On This Day ... 1776 an AI-generated film, made by Darren Aronofsky. Photo: YouTube

Set your watch to Pacific Time and the long-heralded “AI dawn” has already arrived. In Hollywood, it’s now sometime around AI lunchtime, and the film industry’s great and good are busy picking sides in the coming robot wars. 

Among the enthusiastic early adopters there are Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky, who’s made an AI-generated YouTube series (it’s bad), and Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, who says he’s also “engaging”. But then, Soderbergh is such a confirmed gadget-head he once shot a movie entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus (2018’s Unsane; it’s pretty good, actually). More telling, perhaps, is the fact that even Martin “Marvel films are theme park rides” Scorsese has now suspended his usual purist stance to flog storyboarding software for the AI firm Black Forest Labs, while the A-list movie stars Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey have all either invested in AI startups, proselytised about its virtues, or both.

AI-generated feature film Hell Grind

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, this tech has become routine. It’s used for everything from de-aging Robert De Niro in The Irishman to turning Zendaya’s eyes blue in Dune, and earlier this year, two entirely AI-generated feature films premiered. Hell Grind is a 95-minute “live-action” supernatural samurai adventure produced by a San Francisco start-up, which premiered at Cannes – the town, not the prestigious film festival. Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute “docudrama” about the Iranian regime’s January 2026 crackdown on protesters, which was first screened at New York’s Tribeca film festival. Neither film would merit a five-star review in the Nerve – or even a three-star mention – but both were made entirely without the aid of human screenwriters, camera crew, designers or performers, in a matter of weeks, and for under $500,000; Dreams of Violets reportedly cost less than $2,000. Both also claim to represent the future of film-making. 

There are plenty of horrified hold-outs who reject this notion. Director Guillermo Del Toro, having clearly heeded the moral of his own recent Frankenstein movie, says he’d “rather die” than use generative AI. Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of buzzy A24 horror Backrooms, agrees, calling AI a symptom of “cultural and economic rot”. This side has the support of several venerable film institutions. Cannes – the actual film festival this time – has banned wholly AI-generated work from competition, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled earlier this year that only humans are eligible for Oscar nominations in the acting and writing categories. 

Is there a future in which this will be seen as discrimination against the likes of the world’s first AI actor, Tilly Norwood, who recently announced her upcoming feature film debut? Will we see a “#OscarsSoHuman” campaign trending on social media, just as “#OscarsSoWhite” did in 2015? 

AI actor Tilly Norwood

I reached out to Ms Norwood to see what she (it?) thinks, but since “fully interactive Tilly won’t be trialling [until] September”, I ended up speaking to her human creator, Eline van der Velden, instead. “I certainly don't feel Tilly or any other AI actors that follow are being discriminated against,” said Van der Velden, a trained actor and the founder and CEO of Particle6. “We've said from day one there are three mediums here: animation, traditional live action, and the AI medium. She belongs in that third one. Honestly, I'd love for the AI medium to eventually have its own awards categories, to highlight the human creative skill involved. That's a much bigger conversation than one Academy rule, and one I think the industry is going to have to keep having.”

Certainly, with the long view of history, much of this current controversy may seem unremarkable. We know cinema has incorporated, adapted to and benefited from a constant flow of new technologies – from sound recording to CGI effects – since the medium’s inception, which was itself rooted in technological innovation. When, in 1923, Italian film theorist Ricciotto Canudo proclaimed cinema the “the seventh art”, he was adding to a traditional list of six creative forms – architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature, and performing arts/dance – which have been practised by humans since Homer first jotted down a few lines from his favourite spoken-word poem. Incidentally, Christopher Nolan’s recent “tactile realist” blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey puts him firmly in the anti-AI camp, a position he recently confirmed by comparing the tech to “a transparent [Trojan] horse, made of glass” and praising gen Z for their “very healthy scepticism” in rejecting the satiny, poreless aesthetic of “AI slop” online. 

What Homer knew as well as Nolan is that “art" is distinguished from “slop” not according to the tools used by the creator, but by the soul of the creator and the extent to which he/she/they – but never “it” – is able to invest that soul into their work. Art is an expression of our shared humanity: the means by which we transcend apparent barriers of distance and time to create soul-to-soul connection. So while AI isn’t capable of making art, and never will be, humans are absolutely capable of making slop, and always have been.

The problem – which has been correctly identified by both AI’s proponents and its detractors – is that interesting artists aren’t currently very interested in AI. Instead, it is the capitalists who’ve taken up this tool with the most violent enthusiasm. That is, the same soulless suits who’ve long headed up movie studios and media conglomerates, making decisions in order to increase profit margins by devaluing human life. (Ironically, these are the very bean counters who really could be seamlessly replaced by a line of code, but it's always someone else’s job they’re seeking to make redundant, isn’t it?)

Our urgent task, then, is not to use AI less – a barn from which the glass horse has, in any case, already bolted – but to love real art more. And, crucially, to discern the difference. That might be particularly difficult in the cinema, where a productive tension with commercial entertainment has always existed. But I happen to believe human beings have an innate ability to know art when they see it. It is an ability which can be dulled by repeated exposure to Netflix reality shows and Donald Trump Star Wars memes, yes. But it exists in you nonetheless.

How do we join the anti-slop resistance? The answer is simple and non-violent: take your kids to art galleries, talk to your friends about books, even argue with strangers on the internet about The Odyssey, if that’s your thing. Art lives because of the human beings who live through it. No artificial intelligence can ever kill that.

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

Throughout the 2010s, performance artist Bryony Kimmings rose to fame with a string of bold, witty, candid shows exploring her own problems, from STDs (2010's Sex Idiot) to illness (2016’s A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer) and post-natal depression (2018’s I’m A Phoenix, Bitch). In recent years, she has turned to screen work, co-writing the 2019 film Last Christmas with Emma Thompson and the recent television adaptation of Liz Jensen’s eco-thriller The Rapture with Rebecca Manley, but she returned to the stage last October with Bog Witch, a climate-crisis-themed account of her experiences living off-grid in rural East Sussex. The show opened at Soho Theatre Walthamstow last October and now runs at the Traverse theatre during the Edinburgh fringe - before touring - in Kimmings’s first appearance at the festival in seven years.

NOVEL

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

(John Murray Publishers)

I loved this. It is a really funny little book about an actor who gets a job where he just has to sit through these university lectures wearing a big black bag over his head. Eventually, he stops getting paid and just lives in the bag because he is much happier like that. He wants to be passive. He wants to be female. He wants to be an object. It feels quite timely about the masculinity and the manosphere. Maybe all men should live in bags.

Oliva Colman as a fisherwoman in Wicker

FILM

Wicker 

(dir. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, 2026)

I am desperate to see this film. Olivia Colman plays a fishwife who decides she needs a man, but no one in the town will marry her, so she gets a magician to make a husband for her out of wicker instead. He is played by Alexander Skarsgård, the sexiest man on the planet. It is based on a short story by Ursula Wills-Jones, it has a brilliant cast, and it is written and directed by two women, Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Every woman I know is obsessed. I have seen a lot of stupid memes. It says a lot that so many women want a husband made from reeds.

L-r: Jason Bateman as Clark Forrest and David Harbour as Floyd Smernitch

TV

DTF St Louis 

(Sky/HBO Max)

You need to watch this immediately. It stars David Harbour, of West End Girl fame, and Jason Bateman, and it is about two married guys living in the suburbs of St Louis who go on this app called DTF (as in “Down To Fuck”) St Louis. It plays out like this unravelling murder mystery. It is really heightened, with this amazingly scant script. There is a brilliant moment in the penultimate episode when Harbour and Bateman do this weird music video that comes out of nowhere. It is also extremely funny.

The opening night of Shedinburgh. Photo: Andrew Perry

VENUE

Shedinburgh

(Edinburgh festival fringe/Young Vic, London)

Shedinburgh is a brilliant new venue at the Edinburgh fringe set up by producer Francesca Moody that is trying to operate a new model where artists are paid and supported properly to perform one-off shows and works-in-progress at the festival. It’s very pared down, with no tech and lighting. It is all about the performer and the audience. It is a joyous and intimate space. I am desperate to see Bourgeois & Maurice try out their new cabaret show there next week.

Wendy McMurdo’s Girl with Bears, 1999. All rights reserved / DACS 2026

EXHIBITION

Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror

(National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, Edinburgh)

This exhibition by the photographer and digital artist Wendy McMurdo is full of these strange, uncanny images that blur the boundary between what is real and what isn’t. Some of them are stunning. I took my kids, who are 10 and 11, and they loved it. We talked afterwards about perception. Watching my kids engage with art and talking about it with them is so beautiful.

Justin Austin as Lucky Mack and Susan Bullock as Ivona Kowalski in The Galloping Cure. Photo: Antonia Bain

OPERA

The Galloping Cure

(Edinburgh International Festival)

I’m excited about an opera, which isn’t something I’d normally say. I love opera, but it can be stuffy and stupid. This is by the composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. I was blown away by their opera Breaking the Waves; this new one is about the opioid crisis. Both of them have had family members become addicts. It’s a bit like the series Dopesick, but it is an opera, so it is gruesome and graphic, with blood and guts and shit and gorgeous music. I am in awe of someone that can write music for an orchestra. I just make up stupid songs and sing them by myself onstage.

Interview by Fergus Morgan

Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64. Tate

Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, until 25 October

If you’ve heard of Richard Dadd, it’s probably due to one of two things: a tragic biographical detail or his best-known painting. The tragedy is Dadd’s murder of his father in 1843; the picture is Tate’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), a burst of rustic fantasy painted in Bethlem psychiatric hospital after the patricide, once owned by the poet Siegfried Sassoon and later the subject of a song of the same name by Queen (refrain: “Fairy dandy tickling the fancy of his lady friend”).

A student of the Royal Academy, Dadd was fleetingly celebrated in art circles before he developed what is now widely thought to be schizophrenia. As a journal shown in the Royal Academy’s new exhibition tells us, he became “an artist still living, though long dead to the world” after the murder, confined first to Bethlem and then to Broadmoor until his death aged 68 in 1886. He was rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s (hence Freddie Mercury et al’s homage) but the Royal Academy’s survey is the first since then. 

Shown in the upstairs Sackler Galleries, it is a medium-scale exhibition, with a chronological sweep: it represents Dadd’s full career, but his output was inevitably variable due to his health and incarceration. The show’s pitch is clear: Dadd deserves a more rounded reputation, more things to remember him by. And while it is never less than fascinating, I’m not convinced Dadd emerges as more than a brilliantly talented minor artist.

Photograph of Richard Dadd by Henry Hering, c. 1857. Courtesy of Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Alex Fox (Roy Fox Fine Art Photography)

The first evidence of his outstanding technical gifts are in two paintings featuring scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After Dadd’s accomplished but modest student watercolours and oils, Puck and Titania Sleeping (both 1841) provide an astonishing jolt, reflecting a teeming, fecund imagination, made flesh with extraordinary skill. Puck, naked and pudgy, sits, with an impish grin, on a pedestal while tiny, cavorting, also naked, figures dance in a circle beneath him. Creeping leaves frame the scene, and a flower from one of their tendrils hangs directly above Puck’s head. This is the first of several visual gags – Dadd jokes, if you will – through the show. In theory, Puck is lit from behind by a crescent moon, but the flower above his head surely evokes an early gaslight lampshade or chandelier, perhaps a reference to stage lighting. Dewdrops form a glistening fringe around the flower’s edge, to emphasise the point. 

These little bubbles might be Dadd’s most abiding visual tic; they effervesce across the surface of several paintings, not least Titania Sleeping, where they form the fairy queen’s tiara. She sleeps, attended to by her nymphs, beneath a bower formed by a tumbling encrusted filigree of horn-blowing imps and ghouls. More cavorting figures complete the scene, which is framed by a painted border of gilded hanging bats. How you respond to this turbocharged whimsy will probably reflect the extent of your enjoyment of this show. For all Dadd’s technical prowess, I find it close to unbearable.

It was some relief, then, to encounter the drawings Dadd made on a trip to the eastern Mediterranean as the artist-companion of Thomas Phillips, a lawyer. Apparently, the itinerary was so punishing that Dadd barely found time to stop and sketch, but the moments he was able to put pencil to sketchbook reveal a fine and sure descriptive line, depicting landscapes, architecture, animals and people (often on the same sheet) with marvellous precision and atmosphere. 

Less stirring, indeed almost laughable today in their absurdity, are his orientalist portraits of Phillips in exoticising Turkish and Arabic dress. The problematic stereotypes continue in The Flight Out of Egypt (1849-50), a Bethlem picture, with its prominent racist caricature of a Black man – acknowledged by the curators, to their credit. Among Dadd’s most ambitious paintings, it is partly based on biblical stories, and again brims with figures and incident (and, yes, bubbles). But for all the painterly flair Dadd brings to the individual elements, the composition is awkwardly episodic, even fractured, in contrast to truly great multifigure scenes by the likes of, say, Bosch or Bruegel. 

Richard Dadd, Contradiction. Oberon and Titania, 1854-58. Oil on canvas. Private
Collection. Photo © David Parmiter

Also in Bethlem, Dadd made distinctive portraits of doctors and superintendents, including two oils with a vividness close to hallucination (it is difficult to avoid seeing his work through the prism of his illness). But it is the fantasy pictures painted there, again informed by Shakespeare, that are the main event. I will never cease to be mystified by the Victorians’ – or indeed any age’s – fascination with fairies, but Dadd does at least rid his two greatest Bethlem fantasies of the queasy, kitschy excesses of his earlier 1841 pictures. In Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-58), he captures the couple’s dispute over a “little changeling boy” that prompts an environmental collapse, which he describes in withering and greyed, if still densely abundant, flora. Every millimetre of this oval canvas is active, including near-microscopic fantasy frolics around the main scene. 

