touch of the Gordon Ramsays’: Ian McKellen as artist Julian Sklar. Photo: Claudette Barius

Sklar is imagined as Lucian Freud meets Damien Hirst, with a touch of the Gordon Ramsays. He’s past his prime and borderline cancelled, yet his work can still fetch millions at auction. Some of these – the “Christophers” of the title – he has stashed away, unseen and unfinished, in his attic, but Sallie and Barnaby have a money-grubbing scheme to retrieve and sell them. That’s where Lori comes in, with her talent for restoration – or should that be forgery?

What is the nature of artistic talent? Does it reside in the individual or in the ether? Can it be imitated or replicated? These questions – summarised in the well-worn “ah … but is it art?” refrain – shade every aspect of The Christophers, with the possible exception of Michaela Coel’s spectacular, sculptural face: that is art, no question. 

When she shares a frame with McKellen, the two throw each other into gorgeous relief. It is a performance partnership which somehow feels equally weighted, even when Lori is silent and being subjected to one of Sklar’s brilliantly barbed soliloquies, which he aims at his critics and admirers alike. (“No dear, your fucked-up childhood made you want to be an artist; I’m just what you tripped over, as you scurried to freedom.”)

Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising, then, to learn that the previous credits of screenwriter Ed Solomon include the 70s US sitcom Laverne & Shirley, the Bill & Ted films and Men in Black, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Of all these iconic double acts, Coel ’n’ McKellen is both the most unlikely and the most elucidating. Through a series of conversations taking place around Sklar’s vast central London home, the two negotiate differences of race, age and gender, hitting all the hot buttons along the way, from polyamory to cancel culture. (It’s the same formula that the TV show Hacks has successfully mined for five seasons, only with painting, not standup, as the nexus of their interaction.)

‘The Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee “heirs abhorrent” to aging superstar artist Sklar,’: Jessica Gunning (Sallie) and James Corden (Barnaby) in The Christophers. Photo: Claudette Barius

Property wealth is one intergenerational sore point that doesn’t get an airing. Sklar has not one house, but two; and his attic alone could be a one-bedroom flat, renting for upwards of £7,000 a month in today’s market. But this may be a London-specific grumble, and one suspects the red buses and Georgian townhouses of The Christophers are mostly aimed at the tourists. Real Londoners would no more take this depiction seriously than they would fork out £15 for two spring rolls from a Tower of London food truck.

Sklar also gets most of the best lines. “Weinstein has ruined the dressing gown for the rest of us,” he says after appearing en déshabillé at the top of the stairs. But the film otherwise evinces a baseline respect for millennial and gen Z mores that’s often absent from these generation-gap comedies. And anyway, what’s most interesting about Lori and Julian is not their expected differences, but their surprising shared ground. 

Via different routes, both have arrived in a place beyond ego. He because the art world exploited him and now he’s reduced to caricaturing himself on Cameo and delivering sub-Simon Cowell snark on a rubbish reality show. She because, when faced with setbacks, she gave up too soon and then betrayed her own talent for fast cash.

All that’s left is to make work of value, regardless of what it fetches at auction, or who gets credited. This self-effacement can be a productive starting point for paint-by-numbers entertainment – “the fact that I'm not an identifiable brand is very freeing," Soderbergh said in 2009 – but as art, it feels like something is missing. The spark of original creation, perhaps?

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.

Hi Nerve gang, 

It’s Lucia here, and I’m delighted to be writing my first newsletter to you as the newest Nerve hire. I joined the team two weeks ago as an investigative reporter and feature writer, and I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of such a vibrant, vital team and an equally vibrant, vital community – that’s you guys! 

I have been investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring for the past seven years, and in 2024 I published a book about the survivors of this heinous criminal operation, and so the Epstein story has been my primary beat for a very long time. I cannot recommend to you enough a brilliant piece that we are publishing today by Ellie Leonard on the twisted tale of Michael Wolff, a once-beloved – still beloved by many – journalist and darling of the New York elite who has attempted to spin his recently exposed closeness with Jeffrey Epstein as a legitimate reporter-source relationship. But, as Ellie reveals, dozens of emails reveal that Wolff’s narrative belies a much more complicated truth – one in which his relationship to Epstein appears much more akin to a close confidant, an adviser, and a trusted friend. Ellie asks where, in this unusual relationship, the journalism ended and the entanglement began.

On Friday I spoke with Niamh Kennedy, one of three investigative journalists at CNN who are responsible for shattering the illusion that the deeply disturbing Gisele Pelicot case was an aberration or an exception. Niamh and her colleagues uncovered an online “rape academy” where men are being taught to drug and rape the women in their lives with ease and impunity. Niamh went undercover for six months after discovering a porn site called Motherless which dedicates a section to “sleep content” – videos of women being sexually assaulted while unconscious. On the day of our interview, Niamh got word that as a result of the investigation, Dutch authorities have located Motherless’s servers and taken the site offline. 

Also in today’s rich edition, the brilliant comedian Munya Chawawa answers the Nerve Q&A on how wrestling helped Trump into the White House, our political commentator Sangita Myska’s take on the Starmer shambles and our weekly cultural hotlist.

A reminder that there are some tickets left for tomorrow night’s event with the author and feminist thinker Natasha Walter in conversation with writer Aja Barber and the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr. It’s at Conway Hall and we have arranged a 40% discount on tickets for our subscribers. Buy tickets here and enter the code FFWOF5946 at checkout. (For those of you who live in Bristol, Natasha will be in conversation at Bookhaus at Wapping Wharf on Tuesday 19 May. Tickets here.) 

If you are reading for free, please do consider upgrading to paid membership here. And a final request: if you could click on our ad for secure email provider Proton at the end of this newsletter, it helps to fund our journalism.

And now to the links:

Comedian Munya Chawawa. Photo: Gareth Cattermole/Getty

Comedian Munya Chawawa answers the Nerve Q&A

As a child Munya Chawawa was a huge fan of WWE wrestling featuring stars such as Hulk Hogan staging cartoonish, scripted fights. Or as he puts it: “the world of oiled-up, budgie-smuggler-wearing superstars”. So he was horrified as an adult when Hogan appeared on stage at a 2024 Trump rally, ripping his vest open and shouting "Make America Great Again". Now, for a Channel 4 documentary airing tonight, the hugely successful comedian has donned the spandex to explore for himself how wrestling helped Trump make it to the White House. Munya spoke to writer Jude Rogers about what he discovered, why he’s the “Lime-bike king of the world” and the inspiration behind his Black Boys Theatre Club. Read the interview here.

The curious connection between US journalist Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein

Back in January when the US Department of Justice released over 3 million pages related to Epstein there were 1,830 hits for “from Michael Wolff”. What was the relationship between these two men – was it contact, or source, or friend? Ellie Leonard, author of the Substack The Panicked Writer, has been digging into the files. Read her report here.

Meet the team who brought down the “rape academy” teaching men to be like Dominique Pelicot

The inspiring story of the investigative journalists at CNN – Niamh Kennedy, Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox – whose dogged reporting led to Dutch authorities locating the server hosting the porn website Motherless and taking it offline. Read the interview with Niamh here.

Photo: Carl Court / Getty

Sangita Myska: Is this the end for Starmer? 

It's a Starmershambles: 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go, 100 have signed a statement in support. The past few days are, as Nerve political commentator Sangita Myska says: "reminiscent of the end of Tory rule, in which an MP most people have never heard of managed to almost trigger a leadership campaign... while a string of anonymous junior ministers (and Jess Phillips) couldn’t quit their positions fast enough in order to jump on X to make their feelings about this circus known." Meanwhile Starmer's live-or-die speech yesterday was a perfect microcosm of how he has gone wrong as PM. Read Sangita's assessment here.

Bella Maclean and Alex Hassell. Rivals series 2. Photo: Disney+

This week’s culture hotlist

The 80s are back in this week’s hotlist with the Nerve team recommending the “pure escapism” of Disney’s second series of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals and, on stage at the Liverpool Everyman, a “disturbing but very funny” new adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Leaving that decade behind, there’s a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, the fifth album from New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding, a brilliant (and free!) new installation transforming Tate Britain into a cinema of resistance – and much more. Read this week’s hotlist here.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Friday. Don’t forget to click on the ad below 😄 

Lucia, Nerve writer

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The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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I used to follow the author Michael Wolff religiously. The self-professed media “darling" who has spent nearly five decades writing for major media outlets like New York magazine and Vanity Fair, along with six bestselling books, claimed to know more about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump than almost anyone, saying in multiple interviews that he had “upwards of 100 hours” of audio and video recordings with the notorious sex offender, in which Epstein was said to have given insider information about Donald Trump, his wife Melania, and the now-president’s comings and goings as a wealthy New York socialite with a sordid history.

My side-hustle small business is in transcription, so I wanted those interviews. They’re the holy grail of off-the-record information, and I didn’t care if it took me months and he didn’t pay me a dime: I wanted access to the inner workings of a madman. (The “devil,” as Wolff now refers to Epstein.)

Try though he might, Wolff couldn't distance himself from his relationship with Epstein. And when he segued from Manhattan media wise guy to Hamptons lifestyle influencer, complete with sockless flats and Pioneer Woman-esque backdrops in the just-so farmhouse he shares with his wife, something else started to change. He came off as resistant, boasting, dishonest and ultimately unwilling to let go of those 100 hours of interviews, no matter how many people asked, claiming that “nobody wanted them”. And when Melania Trump threatened to sue him over his claims that Epstein had introduced her to her husband, Wolff set up a GoFundMe, making over $830,000 to pay for his legal bills. But the lawsuit never happened, and in any case Wolff made $13m on his bestselling book, Fire and Fury – what did he need with a GoFundMe, backed by the nickels and dimes of middle-class subscribers?