The Fairy Feller deserves its reputation as the definitive expression of Dadd’s overflowing imagination. Unlike The Flight, the clusters of figures, however isolated, seem to enhance the thronging composition. It helps that Dadd seems less focused on illustrating the source of the title – Mercutio’s Queen Mab passage in Romeo and Juliet – and more on what he called the “pure fancy” of the images in his mind. But what I admire most is Dadd’s chutzpah in making us work to see the action: the blades and inflorescences of grass faintly obscure our view, so it is as if we peer in on this scene from undergrowth, witnesses to the fantastical action.

After this predictable highpoint, the show rather pales for the last two sections. This is partly because watercolour becomes his most frequent medium, but also because of the nature of his subjects and approach, often closer to illustration than to more ambitious art. His 1864 move to Broadmoor, in open Berkshire countryside, was undoubtedly positive for his life, and he depicts the surrounding bucolic landscapes as well as remembered landscapes from earlier in his life. And while moments of brilliance and glimpses of that rich imagination do appear in his late pictures, the overall effect is subdued and calm, possibly relating to the fact that Dadd’s delusions had stabilised. So the show ends more with a whimper than a bang – perhaps reflecting circumstances that were positive for Dadd’s life, if less so for the progress of his art.

Ben Luke is an art historian, critic and broadcaster. He hosts the podcasts A brush with... and The Week in Art and is a contributing editor at the Art Newspaper

Ed Smith. Photo: Sam A Harris

It was while working as a lawyer in the 2010s that Ed Smith started to write a food blog he called Rocket & Squash. Initially he says, there was “no ambition other than providing myself with a reason/handcuff for making sure that I cooked something new and also booked in to a good restaurant every weekend”. But his hobby took off and eventually he left law, trained as a chef and switched fulltime to food. That original blog is now a successful Substack where every week Ed posts his no-fuss recipes and advice. (Back in October last year we featured his squash and sage orzo.)

He has published five books. His last one was Good Eggs, which he has followed up with Peckish – essentially 80 ways to cook a chicken, or, as he puts it, “a one-stop-shop for chick-inspo”. Chapter titles range from Low Effort through Crunchy to Saucy. The recipe Ed shares here is from the Bright and Fresh section. For those of you who’ve travelled to Laos or Thailand, or just to a local Thai restaurant, Ed points out that you might have eaten grilled chicken with a tangy dipping sauce. “It’ll likely have been called gai yang, and you’ll have loved it.” Here is Ed’s version, and as he promises: “Whenever I’m devising recipes, at the forefront of my mind is the relative toil involved, and I always question whether it’s worth it.”

Words by Jane Ferguson

Ed’s roast Thai-ish chicken thighs with a hot and sour salad

You could pair the thighs with a som tam salad, but I think the contrast of succulent and savoury thigh meat against the vibrant tomato and red pepper salad offered here is ideal.

Serves 4

Ingredients

For the chicken

• 4 garlic cloves

• Handful of coriander stems (10g), roughly chopped

• 1½ tsps white pepper

• 2 tbsps fish sauce

• 2 tsps light soy sauce

• 1 tbsp golden caster (superfine) sugar

• 1 tbsp neutral cooking oil

• 8 skinless, boneless chicken thighs (800-950g)

• 2 tsps ground turmeric

• 8 small shallots, halved

• Plain white or sticky rice, to serve

For the salad

• 2-3 fleshy tomatoes (300-400g)

• 6-8 baby sweet peppers (or 1 red Romano pepper) (130-150g)

• Finely grated zest and juice of 1 lime

• 4 tbsps fish sauce

• 1 tsp sriracha

• 2 tsps caster sugar

• Handful of coriander leaves (around 10g) (and/or Thai basil or mint)

• 2-3 tbsps crisp fried shallots 

Method

1. Put the garlic, coriander stems, white pepper, fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar and cooking oil into a food processor and blend to a paste. 

2. Put the chicken in a bowl or shallow tray, sprinkle the turmeric all over, then add the paste and rub it into the meat. Leave for between 30 mins and 24 hrs (refrigerated if longer than 1 hr).

3. Heat the oven to 240C (220C fan).

4. Arrange the chicken pieces, smooth side up, in a low-sided roasting tin or rimmed baking sheet in which they comfortably fit in one layer. Pop the shallots in any gaps and ensure all the marinade is spooned over. Roast for 30-35 mins until bronze and tender.

5. Meanwhile, cook your rice according to the packet instructions. 

6. For the salad, cut the tomatoes into chunky, angular pieces. Halve and deseed the peppers, then cut into 2cm-3cm angular pieces. Combine the lime zest and juice, fish sauce, sriracha and sugar with 2 tbsps water in a bowl. Add the tomatoes and peppers, mix and set aside.

7. Just before serving, toss the herbs through the salad. Spread over a wide platter and sprinkle over the crisp shallots. Serve alongside the chicken and rice.

Also consider

Cooking the thighs in a griddle pan or (better still) on a barbecue. The marinade works well on skin-on, bone-in thighs, too, and whole legs.

Peckish by Ed Smith is published by Quadrille, £22. Click here to buy at a discount from the Nerve Bookshop 

Photography by Sam A Harris

Hi Nerve readers,

I'm Brenna. I've just joined the Nerve as a junior reporter and am bringing you our regular Tuesday culture hotlist (read it here), including a luminous coming-of-age film and a Clacton-set reality show, and two reports about the real-world impact – or not – of artificial intelligence. 

The first is a fascinating piece by our tech columnist Cory Doctorow about a report that says AI – “the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society” – has pretty much zero discernible benefit to the businesses that champion it. He describes a situation in which bosses simply lie about AI’s effects, essentially because they said it would transform their business, and it’s too commercially dangerous to admit otherwise. 

My first Nerve assignment showed a different angle on the technology. On Friday, communities secretary Angela Rayner gave the green light to a controversial new data centre in east London, overturning Tower Hamlets council’s refusal. Residents say a site that could have delivered desperately needed homes will instead become what one local resident called "a big metal box" employing around 15 people to help power high-frequency trading in the City of London.

The timing of the announcement came as a surprise, and I headed straight down to the Truman Brewery site – two minutes from Brick Lane’s cafes, curry houses and independent shops – to see what it actually means for the people who live and work there. The first thing I noticed wasn't the site itself but the low drone of the rooftop cooling units from an existing data centre next door: the sound of heat being pulled out of thousands of servers and pushed back into the air.

Plans for the new data centre at the Truman Brewery site, Brick Lane

If the newly approved data centre is built – just metres away – residents say there'll soon be another one just like it. I met Jamal Khalique, co-owner of Taj Stores, believed to be England's oldest Bangladeshi grocery shop, who said he thinks that many people still don't know what's been approved. "The majority of local residents don't even know about this data centre, and that's kind of alarming, isn't it? They want to do it hush-hush ... They need to make sure everyone is aware of it instead of doing it in a sneaky way."

The five-storey building will sit on Grey Eagle Street as part of the wider Truman Brewery redevelopment. It will be air-cooled, drawing around 5.2 megawatts of power, with diesel backup generators tested once a month.

Jonathan Moberly, who has lived in the area for 30 years, says the building won't be serving Brick Lane. "Apparently it's for high-frequency traders. They like to keep their computers as close as possible to the trading floors in the City. The benefit is for that ... It doesn't even benefit us." You can watch my video report below – and also please do check out our film with Caroline Lucas about her excellent/terrifying podcast covering the security threats coming the UK’s way due to climate change, which she wrote about last week.

Instagram post

Cory’s piece follows below in full; tickets are still available here for his talk in Brighton with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on 8 September (members get 20% off; email us if you haven’t been sent the code). Please do take a second to click on our Proton Mail ad at the end of the newsletter to help us earn some money towards our journalism.

We’ll see you again on Friday!

Brenna

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our tech columnist

Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.

But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need for nations to create "sovereign AI", no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI". If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact.)

The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.

Maybe.

(They're pretty sure.)

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). For a year and a half he has been talking to hundreds of executives – and, more importantly, their subordinates – about what, if anything, AI is doing for their businesses. The "head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm told him that his job was "totally fraudulent" – but that it was "the only promotion pathway remaining" at the organisation.

Suresh has set his findings out in an essay – "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking" – that is a diagnosis of mass corporate delusion.

Its central claim:

“We’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.”

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500-plus-employee businesses he studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI". Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.

This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.

Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively". Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer-service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural-sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

He says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organisation "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT".

This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centred strategy for a $2bn-a-year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life”.

Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership". But many other people (especially non-technical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything". As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer.

The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff". But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.

As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.

Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards".

I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?

I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral or lethal.

The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.

Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput.

An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realise a gigantic saving, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.

That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximisation" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI". When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI".

As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does" but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."

Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His new book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Farhan Hasnat as Ish, Yahya Kitana as Maram. Photo: Lara Cornell / Primal Pictures

This week’s hotlist

Whether you are staying in or going out, there’s a cultural recommendation for you. At the cinema, there’s the indie film Ish – a hauntingly beautiful coming-of-age drama set in Luton – and the big-budget Spider-Man: Brand New Day, “a comic-book movie that understands the rich character history,” according to critic Hanna Flint. Or, if you’re home, there’s the Booker-longlisted new novel by M John Harrison and Nick Hakim’s ghostly new album to try. Read the full list here.

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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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Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.

But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need for nations to create "sovereign AI", no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI". If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact.)

The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.

Maybe.

(They're pretty sure.)

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). For a year and a half he has been talking to hundreds of executives — and, more importantly, their subordinates — about what, if anything, AI is doing for their businesses. The "head of AI" at a billion-dollar firm told him that his job was "totally fraudulent" – but that it was "the only promotion pathway remaining" at the organisation.

Suresh has set his findings out in an essay – "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking" – that is a diagnosis of mass corporate delusion.

Its central claim:

“We’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.”

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Suresh describes this as a literal religious mania. In the 500-plus-employee businesses he studied, the only people who were promoted – or even spared from being fired – were people who professed "religious declarations of faith" about "the transformative power of AI". Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.

This has created a situation in which everyone – "boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants" – has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he's seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.

Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively". Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer-service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural-sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

He says he frequently encounters people who reflexively utter the AI catechism: "AI is changing everything." But when he presses these people for details, they admit that their organisation "does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT".

This shear ("AI is changing everything"/"Well, OK, we're not using AI for anything") is so extreme that Suresh once met an exec who confessed to crafting an AI-centred strategy for a $2bn-a-year business, even though that exec "had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life”.

Some people have privately admitted to Suresh that they've embraced AI in order to earn a career-boosting corporate reputation for "thought leadership". But many other people (especially non-technical people) sincerely believe that AI is about to "change everything". As Suresh says, if you're in business with a liar, you might be able to reason with them in private – but you can't reason with a true believer.

The true believers are in charge. Suresh points out that it would be very weird for the CEO of an engineering firm or a hospital to mandate "specific procedures or building techniques without explicit agreement from the professionals on staff". But when it comes to AI, business leaders will confidently demand that the skilled professionals who perform the business's core functions use AI, even if those professionals don't think it will help.

As an aside: I remember the dotcom era, when the business press was full of articles about the conflict between CEOs and a new workforce that demanded the right to use the web on the job. Today, the business press is full of articles about the conflict between the workforce and CEOs who demand that they use AI.

Suresh describes workers who feel they have to "AI wash" their work: "They just do the work, the same way they have for decades, and say Claude did it." To add verisimilitude to this sham, they write circular processes in which one chatbot prompts another, and then the process repeats itself in reverse, for the sole purpose of consuming AI tokens to score a high rank on corporate "token leaderboards".

I want to reflect a little on two questions that Suresh's essay raises but doesn't answer. The first is why? Why are people in power such easy converts to this religious mania?

I have my own theory. The most important discomfort that powerful people experience is having ego-shattering conflicts with subordinates who know how to do things they do not know how to do. The fact that you're "in charge" is hard to reconcile with the fact that the people you're nominally in charge of tell you that all your ideas are impossible, illegal, immoral or lethal.

The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.

Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput.

An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realise a gigantic saving, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.

That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximisation" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI". When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI".

As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does" but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to."

Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage.

Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His new book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. He will be appearing  in conversation with the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr at Brighton Dome on 8 September; tickets are available here

Farhan Hasnat as Ish, Yahya Kitana as Maram. Photo: Lara Cornell / Primal Pictures

FILM

Ish 

(15, 89 mins, in cinemas)

This new film by director, composer and moving image artist Imran Perretta may be one of the best you'll see all year. Co-written by Perretta and Enda Walsh, it follows a group of young teenagers from the Middle Eastern and South Asian community in Luton. It’s a hauntingly beautiful and poetic tale of coming of age, loss of innocence and friendship, as the boys try to navigate their identities as Israel ravages its genocide in Gaza and as British police ramp up stop-and-search efforts. The lead characters, best friends Ish and Maram – played by two real-life friends from Luton, Farhan Hasnat and Yahya Kitani, with no previous acting experience – deliver an unforgettably authentic performance, set against a harrowing, sometimes otherworldly and always dazzling score written by Perretta. The film will make you laugh a lot and cry a lot. You'll never forget it. Also worth checking out is the director’s The Destructors, a 23-minute film now playing at Tate Britain (free entry). 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

NOVEL

The End of Everything by M John Harrison 

(Serpent’s Tail)

This book perturbs for all the right reasons. It fits the genre-fiction bill for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi book while also conducting a profound, non-prescriptive meditation on the present day. Announced last week on the Booker prize longlist, it is set in a liminal, achingly familiar setting, beginning with an “artefact” collector named Phillip whose journey begins when he pulls something new out of the water. The writing is stirring and unlikely, in a kind of adult Patrick Ness way. It is our London, but not really; it is about unfettered technological growth, but not quite about that. Those topics would seem almost limiting to what Harrison is really asking: what are we trying to understand? And who do we become if we don’t?