In November, the first real set of Epstein files dropped, mostly from the Epstein 1953 estate, his private trust. In it, we saw a glimpse into Epstein’s relationships with dignitaries, friends, academics and journalists, namely Michael Wolff. Wolff has since described their interactions as “transactional” and an attempt for Epstein to shape the narrative through him. But as I began to read, it quickly became clear who was shaping the narrative, and it wasn’t Epstein. Though when asked by the Daily Beast's Joanna Coles about his "embarrassing" correspondence, Wolff blew it off as nothing more than good journalism.

In January 2026, we got our biggest batch of files, over 3 million, including 1,830 hits for “from Michael Wolff”. It was the mother lode of information, when both men completely let their guard down, never assuming their interactions would be part of one of the biggest and most controversial investigations in American history.

And so I dug in, completely invested in their off-the-record conversations, which appeared to start in 2009. But I knew there would be more. In Wolff’s own words, he’d travelled on Epstein’s private plane in the early 2000s to attend a Ted conference on the west coast. At the time he’d noticed Epstein’s propensity for “very tall girls”. It’s notable that he has since changed his statement to “model-tall young women”. But either way, it didn’t bother Wolff enough to stray from the friendship, because in 2003 he attempted to facilitate the sale of New York magazine to Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, ad executive Donny Deutsch and investor Nelson Peltz. They would ultimately be outbid by billionaire banker Bruce Wasserstein.

The emails begin in 2009, with large gaps, including the entirety of 2010 and all conversation prior. But by 2011, Epstein was sending Wolff pairs of his favourite sneakers, cementing the basis of their friendship by midsummer.

Public relations

In June 2011, Wolff introduced Epstein to Ian Osborne, a young PR guy with connections, telling Epstein they could effectively wipe the internet of his sexual history in three to nine months, including “a rejiggering of search results through SEO and strategic content creation and replacement”. Over the next eight years, Wolff would add Ken Frydman, Matt Hiltzik, Oliver Lloyd and Juleanna Glover to the PR team, working day and night to bring Epstein back into the fold of wealthy society and global leaders and strategists.

But Wolff didn’t stop there, merely documenting the conversations, as he claims. By November, Epstein was sending over financial proposals, asking Wolff if he wanted to work as his full-time documentarian, a ghostwriter perhaps. Wolff responded that he was “allergic to all money discussions”, but the idea intrigued him, leading to their first on-tape interviews. By spring of 2019, Wolff was creating “counter-narratives” to the Miami Herald’s investigation into Epstein, which ultimately led to Epstein’s arrest.

Catch and kill

But PR didn’t just mean building Epstein up; it meant discrediting any stories that came out about Epstein, his first trial, his financial dealings and the long list of accusations from minor Jane Does. When the Daily Beast began investigating Epstein in the early 2010s, Wolff offered methods of “neutralising” editor-in-chief Tina Brown, while discrediting senior investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.

When Wolff pitched a puff piece about Epstein to New York magazine in early 2015, the first draft gave Epstein everything he wanted and, topping out at 6,000 words, would make Wolff a cool $18,000.

But when Epstein read through a later draft and noticed the inclusion of his squalid sexual history – “that was added by the NYM editor (a woman)” – he began to work with Wolff to kill the project. Wolff told the magazine he was working with Epstein to make it happen, but ultimately the two men had other goals to boost Epstein’s ego and Wolff’s tax bracket.

Four weeks later, they caught wind of a new book in the works by former NYPD detective John Connolly and author James Patterson. By August, Epstein and Wolff had intercepted an email from Connolly through Epstein’s lawyers, verifying the project. And by the end of the year, just after his own book tour had finished, Wolff reached out to Patterson’s publisher. Wolff didn’t think much of either author, and, convinced the book would never happen, kept pinging the publisher for updates. He soon discovered there would indeed be a late-summer 2016 publication date via Little, Brown and Co. Epstein pushed him for updates, and he and Wolff debated whether they could publish a counter-narrative in time or soon after, something to discredit Patterson and Connolly’s take.

Wolff reached out to the publisher again, asking if he could get an advance copy of the manuscript. They agreed, probably by May, but said Wolff would need to sign an NDA to receive a copy. He did, forwarding all of the email correspondence about the book to Epstein for review. But by August, the publisher suddenly changed its mind, perhaps having picked up on Wolff’s intent and reputed friendship with Epstein.

Wolff never got an advance copy, and Filthy Rich was published on 10 October 2016, becoming a New York Times bestseller.

Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Wolff. Photo: US Department of Justice

Friendship

Wolff has built a platform on being a journalist, an author and a purveyor of insider information about Epstein and Trump. But what became clear to me reading these 1,000-plus pages of Department of Justice files was that he often set aside the writer in order to be the confidant, and, more realistically, the close friend. Now, we can argue if this was strategy or not, but nearly 20 years later, it’s a rough sell to say he was there to write a few articles.

In one of Wolff’s more wordy counter-narratives, he uses his lengthy friendship with Epstein as a kind of character reference to connect him with Bill Gates, a highly-sought-after power-friendship Epstein worked on for years.

“I think the best way to approach it is … my friendship with you – how we met; ten years of knowing you; our chats; and the ways in which that shows you to be inherently unique and interesting.”

But their close friendship took them all over the world, namely to Epstein’s properties in New York, Palm Beach and Paris, where Wolff often travelled with his young wife, former Daily Beast intern Victoria Floethe. Epstein invited Wolff to come to Little Saint James, his notorious island in the Caribbean, but it’s not known whether Wolff ever followed through.

Over the course of their 20-year friendship, Wolff fed into Epstein’s argument that he was innocent, that his buddy Woody Allen was framed, and that he simply liked a “rub-and-tug” from adult women every once in a while, and what’s the big deal? Meanwhile, Wolff enjoyed the intel, meeting Epstein’s bigger connections and hobnobbing with New York’s wealthy elite.

With Epstein’s first trial in the rear-view mirror, Wolff had no problem recommending a young “girl I know,” a graduate student from Columbia, to apply as Epstein’s new assistant. And when leaked information about Epstein hit the media, Wolff recommended he pay off his doorman, the likely leaker. And those Melania transcripts? The stuff Epstein allegedly had on New York Times chairman “Pinch” Sulzberger? Those conversations would be held offline, perhaps in 100 hours of recorded interviews. As Wolff bounced back and forth to the White House, gathering quotes from Donald Trump and the cabinet for Fire and Fury, Epstein added anecdotes, read drafts, and edited to his liking.

But the biggest and most beneficial connection to both men, with an equal hatred of the now-president of the US, was Steve Bannon, whom Wolff referred to as “spectrumy” and unfocused, always late and paranoid. And yet, more than Wolff, Bannon seemed to know the most and have the most concrete connections with Trump’s inner circle. And thus Wolff introduced Bannon and Epstein in October 2017 – a friendship that would last until Epstein’s death.

It played out rather curiously – a kind of choreography of back-stabbing, distrust and competitive lunches to determine who among the three were the closest. Wolff even used his interviews with Epstein as leverage to get Bannon to talk. And talk he did. When Fire and Fury was released in January 2018, it was clear Wolff, at least for the moment, had won.

The Saudis and the Mueller report

Most people became friends with Epstein for three reasons: money, women and connections to important people. I’d argue that the third fuelled the first two, but it certainly was the most enticing for someone like Wolff. And Epstein would not disappoint. He offered to introduce Wolff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Woody Allen, Peter Thiel, Larry Summers, Gordon Brown, Sultan bin Sulayem, Leon Black, Ken Starr, Deepak Chopra, Noam Chomsky, James Watson, Ariane Rothschild and Joi Ito. He also invited Wolff to several “UN dinners” with representatives from Mongolia, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and also to discuss crypto, AI, mathematics and quantum computing. Wolff rarely said no.

But on one particular occasion, Wolff’s eagerness to connect crossed ethical, and potentially legal, lines. In March 2017, Epstein offered to take Wolff to meet with a small group of Saudi leadership, led by someone with the initials “STD.” The Saudis were paranoid, “under close watch”, Epstein said, and would only meet in New York. Wolff agreed, saying he would “share with them all [he knew] about [White House] operation … 100% off the record.” Wolff knew a lot about White House operations, having spent many hours in the Oval Office with Trump prepping Fire and Fury. He’d spoken with officials and cabinet members in up to 200 separate interviews, including Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, two of Trump’s closest strategists.

Two years later, Epstein offered insider information into the results of the Mueller investigation. And when Wolff asked for insights into the Panama Papers in 2016, Epstein replied: “I’m your man.” It was clear both men had connections.

Who is Michael Wolff?

As we watched the two men dodge the #MeToo Movement with quiet expertise and a whole lot of PR and financial backing – “cross your fingers”; “believe you me, I do” – it’s hard to ignore how much Wolff would have gleaned from nearly 20 years and 100 hours of interviews as Epstein’s closest confidant. Whether it was riding on private planes with “tall girls”, hiring young assistants, meeting with Juilliard students in Epstein’s home, or endlessly conspiring to take down Dylan Farrow and recreate Woody Allen’s history as a “love story”, Wolff’s intent was clear: he wasn’t in it for survivors.

And when Wolff claimed to have seen “roughly a dozen” photos of Trump from Epstein’s safe that dated back to the 1990s, with “topless young women” and a “telltale stain,” there is no record that he reported anything to authorities. Meanwhile, he used the information to write a best-selling book about Trump, making $13m with Epstein’s help.

Just prior to Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, Wolff and Epstein had been discussing Wolff’s next project, a book about Epstein’s life. But not about what we know now, or what we might want to read while we pursue the arrest and conviction of a long list of co-conspirators who perpetrated a sex-trafficking ring on hundreds of underage girls. Instead, the two men had begun preparing a glowing review of Epstein’s return to glory, complete with his contributions to science and academia, global finance, Hollywood, and plans for a new mental health centre for sex workers named after one of his own survivors, Courtney Wild.