Anandita Abraham, writer

(L-R) Honey, Ruby-Anne, Trewley, Tina and Pearlygirl in Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives. Photo: Channel 4 / Optomen

TV

Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives 

(Channel 4)

National-treasure-in-waiting Trewley Precious is an online influencer with almost a million TikTok followers. This Channel 4 documentary follows her efforts to build on that success and “start an empire”, but while still upholding the strong traditions of the Traveller community. She’s smart, gobby and funny, cheerily describing her siblings (Honey, Ruby-Anne, Pearlygirl and Jamie) and mum Tina as “if the Kardashians were fat and on benefits!” Her sisters now have families of their own but Trewley doesn’t want to go down that route yet, determined to use her voice to discuss alternative opportunities for Traveller women. The show also focuses on how the shattered family is rebuilding itself after beloved dad Sid died three years ago.

Set on a neglected estate in Clacton, the lack of funding seen in Nigel Farage’s constituency comes to the fore. Ruby-Anne points out to friend Dee: “We’re pigeons and they’re eagles and no one that’s meant to care, does care.” And it’s because of this that Trewley wants to be able to give back to her family and community. You can’t help but cheer her on. It could have been exploitative, but with Trewley clearly in control, instead it’s poignant, big-hearted and full of kindness.

Lynsey Irvine, Nerve co-founder and creative director

Nick Hakim. Photo: Jack McKain

ALBUM

Nick Hakim – I Can See

(Earseed)

When Nick Hakim released his third album, 2022’s Cometa, it was rarely out of my earbuds. Sexy, sensual, a little cringe – it depicted new love in all its gauzy sweetness. In the years since, he’s worked with artists as varied as Miley Cyrus (big pop), Lil Yachty (offbeat rap) and Beth Orton (on her Americana-y 2026 album), ended a record deal and a relationship, and returned at the end of July with I Can See. Gauze firmly lifted, the American artist has created a ghostly and watery world of soulful boom-bap folk that sounds like it’s rising up from a shipwreck towards the shard of sunlight on the surface. The production is what really sparkles here: woozy, sticky, ethereal and brilliantly weird, echoing the title of one track, Soft Wet Clay. These are songs about becoming unstuck and reshaping yourself. The pitched-up falsetto style of vocals could well be a Marmite moment but if you let that go, this is an intricate, intimate listen that you can get lost in for days.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

Tom Holland as Spider-Man.

FILM

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

(12A, 145 mins, in cinemas now)

If the last three Spider-Man films (and his various outings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) followed Tom Holland maturing into superhero life, then Brand New Day is his melancholy arrival into adulthood. Alone, with the world not knowing who Peter Parker is, due to a world-saving spell cast in No Way Home, he's navigating life without his late Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and true love MJ (Zendaya). So he throws himself into his crime-fighting alter ego to combat that loneliness.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton grounds Spidey in a street-level story with indie film resonance that captures the humour, charm, sadness and earnestness of the New York hero. It offers blockbuster displays of Spider-Man's web-slinging powers, with homages to the various comic-book covers and panels he emerged from, plus odd-couple team-ups with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) to entertaining effect. This isn't just another superhero sequel, but a comic-book movie that understands the rich character history and the trials and tribulations inherent to the world Peter Parker lives in. 

Hanna Flint, author and critic

Samois at San Francisco Pride, 1980. Photo: Del LaGrace Volcano

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sensual / Mutual 

(Auto Italia, London E2, until 25 October)

This politically charged and deeply personal exhibition by pioneering American artist Del LaGrace Volcano – their first major solo show in the UK – brings together previously unseen, largely black-and-white photographs of queer communities in San Francisco and Santa Fe from the 1970s and 80s. 

Distinctive and tender, the power of Volcano’s work arguably lies in its authenticity; the artist depicts the world they were part of. Scenes of protest, pleasure, self-creation and survival capture extraordinary moments of collective care, powerfully relevant to the present day. The images celebrate imagination and fluidity, resisting conventional representations of gender and sexuality. In Kevin & Alan, Goodman Building (1980), an intimate embrace is full of warmth, reflecting life inside an artist-run hotel on rent strike. Mandy, Beth & Estelle, ARF (1985) pictures women gathered on sunlit rocks by natural pools, a joyful vision of belonging and freedom. A sister exhibition, Love Bites Back, will be presented at Edinburgh Art Festival 2026 (14-30 August).

Meg Molloy, writer and founder of Working Arts Club

BOOKING NOW

EVENT
Inside Out: Echoes
(Photographers Gallery, London W1, Saturday 8 August, 1-5pm)

To coincide with its major exhibition Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now the gallery will hold a free outdoor music event this Saturday, hosted by RIEKO and featuring Japanese musicians alongside films by Umi Ishihara. Sign up here.

THEATRE
Supernova 
(Pitlochry Festival theatre, 24 July-21 August 2027)

The theatre’s new artistic director, Alan Cumming, stars alongside Ewan McGregor in the world premiere of the stage adaptation of Harry Macqueen’s hit film.

FESTIVAL
Rock N Roll Circus 
(Don Valley Bowl, Sheffield, 27-30 August)

A mix of music and circus, with headline acts including the Kooks, the Streets and Wunderhorse.

FILM
Claude Chabrol – Elements of Crime 
(BFI, London SE1, 1 September-6 October)

Tickets go on general sale on Thursday for a season celebrating the New Wave director dubbed the “French Hitchcock”.

CLOSING SOON

Tracey Emin: A Second Life
(Tate Modern, London SE1, until 31 August)

Paintings, textiles, videos… that bed! Forty years of work from the former YBA, now Dame.

Evening all,

It’s Carole here. Normally, this time of year would be “silly season”. Parliament has knocked off, the MPs are on holiday and the papers would have some stories about lost dogs and the usual “washout” British summer.

Instead, France and Spain are literally on fire and Nigel Farage – and Reform’s finances – are being roasted daily across multiple news outlets in a way that we haven’t seen for a decade. It’s rich pickings for a must-read from our columnist Stewart Lee, who masterfully dissects the “row” about Zack Polanski’s refusal to apologise to Farage. And I’ve written a news story about Britain’s newest favourite convicted money launderer: Reform donor and close friend to Nigel Farage, George Cottrell. 

That relationship is now – finally – under the spotlight. And my piece is a straight news story because I wanted to reveal some new pieces of evidence that have come to light. You may have read or at least heard about this summer’s bestseller London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. That tells the true story of a British schoolboy who ends up dead after impersonating a Russian oligarch’s son. 

There’s some strange echoes here with George Cottrell, and in my piece I delve into allegations of his friendship with another Russian oligarch’s son: Arkadiy Abramovich, son of Roman Abramovich. And I include more allegations about what he was up to in the Brexit years (spoiler alert: it involves “suitcases of cash”). 

This week, I also interviewed the wonderful Amy Goodman, co-founder and main host of Democracy Now!, an independent US news show that recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. She’s also the star of a brilliant new documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, that we’ll be screening with her and the film’s directors on 12 August. 

Do read the interview to hear her thoughts on why independent journalism matters now more than ever. She was an inspiration to us in setting up the Nerve and it’s a far-fetched dream that we’ll be around in 30 years … but you have to start somewhere. 

Now here’s the team to provide the links to today’s stories: 

(L-R) Arkadiy Abramovich, Roman Abramovich and George Cottrell

The Abramovich connection

In recent weeks, reports have been growing that George Cottrell – Reform funder, convicted money launderer and close ally of Nigel Farage – had been a friend of Roman Abramovich’s son Arkadiy. Now a new source who knew Cottrell as a teenager alleges that not only were Arkadiy and Cottrell close, but that Cottrell used to work for Arkadiy’s father – the now-sanctioned, pro-Putin, oligarch Roman Abramovich. Read Carole’s report here.

Stewart Lee on the Farage-Polanski row

“Like a man accidentally photocopying his testicles and then somehow pressing a magic button that sends the image to the entire workforce,” writes Stewart in his column, “Zack Polanski can’t seem to help himself from posting exactly the wrong thing.” When the Green party leader inadvertently shared an image of a protester’s supposedly threatening T-shirt, it allowed a beleaguered Farage to create days of distraction about his security. It’s a good thing there isn’t anything else to worry about, says Stewart, such as the worsening climate crisis and, you know, “our descent into the inevitable inferno of white-hot death”. Read his column here.

Journalist Amy Goodman. Photo: courtesy Right Livelihood/Wolfgang Schmidt

‘We go where the silence is’: investigative journalist Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman, co-founder and host of Democracy Now!, the New York-based independent online news show has spent three decades reporting from the frontlines. Now she’s the subject of a new documentary, Steal This Story, Please! “I consider an exclusive a failure if we're the only ones telling the story,” she tells Carole Cadwalladr. Read the interview here.

Courttia Newland. Photo: David Levenson/Getty

The Recommender: novelist Courttia Newland

Courttia Newland is an award-winning novelist who co-wrote two of the films, including Lovers Rock, in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series. To mark the publication of his book of essays, The Art of Opposition, he picks his cultural highlights, including an African movie – “the most beautiful film I think I’ve ever seen in my life” – a timely book about the climate crisis from a Black perspective and a classic novel he says is “a masterclass in storytelling”. Read his tips here.

Phelim McDermott, left, in Tao of Glass. Photo: Johan Persson

Review of the Week: Tao of Glass at Soho Place

“Tao of Glass is partly the autobiography of a fan who happens to be an exceptional storyteller…” writes Nerve theatre critic Dorian Lynskey of the latest one-of-a-kind production from writer, director and performer Phelim McDermott, created in tribute to the composer Philip Glass. Inspired by a dream, this West End premiere features performance, puppetry and compositions by Glass, fused together by the man who most recently won an Olivier for bringing Studio Ghibli’s classic My Neighbour Totoro to the stage. Does Tao of Glass match up? Read Dorian’s review to find out.

Photo: Yuki Sugiura

The Weekend Dish: Ella Risbridger’s herby mango salad

Ella has been described as “the most talented food writer of her generation and her recently published Kitchen Book has been hailed as a “modern classic” and “utter magic”. She shares a recipe that is perfect for these hot summer days: “zero cooking, one hundred refreshing”. Get the details here. 

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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

George Cottrell, the convicted money launderer whose donations to Reform are now the subject of a police investigation, previously worked for Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch close to Putin, a Nerve investigation can reveal.

Separately, members of Cottrell’s family have claimed that he would frequently appear with “suitcases of cash”. The purpose of the cash was unclear, they said. Cottrell, a close friend and ally of Nigel Farage for more than a decade, was at the time Ukip’s main fundraiser and worked with Farage on the Brexit campaign.

The allegations – denied by Cottrell’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck – add another layer of intrigue to the story of the Reform funder, who began working with Farage when still in his early 20s. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the National Crime Agency has now opened an investigation into donations he and his mother made to Reform and Richard Tice’s Britain Means Business. 

George Cottrell, the convicted money launderer whose donations to Reform are now the subject of a police investigation, previously worked for Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian oligarch close to Putin, a Nerve investigation can reveal. 

Two weeks ago, the Nerve published an article about how Cottrell has operated in plain sight at the top of UK politics for a decade. That article included a member of Cottrell’s family revealing that Cottrell had been a close friend of Roman Abramovich’s son, Arkadiy Abramovich. A week later, Byline Times published a lengthy article about Cottrell’s business dealings and quoted a different source who made the same claim. 

Cottrell’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, in correspondence with the outlet, denied the claim. 

But now a new source has come forward who knew Cottrell as a teenager – when, he says, there was no secret of Cottrell’s friendship with Abramovich’s son. On the contrary, the source says, it was something he boasted about. He paints a picture of Cottrell as a reckless “risk taker” whose taste for the high life was nurtured, in part, through his friendship with Arkadiy. 

That friendship appears to have involved visits to Abramovich’s home, visits to Kensington casinos and an early entrée to the world of complex offshore financial deals. The former friend alleges that Cottrell worked directly for Roman Abramovich, including “signing contracts on his behalf”. 

This was before the dramatic events of 2016, when federal agents arrested Cottrell while he was travelling with Nigel Farage in America, on the campaign trail for Donald Trump. 

Cottrell subsequently pleaded guilty to one charge – wire fraud – and admitted to advertising crypto money laundering services on the dark web. He was sentenced to eight months in prison. On his release, he told a journalist that he’d learned as a teenager “about the murky and complicated world of ‘shadow banking’, secret offshore accounts and sophisticated financial structures”.

But, even after a series of investigative reports in the Sunday Times and elsewhere, the origins of George Cottrell’s crypto career remain obscure. 

Members of Cottrell’s family have told the Nerve that they didn’t know what to make of his activities at the time. He was a gambler, visiting casinos and bookmakers and returning with what they described as “suitcases of cash”. 

Cottrell, through Carter-Ruck, dismissed the allegations as “wild exaggeration” and said he denied them “in the strongest possible terms”.

During this period, Cottrell was working for Ukip as its main fundraiser, and after his release from prison, he went on to become “acting treasurer” for the Brexit party. In our piece two weeks ago, we published emails from Cottrell to a potential donor in 2019, when he was apparently the main point of contact for the Brexit party’s financial transactions. 

But the Nerve has now learned more about Cottrell’s activities as a teenager. His friend describes how he appeared to have been drawn into a world that seemed miles away from the relatively modest home where he lived with his mother in the Worcestershire countryside. 

“I knew already that he was friends with Abramovich's son, and he would sort of be talking about this. And I just remember quite distinctly, he explained what he was doing, on behalf of the dad. He showed me how he was signing stuff on his behalf.” 

The friend expressed his alarm that Cottrell would become some sort of “fall guy”. Cottrell didn’t seem to care about any potential consequences. 

Expelled at 16 from Malvern College for gambling, he nonetheless didn’t seem short of cash. Staying with relatives in South Kensington and hanging out with Arkadiy Abramovich, he boasted about living the London high life with an international elite. 

Arkadiy had undertaken an internship at the Russian bank VTB, before opening his own fund, ARA Capital, a private investment vehicle. Back in 2017, the Daily Beast noted that on Cottrell’s LinkedIn page he expressed an interest in VTB Bank as well as Moldindconbank, an obscure Moldovan bank involved in the “Russian laundromat”.