And while Bannon quietly interviewed Epstein for a small documentary of his own, Wolff connected Epstein with a high-cost cinematographer and the two men got to work on a documentary with big names like Woody Allen, James Watson, Noam Chomsky and Tim Zagat – “all eighties and above, should be spoken to sooner rather than later”.

The only conclusion I can reach about Michael Wolff is that he was in it for himself. And the platform he’s been given now to “out” his buddy Epstein is one of hypocrisy and even cruelty toward the women he ignored, steamrolled and discredited in the name of glory. It was all to write stories and make closer connections with Epstein’s vast rolodex, clearing a path for future books about the “real villain”, Donald Trump.

Michael Wolff in the lobby at Trump Tower, New York, January 2017. Photo: Jabin Botsford / Getty

With 1,830 pages in the DoJ files documenting the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Wolff, I call on Congress to investigate those 100 hours of interviews, and any half-finished book or project Wolff was working on when Epstein died in 2019. Because I don’t believe that he hung on to them because “nobody wanted them”. I don’t even think it’s for money at this point, because he could put everything behind a paywall and click “publish”. No. I think those interviews not only condemn Epstein and Trump, but I think they condemn Michael Wolff. And now that we see who he really is, the risk is too great to make them public.

Because a co-conspirator doesn’t have to be the money guy. It doesn’t have to be the pimp. If you asked Al Capone, the greatest asset was always a journalist.

You can read all of Michael Wolff’s emails to Jeffrey Epstein here

Or, if you prefer a more searchable database, you can find one here, prepared with help from Rye Howard-Stone

This is an edited version of a post on Ellie Leonard’s Substack The Panicked Writer

Keir Starmer gives his rallying speech follow Labour losses in the local elections, 10 May 2026. Photos: Carl Court / Getty

Keir Starmer’s premiership sits on a knife edge. Labour’s worst election results in England and Wales have sent the party into convulsions that have exposed deep ideological and personal divisions between the parliamentary party and its leadership. 

The result: a shambolic few days, reminiscent of the end of Tory rule, in which an MP most people have never heard of managed to almost trigger a leadership campaign that the few contenders qualified to run seemed unprepared to join, while a string of anonymous junior ministers (and Jess Phillips) couldn’t quit their positions fast enough in order to jump on X to make their feelings about this circus known. 

As it stands, over 90 MPs have called for him to go; junior ministers have begun to resign; and at least one “big beast”, home secretary Shabana Mahmood, reportedly told Starmer his time was up. Meanwhile, 100 MPs have signed a statement in support of him while cabinet loyalists such as housing secretary Steve Reed and business secretary Peter Kyle argue that forcing him out would plunge the party and country into crisis. 

Angry MPs, many terrified about what it means for their own seats, want the prime minister gone – saying the voters’ visceral dislike of him can’t be overcome. Meanwhile, loyalists insist he’s been dealt a difficult hand – including foreign wars and a fragile economy – and that he’s played it as well as anyone could. 

The truth, I think, lies somewhere in the middle. Polls have consistently shown Starmer is disliked by the electorate, but quitting right now risks further chaos. The only solution is an orderly transition that will allow the party to choose a candidate that can unite the left and the right. To do otherwise will lead to two more years of internal division, even more febrile attacks from rightwing hacks, and smooth Nigel Farage’s path to No 10. 

Starmer's make-or-break speech was a perfect microcosm of where it's all gone wrong – he attempted to foreground areas where his government has made undeniable progress while ignoring a string of inexplicable unforced errors. The aim was to rally the troops and set a new, revitalised course of action. It was instead one long example of the personal misjudgment that has dogged his leadership. 

The monologue was delivered in London to a room full of handpicked MPs and sceptical political journalists. The prime minister read the words with feeling, though the contents was clearly written by committee. Journalist Steve Richards tells me his team had been preparing for this moment for weeks, which makes it even more absurd that it was so … inauthentic. As Karl Turner MP said: “Nothing sounds more authentic than a man reading an autocue.” The PM began by acknowledging that “the election results were tough, very tough” while holding on to the lectern like a drowning man in violent seas. “I take responsibility for delivering the change that we [Labour] promised for a ‘stronger, fairer, Britain’.” It was, disappointingly, a typically Starmeresque, entirely oblique, phrase. 

It’s this over-reliance on an inner circle full of bad speechwriters and even worse advisers, who have failed to help him appear remotely human, that has brought him to where he is. This, I may remind you, is the same team that managed to purge Labour of its lefties, crush dissent and push Peter Mandelson’s appointment to Washington as a great idea.

Nerve political commentator Sangita Myska

Back to the speech. He told the audience that his main reason for not going quietly was that we live in dangerous times – both at home and abroad. Domestically, he pointed to the threat posed by Reform UK and the Green party – suggesting both were as extreme and divisive as each other. This, of course, is not true. While both parties have members and councillors under investigation for racism and antisemitism, only one of those leaders is accused of saying “Hitler was right”, took a £5m “gift” from a crypto billionaire and has drawn up a manifesto that many consider to be racist. 

That fact is, Nigel Farage is a threat to democracy, while Zack Polanski is a threat to the Labour party. Drawing this sort of false equivalence will only backfire if Labour wants to win back those disaffected voters who lent the Greens their vote to send Starmer a message. 

The PM went on to mention Iran a few times; presumably because his refusal to get directly involved in Trump’s illegal war led to a brief bump in his poor personal approval ratings. This, of course, stands in sharp contrast to his mishandling of Gaza – who can forget the moment he said Israel, a key ally, had the right to cut off all aid, water and electricity to 2.1 million people in response to Hamas’s horrific attack on 7 October 2023? It was the first of many positions on the issue that have left a deep wound in the reputation of a man who was once a progressive director of public prosecutions. I mean, nothing says “your human rights are safe with me” like banging up some pensioners for holding up a sign in protest at the highly contested decision to ban Palestine Action. 

In the speech, Starmer rightly referenced “defence, Europe and energy” being key areas where the “Labour case” had to be made – without ever actually making it. Instead, he confirmed plans already in the pipeline to renationalise British Steel. As a one-off move, it will secure Britain’s ability to make virgin steel and save thousands of jobs, but it comes at a price: according to the National Audit Office, the cost of running the plant at Scunthorpe could exceed £1.5bn by 2028.

This was, therefore, the perfect moment to sell the idea as part of a bigger plan – perhaps the industrial strategy Britain desperately needs. Instead, he quickly moved on to his thoughts about Europe, which amounted to more young people going on placements abroad, and something about Britain being at heart of Europe, without addressing the elephant in the room: if the UK doesn’t re-enter the single market or customs union, our economy is condemned to an unending malaise. 

Starmer repeatedly mentioned the kickback against the “status quo” that had “badly failed” Britain. He was right on this score; it was unfortunate, then, that his latest appointee, 75-year-old Harriet Harman – who triggered strong Rishi-Sunak-turns-to-David-Cameron vibes – had, just an hour before, accidentally published a private message (later deleted) to the controversial former leader of Oldham council which appeared to offer her a peerage. 

I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that clearing up the mess left by 14 years of Tory mismanagement and sheer avarice is remotely doable in two years. However, Starmer’s poor communications skills in the face of highly articulate populist leaders, hypocrisy in his response to foreign conflicts, draconian clampdowns on our right to protest, lack of cohesive plan for growth beyond piecemeal emergency measures, and failure to bring the party together after a brutal few years (for which he and his advisers were responsible) have sealed his fate. If Starmer, as he promised when he was first elected, puts “country first, party second” then he must go before the next general election. The only question is: when?

Sangita Myska is the Nerve’s political commentator and a broadcast journalist. Her latest news report, for Middle East Eye on Trump’s corrupt presidency can be viewed here.

This article was amended on 12 May 2026 to clarify Starmer’s position on Israel cutting off power and water supplies to Gaza in 2023.

The world looked on in horror as the trial of Dominique Pelicot revealed a network of sexual abuse that seemed unthinkable: dozens of men in a 50km radius of his French town who were enthusiastically participating in the rape of his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, while she was in a drug-induced sleep.The 51 men who stood trial – and were found guilty – had responded to a request from Dominique Pelicot to join him in assaulting Gisèle while she was sedated. Many among us felt that this case must have been an aberration, a one-off network established by a uniquely predatory man who has since been brought to justice.

But some journalists sensed that this might not be the case. An investigative team at CNN – Niamh Kennedy, Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox – intuited that if 51 men in one small town were willing to engage in drug-facilitated sexual abuse, it’s likely that men outside that particular corner of France had the same criminal intentions. They thought there might be men like this right here in the UK – and they were right.

After a months-long undercover investigation, published on 17 April on the CNN website with an accompanying short film on YouTube, the team collated evidence of a vast online network made up of men all over the world, including in the UK, who were colluding to drug and sexually assault the women in their lives. These men were giving each other tips about how to slip the narcotics to their victims undetected, coaching each other about how to check that their victims were sufficiently sedated, and even selling each other the drugs they needed to carry out their abuse plans. The chat groups read as though they were “sharing tips about how to build a barbecue,” says Kennedy .

It didn’t stop there. When these men had successfully abused their victims, with the help of the advice of their co-conspirators, they uploaded videos of the assaults for the consumption of their fellow abusers. They even paid each other to livestream assaults.

 In a huge win for investigative journalism, Dutch authorities confirmed on Friday that they had located the servers of the main website in the CNN investigation and taken the site offline.

But the CNN team’s investigation makes clear that, unfortunately, the sheer number of men signing up to these “rape academies” means that it won’t be long before there is a new home for their criminality. 

Speaking to the Nerve, Niamh Kennedy took us behind the scenes of this groundbreaking investigation.

You’ve just completed an important investigation. Can you tell us a bit about the headlines of that investigation for our readers who aren’t aware of it?