To his friends at the time, it was never clear how much of Cottrell’s claims were “bullshit”. But “at the same time, he’d have casino receipts for £15,000”. 

Claire Gill, Cottrell’s lawyer at Carter-Ruck, said the allegations were “rumour” with “no direct evidence”. She categorically denied Cottrell had had any relationship with Arkadiy Abramovich or had conducted financial transactions on his father’s behalf. 

Gill declined to answer a question about her legal representation of both Nigel Farage and George Cottrell after being told that the Nerve had seen letters from her and her colleague, Dominic Garner, sent on behalf of both Cottrell and Farage. She didn’t respond to questions about whether Carter-Ruck still represented both men, or what conflict checks had been undertaken before taking them on as clients. 

In the same way as one would probably keep a small child away from a raging blast furnace with teddy bears and Lego ™ ® and sweets stuck all round it, the Green party should probably keep Zack Polanski away from social media. Like a man in an office stationery cupboard accidentally photocopying his testicles and then somehow pressing a magic button that sends the image to the entire workforce, Zack can’t seem to help himself from posting exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment.  Dad! I think I got it wrong again!

To be fair though, the troublesome image that Polanski inadvertently disseminated this week, unlike my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly’s brutal social media request that an assembled mob of excitable flag-wavers burn down a migrants’ hotel and kill the migrants in it, was clearly a joke.  Maybe if Polanski’s post had been less like a joke and more like a direct call to burn foreign babies to death, he, like Lucy Connolly, could have got a gig, to rapturous applause, as the free-speech star turn at the Reform conference.

There now follows a description of the image Polanski posted, along with an explanation of how the joke in the image works. And remember I know about jokes, because I am either the world’s best (the Times), or second-best (the Daily Telegraph), living standup comedian, depending on which rightwing journal of record you believe. Or, if you prefer, I am, according to Tony Parsons in the Sun, “a pot-bellied Bernard Manning for snowflakes”. Ah! Those bloody snowflakes! With their anti-racist tofu workshops! And their non-binary hessian muesli yurts!! And their pot-bellied Bernard Mannings!!!

Apparently Mark Twain said “analysing humour is a bit like dissecting a frog: you learn how it works but you end up with a dead frog”.  But here goes. Last Sunday, Polanski shared with his 713,103 Instagram followers a post of a collection of images of attendees at a Green party event. Polanski hadn’t noticed that one of them was wearing a T-shirt sporting the words “We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel”, which most people of my generation would recognise as the title of the superb 1979 XTC hit single in which the sneering Swindon punks take a middle-class family to task for hoping their son gets a good job on a reasonable salary, perhaps with British Steel (stee-ole stee-ole stee-o-o-o-o-ole). I hope Nigel eventually worked in AI instead, perhaps for Palantir, as 47 years on things aren’t looking so good for British Steel, which was recently renationalised to avoid insolvency despite Nigel’s best efforts.

However, for comic effect, the T-shirt Polanski inadvertently posted a photo of has an image of a guillotine attached, the implication being that the “plans” being “made” for “Nigel” involve his public execution. And this is where the humour, such as it is, arises, as a good joke can rely on the listener (or reader of a T-shirt in this case) making connections for themselves between apparently unrelated concepts that add up to an extra idea not explicitly stated by the initial ideas themselves in isolation. Is the frog dead yet? I’m dissecting it as delicately as possible.

Which Nigel would one be talking about if a Green party event attendee were to suggest he should be executed? Nigel Havers? Nigel Slater? No. Probably Nigel Farage. Would it be funny to go out in a T-shirt saying “Execute Nigel Farage”? No. Is it funny to imply that one should execute Nigel Farage, cheekily, by a juxtaposition of apparently unrelated concepts? Arguably yes, especially as the listener/reader has the fun of making that unspoken connection themselves, probably involuntarily, using knowledge they didn’t even know they had. Croak!

And the T-shirt, by only suggesting its message rather than stating it explicitly, carries with it, and its observer, the self-aware understanding that it is crossing a line. It’s the T-shirt-humour equivalent of the music-hall comedian genius Max Miller checking both sides of the stage for censorious officials before confidentially sharing an obscene observation he knew was inappropriate.  Can I have a jiffy bag for this dead frog please?

The suggestion created by the T-shirt’s juxtaposition of the XTC lyric and the guillotine image is perhaps funny in a similar way to a T-shirt produced in 1984 by the Federation of Conservative Students, then headed by future BBC non-executive board director, future director of communications for Theresa May, and future sole owner of the discredited news provider Jewish Chronicle Media, Robbie Gibb. The T-shirt Gibb’s outfit produced stated simply: “Hang Nelson Mandela.” Laugh? I nearly spent 21 years in captivity, shoes too small to fit my feet, my body abused but my mind still free! This frog is starting to stink!

Now, if the statement “Hang Nelson Mandela” seems a bit unfunny and “on the nose”, you have to remember that Coventry ska boom survivors the Special AKA’s consciousness-raising afro-pop earworm Free Nelson Mandela had just spent a lengthy period in the British Top 40, back when that still meant something, and would have been front and centre in the collective subconscious. Young people today would call it a “meme”, but it wasn’t. It was a statement which had value in itself. I don’t know! Put the frog in the waste disposal!

Anyway, the phrase Robbie Gibb’s gang let out into the world was a brutal subversion of the record’s easily recognised titular sentiment, albeit one which history and the growing acceptance of the idea that apartheid was fundamentally wrong has rendered extremely ill-judged. It’s rightwing humour, joyless and essentially unpleasant as usual, admittedly, but the joke didn’t come from nowhere.  And neither does the We’re Only Making Plans for Nigel juxtaposition. It can’t have jammed it. Press the button again.

Nigel Farage wanted the police to investigate Polanski for supposedly calling for his murder, though they eventually declined to do so, and Polanski declined to apologise to Farage. To be clear, it is necessary for Farage to emphasise any potential threats to his safety because he initially justified taking that £5m gift from a cryptobillionaire on the grounds that the money was for his personal security.  In the end, he declared on LBC that it wasn’t for that, and said he could spend the money on Ferraris if he wished. He was talking to the LBC talk-tagnut Nick Ferrari at the time, so maybe that’s why he thought of spending the money on Ferraris.  It’s lucky Farage wasn’t talking to the 1930s dance band leader Charlie Kunz instead, or his preferred purchases may have looked tasteless, especially given his support for the alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate, whom Farage describes as an “important voice for men”. 

(I do appreciate I have done a version of this joke twice now, but I just remembered that Charlie Kunz exists, which is a funnier name than the names I chose before, so I reserve the right to have another go at it. I might do it again next week if I can find someone with an even funnier surname than Kunz.)

But is Zack Polanski right not to apologise to Nigel Farage for sharing a picture of a T-shirt he didn’t know was in the photo he disseminated, especially when Farage has called explicitly for “pure cold rage” against ethnic minorities, and for the knife to be taken to Whitehall civil servants, and claimed that he would pick up a rifle and don combat gear should Brexit not have gone through? And given that his chief political rival is a bin from space. You should have put the lid on. Now there’s shredded frog all over the kitchen window.

And, moreover, is Polanski right not to apologise to the grifting and insincere bin challenger Nigel Farage, given that Nigel Farage’s own party’s conference platformed and celebrated and honoured my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly, who called for migrants to be burned to death in their beds? Maybe if Connolly had just worn a T-shirt saying “Come Home to a Real Fire” with a picture of a disused Holiday Inn going up in flames and children with third-degree burns fleeing the righteous inferno, her demands might at least have been able to be considered a joke, rather than a call to action. Wipe the window down, and then put the cloth, and the frog fragments, in the brown garden waste bin.

Farage’s criticisms of Polanski are hypocrisy in the extreme, and I think Nigel Farage knows he is absolutely full of shit here. But at this moment, truth and consistency aren’t important to Farage. What is important is that Farage mobilises any smokescreen of manufactured controversy that will help him avoid being beaten in his own Clacton byelection by a bin from space that isn’t even a real bin from space, but is in fact a man pretending to be a bin from space.

Nonetheless, Polanski, like all under-16s and all over-60s, needs to get off the internet or nominate a less trigger-happy successor. The Cairngorms are on fire. Arthur’s Seat just burned in the middle of Edinburgh, a British capital city. A quarter of a million French people, just over that narrow stretch of Channel that one day might act as a useful firebreak, are displaced by an inferno near Bordeaux. Our capital city is running out of water. And, as the Nerve reports this week, it would appear our own government are actively suppressing terrifying reports from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ now disbanded “Futures Team”, which detail the catastrophic danger to national security, by the end of this decade, caused by the imminent collapse of all ecosystems. Hot enough for ya? I hope you like your oysters boiled!

Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is standing down any Tory MPs that support the net zero commitments that were actually in the last Conservative manifesto; Andy “Burn Them” Burnham threatens to reopen North Sea oil drilling for short-term political gain in a world that is literally going up in flames due, undeniably now surely, to fossil fuels; and the tech-bro billionaires hoover up as much wealth as they can while planning to download themselves into memory sticks and shoot themselves into space to inhabit yet-to-be-terraformed alien worlds, in virtual marble mansions full of AI-generated naked teenagers and compliant African American bellboys of immense dignity. 

It’s too late to save life on Earth. I think we all know that in our hearts. Think about it too much and you will weep for the children and their lost futures, and for the decades of political paralysis that lingered long after we were told the undeniable risks of ongoing fossil fuel extraction. But if we are to go down fighting with the courage and honour that defines our species at its best, and at least slow our descent into the inevitable inferno of white-hot death, we need some credible Green voices in British politics to stand up to the propaganda of oil-money-funded outfits like GB News and Reform plc, and the global evil of Donald Trump’s fossil fuel fanaticism. And it doesn’t look like Andy “Burn Them” Burnham is going to make room for those voices. The irony is, there’s no point making any plans for the ambitious young Nigels of today, as Nigel’s conscientious parents did in 1979, 47 years ago. Because in 47 years’ time, the burning world of 2073 will have precious few opportunities for young would-be executives like Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh) Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh)  Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh)  Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh)  Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh).

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 is appearing in various capacities at the Krankenhaus festival at Muncaster Castle in the Lake District, 28-30 August, which also features Sea Power, Stereolab, Charlotte Church’s End Times Pop Dungeon, Tristwch Y Fenywod, Earthball, Smote, the Fallen Women and Best Dog Competition.

And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October. 

Phelim McDermott, left, in Tao of Glass. Photo: Johan Persson

Soho Place, London W1, until 12 September

Phelim McDermott’s singular sort-of-one-man show is haunted by two absences. The first is Billy’s Wonderful Kettle, an Aladdin knock-off that the seven-year-old McDermott missed because he made himself literally sick with excitement, and which he convinced himself was an unrepeatable masterpiece. The second is a collaboration with his hero Philip Glass on a musical adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s uncanny picture book In the Night Kitchen, cut short by Sendak’s death in 2012. 

Perhaps all artists live with these maddening ghosts: the performance you never saw and the work you never made. The might-have-beens and nearly-weres. But one of this show’s many motifs is kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken things with seams of gold so that they are more beautiful than ever. From the fragments of In the Night Kitchen, and McDermott’s own life, the two men eventually made a show that is the story of its own creation. It was inspired by a dream the director had while in a flotation tank; Glass is the kind of guy to say yes to this.

Tao of Glass is partly the autobiography of a fan who happens to be an exceptional storyteller, disguising structural ingenuity as amiable meandering. McDermott, 62, opens the show sitting in the front row, waxing lyrical about seeing the likes of Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley as a teenager in Manchester. He re-enacts driving his family mad by blasting out Glass’s 1982 album Glassworks; traces his path from watching Glass operas to directing them himself through his theatre company Improbable; and explains how this show (previously staged in Manchester in 2019 and New York in 2023) came to pass. He mocks his astonishment at seeing his hero do normal-guy stuff (“Philip Glass eats sushi!”) but ultimately portrays the 89-year-old composer as a kind of humble mystic who doesn’t understand where his music comes from.

The score, performed by a quartet of violin, clarinet, piano and percussion, is characteristically meditative, with its loops and echoes and Escher-like reversals. At key points, a self-operating Steinway recreates Glass’s own playing, like a high-class player piano. The staging is just as intricately patterned, as three puppeteers conjure up magical set-pieces with humble materials (McDermott won an Olivier in 2023 for directing the RSC’s spectacular My Neighbour Totoro). In the Night Kitchen is resurrected in a few dream-like minutes of puppets and shadows against a kitchenware skyline, honouring Sendak’s vertiginous depiction of tumbling through different levels of reality. McDermott gabbles disconnected lines from all over, dressed as one of Beckett’s tramps, while the puppeteers swathe him in sticky tape and sheet-music tissue paper until he resembles the mad king of an empire of discarded things. Elsewhere, the paper coalesces into a bristling phantasm of Glass himself, communing with his piano.

Something further from Soho Place’s next production – two Hollywood stars in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – would be hard to imagine. Tao of Glass is a deeply personal, wholly original piece of work but it is not everybody’s idea of a good night out. Like the scene where he is swaddled in paper, McDermott keeps layering ideas, from ceramics and flotation tanks to the Rigveda and the Tao Te Ching, until he becomes hard to see. Three glowing concentric rings represent the therapist Arnold Mindell’s levels of existence, which McDermott previously explored in 1999’s Coma and which structure this show. These are Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence, the goal being to access them all through the total awareness of “deep democracy”.

Phelim McDermott, left, in Tao of Glass. Photo: Johan Persson

Perhaps I’m lacking some vital spiritual nutrient, but I tend to think the meaning of life is best approached at a slant. McDermott’s tragicomic anecdote about a stupidly expensive glass coffee table that was shattered beyond the reach of kintsugi is a wonderful metaphor for the limits of second chances, but whenever the specific evanesces into the spiritual it’s transcendence or bust. As McDermott lies supine for 10 minutes, simulating a coma, while music rises from the Steinway, it’s either an emotional revelation or an invitation to check your watch. Of art, he says: “No one knows where it comes from but you have to keep doing it.” OK, sure. Is that an epiphany after two and a half hours? More moving to me is a very small, simple scene in which he sits down and plays Glassworks on a portable turntable in a devotional act of listening and remembering.

Ultimately, McDermott’s audacity and conviction prevail. One idea is that the coffee table’s glass was brittle and temporary whereas the Tao flows eternally – like a river, like art, like life. Glass’s music has been a river winding through McDermott’s life, and he dramatises what it means to plunge in and out of the current at different points, re-experiencing different versions of himself. I suppose Tao of Glass, with its ecstasies and frustrations, mirrors Glass’s polarising music. It asks you to surrender to a unique artistic vision and go with the flow.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize. 

Journalist Amy Goodman. Photo: courtesy Right Livelihood/Wolfgang Schmidt

Amy Goodman is the co-founder and host of Democracy Now!, the independent online news show launched nearly 30 years ago. Now the subject of the documentary Steal This Story, Please!, Goodman has spent three decades reporting from the frontlines of wars, protests and political upheaval around the world.

Carole: The documentary is called Steal This Story, Please! Why that title, and what does it represent to you?

Amy: One of our mottos is "steal the story". I consider an exclusive a failure if we're the only ones telling the story. The point is that the voices we have on Democracy Now! – whether it's someone on the frontlines in Gaza, someone working in AI, or whoever is closest to the story – reverberate around the world.

That's why we say "steal the story, please.” Democracy Now! started 30 years ago when we didn't have the money that the big networks had. It began as a radio show, before the word "podcast" existed, a 59-minute MP3 radio programme.

We expanded into television during the week of the September 11 attacks, it was also the beginning of the internet. We secured democracynow.org, and while the major networks were paying for satellite distribution, we simply posted the programme online.

We don't bring you the typical pundits, the people who know so little about so much, explaining the world and getting it so wrong. We bring you people who are closest to the story. The idea is to have those voices shared as widely as possible.

The documentary itself wasn't my project. It was made by the Oscar-nominated film-makers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. The title also refers to what happened during our coverage of Standing Rock.

How did Standing Rock become an example of "steal the story"?

Standing Rock was an epic struggle led by Indigenous people in North Dakota against the Dakota Access pipeline [built in 2016 to transport crude from the state’s shale oil fields to a refinery].

We went there expecting to be one of many news organisations covering a historic story. Thousands of people had travelled there from around the world, yet very few journalists were reporting seriously on climate change.

We filmed security guards unleashing German Shepherds on protesters, who called themselves water protectors. One of the dogs had blood covering its nose and mouth after attacking people.

We posted the footage online, and within 24 hours it had been viewed 14m times.

President Obama happened to be in Laos at the time. During a public event, someone asked him about the footage of dogs being used against protesters. When he returned to Washington, I was told he watched the video himself. It wasn't lost on the first African American president what it meant to see dogs unleashed on protesters. After that, every network used the footage. Steal the story, please.

Amy Goodman under arrest while covering the Republican National Convention, 1 September, 2008. Photo: courtesy Rick Rowley/Democracy Now!

This really speaks to the way you look at things differently. It's a very independent ethos, but it's also very generous, because traditionally journalists are competitive and the exclusive is everything. Whereas your point is that you're platforming global voices, people who are closest to the ground, and you want to get those voices out further. Is that right?

Right. And by the way, I don't think they're a fringe minority. I don't even think they're a silent majority. Those who care about war and peace, climate change, racial and economic justice, the immigrant crackdown, LGBTQ issues, about inequality – they're not a fringe minority or a silent majority. They're the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.

Which is why we have to build a whole network of independent radio, television and online news sources around the planet. As reporters, we know no borders. We care about getting out the word of people all over the world.

Just explain, for people who aren't familiar, what Democracy Now! is. It's your flagship hour-long programme. It's international reporting on the major issues around the world. And it's also the name of the show itself, right?

It's the show. It's the daily grassroots, global, unembedded, independent, international news hour. It airs every weekday, it's online, we have a mass social media audience, because, very early on, we started online as well as on radio.

I remember asking someone at Fox who worked on the tech side: "Can you just look at our website?" He said: "Are you kidding? All the networks are looking at you."

I remember when Time magazine put something like $20m into its first website and put up a paywall. First mistake. We have no paywalls. It really didn't succeed, and we went the other way.

We were growing on radio stations, and now we're on 1,500 public radio and television stations around the world. But social media has given us a mass audience of millions because we never said "if you think we're important, you should come to us". We felt we needed to be where everyone is, whether that's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. 

What matters is that we get out the news, produced by deeply committed journalists, producers and videographers who care about fair, independent reporting. It's brought to you not by the weapons manufacturers when we cover war and peace, not by the oil, gas and coal industry when we cover climate change, not by the banks and financial institutions when we cover inequality, but by the listeners, the viewers and the readers, it really is a mass audience.

There are some wonderful scenes in the documentary from different stories you've covered over the years. One I particularly loved is where you're really annoying somebody in a White House press briefing by asking tough questions. One of the journalists says there's always a trade-off – that the tougher your questions are, the less access you're going to get.

It seems to me that you're doing the opposite of access journalism. I suppose I'd love your critique of it, because, reporting on technology companies, it often feels to me that access is the enemy of good journalism.

I call it "the access of evil", a play on the "axis of evil". It's trading truth for access. That scene in the White House briefing room was with Mike McCurry, President Clinton's spokesperson. It was five years after the massacre I survived in East Timor.

That island nation, about 300 miles north of Australia, was occupied by Indonesia from 1975. Britain armed Indonesia, and so did the United States. The US provided 90% of the weapons for the invasion in December 1975. It was one of the great genocides of the late 20th century. Indonesia killed a third of the population of East Timor. In 1991, I was there with my colleague, Allan Nairn, a journalist for the New Yorker.

The Indonesian military marched up on a peaceful procession carrying US M16s. Thousands of people were there. They opened fire, gunning people down from right to left. They killed more than 270 people, they beat me to the ground, Allan threw himself on top of me to protect me, and they took their M16s like baseball bats and slammed them against his skull until they fractured it.

We lay on the ground while they were killing people all around us. They put guns to our heads and shouted: "Are you from Australia?"

We knew what had happened in 1975, when the Indonesian military murdered a group of Australian-based journalists in Balibo. The Australian government barely protested because, years later, Australia and Indonesia divided up the oil in the Timor Gap. Oil is the source of so much pain.

As we lay there with guns to our heads and they shouted "Are you from Australia?", I shouted back: "No." We understood how important it was that they knew we were from the same country their weapons came from. They would have to pay a price for killing us that they never had to pay for killing the Timorese. They moved on.

Five years later, I was at the White House press briefing because a nationwide movement had grown up opposing US military support for Indonesia. Congress had cut off military training for Indonesia, and we understood that President Clinton was about to restore it.

So I kept asking Mike McCurry why. He said it was "in the US interest". I kept pursuing the question until he finally said "the turnip is dry", but what disturbed me even more than his refusal to answer was the tittering, the giggling, of the journalists around me.

I teach young people every day when they come to Democracy Now!, and peer pressure is a huge issue. You have to stand up for what you know is right. When journalists become too closely aligned with those in power, we stop challenging them.

It's such a powerful scene. And the scenes from East Timor feel very foundational to everything you've gone on to do, especially exposing the effects of US power around the world. I think you say in the film that for 17 years not a single US television network covered East Timor.

The day after Indonesia invaded East Timor, President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew from Jakarta, where they'd effectively given [Indonesia’s President] Suharto the green light, to meet another dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, in the Philippines. Once Suharto had the go-ahead, Indonesia invaded by land, sea and air; for the next 17 years, they wiped out a third of the population. ABC, NBC and CBS, the major broadcast networks at the time, never mentioned East Timor.

It's an incredibly shocking statistic, and then your reporting helped change that.

Well, after the massacre, when we got out, we knew the Indonesian military would deny it had happened. As we went into hiding, before catching the only plane out that day, we asked someone to take photographs of Allan and me: Allan was covered in blood.

At first they said maybe 10 people had died, then maybe 50, eventually it became clear that more than 270 people had been killed. I was later captured trying to get back into Indonesia on my way to East Timor and was jailed.

In 1999, the people of East Timor finally got to vote for their freedom in a UN-sponsored referendum. I wasn't allowed in – I was deported – but Allan did get in. As the Timorese voted for independence, Indonesia burned much of East Timor to the ground and killed another 1,000 people. For the next three years the UN administered East Timor, then, in 2002, Allan and I were both able to return.

We were there when Xanana Gusmão, who had spent years imprisoned by Indonesia, became the founding president of the Democratic Republic of East Timor. A hundred thousand people gathered outside the parliament: you could see the fireworks reflected in their tear-stained faces as he addressed them in four different languages.

They had resisted, they had won – at an unimaginably high price, a third of their population killed – but they also had a lesson to teach all of us, whether we're journalists, artists, teachers, doctors or nurses.

Every day we have to decide whether we represent the sword or the shield. People around the world often see ordinary people in countries like the US and Britain as the shield, even if they see our governments as the sword, whether that's bombing countries directly or supplying weapons to regimes that abuse human rights. Every one of us has to decide which we want to represent in the world.

Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn in East Timor in 1991 following a massacre of unarmed Timorese civilians by the Indonesian Army. Photo: courtesy of Democracy Now!

Now we're faced with what feels like a spectacle in the White House. We've seen the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and it also feels as though the corporate media, which for all its faults still looked powerful, well-funded and well-resourced, is collapsing. It feels as though these organisations are falling like skittles because they're being bought up by allies of President Trump.

Can you describe what you think is happening in the media at this moment?

First of all, President Trump calls the media "the enemy of the people." Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, most of what he says couldn't be further from the truth. Just look at the circle behind him on Inauguration Day – there were these billionaire tech bros who didn't always support him, but now they do, and they're buying up so much.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, bought the Washington Post. During his ownership they developed the motto "Democracy Dies in Darkness", which is true – but it's very dark at the Washington Post right now: they've laid off around a third of the newsroom.

Then you have the corporate media mergers, when CBS announced that Stephen Colbert's late-night show would be ending; [CBS’s parent] Paramount was trying to merge with Skydance. Trump's Federal Communications Commission approved the merger.

Trump had also sued CBS over an edited interview with Kamala Harris. It was a ludicrous lawsuit, I don't think it would have stood up in court. Instead, CBS paid him $16m. They caved. ABC paid $15m rather than fight.

It's actually a very efficient strategy. Instead of going after the weakest media organisations first, Trump goes after the strongest: when they cave, it sends a chill through the entire media.

One thing that really struck me is that you've often been criticised by people saying, "You're not a journalist, you're an activist." I've had exactly the same criticism myself. What's your answer to that?

First of all, that was a local Fox journalist saying that. The very next scene in the documentary is me climbing over a fence because journalists were being arrested during the Republican Convention in Minneapolis. I am active, that's for sure: I have to chase politicians, I have to jump over fences to get the story.

But the word "activist" is used to denigrate journalists. We certainly cover activists – people who risk their lives, and often lose their lives.

As journalists, it's absolutely critical that we go to where the silence is, that we get as close to the story as we can. That's why the highest officials try to denigrate journalists. I don't see that label as an insult.

I see the media as a huge kitchen table, like the one I grew up around, except it stretches across the globe.

Anything less than that is a disservice to the servicemen and women who can't have those debates on military bases about the decisions being made, whether they're sent to kill or be killed. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.

Where do you see America right now? Do you feel the tide is turning on Trump?

I do feel the tide is turning, and I'm inspired by the people I interview and by the people I work with. In Steal the Story, Please! you see many of those people, from Juan González, with whom I co-founded Democracy Now!, to Jeremy Scahill, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nermeen Shaikh, who co-hosts the programme with me. These are people who inspire me, and so do the people we cover.

When I was reporting from East Timor all those years ago, I was inspired by the extraordinary bravery of the people there.

Look at the journalists in Gaza: hundreds have been killed, their courage is extraordinary. We don't have the luxury of stepping back: it's too important and I do believe the tide is turning.

I think that whenever we show people the reality of what's happening on the ground, things begin to change.

Finally, Amy, what do you hope people take away from the film?

I hope people come away believing that this model of journalism is possible: that independent media isn't some idealistic dream. It can work, we've been doing it for 30 years. The film isn't really about me: it's about all the people who make Democracy Now! possible, the journalists I work with, the people we cover, and the communities that support us. I hope people leave thinking "we can do this where we live". Whether you're in the United States, the UK or anywhere else, you don't have to wait for the corporate media to change. You can build something different, you can build media that's accountable to people instead of power. That's what democracy needs.

The Nerve is supporting a screening of Steal This Story, Please! on Wednesday 12 August at Bertha DocHouse, Curzon Bloomsbury, London WC1 at 6.20pm. The film will be followed by a conversation with Amy Goodman plus co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin moderated by Carole Cadwalladr. Buy tickets here.

Courttia Newland. Photo: David Levenson/Getty

Born in west London in 1973, writer Courttia Newland started out in the music industry before publishing his debut novel, The Scholar, in 1997. His other novels include The Gospel According to Cane and A River Called Time, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Arthur C Clarke award; he has also written several plays and short story collections. In 2020, Newland co-wrote two instalments of Steve McQueen’s BBC film anthology Small Axe, including Lovers Rock, which was selected for the Cannes film festival. He has been awarded the Tayner Barbers award for science fiction writing and the Roland Rees bursary for playwriting. His latest book is The Art of Opposition (Faber, out now), a selection of essays about creating art from a place of opposition to the mainstream (to order at a discount, click here)

NON-FICTION BOOK 

Black Climates by Selina Nwulu 

A really pertinent, well-written book about the climate crisis from a Black perspective. We can’t consider the climate crisis without talking about race – the two things go hand in hand. The history of the slave trade movement meant that the climate crisis began for us a long time ago: we’re mostly impacted in places like upper Africa, the Caribbean and India. Selina is great at dissecting how this affects us, and climate anxiety. It’s a powerful, amazing book that I couldn’t have written myself – I don’t have that knowledge, but she does. Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory talks about similar themes: one example is the introduction of the mongoose to the Caribbean to control the rats. It didn’t work, but it decimated the local population of birds and animals.