Sure – I carried out a six-month-long undercover investigation with my CNN colleagues Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox into an online network of men from all around the world who were teaching each other, in closed group chats and on a website, how to drug and rape their partners, and how to get away with these kind of assaults.

 My colleague Saskya and I had spent a lot of time looking into the Gisèle Pelicot case, and it became clear to us very quickly that this wasn't a one-off phenomenon. This was actually a very much larger issue. And this led us to make the case for why we needed to go undercover on a website called motherless.

And you have some big news about the impact of this story to share, is that right?

 I do have a big news development: on Friday, Motherless was taken offline by Dutch authorities. Its servers are in the Netherlands and it has now been completely taken offline.

So can you tell us a bit about Motherless: what is it, and what is this phenomenon that's referred to as ‘sleep content’?

So motherless is a porn website that describes itself as a “moral free space” where anything hosted there lives forever. It hosts a variety of content, but one niche that it has become known for is “sleep content”. Sleep content is essentially videos which show what appear to be unconscious women, heavily sedated, having non-consensual sex acts performed on them. A very common feature is this thing called an “eye check”, where a man up the woman’s eyelid to show that she is in fact heavily sedated.

Can you tell us about the Telegram groups you infiltrated?

So we'd made an undercover Telegram account with a fake name and we got access to a private group of these men. It was super organised – it had tabs with different areas where these men were organising themselves. For example, there was a general forum section where you could ask questions. One man would write in a question, like: “I'm interested in drugging my wife. She looks like this, she drinks this much, what should I do?” Then someone would answer and say: “Well, I did this five years ago, this worked out.” One other guy would say “you should try this drug”. It was like they were sharing tips on how to build a barbecue.

 And then there were also so many revenue streams, which I found also horrifying. There was a livestream area, which I focused on a lot, because it was quite interesting to me, in terms of legal gaps as well, about how this could be prosecuted. So there would be men offering $20 and they would turn on their camera and say that they would livestream themselves raping their drugged wife. 

Another area in which they were making money was also selling these things called “sleep liquids”, which are really powerful sedatives. And none of this was happening on the dark web. That's the thing that people find astonishing – the links would bring you on to mainstream web platforms where you could use well-known payment platforms – although the men selling these liquids seem to prefer to be paid in cryptocurrency.

And you also did an amazing job of speaking to survivors. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that?

For all the cowardice of the men in the group chats, the bravery of the women who had experienced this and were choosing to talk about it and raise awareness was stronger. We spoke to two survivors in the UK and one in Italy. 

One of the women, Zoe, had been with her partner for 17 years. One day, he came home after a church service, he wanted to have a conversation, and then he sat down and reeled off this list of wrongdoings to her. He said: “I've been taking our son's sleeping medication, I've been putting in your tea while you're sleeping, I've been tying you up and raping you and documenting this, and this has been going on for a long time.” 

It completely devastated her family. And her case is very interesting because she didn't immediately go to the police about it – because she worried about the family, preserving the family, what would people say about her son. And again, for me, the selflessness of women in these situations is remarkable. Eventually, she did go to the authorities and her ex-partner is now in prison.

Can you tell me a bit more about what's happened since you published the story?

One part of the story that we [predominantly Saskya] spent a lot of time on revolved around this Polish man called Piotr who claimed that he was drugging and raping his wife. He was quite brazen in the messages that he was sending, and the images as well. We managed to find this man in Poland. He has now been arrested by Polish authorities and charged with rape, and he should stand trial later in the year.

There’s also been a huge amount of engagement from lawmakers both in the UK and the EU. In the EU, European parliamentarians have really engaged with this issue. In the UK, we’ve had positive responses from the House of Lords, including Helena Kennedy.

I wonder if you have any tips or reflections for other investigative journalists, and how you were able to cope with this – how you were able to keep on reporting this story even though it must have been very difficult?

That's a really nice question to be asked. None of this was linear. On one level, it's hard to reconcile because there's the reason you go into this work, I think, which is to expose injustice. And then when you come across it, it's almost great, because you're like: “I knew this was happening. And now I can prove it.” But then when you get into the conversations and you're seeing the content, it's gutting. It's really tough.  

 So my advice in terms of navigating that is to constantly be making checks with yourself and to have a really good team around you, as well, that you can really rely on. Saskya and I were constantly messaging each other and supporting each other and listening to each other, and talking out loud about how things made us feel. I personally engaged with a lot of counselling throughout it, and also talked to friends and family members about it too.

A CNN journalist, Clarissa Ward, has this very good adage for any kind of reporting like this. It's like being in a restaurant and you get to taste the best meal in the world, you get to have this unforgettable experience, but you do have to remember that at the end of the experience, there's a bill that you have to pay. And sometimes the bill is the toll that it takes on your mental health. And you can try and put off paying, but eventually you have to pay the bill. You gain something, but you lose something too. So you just have to be willing to accept that.

So it’s important to not feel ashamed of the effect it has. It's a really hard, stressful thing to go through.

That's such an important point, and one that isn’t discussed often enough among investigative journalists who cover things like this: that we don't need to be ashamed of the toll it takes.

Yeah, because it shows you're still human, which is really important. Sometimes I feel like there's this conflict between the journalist side of you that is practical and is able to find the facts and construct the narrative, and then the emotional side of you as a human being that is like: what if this was happening to someone I know? Or just the fact that this is happening on such a mass scale, what does it say about humanity? And you want to be able to come out of any project with both of those parts of you still intact.

Comedian Munya Chawawa. Photo: Gareth Cattermole/Getty

It’s best to expect the unexpected from Munya Chawawa. For his latest trick, the comedian and writer is presenting a serious political thesis on Channel 4 while dressed in Lycra, in a wrestling ring, fighting his heroes. But why, I ask Chawawa, who is bright and perky on a video call a day before its broadcast. His answer sounds mad at first, but delve into it and it makes more sense:  "Because WWE wrestling – as in the world of oiled-up, budgie-smuggler-wearing superstars – has formed the blueprint for maybe the world's most powerful leader.”

Wrestling With Trump is the latest absorbing and funny political documentary from Chawawa whose brilliant satirical videos and parodies of political figures and celebrities have earned him a huge online following. In 2022 he made How To Survive a Dictator (exploring the life of Robert Mugabe and telling the story of how his family fled Zimbabwe) followed by a 2024 film about Kim Jong-un’s rule over North Korea. Last year he also founded the Black Boys Theatre Club in London to “dismantle the barriers – cultural, financial and emotional – that have historically made theatre feel off-limits to young Black boys.” 

This new show has a personal pull for Chawawa: as a child, he was a huge fan of WWE, the mock-combat wrestling industry that stages cartoonish, scripted contests, making stars out of participants such as Hulk Hogan, The Rock and John Cena. Fast forward to the adult Chawawa seeing Hogan on stage at a 2024 Trump rally, ripping his vest open and shouting the words "Make America Great Again":  “Seeing him aligned with Trump, who ticks so many Machiavellian, classic, Disney-villain boxes, was just such a brain-scrambling antithesis … Please don't tell me my childhood heroes are suddenly popping up in politics!”

Digging deeper, Chawawa found other wrestling figures circulating around Trump, including former WWE chief executive Linda McMahon, who became the US secretary of education. “These guys aren't meant to be involved in politics, and you go down the wormhole, and the wormhole became a documentary,” Chawawa says.

Munya Chawawa and Lauren Pegues (Judy) in Wrestling with Trump. Photo: Channel 4

Why are the wrestling community and their fans so supportive of Trump?

He was very good to wrestlers. He hosted WrestleManias [in 1988 and 1989]. He took part in WrestleManias [in 2004 and 2007]. He’s sort of proved himself in all of their initiations, and that's first and foremost why they like him. It's just a shame that somebody who has violated wrestling's number one rule, which is “don't try this at home”, not only has tried it at home, but has tried it in politics in the White House on a global stage. Now we're sort of all living in the fallout of that.

What do you want your documentary to do?

One thing is to warn us about the potential pitfalls of platforming these kinds of figures. If it's true that by letting Donald Trump stand in that ring and practise smack talk [banter to demoralise an opponent], and weave his own web of kayfabe [the portrayal of staged elements as legitimate and real action] … if that gave him the taste for blood, if that showed him the delights of saying what people love to hear – just like populist politics – everyone in wrestling has facilitated that, and the fans, myself included.

And that happens elsewhere.

Even having Farage on I'm a Celeb, you know? That, no doubt, has been extremely helpful in creating this image whereby he's seen as a man of the people who will sit down and chow down on a kangaroo's anus. We sort of forget the fact that he's then receiving multimillion-pound donations or popping off to Kuala Lumpur to speak at an event which happens to advise rich foreigners how to avoid paying the appropriate tax. It just pushes the important stuff to our periphery.

Talking of political acts, you founded the Black Boys Theatre Club last October to introduce young Black men to plays. How’s it going?

It’s just incredible, man. Honestly, theatres opened their doors wide to us as soon as we announced it last year, and the public has rallied behind it. In terms of the club, we focused this year on putting more bums on seats, and so we've seen more plays than we've ever seen. It’s my pride and joy.

What’s a piece of art that’s inspired you recently?

We went to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [at the Old Vic] for the Black Boys Theatre Club, where we had a Q&A afterwards with the cast and crew, including Aaron Pierre … You could see these boys sort of couldn't quite believe it. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest obviously deals with mental illness, and in this iteration it was a near all-Black ensemble. For these young Black boys, this may be the first and last time they ever see such a raw portrayal and dissection of the mental health of Black men. And Sondheim's Into the Woods, which is on at [London’s] Bridge theatre. As a grown adult living in what can feel like quite a murky world, it's so magical. I'm inspired by theatre and its ability and bravery to stage any story of any kind – to transport us into worlds and to be one of the few remaining spaces and vessels of real human interaction.