This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection. Photo: Mubi

FILM

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

(dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, 2019)

I came across this by accident: I spent six weeks watching African diaspora films for research, and Mubi was doing an African season. It’s the most beautiful film I think I’ve ever seen in my life. Every scene is like an art installation. I did see a criticism in the Guardian saying: is this a film or a piece of visual art? But it’s very much a film. It has a very strong story, about a village in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Developers come from the city and tell everyone they need to leave. One woman refuses, and people try to convince her, but she poses this one-woman protest. She’s portrayed by Mary Twala, a major South African actress, who passed away aged 80 after the film – it’s her last performance. I loved what it was about. I loved the themes. I loved her acting. Everything was just beautiful: 10 out of 10.

West Ham Park

PARK

West Ham Park

I’ve just come from this park, which is a stone’s throw from where I live. I grew up in west London, down the road from Holland Park and North Kensington Gardens – I had the best of parks, but this one is comparable. You’ve got big oak trees and a little rose garden, where we sit sometimes, and we’ve had our kids’ birthday parties there practically every summer. The park is packed all the time: there’s local communities, people playing football, playing cricket, jogging. The other day I was hearing this knock-knock-knock, and my daughter told me: “It’s a woodpecker, dad.” We actually got it on video, looking for ants.

RESTAURANT

What’s on the Menu Ish?

London E3

I’m a major foodie – people come to me for recommendations. What’s on the Menu Ish? is a mainly Jamaican restaurant serving really, really good Caribbean food. Ish’s jerk is incredible. I like jerk, it’s my staple family food, we’ve had it our whole lives. But when I had Ish’s jerk, I’ve got to say I was like, this is not the same as everybody else’s. Earlier this week he won the judges’ choice award at UK Jerk Fest. They also do fish tea, which is a fish soup, and dumplings – everything’s fresh and super tasty. We ended up going there for father’s day. If anyone happens to be in the area, you should really check out Ish’s food. It’s very humble settings, but don’t let that fool you.

DJ Doc Scott

RAVE

Rupture at FOLD

London E16

Rupture have been running an event at Corsica Studios for 20 years – I couldn’t go to the last night, but they told me not to worry: they were going to do a day rave at FOLD. Lots of people say they’re into old-school drum’n’bass and jungle, but I was there when it happened – I started raving when I was 15. From the minute I walked into Rupture, I thought: “This feels like the old days.” I raved like I haven’t raved for ages. It was the middle of the day, but it felt like three o’clock in the morning. I did not hear one terrible tune the whole night. Doc Scott did an amazing closing set – legendary DJ from back in the day. Everyone was so friendly, chatting to each other, and there was just an energy in the room. I was taken back to being 16 again. If they do another one, I would seriously recommend it.

NOVEL

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

I’ve gone through a stint of reading classics I missed growing up: Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, To the Lighthouse. I’d always wanted to read The Count of Monte Cristo, so I got it out of the library. It’s super daunting – I tried to forget about how long it was, and you do get immersed into it. I think my favourite scene is when he’s in prison and nearly gives up, and then he meets the guy who’s got all the riches. But there’s so many good things in that book – I really liked the character of his fiancée. It’s an amazing story, and so intricately entwined: a masterclass in storytelling. It embedded you in the culture and politics of the time. I was in awe.

Interview by Kathryn Bromwich

The eagle-eyed among you will remember that we featured Ella Risbridger in this slot back in June when the food world was abuzz about her Kitchen Book. “Everything about this book is worth it,” notes Nigella Lawson. “Frankly, even if you never ever cook … I love it.” It is not surprising that Ella has been described as “the most talented food writer of her generation”. Her recipes are so inviting, and her style so practical, that we are treating you to second helpings with this quintessential summer salad. The loose inspiration for the dish is, she admits, her go-to Thai order of som tam, or papaya salad – “you can see just how loosely when I tell you that there is no papaya in this at all”.

The Kitchen Book is nothing if not quirky. Including such recipes as crisp soup and Kale Caesar!, it’s divided into chapters such as On the Sofa, With a Tablecloth and On the Floor. This salad is from the one entitled At the Kitchen Counter. 

To Ella, this is “peak summer food: zero cooking, one hundred refreshing”. But she says that it’s also good in the dark days of winter, when “I seek the opposite of outside: I seek to feel alive!” 

Words by Jane Ferguson

Ella’s herby mango salad

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp fish sauce

• 2 tbsps rice wine vinegar 

• 1 tbsp caster sugar

• 1 red chilli

• 2 medium carrots

• 3 baby cucumbers (or half a big cucumber)

• 50g green beans

• 1 long red pepper

• 300g chopped mango

• 10g mint

• 10g Thai basil

• 10g coriander

• 1 Romaine lettuce

• 150g cooked prawns or fried tofu, chopped chicken, crispy chicken thighs, whatever)

• 30g chopped roasted peanuts

• 1 lime

• Sriracha, if liked

Method

1. In a much-too-big bowl (it will hold everything!), whisk together the fish sauce, vinegar, and caster sugar until the sugar dissolves.

2. Thinly slice the red chilli and add it too. (Easy to omit if you’re not a big spice house.)

3. Peel the carrots and use a julienne peeler to turn them into thin, pretty little strips. Toss the carrot strips into the bowl and let marinate for a minute. 

4. Halve and thinly slice the cucumbers: if you’re using half a big boy, split it in half, and use a teaspoon to drag out the seeds. Discard the seeds, and thinly slice. Toss the cucumbers in with the carrots and stir.

5. Chop the raw green beans. If you can do this on the diagonal, so much the better. (Do not forget to take off and discard the stringy ends.) Add them to the bowl too. De-seed and finely slice the pepper, and stir the chopped pepper in as well. (This is a good point to stop, this part, if you’re making in advance.)

6. Finely chop the mango into little dice.

7. De-stem and finely shred the herbs then shred the lettuce (wash the leaves; stack the leaves; slightly roll the leaves in a bundle; slice the bundle across).

8. Mix the leaves, the mango, the prawns into the pickled vegetables.

9. Roughly chop the peanuts; quarter the lime. Divide salad into bowls; drizzle with sriracha, if liked; scatter with peanuts; set the lime quarter at a jaunty angle for individual jaunty squeezes.

Notes

• Eat this by itself for lunch!

• Eat it with a big handful of cooked vermicelli noodles (very Vietnamese)!

• Eat it cold, over hot coconut rice: 200g jasmine rice, 1 tin of coconut milk, pinch of salt, steam until fully absorbed.

• If you keep the components separately in the fridge – so pickled vegetables and vinaigrette in one Tupperware, chopped lettuce and leaves in another, prawns in their packet – it is a phenomenal make-ahead lunch for the week.

• Feel free to leave out the prawns, which is a mad thing to say about a prawn salad, but is probably how I make it most of the time. Prawns are expensive!

The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger is published by 4th Estate (RRP £26; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop)

Photographs: Yuki Sugiura

Dear Nerve gang,

It’s Lucia here, with positive news for once – it’s been a bad week so far for the hugely popular manosphere influencers the Tate brothers. Just yesterday, a federal judge in Florida ordered that Andrew and Tristan Tate must stay behind bars for at least another two weeks as the US courts grapple with their extradition to the UK to face charges of rape and sex trafficking, among other allegations.

As the brilliant Deborah Frances-White writes in her column today, this judicial no-nonsense approach appears indicative of a broader trend. Some of the Tates’ biggest fans have forsaken them – Nigel Farage, who only two years ago called Tate an “important voice for men”, has gone conspicuously silent since their US arrest. The Tates even seemed to believe Trump would come to their rescue, but his press secretary has confirmed that he won’t. So what’s changed?

As Deborah powerfully writes, this isn’t because the Tates’ wildfire-esque spread of contempt for women didn’t work – it’s because it did. The men they set out to embolden have been duly emboldened; they no longer need Andrew Tate to tell them it’s OK to say publicly that “women shouldn’t vote”. The brothers are no longer useful to the fans they once believed would always rely on them – which comes as a shock to Andrew Tate, who whines from jail about being held in a solitary unit with “no visits”. But what the Tates didn’t count on, and what Deborah elucidates for us today, is this: “If you’re selling dehumanisation, those who will buy will feel no empathy for you when the time comes.”

Here are the links to all today’s stories:

Andrew Tate, right, poses with Nigel Farage for a photo shared on social media in 2019. Photograph: Emory Andrew Tate/Facebook

Deborah Frances-White on the manosphere's favourite misogynist Andrew Tate

In her column today, the Guilty Feminist writes that the influencer Andrew Tate has been abandoned by even his former diehard supporters. But thanks to him, male discourse around women, consent and empathy has been well and truly poisoned. Read the full column here.

Caroline Lucas on the shocking climate reports the UK government didn’t want you to read

A stark report by the UK intelligence services, setting out the security threat posed by climate change, was due to be published last year – and then it disappeared. Months later, after pressure from campaigners, a redacted version came out. Now another alarming report, on food security, has also came to light. As former Green party leader Caroline Lucas writes, for a government that has "repeatedly sought to create a conflict between environmental protection and prosperity”, were the studies’ conclusions a little too “inconvenient” for comfort? Read her column here.

Helen Levitt, New York, 1972 © Film Document LLC. Courtesy: Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris

This week’s culture hotlist

The Big Apple looms large in the hotlist this week: it’s the setting for Furious, a fantastic new female-powered crime show on Disney+ starring Lola Petticrew as a female serial killer, and for Colson Whitehead’s “sharp, noirish” new novel, Cool Machine, recommended by Hanna Flint. And if you head to Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London you can lose yourself in the streets of New York (and beyond) as seen through the eyes of 38 photographic greats including Helen Levitt, Saul Leiter, Walker Evans, Roy DeCarava and more in its new show Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography. For all these tips and more in theatre, books and film, read this week’s hotlist.

Author Omar El Akkad. Photo: Kateshia Pendergrass

Nerve Events update

The tech critic and Nerve columnist Cory Doctorow has a new book out – The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI – and will be in conversation with Carole Cadwalladr at Brighton Dome on 8 September. 20% discount for members.

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was an international bestseller. On 23 September at The Station in Bristol he will be in conversation with journalist Ramita Navai, who won a Bafta for the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.  Members can buy £6 tickets.

Stephen Sackur, the presenter of BBC’s HARDtalk before it was axed last year, has a new book, Hard Truth, out in October. Hear him in conversation with Carole Cadwalladr at London’s Conduit Club on 12 October. 15% discount for members. 

Members discount codes and links below. 

Thanks for reading! We have an ad from Proton today, so it would be wonderful if you could spare a moment to click on it – below – to help us earn some money towards our journalism.

We’ll be back on Friday with the Weekend Edition – see you then.

Lucia

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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

To suppress one high-level report into the security impacts of climate and nature collapse seems odd. To suppress two starts to look like a pattern. 

The first report was compiled by the joint intelligence committee, the UK’s top security chiefs, including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, it was due to be launched, with much fanfare, last October. But then abruptly, without notice, the launch was cancelled. It’s only thanks to a sustained freedom of information campaign from Ruth Chambers at the Green Alliance thinktank that ministers were finally forced to publish something – so back in January they produced a version that was heavily redacted and truncated. 

Yet even in its diluted form, the report reveals a frankly terrifying forecast of potential impacts, with warnings that critical ecosystems underpinning global food systems and climate stability are degrading worldwide and every critical ecosystem is now “on a pathway to collapse”. The UK is heavily reliant on food imports, and the report spells out the domestic implications in no uncertain terms: “Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” 

In spite of repeated efforts from campaigners and politicians – including most recently the cross-party environmental audit committee – the government is still resolutely refusing to put the full unredacted version into the public domain. 

Exactly why this might be – and what the concealed contents might say – are the subject of a new four-part podcast series, “When Nature Becomes a Security Threat”, that I’ve just produced for The Rest Is Politics. It investigates what we know about this suppressed report and why the UK’s intelligence and security establishment now see climate and ecosystem collapse as a national security threat, with guests including former senior army officer Lt Gen Richard Nugee and former diplomat Arthur Snell. 

There has been considerable speculation as to why the report has been hidden and then censored. According to the Times, No 10 blocked the release owing to fears it could be considered too negative. Others have pointed to the uncomfortable questions it might raise – particularly in the light of policy decisions that move in the opposite direction, such as reductions in international aid budgets. Indeed, given that it’s long been recognised that aid is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk of conflict and instability, it’s hard to think of a more misguided, self-defeating decision than cutting aid budgets to fund security and defence. 

Indeed, this report was a deeply inconvenient one for Keir Starmer’s government in other ways too. Ministers have repeatedly sought to create a conflict between environmental protection and prosperity (think Rachel Reeves’s war on bats and newts, and her insistence that development trumps nature), yet here are the security services saying that environmental protection is in fact essential to prosperity. 

Or take the shocking decision not to invest one penny so far in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, despite being instrumental in the establishment of this global funding mechanism, which was launched last year at the Cop climate talks. How awkward, then, that this assessment concludes unequivocally that tropical forest ecosystems, which play a vital role in global water and food security, are crucial to the UK’s future.

Or consider the recent damning report from the Office for Environmental Protection watchdog which found that the government will not meet its targets to save wildlife in England and is failing on almost all environmental measures: seven of the 10 targets set out in the Environment Act 2021 have little likelihood of being met by the legal deadline of 2030. 

Frankly, an increasingly unavoidable – and shameful – conclusion is that the government chose to try to cover up this vital report simply to save face.

Yet that’s not all. In episode two of the series, we uncover a second report, this time from 2024, commissioned from a now-disbanded “futures team” – an expert group of civil servants at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was produced ahead of the 2024 general election to brief an incoming government on long-term risks. Yet, oddly, it wasn’t included in official handover documents, and it’s only come to light quite recently thanks to the investigative persistence of journalist Ben Cooke at the Times. 

For a government document, its findings are unusually blunt: Britain’s food and water supply, together with its international trade networks, are “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”; and climate change, habitat loss and geopolitical instability mean that the UK’s food security is “at risk of catastrophic failure”. Not in some distant future, but potentially by the end of this decade. That could mean empty shelves, rationing, and the state losing its ability to guarantee food supply. 

Absorbing the implications of assessments like these is not easy. Statements like “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse” (with its grimly helpful explainer in parenthesis: in other words, “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”) are difficult to fully process. 

They challenge deeply held assumptions about stability, progress and the guarantee of the future. How many of us have looked in awe and wonder at the recent photographs of the Earth taken from the Artemis II spacecraft, and marvelled at its fragile beauty? And how do we then come to terms with the fact that human activity is systematically destroying its ability to sustain life?

It’s heartbreaking and rage-inducing in equal parts. Heartbreaking because this is our one and only precious home. Rage-inducing because governments cannot pretend they didn’t know what they were doing. 

How many warnings do we need to have before we intervene to prevent imminent disaster? Scientists have been sending us messages about the growing risk of climate and natural catastrophes with increasing urgency since the 1970s, but while some progress has undoubtedly been made, it’s nowhere near enough. 

Economists have repeatedly told us that the cost of saving the planet is far lower than the cost of destroying it – again, it’s not significantly moved the dial.

And now intelligence agencies and security chiefs are spelling it out in stark terms: our national security is at risk. Neither the Starmer government, nor Andy Burnham’s, can say it didn’t know.

The first priority for government is to protect its citizens – and that starts with the release of the full unredacted reports. An early test of Burnham’s government will be whether it’s prepared to do so. Unless and until we know the full scale of the threats we face, the chances of rising to them will remain remote.

Caroline Lucas was the Green Party’s first Member of Parliament and is a former Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

Andrew Tate, right, poses with Nigel Farage for a photo shared on social media in 2019. Photograph: Emory Andrew Tate/Facebook

Andrew Tate – self-proclaimed misogynistic pornographer and alleged human trafficker, rapist and owner of hideous child sexual abuse material – was arrested this month in the US, along with his brother and sidekick Tristan. You probably saw the memes about Andrew Tate’s risible outfit; I’m the kind of person who would never stoop so low as to take a shot at someone’s personal style, but I feel that in his case I should make an exception. 

The brothers have both appeared in a federal court in Miami so their extradition proceedings to the UK can begin. The Crown Prosecution Service, at the behest of the Bedfordshire police (giving the whole thing a provincial Midsomer Murders feel), has brought 59 serious charges against them.

Tate’s tough-guy persona is slipping; he has had a hysterical social-media tantrum about his prison conditions. It does make you wonder why men are always so emotional. Expect more entitled fury, because the magistrate has said he and his brother will definitely be staying behind bars till 13 August at least. 

The Tates were facing similar charges, minus the child abuse material but including the human trafficking, in Romania at the end of 2022. In December 2025, the New York Times reported Andrew Tate’s leaked texts suggested that President Trump had personally helped him and his brother get out of the country earlier in the year. He reportedly told an unknown recipient: “I had word from The Trump admin that theyre [sic] on top of things.” and “Ive been told ill [sic] be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami.” 

Certainly US special envoy Richard Grenell explicitly raised the Tate brothers' case during a meeting with Romania’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu in February. Hurezeanu publicly denied that this constituted "pressure," but the travel ban was lifted about a week later.

Joseph McBride, a lawyer representing the Tates in a defamation case they have filed against several of their accusers, said in an official statement: "They feel secure in America for several reasons, the primary one being that Donald Trump is the president."

But it’s clear now that neither Trump nor any of the Tates’ other powerful former supporters or defenders are coming to rescue him and his brother. 

The executive branch has the power to block the UK’s extradition. During a recent White House press briefing, a reporter asked Karoline Leavitt if the president or the administration have any plans to intervene in the process. “No,” Leavitt answered in her signature style – as if she were furious to have woken up and found herself still Trump’s press secretary. 

The brothers’ lawyer, McBride, has been quick to claim that this is not a sign of rats leaving a sinking ship, saying: “There’s no reason at this point for Trump to parachute in from Air Force One to the courtroom, because we think we’ll win in court.”  Far from any James Bond stunts, it doesn’t seem like the president is even going to send them a parachute in the mail. 

Nigel Farage famously said on a podcast in 2024 that Andrew Tate was a “very important voice” for men. He added that Tate’s presence has meant we can now say ‘Hang on, what’s wrong with being a bloke? What’s wrong with male culture?’” These charges might have answered that second question for Farage, who is now eerily silent and not answering questions about a chummy photo of him with Tate circulating on socials. 

What’s changed for all these high-profile players? Well, since the Tate brothers were welcomed back into the US from Romania, the Epstein files have been released, along with the can of worms that slithered out with them. The current US administration certainly doesn’t need any up-to-date associations with alleged sex traffickers and child sex abuse materials, and neither does anyone vying for leadership here.  

But it’s more than that. In truth, the Tates have outlived their usefulness. And if you’re asking “what have the Tates ever done for anyone?” then let me enlighten you. In January this year, Andrew Tate talked to Jack Neel, who looks like a ginger Ferris Bueller having another day off. Jack, who was 24 at the time of the interview, claims he has the fastest growing “Matrix-resistant” podcast in the world. 

Neel asked Tate if he knew how much the landscape had changed because of Tate’s work. Tate replied: “Oh, it’s changed. When I first started speaking up I would make national news for saying something as mundane as ‘women can’t drive’ and now everyone on the internet is screaming ‘women shouldn’t even vote’, so I’ve super-heavily shifted the Overton window. And now we can have conversations about gender, about inter-sex dynamics which are super-important because that affects politics as a whole. We can have conversations about geopolitics that we couldn’t previously have.” 

It’s very difficult for me to type these words, but … Andrew Tate is right. Every podcast bro who says anything short of Tate classics such as “women are property", "if you put yourself in a position of being raped, you must bear some responsibility” and “99% of the world's problems would vanish if women had their sexual ‘body count’ tattooed or stamped on their foreheads” is now seen as centrist and reasonable. The kind of misogyny we hear touted on “Welcome to Nice Guys Just Asking Questions About Females” podcasts is a direct result of what the Tates normalised. 

Andrew Tate admits here that his shock-jock-cock antics were intended to change the conversation and to allow new lows in the way women and other marginalised groups are seen and treated. He and his brother were trying to embolden contempt for us. 

Do not forgive them, Father, because they knew exactly what they were doing. And now we live here, in a place where, as Tate points out, “everyone on the internet is screaming ‘women shouldn’t even vote’” – a consistent and growing campaign of the far right in the US. 

What must be dawning on the Tate brothers now is that they are toxic waste and that their powerful friends are playing a game of “you touched them last”. If you’re selling dehumanisation, those who are buying will feel no empathy for you when your time comes. Let this be a lesson to those who throw others under the bus in exchange for proximity to power. That’s the thing about buses: there’ll be another one along in a minute. 

Tate is clearly surprised that the establishment has forsaken him. His plaintive social media posts from prison are pathetic: “I am being held in SHU, the highest level of security that exists. No commissary. No visits. No contact with the outside world. My neighbour is a cannibal who screams throughout the night.” In another post he claims he is not allowed to make a phone call. If all this is true, how is he posting on social media? It is to be hoped this will give him time to think about how women feel when they are kidnapped and trafficked, and build some empathy. But it is unlikely, as he continually demonstrates that he does not think women are people. He can only feel pity for himself. I do not believe in prison in its current form. But I’ll make an exception. 

The Tates were not the first alleged traffickers and abusers who were embraced by the establishment and sadly they won’t be the last. But they were the first ones to advertise who they were and livestream their ugly views. Their legacy is the loss of shame for their most shameful acts.

Will society ever recover from their contempt for us?

Deborah Frances-White hosts The Guilty Feminist podcast which has been longlisted for three British Podcast Awards. Her latest book ‘Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have’ is published in paperback by Virago. Buy at a discounted price in the Nerve’s bookshop here.

Helen Levitt, New York¸1972 © Film Document LLC. Courtesy: Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris

PHOTOGRAPHY

Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography

(Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, until 4 October)

From the quiet despair of Dorothea Lange’s Great Depression-era portrait Migrant Mother, to a final room bustling with dozens of Bruce Davidson’s gritty and glamorous 1980s New York subway riders, Portrait of a City depicts the evolution of American city life through the work of 38 leading photographers. Across five rooms at Dulwich Picture Gallery – including a viewing room with excerpts from films featuring the likes of Saul Leiter talking through his transparencies, and In the Street, Helen Levitt’s 1948 silent short fondly depicting New York’s smiley, smudgy-faced children at play – it’s a joy to see the varying styles and obsessions of so many of the country’s great documentarians on display. The show is curated exclusively from images from one Norwegian collection (the DNB Saving Bank Foundation’s) rather than being an exhaustive survey, and so there are notable absences – only one photograph each from William Eggleston and Peter Hujar, for example – but it’s still a delightful saunter through the streets of 20th-century America in an era before everyone had their heads down looking at a phone.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

Lola Petticrew in Furious. Photo: Disney

TV

Furious

(Disney+)

This hit new show from producer Elizabeth Meriwether, based on the 1987 film Black Widow, is anything but your run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter crime drama (which, I’ll admit, I love anyway). Including an unforgettable performance by Lola Petticrew as the show’s female serial killer, the show uses one of the defining issues of our time – child trafficking – to set the scene for a genre-bending part-horror, part-thriller, part-police-procedural. And, best of all, it takes as its primary subject the sheer power of female rage and revenge. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

BOOKS

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

(Fleet)

Until now, my relationship to Colson Whitehead has been completely screen-based. I was blown away by the TV and film adaptations of his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, but with the release of Cool Machine this month, I've finally sat down with his prose – and it did not disappoint. The new novel is the third in his Harlem trilogy, but you don't have to have read the previous two to be swept up in this sharp, noirish critique of New York, Black masculinity, and the churn of existence. Whitehead draws a vivid world for his protagonist, Ray Carney, a middle-aged furniture salesman by day and fence (that is, mover of stolen goods) by night, who's embroiled in a high-stakes heist and murder case. With its rhythmic pace, biting social commentary and sensory sketch of an evolving city, Cool Machine makes me want to go back and see what I missed.

Hanna Flint, culture writer

L-R: Archie Madekwe, Mary-Louise Parker, David Morrissey and Lloyd Hutchinson in The Oresteia. Photo: Johan Persson

THEATRE

The Oresteia

(Bridge theatre, London SE1, until 19 September)

Through 2016’s Yerma at the Young Vic, 2019’s Medea at the Barbican, 2023’s Phaedra at the National Theatre and last year’s The Lady From The Sea at the Bridge, Australian auteur Simon Stone has developed a distinct style: he takes a classic text, reimagines it in a contemporary context, and stuffs it full of wealthy people saying witty things. His latest work, back at the Bridge, is perhaps his boldest yet: a reworking of The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s cycle of tragedies about the murderous fall of the house of Atreus, in which the monarchs of ancient Mycenae are now a squabbling Kent clan grown obscenely rich through a shady defence tech firm doing dodgy deals with Russia. Over three and a half hours and two intervals, Stone’s show jumps around over a 10-year period to graphically depict how they tear themselves apart in an orgy of retributive killing. The inexorable logic of Aeschylus’s original is absent, as is its redemptive final third, but this modern take is utterly thrilling nonetheless, with superb performances from David Morrissey, Mary-Louise Parker, Rosie Sheehy, Tom Glynn-Carney and more. Best of all, though, is Lizzie Clachan’s set: a vast, stylish, glass-walled home, which sleekly spins, revealing blood-stained walls, bodies in baths, and other grisly delights.

Fergus Morgan, culture writer

MEMOIR

The Motel: High Times in 90s Ibiza by Claire Manumission

(Velocity Press)

There was hedonism, and then there was Manumission. It must have been tricky to recall the finer details of the high life at the legendary saucy Ibiza club, what with all the drugs, sex, excess and partying till 10am, but Claire Manumission – one half of the duo behind the night with partner Mike – has done a rip-roaring job of taking readers from the heady days following the Second Summer of Love to the superstar DJ era of the 90s. The memoir is written with an incredible energy and is full of salacious celeb cameos (Robbie Williams, Howard Marks, Irvine Welsh, Kate Moss) and risqué anecdotes that were, how do you say, of their time – like when David Guetta begged Mike and Claire to stop bonking under a sheet onstage at the launch of their Paris club night (co-organised by Pedro Winter, Daft Punk’s one-time manager, no less!). The pair were famed for bringing sex acts to the stage: this is the eyeball-twisting story of club promoters who were in love and making love and starting a “revolution in nightlife” while they were at it. The book sets the scene for the return of Manumission across an entire weekend in Ibiza, from 25 to 27 September.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

Evan Rachel Wood in Narcissist’s Playbook

DOCUMENTARY

Narcissist’s Playbook

(Digital rental from 29 July)

When film-makers Mark Vicente and Scott Altomare decided to make a documentary about narcissistic abuse, they couldn’t know how effectively the finished film would illustrate that phenomenon. Through interviews with psychologists, survivors including actor Evan Rachel Wood (Marilyn Manson’s ex-partner) and four self-aware narcissists, it looks at the hidden manipulation tactics narcissists use and why their toxic influence is everywhere. WhatsApp chats are likely to light up with feverish discussion of “the twist”; part-way through there’s a handbrake turn so abrupt that it changes the film into something shockingly immersive. Early audiences have so far kept the secret, but the less you know going in, the better. Journalist Isla Traquair, who also features in the film, will release an accompanying podcast soon after release, on the usual pod platforms. But see the film first for the full effect. It’s initially available at narcissistsplaybook.com for around £15, but surely a streamer will pounce on this televisual gold.