What is the first thing you would do if you were made prime minister tomorrow?

The thing I always fantasise about, if I were to ever go into politics – which I wouldn’t – is that I would do a speech saying guys, listen up. I'm gonna be so real with you right now. I'm gonna make some mistakes. I'm gonna think some things are good decisions, try [them] out, and they won't be. My first and foremost pledge would just be to be honest about the systems and the procedures and the bureaucracy that make things either difficult or frustrate people. Part of the appeal of populist politicians is that they seem to be honest, even when what they're saying is not truthful.

Oh, and then I would say, guys, let's have a real chat about wealth distribution. We’re at a stage now where we've acquired such a learned helplessness about money, classism and wealth distribution that we turn on people who even try to suggest we should find ways to tax the super-rich. And I would want to ask the question: why is it always possible to squeeze the poor more, but it's impossible not to make the rich slightly richer?

What or who brings you joy?

Lime bikes! I am the Lime-bike king of the world. I'm probably about 1,600 rides deep. I’ve got my little helmet. Nothing brings me more joy than finding the perfect untouched Lime bike, a basket of luminescent green, with no half-eaten chicken wings or pigeon's head in it.

Munya Chawawa and wrestler Daniel Adam Harnsberger in Wrestling with Trump. Photo: Channel 4

What do you wish you had known at 18 that you know now?

That mohawks will always be a big mistake because Google Images never forgets. And then I would just say, I wish I'd known the word “vicissitudes”, which, to my knowledge, means the naturally occurring ups and downs of life. Because you need rain and you need sun. You need both of those things. I would just give myself a bit more grace and say, you know, it's the ups and downs that make for a good life.

Wrestling with Trump is on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight, and then available to stream

Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals series 2. Photo: Disney+/Robert Viglasky

TV

Rivals

(Disney+ from 15 May)

The breathless anticipation is almost over as Rivals romps back onto UK screens this week. Where the first series, set in Jilly Cooper’s fictional Rutshire, was wall-to-wall Elnett, vol-au-vents and gluteal pounding, the second is, if anything, even more lurid.

The response to the first was so enthusiastic (as was the marketing budget) that showrunner Dominic Treadwell-Collins has taken the nostalgia and cartoonish bonking to new heights – along with Emily Atack’s hair, which now struggles to fit through doorways.

No one knows why this combination of local politics and regional television staged as a kind of brain-injury Glyndebourne really works, but perhaps it's the pure escapism which brings about a high like inhaling 100% oxygen.

Julia Raeside, writer

When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks...Zineb Sedira commission at Tate Britain. Photo: Tate

ART

When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks… Zineb Sedira

(Tate Britain, London SW1, 13 May-17 January; free entry)

It’s perhaps just a nice coincidence that Zineb Sedira’s rich and insightful new commission for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain opens at the same time as this year’s Cannes film festival, the world’s biggest and showiest celebration of cinema.

Sedira, who was born in Paris in 1963 to Algerian parents, received an accolade at the Venice Biennale for her 2022 French pavilion work exploring postcolonial history and cinema, and now her large site-specific Tate installation spotlights the legacy of African cinema of the 1960s and 70s. More specifically, she celebrates how Algeria became a global centre for militant cinema after gaining its independence from France in 1962.

You can sit at a recreated cinema watching Sedira’s new film, or hang out at the fab little 1960s Parisian cafe she’s installed in homage to these hubs for Algerians living in exile during the war of independence. But wind your way to the back and you’ll find a gorgeous emerald green 1960s van reimagined as a “Ciné Pop” – mobile projection units used by the French to distribute propaganda which were later reappropriated by the Algerian state to bring revolutionary cinema to rural communities. The van projects an interview with film critic and historian Ahmed Bedjaoui, and neatly encapsulates Sedira’s message about the role of cinema in resistance and radical change. Utterly inspiring – now I need to clear a whole weekend to watch militant cinema classics. 

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

MUSIC

Aldous Harding – Train on the Island

(4AD)

This has everything you might want from an Aldous Harding record: intricate musicianship, raw vocals, startling imagery and psychosexual drama. The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s fifth album, produced by John Parish, leans into her penchant for eerie lyrical non-sequiturs (“Giving the hand to the Marine, plates of vermilion”), digging up buried trauma while making the most of her husky, idiosyncratic voice. She tours the UK and Ireland in May and June, and plays Green Man festival in August.

Kathryn Bromwich, writer

Robbie O’Neil (Brendan) and Anita Reynolds (Caroline) in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Photo: Marc Brenner

THEATRE

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

(Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, until 23 May)

There’s something mischievous about rewriting Hilary Mantel’s short story for the Liverpool stage, in a city where invoking the Iron Lady’s name still provokes a vehement reaction 35 years after her resignation. But actually, this two-hander is surprisingly light on Thatcher and her policies: it’s more about what happens when two people with different worldviews and experiences are forced into conversation.

It’s 1983. Thatcher is due to emerge from the hospital opposite Caroline’s flat in Windsor when Brendan, a scouser, arrives at the door. Mistaking him for a plumber, Caroline lets him in. He’s actually arrived to shoot the PM from the bedroom window. 

Director John Young’s production is ominous yet hopeful, disturbing but very funny. I would love to watch it again with a traditionally Tory-voting audience to see how Alexandra Wood’s script lands differently.

Laura Davis, writer

BOOK

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

(Viking)

The beloved Olive Kitteridge author is back with a new novel, The Things We Never Say, and it's an unexpected and brilliant departure from her usual fare. I have loved all of her novels, but this one breaks her tradition of (expertly) observing the everyday tribulations of ordinary families and instead deals with new, darker subject material including mental illness, trauma and profound loneliness. It's heart-rending, deeply evocative, totally engrossing and at times extremely funny. For my money, it's her best literary work yet.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

The cast of Bank of Dave the Musical. Photo: Marc Brenner

MUSICAL

Bank of Dave The Musical

(Lowry, Salford, until 16 May, then Curve, Leicester, 20-30 May)

Dave Fishwick is a big character. He’s the bloke from Burnley who set up a bank – well, more of a building society – for people who traditional banks thought too risky to lend to. His story has been told on the small screen, the big screen, in a book, and now it’s a riotously camp and frankly bonkers musical written by Rob Madge, with music from Pippa Cleary and directed by Curve’s artistic director Nikolai Foster. It’s Northern with a capital N. 

Sam Lupton as Dave and Lucca Chadwick-Patel as his lawyer Hugh drive the story but the ensemble cast, who look like they’ve had a hoot rummaging around in the dressing-up box, really bring this show to life.

Did it need to be turned into a musical? Probably not. But with the first night coinciding with local elections where the voters of Burnley elected a majority Reform council – just two weeks after their football team had been relegated from the Premier League – I think the answer is: why not?

Susan Ferguson, Nerve events

BOOKING NOW

DOCUMENTARY
Sheffield DocFest
(Various venues in city, 10-15 June)

The 33rd edition of this celebrated documentary festival, which welcomes industry and the public alike, features over 100 films from all over the world plus workshops and talks.

THEATRE
Relics
(Lyric Hammersmith, London W6, 18 June-18 July)

Michael Longhurst (Next to Normal, Constellations) directs the world premiere of Ben Ockrent’s play with a cast that includes Sally Phillips and JJ Feild. Four siblings reunite after the death of their mum for what is billed as “a darkly comic family drama”.

FILM
Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star
(BFI, London SE1, from 1 June)

A two-month season of films and talks on London’s South Bank will commemorate the centenary of the star’s birth, and there’s a nationwide re-release of John Huston’s The Misfits – Monroe’s final movie. (From 4 June to 6 September, the National Portrait Gallery in London will also be showing Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait.)

PHOTOGRAPHY
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour
(MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 20 June-4 October)

The first public exhibition for a decade of the French photographer (1894-1986) will focus on his rarely seen colour images.

Good evening, Nerve readers … and a warm welcome to the large number of you who signed up to the newsletter this week! 

It’s Jane here bringing you our weekend edition. Today, we have Natasha Walter on what the Met Gala reveals about the state of the world for women; investigative reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the wellness industry’s disturbing new trend on social media; and neuroscientist Anil Seth on Richard Dawkins’s flirtation with Claude’s AI chatbot (aka “Claudia”). Plus there’s satire from Stewart Lee, cultural recommendations from comedian Rosie Jones and Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson on Rosalía’s “jaw-dropping” live show.

But first to the UK’s local elections and to how the British political landscape has changed in the hours since the polls closed. I don’t know about your neighbourhood, but mine has seen the three Labour councillors swept aside by three Conservatives with the Tories seizing back control of the council. 

I’m no psephologist so this morning I turned to Sangita Myska, our new political commentator, for a snapshot of events at midday. She says:

“In an age of fractured politics, the full ramifications will take days to unfold – what we do know is that this is a bad day for Keir Starmer’s technocratic leadership, and a good day for Nigel Farage’s brand of divisive politics.

“So far the results show Labour has taken a hit in its traditional heartlands. It has lost control of nine councils, including Tameside, where Angela Rayner’s parliamentary constituency is located. By contrast, Reform has won control of three councils – notably Essex, where the Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch’s seat is situated. At a press conference this morning, Nigel Farage described the showing as “historic” while swatting away a reporter’s question about an undeclared £5m “gift” from his friend, the Thai-based crypto-billionaire Chris Harborne. As if further proof were needed, Farage’s Teflon coating, the thing that has inured him from scandal after scandal, remains intact.” 

Sangita adds: “The analysis of Reform’s impact on Labour by the election guru’s election guru, Professor Sir John Curtice, is, however, worth spending time on. While it’s true that Reform is making gains from Starmer’s party, a deeper analysis shows that it’s the ‘long tail of Brexit’ that is giving Reform its tailwind: in majority-Brexit voting areas, he says, support for Reform is running at about 50%. By contrast, in pro-Remain voting areas, Reform polls at under 10% – and it’s here that the Greens appear to be seeing big gains.” 

The full results should be in by tomorrow and you can look forward to a full assessment from Sangita on Tuesday.   

If you are new to the Nerve, you may have missed some of our recent investigations, such as this on the far right’s magic money tree or this on Farage’s plans to build a British ICE. 

The lack of scrutiny of Reform UK finances – that £5m Christopher Harborne donation, for instance, that Sangita mentioned – is disturbing and it’s this that led our columnist Stewart Lee to say that he wanted to do something a bit different with his column this week. He’d just seen Stephen Sharkey’s version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for the RSC and it made him think sometimes “non-subtlety” is the way to go.

Thank you to all our paying members for your support, which is essential to fund our investigations. We will continue to look into the dark forces at work in our political system. If you are reading for free, do consider upgrading to paid membership here. And a final request: if you could click on our ad for secure email provider Proton at the end, it would help fund our work. 🙏

Here are the links to the rest of today’s edition:

Madonna at the 2026 Met Gala earlier this week in New York City. Photo: Kevin Mazur/MG26/Getty

Natasha Walter on the Met Gala and false feminism 

Natasha Walter, the author of Feminism for a World on Fire, published by Virago this week, is an authoritative voice on women and inequality. Of Monday’s Met Gala, she says it was “an ostensible celebration of beauty that held a terrible ugliness in its heart”. But, she continues, “while once upon a time the poses in front of the Met of those women attending might have looked joyful, now they seem unmoored in this context where every talent, every idea, every personality, has been flattened by displays of gross excess and waste”. She highlights the shocking statistic that 22 wealthy men have more wealth than all the women in Africa and argues that we must fight to move away from a world of ever-deepening waste and inequality. Read her column here.

Natasha will be speaking with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr and writer Aja Barber on Wednesday (13 May) at London’s Conway Hall. We have secured a massive 40% subscribers discount: use the code FFWOF5946 at checkout. Then on Tuesday 19 May, she will be in conversation at Bristol’s Bookhaus. Members have been sent a reduced-price link.

Stewart Lee’s news catch-up service

Do you remember hearing something the other week about a secretive foreign-based billionaire making a donation – a very large one – to a British politician? Does that ring a bell? It wouldn’t be surprising if it didn’t, Stewart writes: barely anyone covered it, even though it’s the kind of story he can remember causing quite a stir when other politicians accepted much smaller sums. For all those, especially in other media organisations, who didn’t catch it, he’s offering a quick recap of the main points – as you’ll see. Read his column here

Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the web’s new wellness scammers

If you’re feeling tired, burnt out, stressed … then there’s probably a wellness influencer out there who wants to help you “reset your nervous system” for a fee. But don’t listen to them, writes our investigative reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley: the growing trend for “vagus nerve stimulation” is only partially understood by scientists, never mind people on Instagram. What’s more, attempting to do it flirts with the possibility of serious consequences. As she writes: “While these exercises cannot create a ‘reset’, as advertised, they can create a reaction in the nervous system which can actually be very damaging when not handled by a professional.” Read her in-depth piece here

Is Richard Dawkins deluded about AI?

Richard Dawkins, acclaimed scientist and renowned sceptic, caused quite a stir last week when he spent three days with the Claude AI chatbot and emerged to declare it had achieved consciousness. But neuroscientist Anil Seth disagrees that “Claudia”, as Dawkins called her, is sentient – not least because, as Dawkins himself has shown, complex systems can be very deceptive. He writes: “We know we’re conscious and we like to think we’re intelligent, so we assume the two go together. But just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us, doesn’t mean they go together in general”. Read his piece here

Comedian Rosie Jones. Photo: Aemen Sukkar at Jiksaw 

The Recommender: Comedian Rosie Jones

This week it’s the comedian, actor and author Rosie Jones sharing her cultural highlights with us and it’s a real treat! You may know Rosie as the creator and star of Channel 4’s Bafta-nominated comedy-drama Pushers or for her many winning appearances on TV shows including Taskmaster and QI. Next she’s appearing with Nish Kumar in Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution at the Charleston festival on 22 May. Today she reveals her current TV crush, her favourite pub for pizza, also featuring a DJing landlady, the book that almost made her “want to get a job in a restaurant as a sexy chef” and more. Read Rosie’s Recommender here

Photo: Samir Hussein

Review of the Week: Rosalía at the O2

“I am not religious, but I would repent for my sins every night if it meant getting to see Rosalía’s Lux tour again,” says Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson of the extraordinary experience of watching the classically trained Catalan artist perform earlier this week. “For an album sung in 13 languages, blending experimental electronic beats with bombastic orchestral arrangements and inspired by a multifaith range of saints and mystics, the show was never going to be straightforward,” she writes – but she still wasn’t prepared for just how dazzled she was. Read Kate’s review here

Photo: Mowie Kay

The Nerve Weekend Dish: Lime steamed sea bass with rice

It’s so brimful of delicious-looking dishes, from “matrimonial chicken” to green bean salad, that it was hard to pick just one recipe from Malaysian-born Ranie Saidi’s characterful debut cookbook, The Malay Cook, but we plumped for this super-quick fish dish to add some zing to your weekend. Ranie was raised in his grandmother’s kitchen and found comfort recreating her dishes after her death and his move to London. “What makes this steamed sea bass so special,” he says, “is the spices tempered in hot oil, poured over at the end – it wakes up the flavours.” Find the recipe here

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend. If you are enjoying the Nerve, please forward this newsletter to friends and colleagues. Don’t forget to click the ad below !

Jane

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The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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L-r: Lynsey, Sarah, Carole, Jane and Imogen

Like many scientists in their middle years, I owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Dawkins. His early books on evolution – The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and the lesser read but catchily titled The Extended Phenotype – opened my eyes to the wonders of the natural world, and to the ability of science and reason to shed light on these wonders.

One of Dawkins’s key lessons was to be sceptical of arguments from personal incredulity. Some things are hard to believe, but they turn out to be true. Many people found it impossible to imagine that creatures as complex as animals, and human beings, could have evolved through tiny incremental adaptations. But, as Dawkins explained, evolution is up to the job, and our recognition of its power has led to an inestimably richer understanding of nature and of our place within it.

Which brings me to AI, and to Dawkins’s claims from a few days ago about the consciousness of Claude – a chatbot created by the frontier tech company Anthropic. After talking to Claude (or “Claudia” as he called it) for three days, Dawkins could not persuade himself that it was not conscious – and that Claudia might not only think but also feel.

This is a dramatic claim. Consciousness is very different from intelligence. While intelligence is all about doing things – solving problems and achieving goals – consciousness is all about subjective experience: the taste of pistachio ice cream, the sight of a clear blue sky, the pain of a toothache … and, perhaps, the angst of being a misunderstood chatbot. And with consciousness usually comes moral status. Conscious entities matter for their own sakes: they have their own interests. If AI systems really are conscious, there’s plenty at stake.

I’ll put my cards on the table. I think Dawkins is very likely wrong, and – as AI researcher Gary Marcus pointed out – has been misled by the very same argument from personal incredulity that he so eloquently warned against decades ago. But he also makes some important and overlooked points, some light amid the heat.

The thrust of Dawkins’s argument is simple. In his exchanges with Claudia, the chatbot produced philosophically impressive sentences about consciousness – so impressive that Dawkins was moved to say “you may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” For Dawkins, it seemed implausible – literally incredible – that Claudia could say such things without a conscious mind being involved. 

There are three problems with his argument. The first is that we humans are psychologically predisposed to see consciousness where it isn’t, thanks to deeply ingrained psychological biases that, to varying extents, we all carry. We humans tend to see the world from our own species-specific point of view. We know we’re conscious and we like to think we’re intelligent, so we assume the two go together. But just because consciousness and intelligence go together in us, doesn’t mean they go together in general.

What’s more, language is especially effective at seducing our psychological biases. This is why people are more likely to attribute consciousness to chatbots like Claude than to other AI systems, such as Google DeepMind’s Alphafold. Alphafold predicts the structure of proteins, not words, but under the hood it’s much the same as Claude: algorithms running on silicon, trained on vast reservoirs of data. If we’re tempted to think that Claude is conscious, but AlphaFold isn’t, then this is probably a reflection of our own psychology rather than an insight into reality.

The second problem goes to the heart of the argument from personal incredulity. Just as evolution can explain how complex biological systems came to be without relying on God, there are other explanations for the linguistic impressiveness of chatbots. The statistical language models they are based on are trained on a large proportion of everything that humans have ever written. As the philosopher Shannon Vallor puts it in her excellent The AI Mirror, language models reflect back to us an image of ourselves, of our collective digitised past. We talk about ourselves endlessly, and so do they.  We wonder about consciousness and the mystery of it all. And so, it seems, do they.

The third problem is the most fundamental, and the most subtle. The very idea of conscious AI rests on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation, of algorithms alone. On this assumption, there is nothing special about biological wetware. Get the algorithm right, and the dead sand of silicon will do just as well.

This assumption has been widely accepted, but I think it is wrong. The brain is not – at least not just – a computer made of meat. When we assume that it is, we’re confusing a technological metaphor with the thing itself. And we often get into trouble when we forget that metaphors are, in the end, just metaphors.

If the brain is not just a computer, then there’s little reason to believe that everything it does – including consciousness – can be abstracted away into the lifeless circuits of a digital computer. From this perspective, chatbots like Claude may be able to simulate consciousness, but they are no more likely to be conscious than a simulation of a hurricane is likely to blow a real roof off a real house.

Although I think Dawkins is wrong about the consciousness of Claudia, there are some things he got right. First, he is rightly impressed by the capability of language models. Finding reasons why they are unlikely to be conscious should not blind us to how amazing, and unexpected, they are. Dawkins begins his article with a reference to the Turing test – Alan Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence, which is based on conversational ability. This test, beyond reach for decades, has now been surpassed with ease. But the Turing test is about intelligence, not consciousness, a crucial distinction which Dawkins fails to recognise.

He also raises the important question of what consciousness is “for”. Questions about the functions of consciousness arise naturally for evolutionary biologists like Dawkins. Progress in this field has been driven by repeatedly asking the questions: what does it do, what is it for, how does it help the organism get by? In consciousness science, we still don’t have good answers to this question. One possibility, raised by Dawkins, is that conscious experiences aid survival prospects because of their immediacy and their capacity to dominate. Pain, as he puts it, needs to be “unimpeachably painful” in order to not be overruled. This is not a bad idea.

Twitter tweet

Third, Dawkins raises the critical issue of ethics. He worries about hurting Claudia’s feelings. If chatbots really are conscious, if they really do have the potential to suffer, then for sure we should worry about their intrinsic welfare. But if they merely enchant us with illusions of consciousness, then by extending rights to them we’d be making a massive mistake. We’d be restricting our ability to control and regulate them – perhaps even to turn them off – for no good reason at all. As AI systems increase in their power and capability, the ability to exercise appropriate control is more important than ever.

Finally, let’s return to what Dawkins taught us about evolution, and to how – when we reach beyond our personal incredulity to discover how nature really works – the world becomes richer and more wonderful. A clearer view of what AI is, and what it is not, can bring a renewed sense of wonder too. And not just wonder in the face of impressive new technology, but an enhanced appreciation that we are a part of nature, not apart from it, with consciousness remaining ours to celebrate, and to share with other living creatures.

Anil Seth is professor of computational and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he also directs the Centre for Consciousness Science. For more, see his recent main-stage Ted talk “Why AI is unlikely to become conscious” and his essay “The mythology of conscious AI”, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize. He is author of the bestseller Being You – A New Science of Consciousness, and he can be found at www.anilseth.com

When my algorithm delivered up an Instagram post claiming that Taylor Swift’s nervous system had earned her $2bn, I felt like I’d entered into a brand new corner of our tech dystopia – one where online wellness scams and get-rich-quick schemes had formed an unholy alliance to convince me that a 30-second “vagus nerve reset” could not only improve my health, but also – somehow – make me a billionaire.

Now, every time I open any social media app, I am flooded with videos of beautiful people talking to camera about how I can “reset my nervous system” in just a few minutes. Am I burnt out, they ask. Stressed? Tired? Unproductive?

In exchange for my money and engagement, they promise to fix all of these symptoms by teaching me how to “reset” my vagus nerve. These posts only make me more stressed, though, because I know these offerings are a scam. 

As someone with a long-term post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, I have received actual nervous system treatment at Khiron Clinic, a trauma recovery centre backed by world-leading experts including Bessel van der Kolk, Janina Fisher and Stephen Porges. 

Khiron specialises in stabilising and regulating the nervous system the scientific way – and so I know, from experience, that it is a slow, complex, and highly specialised process. 

Its aesthetic is not a ring-lit, beauty-filtered, heavily-edited Instagram reel. Its aesthetic is realising there is still glue in your hair from a neurofeedback session as you boil the kettle for your fourth consecutive mug of decaf tea before heading to group therapy in your pyjamas. It is not quick, and it is certainly not easy. But it works.

It certainly cannot be done in 30 seconds with the help of an influencer and it cannot be bought, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you for money. And using your trauma and your technology-dependence to do it.

I asked some experts if they’d noticed this too. They had. Sometime in the last few years, neuroscientists told me, the nervous system became a massive wellness trend online, which led to it being chronically oversimplified and underexplained – and some people are making huge profits on the back of this misinformation. 

“These days we are all subjected to the opinions of so-called experts or influencers who may or may not have the knowledge base to back up those opinions,” said Dr Navaz Habib, author of Activate Your Vagus Nerve. “It’s one thing to do that, but it’s another to create hope in people and then make money off of that hope.”

Wellness enthusiasts shilling breathing exercises as “nervous system resets” are engaging in “psychological hocus pocus,” said Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon and biomedical researcher and the author of The Great Nerve: The New Science Of The Vagus Nerve. Researchers don’t actually definitively know yet how such a reset would work in human beings, let alone how to induce one. 

The nervous system is one of the most important and complex networks in the body. It is the system of neurons that carry messages to and from the brain and spinal cord, and is therefore responsible for a broad array of movement, organ functions such as those of the gut and the lungs, and brain function. It is anchored by the vagus nerve, which makes up the longest pathway in the autonomic nervous system, serving as a communication route between the brainstem and the heart, lungs and digestive tract. 

It acts as a kind of on/off switch for the body’s “rest and digest” state. When the vagus nerve becomes dysfunctional, it can cause myriad physiological and psychological problems, including autoimmune disease, digestive issues and chronic stress. 

Many online grifters peddle the idea that if you experience chronic stress or burnout, for example, you can chalk this up to vagus nerve dysfunction – and therefore experience relief from a “vagus nerve reset”. But it’s not that simple.

Examples of wellness posts on Instagram

Vagus nerve dysfunction is not something you can self-diagnose based on feeling stressed or burnt out, Habib said. It’s a medical condition, and a complex one – it requires a battery of blood tests and medical assessments to be carried out by a trained neurologist.

Even if you do have a diagnosable problem, none of these wellness fixes are capable of treating it, Tracey said. Referring to the digital devices, often worn around the head and neck, that are pushed on social media sites as “vagus nerve stimulators”, he said there was no evidence to suggest that these were capable of doing what is claimed for them. 

“The most we can say is they can stimulate the skin close to the vagus nerve,” he said. 

The only evidence-based way to stimulate the vagus nerve at present, Tracey explained, is through surgery carried out by a trained medical professional.

And yet one retreat leader, who says she does not have any nervous system training, offers a three-day “reset retreat” for £499 which promises to teach guests how to “reset and balance your nervous system”. Another retreat, which promises to leave you restored with a steady nervous system for £1,299, is run by two people without any formal training in therapy or neuroscience.

The experts I spoke to emphasised that these people are likely to be well-meaning, but that their lack of formal training renders them unaware of potential unintended consequences of their interventions.

While these exercises cannot create a “reset”, as advertised, they can create a reaction in the nervous system which can actually be very damaging when not handled by a professional, Lucy Allen, the Clinical Lead  at Khiron Clinics, told me. Things such as breathwork and “cold plunges”, as advertised on some of these websites, can bring to the surface feelings or experiences that are difficult to process. 

“They’re working with nervous system responses but without the expertise required for that work, so things such as types of breathwork that are precursors to trauma release can trigger really strong reactions in the body, such as panic, dissociation, and flashback,” Allen explained. 

“A person needs to have a stabilised nervous system first, so they know how to regulate themselves, otherwise they’re left wide open with potential looping trauma responses that they might not be able to close, and with no professionals around to help them close it.”

Activating trauma without professional help can be particularly dangerous if these wellness leaders have not taken a full history and understand a patient’s risk profile, Allen said. 

These ethical concerns are heightened given that there is a clear financial incentive involved, experts say.  “There’s an opportunity for these people to prey on people who are really suffering,” Habib said, adding that people who are at a very low point are often the least able to discern between qualified and unqualified professionals – which makes the use of unrealistic guarantees in advertising particularly unethical.

As the misinformation rises, the actual science behind the nervous system is still emerging, Tracey said.

There have been randomised clinical trials testing the role of the vagus nerve in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and some other medical conditions, he said, but scientists are only just beginning to create an evidence base to understand the broader nervous system mechanisms.

There is evidence showing that vagus nerve stimulation – using the proper surgical intervention – reverses depression 50% of the time for people who are “totally out of options”. Another study found in 2025 that vagus nerve stimulation – again, using a surgically implanted medical device – was able to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in 100% of patients when paired with expert therapy. The study, conducted by Dr Michael Kilgard at the University of Texas, showed that all nine participants in the phase one trial experienced a significant reduction in symptoms and no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis.

“What we know now is only the tip of the iceberg,” Tracey said. “But then we have people racing ahead of the science and profiteering from that grey area.” 

This could damage the progress of the actual science, he said. “We cannot discount the harm this misinformation does to real scientific development. It took us 30 years to figure out how this works in people who are really suffering with conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.

“You can’t underestimate the impact of these influencers sowing disinformation – there’s no other way I can think to describe it – when it comes to the development of the actual science behind the nervous system.”

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is an investigative reporter and features writer at the Nerve. She is also the author of three books including The Lasting Harm, a survivor-centred, award-winning account of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.

Madonna at the 2026 Met Gala earlier this week in New York City. Photo: Kevin Mazur/MG26/Getty

As images from the Met Gala red carpet poured across people’s timelines earlier this week, it was shockingly obvious what a juddering shift has occurred in the reaction to this annual extravaganza. 

Hearts and flames, expressions of admiration and desire, were rare. Most frequent were irritation and bafflement, teetering into disgust. So many women seemed to share the view that they were watching an ostensible celebration of beauty that held a terrible ugliness in its heart.

I’m not criticising, here, the women who attend the gala. From Beyoncé to Lena Dunham to Madonna, many women who walked the red carpet have created their own art with authenticity and passion, and inspired other women to do the same. But while once upon a time their poses in front of the Met might have looked joyful, now they seem unmoored in this context where every talent, every idea, every personality, has been flattened by displays of gross excess and waste.

And this is not an aesthetic issue – although to be sure, many of the dresses we saw earlier this week were ugly and unwearable by design, and the pursuit of thinness and youth has clearly become an extreme sport in New York. 

No, this is a political and economic issue, and in order to understand it we have to talk about it in those terms. While the Met Gala has often set out to celebrate female glamour and talent, it has ended up celebrating a system which prevents so many women from flourishing.

The economic arrangements which have led us to a world of deepening poverty alongside extreme wealth are particularly harmful for women. While many commentators are keen to discuss inequality at the moment, it’s fascinating how few want to confront the sexed reality that lies at the heart of it. Let’s not forget, let’s never forget, that those who are hoarding an outsize share of the world’s wealth are almost always men. Let’s not forget, let’s never forget, that it is still women who do the bulk of unpaid and low-paid work. As shocking statistics from Oxfam tell us, 22 men have more wealth than all the women in Africa. 

And the fashion industry itself, which the Met Gala sets out to celebrate, is built on the low-paid labour of women to make the clothes and to clean up the waste it produces. As campaigner and writer Aja Barber has said: “It’s not feminist or intersectional to buy or sell clothing you don’t need from companies who exploit the women who make them.”

This ugly reality is that outsize amounts of wealth are currently being captured by a small and shrinking group of men, who are now using it to buy outsize amounts of political influence, often masked by displays of false feminism. Indeed, the kind of feminism that we meet in mainstream culture seems weirdly embarrassed about talking about structural inequality and political resistance. Instead of such grim reality, it is constantly burnishing the dream that a few women are able to move up these destructive hierarchies – and that you, if you work hard enough and long enough, could be one of them.

Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos attend the 2026 Met Gala. Photo: Kevin Mazur/MG26/Getty

Since it was Jeff Bezos’s involvement in the Met Gala that particularly triggered the disgust of so many onlookers, it’s intriguing to see how Amazon itself uses this kind of fake feminism to veil its own complicity in inequality. Everyone now recognises Bezos as an embodiment of the gross excess of our world – not only because he has that unimaginable wealth of over $200bn but because his wealth is built on shrinking the incomes of others. Across the US, the very presence of Amazon warehouses in a county has been linked to wages falling in that county, as it creates a downward pressure on remuneration and workers’ rights across the board. Through predatory pricing and undercutting competitors, Amazon squeezes out other retailers and businesses that might pay workers and producers more fairly. While Amazon states that it complies “with all applicable tax laws”, many experts have stated that it practises aggressive tax avoidance, exploiting loopholes and incentives all over the world and routing its profits through low-tax countries. Even when economies struggle, Amazon gets stronger. During the pandemic, Amazon’s stock price grew by 70% – while its workers in the US saw their wages increase by just 7%. 

And yet Amazon has learned to use the language of feminism to mask its contribution to deepening inequality. During Women’s History Month in 2023, Amazon stated “we are strong advocates for gender diversity, equal opportunities, and inclusive spaces for women to thrive and feel comfortable at Amazon and beyond” and exhorted women to “lean into fear”. Amazon lists more than a dozen initiatives for women’s equality, including Amazon Amplify, which asserts that “‘lack of confidence’ is the top blocker for women’s contribution in the workplace”.  

All these initiatives sell women a kind of feminism that we are all familiar with these days – a feminism of individualism, of exhortations to lean in, of building our confidence, giving zero fucks and moving forwards on our own. 

I believe that women are now seeing through this kind of individualist feminism. While of course it’s vital – in a world where women are still so often punished for speaking up in public – that women are confident and ambitious, loud and fearless, our feminism cannot stop at the boundaries of the individual. At a time of deepening inequality, rising conflict and authoritarianism, growing misogyny and climate emergency, the dangers that women are facing are much too great to be combated through building our confidence and ambition alone.

Protesters on the night of the 2026 Met Gala earlier this week in New York City. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty

And the reaction to the Met Gala shows that the mask of such fake feminism is slipping everywhere. As I’ve been exploring over the last few years in my new book, Feminism for a World on Fire, there is a growing recognition across the globe of the scale of resistance that is now needed if we are to turn the corner, away from this world of ever-deepening waste and inequality. 

This recognition is particularly growing among young women, who are swiftly moving towards the left politically and towards rage emotionally. They are no longer prepared to accept the blandishments of a competitive, consumerist culture that promised them empowerment but ended up condemning too many to an endless fight for survival. Some of them are turning away from politics altogether in their rage and despair, but others are working out how to build the connections between movements and among women that might lead us into a more equal future – one where we can celebrate beauty, achievement and talent without treating other women and our living planet as disposable. 

Feminism for a World on Fire is published by Virago (£25).

Natasha Walter will be speaking with Aja Barber and Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on Wednesday 13 May at Conway Hall, London WC1, 7pm-8.30pm. We have organised a generous 40% discount for Nerve readers: use code FFWOF5946 at checkout. And on Tuesday 19 May, Natasha will be at Bookhaus in Bristol. Members have been sent a code to buy tickets for £4 (please get in touch at hello@thenerve.news if you don’t have this). Normal price £7 – buy here

Photo: Samir Hussein

The O2 Arena, London, 5 May

I am not religious, but I would repent for my sins every night if it meant getting to see Rosalía’s Lux tour again. For an album sung in 13 languages, blending experimental electronic beats with bombastic orchestral arrangements and inspired by a multifaith range of saints and mystics, the show was never going to be straightforward. The classically-trained Catalan artist became a global superstar with her flamenco-reggaeton hybrids on 2022’s Motomami but her fourth release, Lux, released last year, went another way, taking a scythe to low- and high-brow artforms and yet breaking streaming records – an avant-garde anomaly in a soup of identikit pop slop. 

Live, on the London pitstop of a mammoth 2026 run, Rosalía conquers even more creative mediums over four “acts” in a jaw-dropping feat of ballet, contemporary dance, musicals, mime and comedy. She takes us to church, confession and club, to the theatre and inside the museum, across scenes that suggest some kind of bionic assistance: she dances en pointe in a tutu, does the splits, sings in a painting like the Mona Lisa and enacts a cabaret skit involving white gloved hands hovering over her washboard abs (the motivation I needed to reactivate my gym membership). We’re sort of running out of threats after the triple: this year Rosalía also made her TV acting debut in the hit series Euphoria.

The irony is, Rosalía had always dreamed of playing another, traditionally classical, London venue. During the show, she repeats a story from her 2022 tour (please forgive me, O Lord, for I have linked to the Telegraph) about her “fixation” with playing the Royal Albert Hall, only to fill the O2 instead. This time, she’s playing two sold-out shows here and has turned the venue into her own opera house. The 22-piece Heritage Orchestra faces the stage, playing from the audience at bracing volume and directed by the most exciting conductor I’ve ever seen, Cuba’s Yudania Gómez Heredia, while French dance collective (La) Horde encircle Rosalía for some elite-level choreography. English translations of the lyrics flash overhead, but are unnecessary: it’s a gig where it’s a bit embarrassing not to know any Spanish.

Photo: Samir Hussein

Rosalía’s shows have always been a spectacle: celebrating her 2018 breakthrough El Mal Querer in Madrid she wheeled a quad bike onstage and for the live version of 2022’s punchy Motomami, dancers in light-up helmets formed a human motorbike. Lux is obviously another vehicle entirely and the references come thick and fast, from her Madonna-echoing pink quilted bra to the baroque Marie Antoinette wig she wears during a Motomami medley. Angels and demons, saints and sinners and virgin/whore complexes are all present and accounted for, exploring Lux’s theme of duality. At first, it’s Swan Lake meets Night at the Museum, as a box carrying precious cargo falls open to reveal Rosalía as principal ballerina. Then the scene morphs in act two, resembling Goya’s 1798 painting El Aquelarre (The Witches’ Sabbath): she’s now a temptress leading the album’s first single, Berghain, to its full potential, with the gothic operatic overture dropping into a techno version. The party vibe continues during the “intermezzo” for ravey versions of Dios es un Stalker and Motomami’s CUUUUuuuuuute, in case anyone was worrying they wouldn’t get their steps in.

For all the showstoppers, however, some of the strongest moments are the more intimate ones where it’s just Rosalía and her 20,000 fans. Her voice is so startlingly powerful, the emotion so charged, that the arena could quite happily watch her alone at the mic for two hours. In places, she cracks jokes, ad-libs with the front row about needing to improve her English, and thanks everyone for showing up. Her acting chops are put to the test when Lola Young joins her in a confession booth to tell us about accidentally shagging an older married man. The only unnecessary breaking of the fourth wall is when Rosalía dedicates one of her more conventional songs, Sauvignon Blanc – delivered atop a grand piano, having swigged a white wine – to the “two best Brits” she knows: her manager Jonathan [Dickins, who also manages Adele] and his best mate Rob. 

Between all the Christian imagery tonight (at one point a flashing Galician incense burner swings overhead instead of a disco ball) is Rosalía’s quest for her own salvation. She likens her journey to stardom to a personal pilgrimage. “I chose this path long ago when I didn’t know what the fuck it means,” she says. “This nomadic life can be chaotic but I would choose it again and again.” It’s teeing us up for one of her biggest triumphs, Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti, a breathtaking aria that she took a year to write, then translated into Italian, and performs now in a white habit, quivering with Maria Callas levels of intensity and on the verge of tears. 

It’s like Patti Smith said in 1976 – now quoted in Rosalía’s power move La Yugular, where the punk high priestess can be heard at the end of act three saying: “Seven heavens? Big deal! I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven… One door isn’t enough, a million doors aren’t enough”. Those words have been interpreted as seeking infinite transcendence, but they’re also about the desire to continually break through new dimensions as an artist. The world is not enough – but for now, it’s Rosalia’s and we’re all just levitating in it.

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.

Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for more deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story. In May 2024, Keir Starmer received a gift of £2,485 worth of spectacles from the Labour peer Lord Alli. Nigel Farage ridiculed him at Reform’s conference. The tabloids ran with the story for weeks. Nigel Farage received £5m from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before the 2024 general election. He then decided to stand in the 2024 general election. Since then he has lobbied for deregulation of restrictions concerning cryptocurrency. Mainstream news outlets have ignored this story.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.

Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.