Julia Raeside, culture writer

BOOKING NOW

THEATRE
Tristan & Yseult
(Theatre Royal Bath, 11-19 September, then touring)

First created in 2003 and staged by Kneehigh Theatre Company in the open air at Restormel Castle in Cornwall, Emma Rice’s influential adaptation of Tristan & Yseult is being revived by Rice’s company for a UK tour this autumn, taking in Bath, Mold, Glasgow and more.

ART
Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector
(Royal Academy, London W1, 21 November-14 March)

This November, the Royal Academy celebrates the pioneering collector and her London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune – a leading venue for surrealist and abstract work between January 1938 and June 1939. This exhibition will reunite work from shows held at the gallery, returning many of them to London for the first time since their original presentation at the space, by artists including Eileen Agar, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and more.

THEATRE
Once Upon a Time in Sokoto
(Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 28 September-10 October, then touring)

Inua Ellams, the poet and playwright behind the acclaimed Barber Shop Chronicles, premieres his new family drama in Northampton before a UK tour taking in Oxford, Nottingham, Warwick, Leeds, Brighton and Bristol.

CLOSING SOON

ART
Zurbarán
(National Gallery, London, until 23 August)

Catch this acclaimed show of works by the Spanish Baroque master before it closes next month.

Evening all,

It’s Imogen here, manically racing to the Friday finish line to bring you our Weekend Edition after a week juggling work, summer holiday childcare and hitting refresh every five minutes to find out what Andy Burnham did next in his action-packed first five days as PM (all while I try to avoid being triggered by the discourse about his wife’s outfit choice). Can you keep up? 

Luckily help is at hand! In this week’s excellent column Stewart Lee is responding to Burnham’s first five days inside “the poisoned door of Downing Street” and the hot political question so many of us want answered: “Which way [will] Andy “Burn Them!” Burnham jump regarding North Sea oil drilling licences, the abandonment of net zero commitments, and the death of all life on Earth in exchange for short-term political gain?”

What’s more, because the Edinburgh festival is just around the corner and the universe therefore demands that life should be full of standup comedy, fun times and biting wit, we’ve also got the brilliant comedian, presenter and artist Joe Lycett answering the Nerve Q&A. It’s a cracking read on Celebrity Traitors, people asking if he’s Count Binface and how his toddler has started heckling Reform UK’s deputy leader, Richard Tice (talk about a fabulously choice first word). Like Stewart, Joe is also raging about inaction in the face of the climate crisis. “We are all cooking and knowingly doing it to ourselves. There doesn’t seem to be any political appetite to unravel it. It makes me angry, scared and ultimately sad. We’d rather buy a new jacket every five days than preserve the awe-inspiring world around us.”

As Natasha Walter said in her column about climate fatalism on Tuesday, “It’s telling that Andy Burnham mentioned ‘power’ 15 times in his first speech as Labour leader, but did not mention climate once.” I for one am hoping that he decides to put the planet ahead of short-term political gain in his policy announcements going forward: now that would be something worth hitting refresh for.

Here are the links to today’s stories:

Stewart Lee on Andy Burnham and oil

“Of all the contrived culture war red herrings, North Sea oil is so red it’s virtually a red mullet,” writes Stewart. Nonetheless, he fears that Andy Burnham is going to double down on fossil fuel extraction – even though it will do little to cut bills or raise funds for the Treasury. “In the face of heat and urban wildfires, is Andy ‘Burn Them!’ Burnham really going to approve more oil drilling? So much for net zero”. Read his column here

Joe Lycett. Photo: Pål Hansen

Joe Lycett answers the Nerve Q&A

Best known as a comedian and TV presenter Joe Lycett is also an artist, and now his name’s going up in lights: he’s opening the first major solo show of his works in Birmingham next week. “There’s a giant sculpture in the middle of the room, plus lightboxes, taxidermy, all sorts,” he tells Michael Hogan in this week’s Q&A. (It’s not giving too much away to reveal that one of the exhibits is a gigantic Creme Egg.) In addition to the art, taking part in Celebrity Traitors, a new TV show and a new tour, Joe says he’s also enjoying life as a parent: “I feel very hashtag blessed. Hashtag live, laugh, love. Just preferably not in 40-plus degrees, please.” Read the interview here

Ten hot tickets: what to book for the Edinburgh Festival

With more than 4,000 shows slated for next month’s festival, it’s difficult to know where to start. So we asked Fergus Morgan, theatre critic and festival veteran (an impressive 12 visits under his belt – he even met his now wife at the Fringe) to pick out 10 shows worth spending your money on. His tantalising selection ranges from Bubble Schmeisis, where the audience sit in a sauna, to an adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies staged in a warehouse in Leith and a trio of shows produced by Francesca Moody, who’s got a great eye for a winner (for example, Fleabag and Baby Reindeer). Read our top tips for the festival here

Charli xcx. Photo: Tyrell Hampton

Review of the week: Music, Fashion, Film by Charli xcx

Where do you go after you’ve created Brat Summer? In the wake of 2024’s zeitgeist-defining album, the polymathic British singer has taken a radical and rocky direction for her new release, writes our music critic Kate Hutchinson. “Inhaled in one go, Music, Fashion, Film is a short, sharp, 29-minute joyride. In a way, that makes it the perfect confection to come after Brat – a sonic evolution, songs written in time snatched between catwalk shows and film premieres". But is it all just a bit, well … shallow? Read Kate’s full review here.

Photo: Joe Woodhouse

The Weekend Dish: Spicy mushroom skewers with peanut lime sauce

In her debut cookery book Big Veg Energy, the chef Christina Soteriou extols the vegan way of life, putting plants at the heart of her recipes. Christina says her cooking is inspired by her Greek-Cypriot roots and “shaped by the big bold flavours of the Mediterranean and the Middle East”. Here she shares a delicious spicy mushroom recipe which she promises is “easy to love”. Get the recipe here.

New Nerve events in Bristol and London + members’ discount code

Our events programme is filling up and if you head over to our members’ page on the website there are four new events to book. First up, we’ve got the documentary Steal This Story, Please! which profiles the veteran US journalist Amy Goodman (host of online news channel Democracy Now!), showing her confronting soldiers, politicians and corporate media in the pursuit of the truth. We will co-host a preview screening at Bertha Dochouse in London on 12 August followed by a conversation with Amy and the Oscar-nominated directors – Tia Lessin and Carl Deal – moderated by co-founder Carole Cadwalladr. Tickets here.

There’s also award-winning writer Omar El Akkad, author of the acclaimed book on Gaza One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, who will be talking to Ramita Navai (the reporter, presenter and producer who was part of the Bafta-winning team behind Gaza: Doctors Under Attack) on 23 September in Bristol.

Full details of all events are on our members’ page, with discount code for Bristol event (visible only to members) below.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading! We are grateful to have an ad from Proton again so it would be wonderful if you could spare a moment to click on it – below – to help us earn some money towards our journalism. Have a great weekend.

Imogen

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

L-R: Sophie Kean and Abby McCann (The Plot), Ania Magliano, Wagner Moura, Alaa Shehada and duo Xhloe and Natasha.

There is nothing like Edinburgh during the festival, when the Scottish capital swells with punters, every nook and cranny is converted into a venue, and thousands of weird and wonderful artists arrive from all over the world hoping for stardom. Of course, the planet’s third largest ticketed event descending on a small city every August results in plenty of intractable issues (overcrowding, exploitation, eye-wateringly expensive accommodation), but the fringe remains a marvellous melting pot nonetheless.

I have spent every summer for the last 12 years reviewing shows at the festival. I have seen early iterations of work that went on to become globally famous. I have been hauled on stage and humiliated so often that the prospect no longer fazes me. I have wept with laughter, sadness, boredom and wonder. I even met my wife at the fringe eight years ago.

This year’s event promises to be as bewildering, boundary-breaking and brilliant as ever, and, when the numbers are totted up in September, looks increasingly likely to emerge as the biggest edition in the fringe’s 79-year history, with a ridiculous 4,148 shows currently registered in the official programme. Here are 10 that should be worth your time and money.

Former Cambridge Footlight and Taskmaster contestant Ania Magliano

Ania Magliano: Peach Fuzz

(Monkey Barrel Comedy)

The surprisingly successful first series of SNL UK shone a light on a new generation of silly, satirical and social-media-literate comedians, several of whom are at the festival this summer. Jake Bhardwaj is hosting a late-night quiz, while Larry Dean, Ayoade Bamgboye and Paddy Young are all doing standup shows, as is former Cambridge Footlight, Taskmaster contestant and Comedy Award nominee Ania Magliano, whose expertly constructed and candidly gossipy new hour, Peach Fuzz, focuses on her own difficulties with intimacy, sex and relationships.

Mayflies

(Brown’s of Leith)

Edinburgh-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron have spent 30 years staging imaginative shows in unlikely locations, from swimming pools to shipping sheds to Edinburgh airport. This August, the company is taking over a warehouse in Leith with an adaptation of Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed 2020 novel about a group of punky Ayrshire teenagers on a riotous weekend in Manchester in 1986. Adapted and directed by Grid Iron boss Ben Harrison, it should be well worth the trip from the city centre, not least due to the trendy new food court next door.

Triple Fringe First winners Xhloe and Natasha. Photo: Morgan McDowell

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It

(Summerhall)

New York City-based duo Xhloe and Natasha (Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) have become one of the hottest acts at the festival in recent years with their string of award-winning, elaborately titled clown shows interrogating the insidious aspects of America’s cultural history, most recently A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First. They are back this year with this new show which tackles conspiracy theories and mass misdirection.

Crybabies: The Scaring

 (Pleasance Courtyard)

Producer Francesca Moody has become one of the biggest names at the fringe, thanks to the extraordinary success of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, both of which she backed. This year, she is behind pop-up venue Shedinburgh (which pops up again at London’s Young Vic in September) and three productions: returning hit Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, new comedy thriller Roleplay, and The Scaring, the third hour from comedy trio Crybabies (Michael Clarke, Ed Jones and James Gault), who specialise in smart, spoofy shaggy-dog sketch shows. This one, directed by festival stalwart Jon Brittain, is about an ex-priest in a remote hotel.

Nick Cassenbaum will perform Bubble Schmeisis in a sauna.

Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed)

(Summerhall)

Perhaps the most outlandish idea at this year’s festival is the Sauna Theatre, a purpose-built venue that will host 80 audience members at a time for literary discussions, dance parties, Aufguss sessions (an immersive experience involving essential oils and towel wafts that is popular in Germany, Austria and elsewhere), and storytelling shows. Will it work? Who knows, but it does seem like the perfect place for a 10th-anniversary revival of Bubble Schmeisis, Nick Cassenbaum’s celebrated show about growing up in the Jewish schvitzes of east London.

Alaa Shehada in The Horse of Jenin. Photo: Harry Elletson

The Horse of Jenin

(Pleasance Courtyard)

The Horse of Jenin was a large sculpture constructed from debris in 2003 following the second intifada, which stood as a symbol of resilience in the West Bank for two decades until it was dismantled by the Israeli military three years ago. This show from Palestine-born, Amsterdam-based performer Alaa Shehada (a huge hit at the festival last year and then at London’s Bush theatre) uses storytelling, comedy, mime and more to weave an entertaining and emotional story about growing up under Israeli occupation in the shadow of the sculpture.

Sophie Kean and Abby McCann star in Emma Howlett’s The Plot.

The Plot

(Summerhall)

Writer and director Emma Howlett has made her name as an ambitious and intelligent theatremaker with a series of slick, sparky fringe shows: 2023’s Her Green Hell, 2024’s Sisters Three and 2025’s Aether, which completely sold out a London run at Jermyn Street theatre earlier this year. Her new work, The Plot, is about Gunpowder-plotting brothers Tom and Robert Wintour, masculinity and Macbeth, and stars her regular collaborators Sophie Kean and Abby McCann. Remember, remember Howlett’s name, because she is destined for great things.

Jamie Rea and Dylan Wood (L-R). Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

The Singer

(Traverse theatre)

The Traverse theatre’s festival programme is always full of invigorating new writing and this year is no different: plays from Scottish dramatists Eilidh Loan, Zinnie Harris and Morna Young; a solo show from Motherland actor Paul Ready; interesting imports from Ireland and America; and a long-awaited transfer for Milly Sweeney’s award-winning debut play Water Colour. Perhaps most eyecatching, though, is The Singer, a new musical about an unlikely partnership between a deaf man and a bitter busker, co-adapted by Cora Bissett and Jamie Rea from the 2023 short film of the same name. The cast includes rising stars Hannah Jarrett-Scott and Dylan Wood, and the score has been written by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall.

Underground Monk Show. Photo: Koltin Sullivan

Underground Monk Show

(Assembly George Square Gardens)

Comedy at the fringe has taken a distinctly absurdist turn in recent years, which is perhaps understandable considering the distinctly absurdist turn taken by the wider world. Perhaps no production typifies this evolution better than Underground Monk Show. Created and performed by a supergroup of California-based clowns, it essentially involves a quintet of shuffling, shrouded monks experiencing various spiritual awakenings, often at the expense of the audience. It is the kind of chaotic, late-night comedy the fringe fosters so well.

Wagner Moura in A Trial – after An Enemy of the People. Photo: Caio Lírio

A Trial – after An Enemy of the People

(Lyceum Theatre)

The Edinburgh International Festival, the fringe’s august big brother, has tilted towards classical music under the directorship of violinist Nicola Benedetti, but there is still plenty of interesting performance in its programme, including Belgian auteur Ivo Van Hove’s take on Angels In America, Scottish company Groupwork’s new dance-theatre piece When Prophecy Fails, and A Trial, a new version of An Enemy of the People from brilliant Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy. Intriguingly, it transposes Ibsen’s 1882 classic into a modern-day courtroom and asks the audience to decide the fate of its protagonist, played by the Golden Globe-winning star of The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura.