Evening all,

It’s Imogen here, excited to be bringing you Tuesday’s edition, which, alongside our regular culture hotlist and a powerful column from Deborah Frances-White, features a fantastically lively and revealing conversation between the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and our very own big tech critic Carole Cadwalladr, ahead of Aaron Sorkin’s much anticipated new film, The Social Reckoning, which opens in the UK this Friday.

It’s been 16 years since Sorkin’s The Social Network was released, and eight since Carole’s investigative reporting into the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal shifted the world’s understanding of Silicon Valley – and what we now know about big tech makes Sorkin’s original film look frankly quaint. The new film dramatises how Frances, then a young Facebook engineer, enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to disclose the company’s most guarded secrets.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from AI hype and the dangers of big tech companies having too much power to how Frances’s undergrad studies into the cold war partly inspired her whistleblowing – and even what Frances’s mum makes of the casting of Mikey Madison as her daughter.

“We have to have different rituals of accountability if we want to incentivise good choices,” says Frances of Facebook and Zuckerberg. That statement could just as well be applied to what columnist Deborah Frances-White is writing about today: the Cornell Seven, a group of former Cornell University fraternity members accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a female student (and allegedly inviting men in a Snapchat group with over 50 members to join them) in October 2024. Nobody was arrested. Several of the students were merely asked to write “reflection papers”. 

It says something about the state of the media in 2026 that the first I heard of the Cornell Seven case last week was via an extraordinarily moving Instagram post by Florence Pugh – a great actor, but not somebody I follow on social media. It takes nerve to use your platform to take such a stand (Ed Sheeran take note!) and the case has since erupted across the media, in chatrooms and campuses across the US. Today, Deborah explores why it isn’t just a problem for Cornell, or US college culture, but throughout society.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Photo: Peter Rae / Getty

Facebook’s whistleblower on The Social Reckoning

Five years ago, Frances Haugen brought thousands of confidential Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal and created one of the biggest whistleblowing scandals in Silicon Valley history. Now she is about to be portrayed in an Aaron Sorkin film – a development, she tells Carole Cadwalladr, that is “surreal, and a huge honour”. And why did she do it all in the first place? “It's not free to keep a secret,” she says simply. “You are a human being first, you're a citizen second and you're an employee third, and your fellow human beings need you.” Read the interview here.

Deborah Frances-White on the Cornell Seven and how frat-house culture spreads

The Cornell Seven gang rape case has made headlines over the past week following an initial lack of response by the authorities to the allegations made by a young woman against seven students at one of the university’s fraternities. The case has now been reopened and “could be a landmark for women who have notoriously been ridiculed, humiliated and sexually abused by men in fraternities – so much so that there is a subgenre of Hollywood films about it,” writes Deborah Frances-White, aka the Guilty Feminist. “Fraternities are where young men’s values are formed and minds are shaped,” she writes – an alarming thought given that so many of the most powerful people in the US today are former frat boys. Read her column here.

The Bar on East 13th Street. Photo: Genevieve Hanson / © Salman Toor

This week’s culture hotlist

More used to creating sets for pop stars such as Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, or for top theatre shows like The Lehman Trilogy, this month Es Devlin has taken the spotlight at London Design Museum for a fabulous mid-career retrospective. Meanwhile at the Courtauld, Salman Toor’s paintings capturing friendship and love, solitude and alienation, dazzle, and it’s a particularly great year for the Turner prize, on show in Middlesbrough, with rich, immersive installations by the four nominated artists. There’s also a cracking eight-part remake of Carrie on TV; some top shows in theatre; and plenty more to see and do in this week’s hotlist. Get our top culture tips here.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back on Friday.

Thanks for reading!

Imogen

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

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Photo: Peter Rae/ Getty

Frances Haugen was not a natural whistleblower. She was a true believer, a data scientist who believed the company’s mission that “connecting” the world would lead to sunlit uplands of peace, love and outbreaks of democracy around the world. Slowly, she began to realise this was not the case. 

The result is depicted in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to The Social Network, which opens nationwide on Friday. Haugen brought thousands of documents out of the firm, laboriously photographing them one by one and handing them over to Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz. 

I met Haugen back in 2021, when she came to Britain to give evidence to parliamentarians shortly after testifying in front of Congress, and in the five years since, less than nothing has happened to hold Facebook – now re-named Meta in an ultimately futile attempt to wipe the stench of scandal off it – to account, or any other Silicon Valley tech firm. 

Mark Zuckerberg, like all the other bros, has enjoyed total impunity despite playing a “determining role” – the United Nations’ words – in stirring up a genocide in Myanmar and, as we see in the film, fomenting an insurrection. 

There has been no justice and no accountability. Eight years after the Nerve team – then at the Observer – published the evidence of another whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, and kicked off the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal, nothing has structurally changed and no one has been held to account. 

But The Social Reckoning brings a little glimmer of hope. Hollywood has woken up from its decade-long slumber and has started to take notice. The film is the start of an autumnal season of features and docs tackling different parts – and people – of Silicon Valley. There’s still no accountability but at least we get to see Jeremy Strong [he plays Zuckerberg] with a Caesar haircut method-acting what a total lack of human empathy looks like in cinemas across the globe. 

Tomorrow night, I’m moderating a panel after a screening of the film with Haugen and another of its characters: Roger McNamee, a former Facebook investor who tried to warn Zuckerberg of the harm he was causing way back in 2016. It’s taken a decade, but as the AI bros look set to unleash more unregulated, unsafe technology on an unsuspecting public, could this film be a sign that the world is finally waking up? 

Maybe. I hope so. Because we have the power to stop them. That’s what Frances Haugen says in this interview. For all our sakes, we have to hope that people will finally start listening. 

Carole: What's it like seeing yourself on the big screen?

Frances: It's surreal, and a huge honour. Aaron Sorkin has a long history of making films about democracy, about journalism and about our power to change society, so for him to pick my story was amazing. It's definitely "inspired by", not "based on" – a lot of it is a little Hollywoodified. But it was fun to revisit that chapter. There were things I knew for sure when I first went to Jeff [Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter] and things we didn't – we were pencilling the lines together, working out how it all connected.

Did the character feel like you?

My mother has decided to be aggrieved on my behalf, because I am very tall and I was much blonder when I was younger, and they have cast a short, brunette actress [Mikey Madison]. So she's like “blonde people can be smart too”. But, you know, that's my mother, not me. The places where it's most "inspired by" is the timeline. They need to make it watchable and a lot of the things happened on a rather condensed scale. Probably at least half of what I was able to get out, we got out in a couple of weeks. And there's a choice to link the events of January 6th and the contents of my disclosures. In actual real chronology, I came forward as a whistleblower about nine months after January 6th, which allowed me to document it while I was inside the company. Those timelines are a little more interwoven in the movie.

I wondered if you had any kind of flashbacks watching the film. But it's actually been a positive experience for you?

It was more like a nostalgia ride than it was traumatic. I was very lucky. A lot of whistleblowers get PTSD because they go through the whole experience alone. During that period of time, I was largely living with my parents, and so they heard my conference calls and we could talk about it over dinner. And Jeff and I had a much more egalitarian partnership than is depicted in the movie. I chose to work with him because I think he's one of the best journalists in terms of understanding how tech works. But in the film he takes on the role of the audience – you need to have someone that you get to do all the exposition to.

You photographed 20,000 pages of internal documents. Only a handful of Facebook insiders have gone public out of the scores of employees who must have seen similar things. Why so few?

Taking 20,000 photos is hard – I had back problems by the end. 

One reason is that there's actually very few people who are well versed in how these systems work. When I was at the company, maybe somewhere between 30 and 100 people understood how these things worked. We should have a public discussion about that. Should 30 to 100 people get to influence the information environment of billions in an unaccountable way – and never have to live with the long-term consequences of their choices? And there was about to be a generational turnover. 

It’s like a house 50 years ago and you renovated it twice. Does anyone really know where the wiring is any more? The handful of people who made the home feed stick together, they were retiring. They'd been doing it for 10 to 15 years. They'd made tons of money. They were moving on to do something else with their lives. 

What would you say to employees inside other Silicon Valley companies, if they see something which alarms them? 

Part of what motivated me was [having done] a cold war studies minor. A lot of what we know about the cold war from the Soviet side is because a couple of academics went into Russia right after the wall fell and microfiched a huge amount of the Soviet archive. And after a couple of years, embarrassing papers came out, and they locked everything down. 

This period of time is one of these rare moments in human history where things change a lot in a very, very short amount of time. So I encourage anyone who's working at one of these superintelligence companies to be aware that you are living history. Do you want to be the keeper of a secret? It's not free to keep a secret. You are a human being first, you're a citizen second and you're an employee third, and your fellow citizens and fellow human beings need you.

Jeremy Allen White as WSJ journalist Jeff Horowitz and Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen in The Social Reckoning

When Trump came back a second time, we had Silicon Valley tech bosses standing behind him, and Mark Zuckerberg said that he's dispensing with third-party fact-checking.

I think I'm one of the only people who was happy that third-party fact-checking went away, because third-party fact-checking was not put in place to keep people safe. It was put in place to make Facebook look respectable.

In 2016, one of the most popular election stories was "Pope endorses Donald Trump". After tens of millions of people had seen it, they'd be like, "Oh, our fact-checkers took that down." But showing them a fact-check afterwards is actually not effective. 

As for the tech bosses: when Mark was sucking up to Trump, he wanted the Digital Services Act in Europe neutered. These companies behave in the ways that they do because they're scared, because the reality is we do have the ability to change a lot of things. It's very easy to feel overwhelmed by things like AI or these big tech companies, but we have to have more awareness of our power, and we need to go and claim it. 

What do you make of the depiction of Zuckerberg in the film as callous, all-powerful? How accurate is that?

I think it's a tragic portrayal. When you compare the two as bookends – The Social Network was about a mid-20s Zuckerberg, and this is a movie about an early-40s, mid-40s Zuckerberg. Most grown-ups experience the consequences of their actions, but Mark has been allowed to continue in the form he was in when he was 20, for his entire adult life, and the movie depicts how sad this is.

Very soon he is going to have to face it. He's going to have a conversation with one of his kids where they say: "You know, people say they hate me because their friend killed themselves because of Instagram. Dad, why did you do this?" And that day is coming. It just hasn't happened yet.

How much of the problem is that he has too much power?

One hundred per cent. The problem we're experiencing today is that we are missing an infrastructure of accountability. 

The reason your car doesn't regularly explode is because we have a set of rituals and processes and expectations for how we manage physical companies. We don't have a flood of whistleblowers out of Apple, because if they lie about an iPhone, people take it apart within an hour of release. We need what Anthropic was asking for a couple of weeks ago, which is independent auditors with full access to the data, embedded in these companies, who can ask questions. Five years ago, I asked for the same thing for Facebook. When we move from tangible, repeated objects to intangible, personalised experiences, we have to have different rituals of accountability if we want to incentivise good choices.

Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning

What's the one takeaway you would like people to get from this movie?

The thing that initiates action in the movie is that the Frances Haugen character finds that, for groups that encourage violence, encourage extremism – groups that are not allowed by Facebook's own rules – two-thirds of the members of those groups joined because Facebook suggested the group to that person.

The question is, what are you being targeted with? We know from research Facebook did on the run-up to January 6th that there was a very, very small number of people – we're talking a couple of hundred, maybe – that started hundreds of “Stop the Steal” groups. We are all vulnerable to having our information environment manipulated, and we can make those environments safer without going in and picking and choosing what ideas are good or bad. But the only way we're going to do that is if we open up the doors and we open up the curtains. We get people inside who can ask independent, real questions, because we cannot trust any of these companies just to do the right thing automatically. They only do it when it hurts.

So the takeaway for British lawmakers who might be looking at this issue now? 

You have powers to compel, and you have the ability to open up data to researchers. The core of my disclosures when I came forward five years ago was that Meta invested in safety for English-speakers in the United States over basically everyone else. And the reason they did that was that they were afraid of consequences. I guarantee if you hold up the average UK user and the average American user, even today Facebook is spending more on safety for the American than for your own citizens. If you want to have an online environment that is safe, you have to fight for disclosures, for openness, for making sure that there's someone other than Facebook calling the shots. 

We're in the middle of an AI panic and hype cycle at the moment, and there's a lot of bamboozling of the public, of journalists and of lawmakers. What can we learn from your experience in how we address what's happening with AI?

There are things that we can control when it comes to AI, and there are things that we cannot control. Part of why I am not a huge proponent of a “pause” is this question of enforcement. Are we calling for drone strikes on data centres that look like they're too warm? How do we detect who was violating? But what we can know for sure are things like: are we investing in early detection of bioweapons? Are we investing in things like broad-spectrum antivirals? Are we taking care of our information environment? Information operations are cheaper today and easier to execute than ever before. We need to focus on things that we can improve and harden today, because we can control that. You know, who knows what happens 10 years down the road, who knows if this apocalypse comes – but the dangers of what AI can do now are real, and we need to make sure that we're closing those cybersecurity doors as fast as they open.

Do you think part of the reason we're facing this now is just because of the impunity that we've seen from these tech companies, of which Mark Zuckerberg is an illustrative example?

I do think there is a "move fast and break things" [attitude] where there is very little downside for people moving too fast. You know, if they move too fast and they win, they win. 

And I think we should all be very, very nervous about the fact that Meta is being managed today with behaviours that indicate that they don't think they're going to be around for that much longer. 

Facebook is dying in the United States, it's dying in western Europe, it's very clearly in decline. If you look at their quarterly reporting, it is clear they do not think they're going to be around in five years – the rate at which they're increasing their ads. 

You should always be careful about desperate people, because desperate people act in ways you don't expect. Right now we have a trillion-dollar company that is acting as if it's desperate. We should be very, very cautious and very, very mindful of what impacts that kind of action could have.

We invited another whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, to this event. She couldn’t come. The last time she appeared at an event with me, at the Hay festival, she sat on stage in silence because of Meta’s legal action against her.

I get asked: were you afraid of being sued by Facebook? I don't think a lot of people are aware of this, but until Sarah Wynn-Williams published Careless People, no Facebook whistleblower had faced legal action, which probably means there's something in her allegations. So go and buy her book, please. It's very clear that the reason Meta is pursuing her – they've never pursued another whistleblower like this – is they want to make sure that should anyone want to come forward and tell a similar set of facts to Sarah Wynn-Williams, you too will face a similar set of consequences.

You've had a child since you did your whistleblowing. Is there any very specific, focused advice for parents that you have in dealing with technology and children?

You know, I feel unqualified to give such advice, because privilege is such an issue in this space. Because I can set up an environment where my kid never sees screens – my kid thinks iPads only exist on aeroplanes. But if you are, you know, a single parent who has to work two jobs, and you need half an hour to get dinner ready, I'm not going to fault you for turning to a screen. But as a society, we need to acknowledge that we are in a much more vulnerable place than we were 20 years ago. We have to be much more mindful about what society we want to build, because technology makes it easy if we want to cut corners. 

How do we turn all this into action?

It's going to sound dull, but I think there's a big opportunity here. Arturo Béjar, the big whistleblower after I came forward, conducted a survey of 13- to 15-year-olds on Instagram – and, 13 to 15 actually probably means, like, nine-year-olds, because kids lie about their ages. But when he asked those kids "Did you receive an unwanted sexual message in the last seven days? Did you witness or experience bullying in the last seven days? Did you see self-harm content in the last seven days?", he got very, very different answers from what Facebook claimed was happening. He’s making a big push right now that we should be thinking about public statistics for social platforms. We don't have to wait for these tech companies to do the right thing. We should be surveying kids ourselves. In a world where we have kind of shared facts about the difference between TikTok and Instagram, or Snapchat and Instagram, then a high school can say: our school is choosing this one over that one.

Mark Zuckerberg pictured last month. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/ Getty

Least favourite tech bro?

Alex Karp is a little smarmy. But Mark is frustrating me so hard. A couple of days ago, they rolled out the new AI glasses, and an interviewer was like: "Hey, we noticed there's no camera in one of your models. Is that because you heard all the complaints about people not wanting to invade others' privacy?" And he's like: "Oh no, it's just so much lighter and so much cheaper if you don't put the camera in." Can you not learn, Mark? They gave you a softball. You could have just hit it out of the park. 

I've been joking we need a "Free Mark" movement, like we had a "Free Britney" movement, right? Hurt people hurt people. I always say I have faith that Mark can achieve greatness. He just needs to do it, probably, on a different path from Facebook.

Any regrets?

I wish I had photographed more dashboards. Inside Facebook there are these little spreadsheets, you know, that are dynamically updated, showing how things work. And if I'd got a bunch of those spreadsheets around content moderation, around investment in safety – like, minutes spent keeping things safe – I think it would've been really, really compelling to see how little was invested in non-English speakers. And any other regrets? I testified to the Senate and then the House, and I wish I had been better prepared for where it was likely going to go, because I could have prepared better soundbites that would have helped bridge the gap.

The Social Reckoning is released in UK cinemas on Friday 9 October

The Bar on East 13th Street. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Genevieve Hanson/© Salman Toor

ART

Salman Toor: Someone Like You

(Courtauld Gallery, until 10 January 2027)

The first survey show of Lahore-born, New York-based Toor’s work in the UK, indeed in Europe, this is the perfect introduction to his singular world. Toor holds in tension a reflection of contemporary life in New York – and particularly scenes of young, queer and often South Asian men – with riffs on the history and languages of painting. Much of what we see is deliberately celebratory: domestic or club scenes that picture what Toor has called "deeply comfortable spaces” for his fictional figures. But there is darkness, too: Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) depicts the humiliation of a search at airport immigration. While Toor has developed an entirely distinctive painterly universe – with a colour sense and approach to handling paint that is immediately recognisable – it is shot through with nods to great paintings, including, in The Bar on East 13th Street (2019), a direct response to Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which hangs in the neighbouring room at the Courtauld. This historical playfulness is evident, too, in a magnificent display of related drawings downstairs in which Toor’s marvellously fluent technique is seen in full effect; make sure you catch both shows.

Ben Luke, Nerve art critic

Summer H Howell as Carrie White in Carrie. Photo: Prime Video

TV

Carrie

(Prime Video, from tomorrow, 7 October)

If only all remakes were as stylish and contemporary as Prime Video’s new eight-part series based on Stephen King’s horror classic. Mike Flanagan’s confident re-telling brings the sheltered teen, played delicately by Summer H Howell, to a middle-American high school in 2026. After years of home schooling with an abusive mother, Carrie is thrust into active shooter drills and surrounded by mean girls who crow when she starts her period in phys-ed and assumes she’s dying. Starting slowly, Flanagan’s story builds beautifully and incorporates a true-crime-doc framing device where surviving characters are interviewed retrospectively about how the school prom ended in such a bloodbath. It’s the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy for bullied kids everywhere.

Julia Raeside, writer

MUSIC

Meshell Ndegeocello – Synonym

(Bluenote)

In a recent list of his favourite 13 albums of all time, Brian Eno included Meshell Ndegeocello’s 1993 debut Plantation Lullabies. “I think she is one of the great musicians alive at the moment,” he wrote; “she plays bass but she plays it with such ferocity.” She’s also a great producer. Best known for her sympathetic interpretations of Prince, Sade and the words of James Baldwin, Ndegeocello’s new album Synonym deploys more of a statement-making concept, assembling what is basically my dream festival of special guests for a collection of gender-flipping, genre-blurring reworks of famous duets. She takes the Kenny Rogers part to Chaka Khan’s Dolly Parton on Islands In The Stream; her voice intertwines with fellow bassist/singer Lianne La Havas for 80s R&B gem Don’t Look Any Further, while Americana types Bill Callahan and Chris Thile join her for Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side. Cynthia Erivo, ANOHNI, Cat Power, Moses Sumney, Brandi Carlile and many more pitch in to go cover-to-cover too.

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

The Ruin by Simeon Barclay at Turner Prize 2026, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Photo: David Levene

ART

Turner Prize 2026

(MIMA, Middlesbrough, until 29 March; free entry)

Held in Middlesbrough for the first time, this edition of the Turner prize feels particularly strong, with each of the four artists drawing on a variety of media to create installations that engage all the senses. There are rubber floors, scaffolding, drapes, mist, shifting lights and otherworldly horns. Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau and Tanoa Sasraku certainly have a knack for immersing viewers in their varied practices that all mine memory, materiality, spirituality and human connection. Freije and Barclay – in particular – stand out. Blending the spoken word with a collage of footage, Barclay’s installation, The Ruin, takes us on a journey to his childhood and across the M62, while Freije invites us to commune with her array of steel figures and animals as they embrace, leap and struggle through life. 

Hannah Clugston Wilson, writer

Es Devlin in Other Worlds at the Design Museum. Photo: Daniel Devlin

DESIGN

Es Devlin: Other Worlds

(Design Museum, London W8, until 4 April 2027)

Known for her dizzying stage sets, Es Devlin was sure to pull off something special for this celebratory mid-career retrospective. Starting with a meticulous and narrated recreation of her studio – transported in crates from Peckham – visitors are led to “Archive Unboxed” or Devlin’s early years, which show childhood scrapbooks and art-school life drawings (many salvaged in black bin bags from an ex-boyfriend’s flat). The centrepiece is the 30 Year Desk, a circular display referencing her first commissions for fringe theatres, then drawing after drawing detailing projects including large stadium sets for the likes of Beyoncé, Pet Shop Boys and Lady Gaga, and the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. I would have loved a little jeopardy that exposed any wrinkles or stumbling blocks she faced along the way, but there’s little sign of those here. For the finale, there’s the show-stopping Infinite Library installation, an eight-metre-wide bookshelf containing 2,000 books that made the designer who she is. 

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

Front L-R: Gillian Anderson as Martha and Josh Dylan as Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photo: Johan Persson

THEATRE

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(Soho Place, London W1, until 19 December)

The slowly rotating living room in Marianne Elliott’s revival looks a bit like an arena, which is perfect for Edward Albee’s three-hour verbal cage fight. Transporting the toxic marital dynamic of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to 1960s academia, Albee drops us into the forever war between George, a bitterly thwarted scholar, and Martha, the boss’s ferally unhappy daughter. Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson – marquee names who began in the theatre – have at it with an almost festive cruelty, at first hilarious, then horrific and finally tragic. They have gamified hatred: is anything real or are they just bored? Josh Dylan and Phoebe Horn hold their own as the junior couple, Nick and Honey, who begin as shocked witnesses but become co-combatants. In the intimacy of Soho Place you can feel the night lengthening and the alcohol rising. This claustrophobic, unforgiving play requires the finest acting to make its misery compelling. This production has what it takes.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

BOOKS

Doom Painting by AK Blakemore

(Granta)

I’ve never been a huge fan of historical fiction – except when it’s written by AK Blakemore. Her debut novel, The Manningtree Witches, announced her as an essential new voice in literary fiction back in 2021 and her third novel, Doom Painting, had me rapt from the get-go. Doom Painting takes us back to 1831, when a peasants’ revolt swept across the south of England. Set across just 16 days, the novel is riveting and pacey while also featuring Blakemore’s signature prose – dazzlingly elegant, deft and poetic. It’s a stunning novel and an epic achievement. 

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nerve writer

L-R: Holly Howden Gilchrist as Ismene and Eilidh Loan as Antigone. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

THEATRE

Antigone

(Tron theatre, Glasgow, until this Saturday, 10 October)

This swift, stylish and sweary adaptation by Lulu Raczka distils Sophocles’s ancient tragedy into the story of two teenage sisters. Antigone is older, bolder, bossier, and determined to bury the body of her brother, which has been left to rot outside the gates of Thebes following a civil war. Ismene is younger, shyer, quieter, and terrified of the consequences. Over 90 minutes, trapped in a kitschy living room, the two girls play drinking games, sing karaoke, bicker about boys, imagine adventures, and ultimately confront mighty themes of grief and justice. Finn den Hertog, who recently staged David Ireland's The Fifth Step with Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman in the West End, directs with typically vivid style, while Eilidh Loan and Holly Howden Gilchrist, two rising stars of Scottish theatre, provide superb performances as Antigone and Ismene.

Fergus Morgan, writer

BOOKING NOW

ART
Mad Bloomsbury
(Charleston, Lewes, East Sussex, 4 November–11 April 2027; tickets on sale Friday 8 October)

Virginia Woolf described herself as “mad” and in her 1926 essay On Being Ill argued that illness, like love, ought to be one of the great subjects of literature. A century on from that essay, a new group exhibition featuring artworks, photographs, documents and personal objects explores how the Bloomsbury group engaged with evolving ideas of insanity. Tickets go on sale this Friday and will be priced on a “pay what you can” basis.

THEATRE
The Pelicot Trial
(The Chamber at London County Hall, Monday 30 November, 6-10pm)

A cast of 30 artists and public figures including Adjoa Andoh, Lorraine Ashbourne, Jordan Stephens, Juliet Stevenson, Samuel West and Olivia Williams will come together on 30 November to take part in a special one-off performance of The Pelicot Trial, a piece of documentary theatre comprising testimonies and written accounts from the trial, police files, social commentary and psychiatric reports on the 51 men who were prosecuted as part of Gisèle Pelicot’s case. Public booking starts tomorrow, 7 October, at 11am and the show will be live-streamed worldwide.

On the evening 19 October 2024, a 20-year-old female student at Cornell University attended a sorority social event. Visibly drunk, she walked to the Chi Phi fraternity house. The young woman is now referred to as Jane Doe, to protect her anonymity, because of what allegedly happened there. She states that she was taken inside by her friend Matthew Ingalls, who plied her with booze and ketamine and proposed a threesome that escalated into an alleged gang rape.  

Doe filed a civil lawsuit in September 2026 that could be a landmark case for women who have notoriously been ridiculed, humiliated and sexually abused by men in fraternities for decades – so much so that there is a subgenre of Hollywood films about it, usually comedies and mostly created by former frat boys. Some that feature sexual harassment and sexual assault for laughs include National Lampoon’s Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, Sorority Boys and Neighbors.  

Doe’s lawsuit claims that she was so intoxicated she was incapable of even consenting to the original proposition of a threesome, much less what happened after that. It also says that at around 1.40am the men exchanged messages in a Snapchat group named  "Chi Phi Actives".  It alleges a student called Jonathan Newell said that there was "free pussy upstairs", that Ingalls added, "like you can walk in and whip it out”, and that subsequently a photo of Doe was sent. Another man is then said to have asked: "Shop still open?" The answer was yes. Ingalls is said to have added: "Boys come whip it out."

A screenshot of the ‘Chi Phi Actives’ Snapchat group messages on the night of the alleged incident.

A number of other men entered the room and Doe alleges she was "horrified" and hid under the covers. Two men took Doe into a closet and were allegedly "just raping" her as she was "in and out of consciousness". Doe was "completely incapacitated" at this point, she says. According to the lawsuit, she passed out at around 5:45am on the morning of 20 October. 

It has recently come to light that, three weeks later, Doe made a phone call to Ingalls and recorded it. She asked: "Do you remember how any of these guys walked in?"

Ingalls didn’t tell her about the group chat. He said: "The door was just unlocked ... The party was sort of like crowded ... There was nowhere else to go."

Doe replied: "If I wanted to take this somewhere, what y'all did would be classified as gang rape."

Seven men were believed to have participated in the alleged assault, but over 50 men were on the group chat. That none of them seem to have expressed alarm on the chat, or called authorities to stop it, or used it as evidence to report it later, appears to demonstrate that this event is part of a wider culture and not an isolated incident. 

The Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which was closed in 2024. Photo: Matt Burkhartt / Getty

Three days after Doe filed a police report, the local chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity voted unanimously to remove the accused members from its rolls. The fraternity house was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus. No one imagines fraternities are banned without cause, so it seems extremely strange that the police have brought no charges against any of them. 

According to the New York Times, “the [Cornell University] panel found Mr Ingalls responsible for sexual assault, judging that he was willing to manipulate, exploit and endanger Jane Doe for his own self-interest and the entertainment of others. Mr Newell was also accused of sexual assault, the university files show.” Ingalls’s lawyer declined to comment and Newell did not respond.

The rest of the men were variously suspended and/or made to attend sexual harassment seminars and write “reflection papers”. One man had already graduated and is banned from campus for three years. Jane Doe will probably not finish her studies and lives with the obvious emotional and mental consequences.  The district attorney initially decided not to prosecute, but, in response to Doe’s civil lawsuit, the criminal case has been reopened and on 1 October this year, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, appointed New York attorney general Letitia James as a special prosecutor.

American college fraternities began in the 18th century, ostensibly to provide camaraderie, accommodation and future networking opportunities, but have long been associated with toxic behaviour, misogyny, bullying, racism and sexual assault, often fuelled by extreme drink and drug use. This is not just anecdotal.  

In 2007 there was a study entitled "Behavior Differences Seven Months Later: Effects of a Rape Prevention Program on First-Year Men Who Join Fraternities", authored by three men: John D Foubert, Johnathan T Newberry and Jerry Tatum. The study found that first-year male undergrads who joined a fraternity were three times more likely to commit sexual assault during their first year than men who did not pledge: around 8% versus 2.5%. This was not some predisposition that led young men to engage in sexually coercive behaviour. They were changed by “Greek life”, as the fraternity lifestyle is often referred to by those in that world.  

Even more astoundingly, women in sororities, the female equivalent of fraternities, are 74% more likely to be sexually assaulted than women who do not join, specifically because of their exposure to unregulated frat-house environments where abuse of drugs and alcohol are prevalent. 

There has been a lot of commentary about the Cornell case and much of the social media response has been in line with Bill Frezza’s notorious Forbes headline from 2014: “Drunk female guests are the gravest threat to fraternities”. The article, which was removed extremely quickly, went on to say: “As recriminations against fraternities mount and panicked college administrators search for an easy out, one factor doesn't seem to be getting sufficient analysis: drunk female guests … We have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through." Frezza (who was then alumni president of his fraternity at MIT) was dropped by Forbes, but he maintained he stood by every word. If my Instagram feed is anything to go by, a lot of people agree with him. 

There is a great deal of discourse that boils down to this: if a woman goes into a frat house, especially if she joins in the drinking, then what can she expect? She knows they will take advantage of her. That’s what frat boys do. 

The Daily Bruin, the University of California’s legacy student newspaper, carried a headline last year: “Fraternity parties are a part of college life. Women must navigate them safely”. The well-meaning article, by a female student journalist, included the advice: “Be careful, because your safety is never guaranteed … If [women get joy] from attending fraternity parties, so be it. But I urge them to do so guided by a strong sense of caution.”

It’s common knowledge. They’re dangerous places. So, young women, don’t go alone. Don’t go to drink, even though the men will coerce you. Better still, just don’t go. That’s the advice. But that won’t solve the problem. Why not? 

Because fraternities are where young men’s values are formed and minds are shaped. Only 7% of men in the US have been members of a college fraternity. But the North American Interfraternity Conference says that 76% of US senators and congressmen, 44% of presidents and, astonishingly, 85% of Fortune 500 execs had their ideas of masculinity, sexual politics and power shaped in fraternities. Why would they showcase these figures? It’s an advertisement. Get into a fraternity and you have brotherhood for life. Men of influence will have your back and make sure the right doors are open, the ones leading to the corridors of power. 

That means if women aren’t safe in a frat house, nor are they safe in a courthouse, congress, the White House or any boardroom. And if frat boys run everything, they get to make the rules and bend them. So women aren’t safe anywhere.  

If you’re thinking, “well, thank God the UK doesn’t have fraternities,” over the last decade or so the Times, the Guardian and various student publications have reported on Oxbridge drinking clubs targeting women, some “existing to get girls so drunk they don’t know what they’re doing”, coercing them into humiliating rituals of downing drinks and eating without using their hands. Some reported men chasing first-year women in a mock fox-hunt (based on their “attractiveness”) and spectacles of young women wrestling in jelly as bespoke entertainment for the men. 

In 2015, the master of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, Sir Alan Fersht, emailed students to decry drinking initiation rituals, stating that it was a “national scandal” that men were “indulging in laddish behaviour and sadistic initiation rights, and … plying women with drink and abusing them”. This was around the same time the police investigated allegations that members of the Wyverns (another notorious Cambridge drinking club) chanted “rape” as they paraded through Oxford.

We would all like to think that the #MeToo movement of 2017 and 2018 tempered the worst behaviour of the Oxbridge drinking clubs – Britain’s answer to the frat houses, and similar portals to power – but reports of sexual assault and harassment have gone up, not down. Perhaps that is, in part, because young women feel more able to report it when it happens, but that is cold comfort if reports are not acted upon. In England and Wales, more than 99% of rapes reported to police do not end in a conviction. It’s easy to wonder if the  lack of convictions is directly related to the most powerful men getting their education at the most elite drinking clubs. Whatever you do there (even if you’re influenced by peer pressure) can make you complicit in the crimes of other men for the whole of your life. 

A Hope Not Hate study found that around 80% of UK boys aged 16 to 17 have consumed content created by core manosphere figures such as Andrew Tate, and that 23% of them said they had a positive view of him; similar studies have found that 24% of young men agreed with his views about women. The RAP Project (a recent consent workshop programme which operated heavily within elite fee-paying British schools) reported that the infiltration rate within affluent demographics is often perceived to be just as high, if not higher, than in less privileged communities. It said this was due to those boys being able to afford more devices, and a hyperfixation on the luxury-lifestyle branding and shortcuts to wealth that manosphere influencers show off as part of their misogyny package.

Cornell University students and others from the Cornell community at the Justice for Survivors protest, 5 October, 2026. Photo: Matt Burkhartt/The Washington Post via Getty

Perhaps any progress we’ve made is being destroyed by the frat house every young man can now carry in his pocket. There is simply nothing we can wear, no way of being abstemious enough and no building we, as women, can avoid. The fraternity house has always been invisibly taken into seats of power and now it is on the loose. It is down to the decent men in our communities, in our universities and in positions of influence to step up and insist that this is not acceptable. They need to create systems of accountability and education and reshape society so that women are no more afraid to visit male students in their halls of residence than men are afraid to visit women. 

In the interim – men everywhere, let me assure you, there is no woman who wants sexual contact with seven men on the same night. If she did want that, she’d organise it in advance when she was sober and she’d interview all the men ahead of time and lay out the ground rules and safe-words. If one of your friends has given a woman ketamine after she’s been drinking, always assume she doesn’t want strange men touching her and penetrating her, no matter what is said or done on the night. Always get all the men out of the room and phone the authorities. Because I guarantee, if you walked into a women’s sorority or hall of residence intoxicated, seven women would get you a blanket and make you a cup of tea or call you a cab. None of us would call our friends and say: “Free dick – come get some.” And if someone did that, we’d stop her. We’d report her. We’d protect you. 

Deborah Frances-White hosts The Guilty Feminist podcast. 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

Good evening!

Carole here, excited to bring you a fresh instalment of our ongoing Palantir investigation. We’ve now published 12 articles on everyone’s favourite spytech firm, including one from back in January when we revealed that it now had £670m worth of contracts in the UK. That figure – and the foundational work that underpins it – has been cited across multiple news outlets and has played a fundamental role in understanding Peter Thiel’s firm and its relationship to the British state. And it’s a moment to reflect on the fact that it simply wouldn’t have been done if we didn’t have our readers’ support. 

Exactly a year ago, we launched the Nerve in an excited, exhausted heap up at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. And it feels pretty miraculous that not only are we still here, we’ve managed to hire journalists, break stories, hold 22 events around the country and do the kind of vital public interest journalism we believe Britain needs more of (here’s a piece all about our first year in this week’s Press Gazette), because our generous and endlessly wise paying members have joined the Nerve family to support our work: thank you to all of you! 

It’s been another busy week. I was back in Liverpool on Monday breaking the news that Lord Tom Watson of Palantir – the former deputy leader of the Labour party, who’s now taken up the role of “senior vice-president UK” at the firm – had sent one of its fiercest critics, MP Clive Lewis, a letter that enumerated all the times that Lewis had spoken about Palantir. The spytech firm had, in effect, been spying on him. If they had done that to an elected member of parliament, who else might they have surveilled? 

The truth is that Palantir’s bet on buying a Labour lord smells like desperation. Yesterday marked a day of protests, including outside its head office in London – we were there! – and around the country, and now the Financial Times is reporting that Andy Burnham is looking for a British alternative for Palantir's NHS and Ministry of Defence contracts. 

It couldn’t come at a more urgent moment. As the indefatigable Max Colbert reveals in our latest piece, the firm has now accrued a staggering £1bn of contracts with the UK state. The danger is that Palantir’s software – and therefore Peter Thiel’s political values and relationships – becomes so embedded that it’s impossible to extract. 

If our members weren’t funding this work, it simply wouldn’t have been done. So thank you. 

I’ll hand over to the others with the rest of this week’s stories, including a brilliant piece from Stewart Lee on the “Fairford Five” farce and an interview with the great Salman Rushdie.

Have a good weekend!

Carole

Stewart Lee on the unwittingly famous Five

It’s obviously a significant story, and all that, but Stewart is finding it hard to take the goings-on in Gloucestershire seriously. The Fairford Five – “who sound like the heroes of an Enid Blyton novel about military sabotage, foreign influence and lashings of ginger beer” – have variously been described (mainly by Nigel Farage) as small boat arrivals (no), Middle Eastern nationals (they’re not) and highly dangerous (except they’ve been bailed). But he commends the actions of the farmer who saw white vans milling around in the middle of the night: “I would have assumed they were just delivery drivers who had given up and got lost, having hurled my order of the new Hawkwind Bristol Custom Bike Show 1986 live album into a damp bush”. Read his column here

Uncovered: The UK government's £1bn splurge on Palantir

Our investigative reporter Max Colbert has unearthed, via freedom of information requests and intense questioning of government departments, the full cost to the British taxpayer of the state’s dependency on controversial tech company Palantir – £992m. Labour MP Clive Lewis calls the spending an “addiction”. With pressure mounting from MPs and the public, but with his old pal Tom Watson now spinning for Palantir, will Andy Burnham have the mettle to do the right thing, and block future contracts with the Trump-adjacent data firm? Read our in-depth investigation here

Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths photographed for the Nerve by Pål Hansen

Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths on surviving assassination

Four years ago, the past that Salman Rushdie thought he had left behind rose up and almost killed him. Looking back on the frenzied knife attack against him – inspired by a three-decade-old fatwa, and now the subject of a major documentary – he and his wife, artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, are surprised how well they came through it. Watching the film and revisiting that day has not been entirely easy, but, the novelist tells Dorian Lynskey, “it’s hard to get through an entire life without having a moment or two when life asks you quite hard questions”. Read the couple’s revealing interview here

Kiell Smith-Bynoe. Photo: The Other Richard 

The Recommender: Kiell Smith-Bynoe

Best known for starring in TV shows Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats, the actor and comedian Kiell Smith-Bynoe has a packed autumn schedule with two films out – Ghosts: The Possession of Button House and saucy comedic fable Wicker – plus he’s back on the road touring his hit improv comedy show Kool Story Bro. He took time out to chat with us about his current cultural favourites at the Nerve Live last Sunday – from the R&B artist he loves to a hilarious improvised couples therapy show – and why he thinks SNL: UK is “a big step forward for comedy”. Read Kiell’s hot tips here

Rory Kinnear and Natalia Osipova in The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Review of the Week: The Standard of Living

A new James Graham play or TV show is always an event. Uniquely talented at turning social and political history into lively drama, his stage hits have included Punch (about a fatal blow and its consequences), Ink (focused on Rupert Murdoch’s Sun) and his 2012 breakthrough This House, about the 1970s Labour governments. Now he’s turned his focus to the colourful life and achievements of the pioneering British economist John Maynard Keynes, played by Rory Kinnear. But really, writes Nerve theatre critic Dorian Lynskey, it’s a beautiful and timely exploration of what it means to lead a good life. Read Dorian’s review here

Photo: Laura Edwards

Weekend Dish: Tim Anderson’s curry ramen

Few people know more about Japanese food than Tim Anderson. He may have been born and raised in Wisconsin, but he’s studied the diet for two decades, lived for a time in Kitakyushu, written 10 cookbooks and won BBC’s Masterchef back in 2011 with a menu that included pork ramen and a Tokyo-inspired burger. This month, Tim’s new book, Japanese Curry, is published and here he shares the details for curry ramen. As he says, curry is one of that country’s “favourite comfort foods.” Get the recipe here

The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched a year ago 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

The British state has spent or agreed to spend close to £1bn on contracts with Palantir Technologies since 2014, the Nerve can reveal. 

The total, just over £992m – compiled from new freedom of information disclosures, departmental spending records and contracts reported since January – is 48% higher than the £670m the Nerve first identified in an investigation at the start of the year. About £372m of the money has not yet been paid, and depends on two contracts running to their full value: the Ministry of Defence’s £240.6m deal, awarded in December 2025, and the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which could cost up to £330m if the government does not exercise a break clause next year.

The figures come as the prime minister, Andy Burnham, faces growing pressure to cut ties with the company co-founded by Peter Thiel. Labour members at the party’s conference this week have called on the government to end its Palantir contracts, and campaigners are holding a week of international protests against the firm.

Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “It’s increasingly clear the British state is in the early stages of addiction to Palantir and all it represents. We now have a chance to chart a new and better course away from Palantir. We should take it quickly, with both hands.”

This week the Financial Times reported that the government is looking for British alternatives to Palantir, including candidates to take over the FDP. 

Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP, said the scale of spending “begs the question of why Palantir isn’t on the Cabinet Office’s strategic suppliers list”. He has asked the Commons public accounts committee to investigate.

In July, the government published the latest list, which featured 36 companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Vodafone. Each are assigned a Crown Representative who oversees their relationship with the government. Although there are no published criteria for inclusion on the list, it is assumed that annual receipts of over £100m is the threshold for inclusion. In the first two years of the FDP, spending on that alone was £198.4m, so it is unclear why Palantir is not on the list. In March, the Cabinet Office told Wrigley, in answer to a written question, that Palantir was not a strategic supplier and that there were no plans to make it one. 

Graphic showing Palantir founder Peter Thiel and totals of money spent since 2014 – or due to be spent – by UK government departments and agencies. Design: Lynsey Irvine

The new findings include £196m of total Ministry of Defence (MoD) spending from April 2021 to 2026; £7.8m spent on Palantir software by the police; and fresh contracts with the Home Office, the National Energy System Operator and the Financial Conduct Authority. 

In January, the Nerve showed that Palantir's work reached into almost every part of the state, from local councils to the MoD, the NHS, police forces, the Cabinet Office, the Department of the Environmant and GCHQ, including previously unreported work on nuclear defence systems.

A demonstration outside Palantir’s London offices yesterday as part of a worldwide series of protests against the company this week. Photo: Henry Nicholls / Getty

Ministry of Defence

The largest share of spending on Palantir is with the MoD, which has maintained a relationship with the company since at least 2015. 

As previously reported by The Citizens, the ministry’s spending with Palantir between the years 2015-16 and 2020-21 totalled over £53.1m across various contracts and arms of the department. New information, obtained from the MoD via freedom of information (FOI) disclosures, reveals that since April 2021 the department has spent a further £196m on Palantir’s software. 

This includes a £75m enterprise agreement with Palantir, which ran between 2022 and 2025, for providing the Palantir “software tool-set to accommodate the UK MoD’s demand, at all security classifications, for the next three years in line with data strategies”.  

In addition, a new directly awarded £240.6m contract was given to the company in December 2025 for “data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across all classifications”, a contract spanning three years. This would bring the total awarded to Palantir by the MoD since 2015 to £489.7m. 

Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons science, innovation and technology committee, said they were “seeking answers from government as to why £240m of public money was awarded to Palantir in an MoD contract without a competitive tender process”.

Before the announcement of the new deal, then-prime minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s offices on a trip to Washington organised by the UK’s former ambassador, Peter Mandelson. Palantir was a client of Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, and Mandelson held shares in the firm. 

But Mandelson isn’t the only senior Labour politician with deep ties to the company. Last month, Labour peer Tom Watson joined Palantir as UK senior vice-president. Before taking a leave of absence from the Lords on joining the company, Watson had held advisory positions at both Palantir and Lodestone Oxford, a consultancy firm which had Palantir as a client in 2024.

Watson has become a vocal defender of the company, as pressure grows on Burnham from campaigners, parliamentary committees and MPs to halt contracts over its controversial work with the Israeli military in Gaza, and its work for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the US. Both Watson and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Mandelson’s co-founder at Global Counsel, attended the Labour conference this week.

In response to the findings, the Ministry of Defence told the Nerve: "There are robust processes in place to ensure government contracts are awarded fairly and transparently. All suppliers are subject to rigorous due diligence and must deliver value for money while complying with our security and legal obligations." 

Regarding the visit to Washington, Palantir said: “This was a typical government visit to a UK employer, organised in the usual way… there was no discussion of any future contract during the meeting that took place as part of the visit.” It added: “The defence secretary has stated categorically that Peter Mandelson had no influence on that contract.”

Keir Starmer during his visit to Palantir’s Washington DC headquarters last year, with the company’s chief executive, Alex Karp, right. Photo: Carl Court / Getty

The NHS and the Department of Health

Although the MoD accounts for Palantir’s largest contracts, the NHS is where the company’s role is most contested. In January, the Nerve put the value of Palantir’s health service work at £244m, including – at that time – £182m for phase one of the FDP. 

New FOI disclosures from NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) show spending of £269m: £198.4m on the FDP by March 2026, £69m on other NHS work between 2020 and 2024, and nearly £2m at DHSC between 2020 and 2022. If the FDP runs to its £330m forecast, the health total since 2020 will exceed £401m. 

The NHS FDP contract has become a focus for opposition to Palantir’s work for the state. The platform represents the biggest challenge Palantir faces in maintaining its foothold in key national infrastructure, as the Burnham government faces a difficult decision in choosing whether to continue with Palantir’s contract and avoid a rupture with Washington, or move away from the FDP and make good on repeated promises to “buy British” and invest in sovereign technologies. 

Pressure has been mounting not just from campaigners, but also from cross-party groups of MPs, to ditch the FDP contract. 

The chairs of two Commons committees, from different parties, want the contract ended. In June, the science, innovation and technology committee called on the government to exercise the February 2027 break clause and either bring the work in-house or turn to UK providers, citing Palantir’s “clear mismatch with UK values”. Onwurah told the Nerve that the FDP contract had created “an unacceptable level of dependency” and crowded out British companies that could provide the same services. 

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the health and social care committee, told the Nerve there was “serious mistrust among both the medical profession and the general public” that could deter people from sharing their medical data. With other tools able to deliver similar benefits, she said, the government should be "actively seeking an alternative in time for spring 2027”.

Last month, James Firth, the health innovation minister, acknowledged the same risk, saying that he was worried that, in future, “mistrust” of the company could affect “people’s willingness to share data with the NHS”.

At the weekend, The Labour Party’s conference arrangement committee blocked an emergency motion brought by party delegates to discuss dropping Palantir from the NHS. 

The Telegraph reported that Louise Haigh, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, intimated at conference that Labour will ban Palantir from the NHS. Although no decision has been announced, it has also been reported that the government is looking at British alternatives to Palantir for both the NHS and MoD.

Police

Palantir has also expanded its work with police forces. Previously known contracts tracked by the Nerve between Palantir and the police included the money awarded for the Bedfordshire and Leicestershire contracts, worth some £2.2m. 

Since then, forces are known to have spent at least £7.8m on Palantir, including trials and contract extensions, and with officers from multiple regional forces such as the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit (ERSOU) and East Midlands Special Operations Unit (EMSOU) having access to data held on Palantir’s “real-time data sharing” tool Nectar, part of its Foundry software platform. Six forces are known to have spent money on Palantir trials and software; as many as 12 forces in the UK had officers with access to Nectar. 

Palantir is known to be in the running for a new national service for sharing local intelligence and police force data, known as the National Data Integration and Exploitation Service (NDIES). A pre-market tender published last year stated that NDIES was expected to cost between £75m and £250m – though this is still an active tender and not reflected in the £992m figure. 

However, recent developments also draw into doubt Palantir’s foothold in this space. Following the reporting into the extent of Palantir’s involvement with the police, five forces using Palantir’s Nectar – the ones within EMSOU (Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire) – are reported to be ending their trial with the software giant, citing “funding streams”. 

Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. Photo: Tobias Schwarz / Getty

The EMSOU exit is a setback for Palantir, although ERSOU is still trialling the software and the Met has extended its internal monitoring contract. Lancashire police also ran a short pilot.

Earlier this year, London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, blocked another £50m, two-year deal with the Metropolitan police that Palantir would have secured, citing a lack of proper procurement process with the Met. Palantir is suing the mayor’s office, with its lawyers claiming that the decision made by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime was "unlawful" because it took into consideration Palantir’s "values and ethics" when blocking the contract.

Other agreements

Many of Palantir’s previously known agreements have been in the public domain for some time, though some ran over the cost value originally reported. The company has also been involved in a number of consortium agreements, its share of which has now been uncovered by the Nerve through FOI disclosures.

The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)) issued Palantir a contract to help build a case management system for Ukrainian humanitarian relief as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme in 2022, for an initial cost of £0, as well as a £4.5m contract to provide the Foundry platform for the department. 

Information obtained under FOI from the department reveals that total spending on these agreements up to March 2026 had run up to £18.6m, also accounting for two contract extensions. MHCLG has now moved to a different system, and after replacing Palantir a department spokesperson said the department had saved “millions”, and the new system was "more flexible" and could meet "high standards" of security. 

The Cabinet Office has worked with Palantir too, to build a £27m post-Brexit “border flow tool”. Scrutiny of departmental spending records indicate it spent £27.9m on Palantir software in total. In 2024, it was reported that the government had pulled the plug on the project because of “budget pressures”, instead opting to develop an “in-house model”. 

The company has, as far as is currently known, held two agreements, years apart, with local council authorities; first in Sunderland, where they built the authority an “intelligence hub” between 2014 and 2019, costing £4.5m. More recently, Coventry council entered into an agreement to provide a “strategic AI platform” at an initial cost of £500,000. 

As previously reported by the Nerve and confirmed via FOI disclosures, the authority then extended its agreement with Palantir at a 50% higher cost of £750,000. 

In addition to contracts previously reported by the Nerve in January, Palantir has subsequently been awarded more work by a variety of departments. The UK’s energy operator, the National Energy System Operator, recently awarded it a £21.2m contract without competition.

The company has also recently been awarded a further £9m to provide software managing firearms licensing across the UK, also handling Home Office licensing for explosives, explosive precursors, and poisons. 

The Nerve’s initial investigation into Palantir’s government contracts in January

‘The People v Palantir’

These latest disclosures come at the end of a week of “People v Palantir” protests taking place across Europe, the Americas, Australia and the UK, focused on the company’s work with ICE and the Israeli military. In England the focus was on the FDP. 

Campaign groups including Medact, Amnesty International, Just Treatment, Health Workers for a Free Palestine, Global Justice Now, Keep Our NHS Public and Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK have held a series of health-worker-led events throughout the week, ending with a rally held outside Palantir’s London HQ in Soho Square on Thursday evening, and protests at locations across the country, demanding an end to all government contracts with the company.

A spokesperson for Medact and the No Palantir in the NHS campaign said: “Given that Palantir’s software services are mainly used for war, surveillance and deportation, it is deeply disturbing to see how much the UK has contracted them in recent years, and speaks to the slide into authoritarianism as Big Tech and governments collaborate more and more.”

“The government has a choice,” they said, “whether to continue with Palantir’s unethical and inefficient tech, or choose to reinvest in public sector innovation and NHS-led data architecture.”

Wrigley said Watson, who joined Palantir last month, would “have his job cut out to rescue the reputation of a company that isn’t as good as it thinks it is”.

L-R: Luke Cinque White and Rory Kinnear in The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1Y until 12 December

James Graham’s delightful new play about the economist John Maynard Keynes opens with a knowing joke. “I have no doubt that some of you will feel daunted by this subject matter,” says Keynes (Rory Kinnear) as he workshops a lecture. His lover Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) scoffs at his dense graphs and equations and asks him what really matters to him. Keynes answers with a question: “What is a good life?” And we’re off.

The implausibly prolific Graham has many strings to his bow but he is uniquely good at wrangling social history and complex ideas into lively drama: the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun in Ink (now a Danny Boyle film) or the 1970s Labour governments in his 2012 breakthrough This House. This time he’s playing on the highest difficulty setting, covering Keynes’s life from the outbreak of war in 1914 to his death in 1946 while explaining concepts such as the multiplier effect. How do he and director Nicholas Hytner make it so much fun?

Keynes certainly lived a good life, and one that made him one of the titans of the 20th century. He didn’t just reinvent economics but saved the UK from postwar bankruptcy, co-founded the IMF and World Bank, and made possible the NHS and the welfare state. Just as importantly, to him, he originated the Arts Council and built the Cambridge Arts Theatre. The play’s merchandise calls him “the Great Persuader”, a title he earned by being a unicorn combination of pragmatist and dreamer.

Kinnear is not only more handsome than the real Keynes (whom Virginia Woolf compared to a “gorged seal”) but a lot more humble. Still, he brings to life a man who absolutely refused to stay in his lane. Keynes is torn between two worlds that he alone believes shouldn’t be separate: the realm of art and the kingdom of money. Costume designer Jenny Beavan outfits the largely anonymous ministers and Treasury officials in grey suits while his friends in the Bloomsbury Group – whose bohemian bubble was kept afloat by Keynes’s stock-market speculations even as they scolded him for selling out – are warm and colourful. Designer Bob Crowley’s sliding panels heighten the contrast with projections of vivid modernist paintings for the Bloomsbury scenes and black-and-white archival photographs to evoke the brutal tides of history.

The cast of The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Keynes was also sexually unpredictable. After numerous liaisons with men (meticulously documented in his journal), he shocked his friends by marrying the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925. “Maynard, that’s a woman!” exclaims Woolf, spikily played by Naomi Frederick. The charismatic Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova doesn’t have much to chew on with Lydia, but her dreamlike dance sequences give the play a second language to express movement, change and the quest for harmony.

Now, you might complain that Keynes’s life lacks dramatic tension. While he had to fight to get his heretical theories a hearing, this well-liked serial overachiever, the cleverest man in any room, was not a tortured, tragic figure. Nor does he lend himself to the same second-act rug-pull as Ink or Brexit: The Uncivil War, where the insurgent becomes the destroyer. He was a good man in a good marriage with good ideas. It is the dance of ideas that gives the play its energy, comedy and soul, like a friendlier version of Tom Stoppard.

Whereas Tim Price’s hagiographic Nye made every one of Nye Bevan’s opponents a dullard or a swine, The Standard of Living gives Keynes’s antagonists their due. His Bloomsbury frenemy Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter, hilariously bitter) is the voice of art for art’s sake: “If only people didn’t want things!” Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston), the monomaniacal father of neoliberalism, is just as intelligent as Keynes and as emotionally scarred by hyperinflation as his opponent is by mass unemployment. Both Hayek and Strachey are partisans who see Keynes’s unifying third way as a dangerous misreading of how the world should be.

Rory Kinnear and Natalia Osipova in The Standard of Living. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Keynes versus Hayek in act two is Graham at his best, turning an intellectual debate into a zippy duel. “We must tighten our belts,” demands Hayek. “Buy a new belt!” replies Keynes. They go head to head on the roof of King’s College, Cambridge, when they are fire wardens during the blitz. “People will look back on this and never believe that it actually happened,” says Keynes, but it really did; while Graham smudges the chronology in places, his research is faultless.

Graham makes a few topical points, about arts funding or the toxic remedies of populism, but what he’s really championing is a view of life. For Keynes, economics was not primarily about numbers and systems but people. His famous quip “In the long run we are all dead” was his rebuke to the laissez-faire argument that the market would eventually correct itself and human suffering in the meantime was inevitable.

The play ends with Kinnear delivering a soaring, humanist peroration to the fullness of life which ties Keynes’s call for state intervention to a broader rejection of passivity in every sphere of life. To laissez-faire (“leave it be”), he responds: “Just do it. Don’t wait.” It depends how you feel about subtext becoming text, but I found it beautiful and apt. Whereas Hayek snaps “economics is not poetry!”, Keynes thought it could be, and so does Graham. Both contend that life does not take place in separate boxes but in the interplay of work and pleasure, politics and friendship, the large and the small. Only connect.

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

Tim Anderson recently wrote a deep-dive essay for the food magazine Vittles on “katsuification: how everything in Britain became katsu curry”, which examined how this craze came to dominate our menus.  

Anderson is a go-to expert on Japanese food. Despite being born and raised in Wisconsin, he has studied the country’s diet for over two decades (including a spell living in Kitakyushu), written 10 cookbooks including Hokkaido: Recipes from the Seas, Fields and Farmlands of Northern Japan and the award-winning Tokyo Stories. Plus, he can cook and in 2011 triumphed in the BBC’s MasterChef with a meal that included pork ramen and a Tokyo-inspired burger. 

His goofy new book Japanese Curry (and its Delicious Companions), published this month, focuses on the country’s “favourite comfort food” and is a celebration of the dish in all its forms, “old and new, classic and creative”. Chicken katsu curry spaghetti, anyone? He points out that his curries are very different from those originating in India:  “Whereas they are naturally thick from puréed onions/tomatoes/chillies and a whole heap of spices, Japan’s curry is based on a fat-and-flour roux that thickens a lightly spiced stock-based sauce, like a gravy.” 

Here he pairs curry with Japanese noodles. “I think the viscosity of Japanese curry broth makes it a natural partner for ramen, which is usually served with meaty broths that have a lot of body from fat and collagen – or, in this case, curry roux.”

Words by Jane Ferguson

Photography by Laura Edwards

Tim’s curry ramen

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1.2 litres dashi or chicken, beef or vegetable stock

• 1 packet curry roux (90–100g), or 1 batch homemade curry roux (see below)

• 3-4 tbsp soy sauce, to taste

• Hot chilli sauce, to taste

• 100g spinach

• ½ hispi (sweetheart) cabbage, cut into strips about 1cm wide

• 150g beansprouts

• 4 portions uncooked ramen noodles

• 4 spring onions, finely sliced

• A few big pinches of toasted sesame seeds

• About 60g red pickled ginger

• A few spoonfuls of chilli oil or sesame oil, to taste

Method

1. Bring the dashi or stock to the boil in a large pot over a medium-high heat. Whisk in the curry roux, soy sauce and chilli sauce, bring up to the boil and simmer for a few minutes until it thickens up nicely.

2. Reduce to a low simmer, drop in the spinach, and place a lid on the pan.

3. Bring a large pot of water to the boil and blanch the cabbage and beansprouts for 1-2 mins, then remove with a slotted spoon or a sieve and reserve.

4. Let the water come back up to a rolling boil, then cook the ramen until al dente, according to the packet instructions. Drain well.

Divide the ramen between four deep bowls and ladle over the soup and spinach. Use chopsticks to gently stir the noodles through the soup, then top with the cabbage and bean sprouts, spring onions, sesame seeds, pickled ginger and chilli or sesame oil.

Homemade curry roux - optional

Makes 120g, enough for 4-6 servings

Ingredients

• 30g coconut oil or butter 

• 1 tbsp vegetable oil 

• ½ small onion, very finely chopped 

• 1 garlic clove, very finely chopped 

• 1cm piece ginger root, peeled and very finely chopped 

• 2 tbsp curry powder

• 2 tsp garam masala 

• 35g plain flour 

• 5g cornflour 

• 2 tsp tomato puree 

• 1 stock cube (any, such as chicken or beef)

Method

1. Heat the coconut oil or butter and vegetable oil in a saucepan over a medium heat, then add the onion, garlic and ginger and saute for 6-8 mins until soft and brown, stirring frequently. 

2. Add the curry powder and garam masala and stir it through the fat. Reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook for about 3 mins to allow the spices to soften and infuse into the fat. 

3. Add the flours and stir them into the fat as well; the flour will absorb all of the fat and make a very solid, dense paste, so work the mixture with a spatula to smash everything together until it is relatively uniform. 

4. Mix in the tomato puree and the stock cube, but don’t worry if the stock cube doesn’t fully dissolve. 

5. Remove from the heat, and tip the mixture into a food processor. Blend the roux for a minute or so to break down the bits of onion. The roux is now ready to use, or to be stored in the fridge or freezer to use later.

Japanese Curry by Tim Anderson is published by Quadrille (RRP £14.99; to order at a discount go to the Nerve Bookshop)

Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths photographed in London for the Nerve by Pål Hansen

Back in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa made The Satanic Verses the world’s most controversial novel and its author the most hunted man, “there were people who were willing to say that I wasn’t in that much danger and that I was dramatising it in order to draw attention to myself,” Salman Rushdie remembers. He pauses. “Nobody thinks that now.”

On 12 August 2022, Rushdie was being interviewed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state when a young man he had never met leapt out of the audience with a knife and began stabbing him, over and over again: in the hand, the leg, the chest, the face. Thirty-three years after the fatwa, the assailant that Rushdie no longer expected or feared had finally come forward.

During the first few months of his recovery Rushdie feared he would never write again but he worked his way back to fiction by writing his 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. “The elephant in the room cliche is appropriate,” he says. His wife, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, told the story her own way in The Flower Bearers, intertwining the attack with the sudden loss of her friend Kamilah Aisha Moon the previous year.

While they were processing events on the page, the couple were also working with director Alex Gibney on a documentary called Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie. “Seeing is believing,” says Rushdie, a lifelong cinephile. “There are things words can do and there are things images can do.”

It’s appropriate, then, that we’re meeting in a screening room at the Soho Hotel. Fresh from New York, Rushdie’s home for the last 26 years, they’re a striking couple: he’s dapper, she’s glamorous. I last met Rushdie in 2019, to talk about his novel Quichotte. Apart from the black lens in his spectacles, which covers the space where his right eye used to be, he seems remarkably unchanged: calm, droll, precise, regal. He’s delighted to hear this.

Salman Rushdie photographed in 1983. Photo: Reg Innell / Getty

“I’m not different,” he says with pride. “It’s hard to get through an entire life without having a moment or two when life asks you quite hard questions. And you don’t know how you’ll answer those questions until you’re obliged to respond. Many people discover that they have inner resources which they didn’t know they had. I think that about Eliza and I think that about myself. I’m surprised that we came through it so well. Tougher than we thought.”

“Looking back now, I’m proud of both of us,” Griffiths gently agrees. “We did the best we could do.”

On his fifth day in hospital, Rushdie decided that his recovery should be documented, if only for the couple themselves. Griffiths sent for her camera and her footage forms the backbone of Knife. Some scenes are hard to watch, like the lurid, horror-movie quality of Rushdie’s doomed eye. “It doesn’t look like eyes should look,” he says drily to me. “I looked much worse than I thought I did.” Griffiths made sure there were no mirrors during his 18 days in the trauma ward: “I thought if he saw himself as I was seeing him, it could impede his recovery. He might feel really hopeless.”

Equally upsetting are Griffiths’s anguished video diaries from the first few days, when there was no guarantee that Rushdie would survive. “I’ve been a photographer for 20 years so the camera is an extension of myself,” she says. “The things that I could never speak to Salman about, I could speak to the lens. It helped me process and survive everything that was happening.”

Ever since the couple had met and fallen in love at a literary event in 2017, they had avoided publicity. Most people didn’t even know they had got married in 2021. Now they were headline news. Griffiths was aware of two worlds: the one outside, where the attack was global news, and the tiny, desperate realm of the hospital room. “Unlike Salman’s family and friends, I had no muscle memory of what it meant to have all this attention,” she says. “I did have a sense that things were happening beyond that trauma ward but I had to dial the volume down on that. I thought if I focus on what’s happening out there, I can’t be present in here.”

Rushdie didn’t have his phone – it took him months to reply to the thousands of text messages he received – but he does remember Eliza’s brother-in-law sitting by his bedside and softly reading President Biden’s statement of support into his ear. “I was very touched. I thought, oh, it’s on that scale.” Unlike in 1989, when the likes of Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jimmy Carter were less than sympathetic to Rushdie’s plight, the solidarity was almost universal. “It’s because I actually got hurt,” he says simply. “That was the difference.”

It took a year of recovery before Rushdie was feeling well enough to view the footage and realised that it could grow into a film. The couple spoke to various directors but Gibney, whose four-hour documentary about Elon Musk is also released this autumn, asked the smartest questions. Gibney suggested taking inspiration from Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, in which a man remembers his life from a hospital bed.

A protest in Beirut over The Satanic Verses in 1989. Photo: Nabil Ishmail

The film therefore takes a journey through Rushdie’s past: his childhood in Mumbai, his migration to Britain in 1961, his years as an advertising copywriter and aspiring novelist, his breakthrough triumph with 1981’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, and the life-changing drama that followed The Satanic Verses. Even if you remember the period, the extremity of the hatred unleashed on “Satan Rushdie” is still shocking – the righteous conviction that a novel (which most of his ill-wishers had never read) should be punishable by death.

Rushdie was hesitant about that part of the film. “I thought, Really? We have to go back there again? It feels like ancient history. So I took some persuading. But it’s been so long that many people watching the film would have no context for why this man decided to jump up out of an audience and attack me. Even my friends were not aware of the weight of it, the scale of the attack in 1989, so I guess it’s worth telling people this is how it was.”

Born in 1978, Griffiths was just 10 when the fatwa happened and knew very little about it. Nor did the subject often come up during the first five years of their relationship. “Just in passing,” she says. “Salman would refer to it as the bad old days but it wasn’t a presence in our daily being together.” When I interviewed Rushdie in 2019, he brushed the topic aside: “Truthfully, it’s been so long now that I don’t think about it.” Was that true, I wonder now, or did he just not want to talk about it?

“No, I did truthfully feel that,” he says. “We live in an age when the subject changes very fast. The world was talking about many other things. I didn’t like to talk about it because I felt like I was being dragged back into a time which I felt I had managed to leave behind. And then, unfortunately, this one young man tried to drag me back into it.” He laughs mordantly. “It’s annoying.”

The attack was not just an injury to Rushdie’s body; it sliced through the life he had made for himself since 1989 and the freedom he had painstakingly reclaimed by no longer hiding. During his decade under police protection in Britain, when the intelligence services foiled six different assassination plots, he was the invisible man. But in New York, he was regularly photographed socialising with celebrities as a declaration of defiance: look, here I am in the swim of things, there’s nothing to fear. In 2017 he even spoofed himself in a Curb Your Enthusiasm plotline about Fatwa! The Musical. It was all over, until it wasn’t.

Knife opens with an impressionistic reenactment of the assault and climaxes with the real thing. The Chautauqua Institution films its events from multiple angles but the video from 12 August 2022 had been legally embargoed as prosecution evidence so the couple had never seen it until three days before the film’s premiere at the Sundance film festival in January. It is shocking enough for an outsider to watch the frenzy of violence descend on Rushdie. What must it have been like for him?

“Yeah, it wasn’t easy to watch,” Rushdie says. It was, though, strangely reassuring. “In my memory I just stood there and he attacked me. But in the film you can see me trying to get away.” Encouraging, too, was the sight of people rushing to his aid. “At that moment on that stage I was exposed to the worst of human behaviour and the best of human behaviour. The audience saved my life. Because he wasn’t planning to stop. Without them I wouldn’t be here. I saw great violence and great courage within seconds of each other.”

Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths photographed in London for the Nerve by Pål Hansen

Griffiths wasn’t in Chautauqua on the day. She heard the news from worried friends. “You wish you could have been there and what could you have done?” she says. “I think the anger is the frustration that nothing could have been done. Nothing could have changed this.” So she set her anger aside (“‘Keep calm and carry on’ is kind of my personality”) and focused on the love and care her husband received. “I remain astonished by the kindness. I love seeing that about humanity after witnessing such violence and darkness from humanity.”

Rushdie was surprised to feel no rage towards his assailant. Did it hit him later? “Strangely not,” he says. “I think I felt that anger and vengeful feelings were a way of being trapped in the thing and in order to move forward you have to not carry that weight around.”

To that end, he chose not to think about his would-be killer, a 24-year-old Muslim from New Jersey called Hadi Matar. In the memoir, he refuses to even name him. “In my head, I dismissed him as not being important. I’m going on with my life, you’re in jail. That’s where we are.” Rushdie attended both trials but Matar never gave testimony, never said a word in his defence. He was a blank space. “I thought, ‘You’re really unimpressive. You’re a little squirt.’ I mean, a little squirt can almost kill you. There’s that, too.”

Rushdie has always wanted to be known as a writer rather than a victim or a symbol of free speech under fire. He published a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, last year, with a novel on the way. Griffiths is writing, too. The film therefore feels like the end of a chapter.

“It’s part of your story, but it’s not the story,” Griffiths says. “You acknowledge it and honour it and then you keep on living and creating and doing the things you must do. By putting it all out there, we get to move on.” Rushdie chuckles: “I hope so. I mean, two books and a film is enough.”

People who come to the brink of death often report a period of psychedelically intense appreciation for life before settling back into normality, but Rushdie still feels, four years later, a sense of gratitude. “I did come away thinking I’d been given a second act,” he says. “The odds were against it. It does make me value the days very much. I wake up and think, ‘Still here. Not doing so badly.’”

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is in UK and Irish cinemas now

The North Sea oil fan Andy “Burn Them” Burnham’s maiden Labour conference speech has thrown open the curtains of the party’s darkened sickroom, flooding it with the angelic light of the very north London metropolitan liberal elitist values that the party had previously been trying to disavow, in pursuit of the elusive Brexit-racist vote. Europe! Public ownership!! Sure Start!!! Whatever next? Being nice to transgender people? I don’t think so! Steady on!! Either this wallpaper goes or I do. 

Some say the tragic death of Burnham’s father focused the new prime minister’s mind on the crisis of social care, and the way it is funded, in post-Brexit Britain.  If that’s what it takes to fix a problem, then hopefully Burnham’s bichon-poo rescue dog Axel, a cross between a bichon-frise and a poodle, will get fatally ill and die as soon as possible. Maybe then Burnham will do something for British pet owners currently cowering under the cosh of ever-increasing vet bills, as the market is cornered by massive companies owned by private equity firms. Thank you, Axel. Off you pop! Greater love hath no bichon-poo. What kind of person calls a dog Axel anyway? That’s the name of a middle-class human man, surely? It’s like calling a boy Fido.

Meanwhile, out in the countryside, far away from the Labour government’s Liverpool dockside conference with its chinking of champagne socialists’ socialist champagne glasses of socialist champagne, where movers and shakers on the left give their pets human names like Colin and Pauline and Alfie, it would appear that ordinary people continue to eat raw offal in all its forms, guzzle Bovril ™ ® by the yard from long glass tubes, and fear foreigners, even when they aren’t even foreign. The small hours of Sunday night! A country lane!! A van with a single barrel of petrol in it!!! RAF Fairford!!!! Gloucestershire!!!!! What really went on there? We only have this extract, and it’s from the testimony of a “hero farmer” ( © Daily Mail 27/9/26)! 

“I just thought, what the hell are they doing? I saw a group of Middle Eastern-looking young guys running off through the trees. Some of them had masks or balaclavas on, and they all scattered ahead of us as we drove back past,” the hero farmer told the Daily Mail, which had opened its report on the Fairford manifestation with the following sentence:  “A hero farmer alerted police over an alleged car bomb plot on RAF Fairford after stumbling upon five 'Middle Eastern-looking, masked' men on the way home from a party.” To be fair to the hero farmer, I appreciate her vigilance. I would have assumed the three white vans were just delivery drivers who had given up and got lost, having hurled my Amazon order of the new Hawkwind Bristol Custom Bike Show 1986 live album into a damp bush to get soaked and ruined instead of leaving it in my mailbox. 

I’m not saying the hero farmer’s description of the Middle Eastern masked men isn’t accurate, but the direction of travel of the story was immediately set in motion. In blurred photographs taken in the aftermath of their arrest, the now handcuffed and shirtless Middle Eastern masked men, unmasked but their faces pixelated in the western fashion, appear to me to be relatively pale-skinned, but then they are floodlit by massive police security lights. The fact that I usually appear brightly lit on the standup comedy stage, for example, means that neither my 1/32nd Indian heritage, nor the fact that a representative of Scandinavia’s Indigenous peoples has suggested I might like to join the Sami Council, have been noted by the press or the audience. 

I don’t know the facts of the hero farmer’s story. And so it wouldn’t be appropriate to say anything definitive.  But not knowing anything definitive never stopped Reform’s cacophonous inflatable hate-frog Nigel Farage from making definitive statements before the starter’s gun in the collective race to blame brown people has even been fired. 

For Farage, speaking on Monday,  the Fairford Five (who sound like the heroes of an Enid Blyton novel about military sabotage, foreign influence, and lashings of ginger beer) were evidence of the fact that hostile regimes like Iran were using the small boats “to get their operatives into Britain”.  What a waste of time that would have been! There’s no need for hostile regimes to smuggle operatives in to do us harm. Russia, for example, just paid Reform’s now-incarcerated leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, hard cash to do its bidding, and no one even got their feet wet or climbed into a dinghy.  And Farage himself, who didn’t arrive here by dinghy, has declared the hostile foreign actor Vladimir Putin “the politician he admires most”. All I can say is I hope he is being well paid!

A few hours after Farage blamed small boat migrants for The Fairford Five Fiasco  (Puffin Books, RRP £7.99), the police revealed that the men arrested were all British nationals anyway,  and were suspected of being proxies for hire. Farage, a sack of rotting seaweed in human form, with flies buzzing in and out of it to lay their eggs in the soggiest bits (which then grow into maggots), was of course quick to correct the record. But he did so in a way that continued to push his own agenda, adding: “I have been saying it for years. I didn’t say anything different yesterday. What I have been saying for years and saying all summer: our national security is threatened from the outside by weakness on borders like it has never been before.” Even though, on this occasion, it wasn’t. 

And if Farage’s anti-migrant message didn’t hit home first time due to having been made immediately irrelevant by the emergence of actual facts, then the impotently futile Ofcom organisation will ensure that he, a sitting MP, is nonetheless able to further amplify it on a programme bearing his own name on an opaquely funded TV channel called GB News, even though this would appear to contradict its own wonky guidelines.

In a BBC News interview clarifying the The Fairford Five ™ ® story, Andy Burnham explained: “We will say more in due course, but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part.” And I can confirm my belief that I believe it’s an indication of how strong Burnham’s belief is that he was able to confirm his belief in his own belief by using the words “belief” and “believe” too many times in the same sentence.

At some point it became clear that one of the five suspects himself had phoned the police to dob the rest of The Fairford Five in (which is why the police were already on top of the situation even before the hero farmer heroically weighed in). This suggests that a slow realisation had dawned on the suspect that whatever the fuck it was he and his loser mates had been subcontracted to do, perhaps by anonymous proxy, was bigger than they initially realised. It reminds me of the moment where Noddy Holder, in the fantasy Slade biopic Flame, realises he is expected to use a microphone that is perpetually ablaze, and declares: “You want me to sing into that?”

And then the police let all of The Fairford Five out on bail anyway because it didn’t seem worth further detaining them. Which, given that they will incarcerate octogenarian environmental or anti-genocide activists for merely planning a protest or knitting on a pavement, suggests that they really had nothing to go on and didn’t believe they posed a threat. What’s happening? It’s like something from the mindfarts of TV’s Chris Morris.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the adjudicated sexual abuser and convicted fraudster and president of the USA, had already made an opportunistic statement claiming that the men, both masked and Middle Eastern-looking, were intending to “do big damage”, and that the US had been "working with Britain", adding "we had them under view for a long time, and we got them.” Really?

Now The Fairford Five are out on bail, it’s not clear if the masked and Middle Eastern-looking men themselves even knew what it was they were supposed to be doing, or why. So how could Trump have been aware of them when they probably weren’t even aware of themselves? What is the exact nature of Donald Trump’s relationship with observable reality? If Donald Trump falls asleep in a forest, and there’s no one there to hear him snore, does he even make a sound? 

And why are we allowing Donald Trump to bomb Iran from an airbase on British soil anyway, when each of his bombing raids merely serves to exacerbate a crisis that achieves nothing but driving up our fuel prices? Every time an American bomber takes off from Fairford, another Lerwick fisherman decides he can no longer afford to fuel his boat and decides to drink himself to death with cans of Tennent’s in a brightly lit bar decorated by a lone black and white photograph of the Shetland fiddler Aly Bain.

If The Fairford Five didn’t know what it was they were doing, whatever it was, I sympathise with them. Is writing this column the thing that I am doing now? And if it is, what am I supposed to be doing? And if so, why? Donald Trump lies. Nigel Farage lies. And Ofcom sticks out its tongue and laps up the lies, and then wipes the dried crust off its eyelashes and puts it all to the back of its mind. And we sit here, you and I, like Neanderthal troglodytes gathered round a fire, watching the flickering flames of the unfolding stories, filtered through the bent news media of biased billionaires, as they cast meaningless shadows on the cave wall of our consciousness, wondering what it all means, and whether it will affect our ability to find our decaying parents a bed to die in.

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.

Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.  

And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October,  and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October

Kiell Smith-Bynoe. Photo: The Other Richard 

Best known for starring in acclaimed TV shows Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats, the actor and comedian Kiell Smith-Bynoe was born in London and trained at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and East 15 Acting School. This autumn, he has a packed schedule with two films out – Ghosts: The Possession of Button House, which gets all the beloved supernatural characters back together for their first film, and Wicker, a saucy comedic fable in which he plays the innkeeper alongside Olivia Colman as an ostracised fisherwoman who commissions the local basketmaker to weave her a husband. Smith-Bynoe is also back on the road with his hit improv comedy show Kool Story Bro, which kicks off on 6 October in Leeds.

Photo: Michelle Helena Janssen

MUSIC

kwn – and all pride aside

(RCA)

I discovered kwn maybe two years ago. She's an R&B artist from east London and is a new flavour, really: I couldn't compare her to any other artist. I love the choir-style backing vocals she has on most of her tracks and she's a really clever writer and a great singer. I've seen some of her a cappella stuff too, and while a lot of music now has effects and autotune on it, she doesn't seem to have loads of effects. Music is really important to me. I grew up in a household where the TV wasn't always on, but the record player was, or a radio. Now, the first thing I do when I wake up is put Apple Music on. Sometimes, if I'm on the road or doing a lot of things back to back and I start to feel low in energy, I realise I haven't listened to any music that day. Having some music on makes me feel better.

THEATRE

Lola-Rose's Safe Space

(at The Free Association, London SE1)

Lola-Rose Maxwell is a comedian and actor who I’ve known through improv for a while, and now she’s created a new show, which she's only performed twice so far. It’s improvised couples therapy. Two improvisers play a couple and are given a problem in their relationship, then she plays the therapist. It's just fantastic. I was filled with jealousy, because any time I see something amazing I'm not involved in, I feel that. But after the first 10 minutes of being green with envy, I really enjoyed it and loved the concept. There are TV shows about therapy now, like Blue Therapy on Netflix or Couples Therapy on iPlayer – it's a bit zeitgeisty. But she's turned that on its head, made it improvised and funny. [The show will be back at The Free Association in November and December. For updates follow Lola-Rose on Instagram]

A gig at Hackney Church in London earlier this year. Photo: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

VENUE

Hackney Church

(London E8)

I went to this venue for the first time recently, to a concert by an American artist called Khamari. I actually went for the warm-up act, Ambré, because she’s not had any UK dates since I got into her. It's R&B, quite a lot of acoustic stuff, and she's an amazing singer. My taste is pretty eclectic but I do really love R&B, and that's what I grew up on. Choice FM, which is now Capital Xtra, was always playing in the house, and my mum was a big Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross fan. I'd sort of assumed the sound quality wouldn't be that good at Hackney Church because it's not built for concerts, it’s built for praise and worship, but it was great. I loved it. It has nice toilets too, which always helps.

APP

Nightkey

This app gets you discounts on restaurants and bars in and around London. A friend told me about it. Discount apps come and go, but I looked at this one and saw that some of the restaurants are fancy places in Mayfair that are really quite expensive – you could get 30% off Hakkasan, which is unheard of, places like Hawksmoor, Gaucho. Not only do you get the booking, you get the discount code. It's become very difficult going out in London – not so easy to just turn up and get a table.

L-R: Emma Sidi and Amelia Dimoldenberg in a sketch from SNL:UK. Photo: Sky

TV

Saturday Night Live UK

(Sky One/Now)

I'm really happy for UK comedy that this show has been successful. There was a lot of negative press before it even came out. People were expecting it to fail. Hopefully it's building more stars from the UK who'll go on to have their own shows, and comedy commissioners will take more of a chance. There’s lots of marketing and advertising for it and it's pushing comedy to the forefront in a way that, until now, has only happened for drama. Before, there wasn't much space for satire or political lampooning on TV, that was happening online. I think it's a big step forward for UK comedy.

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 23 October and Wicker is out on 30 October. For Kool Story Bro dates and tickets go to koolstorybro.co.uk

Hello everyone!

It’s Imogen here with our Tuesday edition, still slightly bleary-eyed but buzzing from our biggest event to date, the Nerve Live. Today, powered by even more coffee than we got through for that, we’re bringing you a moving and infuriating report by the Nerve’s Brenna Spain about the harsh reality of living in Slough, the data centre capital of Europe; Carole Cadwalladr on Palantir’s Tom Watson going on the offensive against the company’s critics; political commentator Sangita Myska on Andy Burnham’s big promise; and of course our weekly culture hotlist.

But first a huge thank-you to everyone who came on Sunday, who bought merch and made it a total blast. We’ll be sharing highlights on our socials and future editions for everyone else.

Scenes from The Nerve Live on Sunday

The day kicked off with a lively conversation between Sangita and our Reform UK correspondent, John Sweeney. Ghosts/Stath Lets Flats star Kiell Smith-Bynoe provided comic relief by sharing his current cultural highlights for the Recommender Live (we’ll publish a print version on Friday), including why Saturday Night Live UK is such a welcome addition to political discourse in this country. Finally, Carole Cadwalladr hosted a discussion on “Fighting Hate with Humour” with the Guilty Feminist, Deborah Frances-White, and satirist Cody Dahler, in which Cody reflected on the time he was told he was “way too leftwing”. I think he spoke for many when he said: "The planet's on fire. I don't think billionaires should exist. I don't think rich people should be able to squirrel away their wealth in tax havens. I think if everyone paid tax, our public services would be good… I'm like, what is ideological about all that?!"

The always inspiring Deborah Frances-White also talked about the simple act of “putting your shoes on”, getting out of the house and taking steps to come together and be part of the resistance. That’s exactly what the Nerve’s Brenna Spain has been doing – since starting with us this summer she’s been digging into the large number of data centres that have been popping up in the UK and talking to local communities about their negative impact, particularly in Slough, where she reports from today.

Brenna says: “For me, data centres have become a good means of exploring what’s at stake in 2026: local democracy, fossil fuels, human health, private equity and Big Tech, all at once. 'The cloud' is a euphemism for energy-hungry servers housed in buildings the size of football fields that squeeze through the red tape of local planning.” 

Here are the links to today’s stories:

Sleepless in Slough: health fears in Europe’s data centre capital

Susan lives in social housing just metres from a data centre in Slough. She tells reporter Brenna Spain that its constant hum and vibrations have kept her awake at night and coincided with bouts of dizziness, nausea and headaches. Her story is a glimpse into how the infrastructure that keeps Big Tech running is causing increasing concern for people over their health and quality of life. Read Brenna’s feature here (and do get in touch with her - brenna.spain@thenerve.news - if you have data centre stories from your community).

Photo: Leon Neal / Getty Images

Sangita Myska: Can Burnham be the King of Care?

Today, in his first speech as leader to the Labour conference, Andy Burnham set out his vision for the future of the country – and didn’t shy away from the big issues, zooming in on the essential but incredibly arduous task of fixing social care. Our political columnist has both witnessed and reported on the parlous state of the system and knows how important, and difficult, reform will be. She says what we need “is for Burnham to stick to his guns, spend the personal political capital he says he’ll sacrifice and, most importantly, face down the enemy.” Read Sangita’s column here.

(l-r): Clive Lewis and Tom Watson

Tom Watson warns Clive Lewis over Palantir

This month it came as a shock to learn that former Labour deputy leader Lord Watson had joined Peter Thiel’s Palantir as a senior vice-president. Yesterday, at a Labour conference fringe event, it emerged that he has now written to his party colleague Clive Lewis MP – who has been outspoken about the surveillance company that is embedding itself in the British state – to enumerate and object to all Lewis’s criticisms. “That, to me, was an implicit threat,” Lewis tells Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr – and from a politician who spoke out in the past about the dangers of surveillance during the phone-hacking scandal. Read Carole’s story here. 

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Elinor Dashwood) and George MacKay (Edward Ferrars) in Sense and Sensibility. Photo: Universal

This week’s culture hotlist

“Oh my god, an actually good new sitcom,” wrote Julia Raeside in her excited email recommending Break Clause, Channel 4’s new sitcom penned by Jess Bray, for this week’s hotlist. Starting on Thursday, it centres around a young couple who sign the lease on a new flat then instantly break up. Love is also central to Georgia Oakley’s fresh new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility and Sunil Gupta’s new photography show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, which, says Nerve art critic Ben Luke, showcases “Gupta’s commitment to exploring queer love, everyday life and politics”. For these tips and more across theatre, film, TV and books, read this week’s hotlist here.

Thanks for reading. Can we ask a favour? If you are enjoying this newsletter, please could you recommend it to a friend or family member and encourage them to sign up? It really helps us grow!

We’ll see you on Friday.

Imogen

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

Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers his speech at Labour Party Conference.
Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty

In the new series of Game of Thrones, the King of the North has returned to his birthplace, Liverpool, to conquer the Labour conference. It’s an important moment for Andy Burnham – having successfully swerved a leadership competition, this is the first time he will face party members, unions and his own MPs en masse, including those still viewing him with residual suspicion following an unsavoury, if necessary, coup against his predecessor Sir Keir Starmer. Most importantly, for Burnham’s advisers, it is where the prime minister set out to the public his ambition for the next three years.

To that end, Burnham used his much anticipated leader’s speech to present a vision that was bold and far-reaching, touching on everything from public control of utilities to stewardship of AI to voting reform. In a Kennedy-esque nod, the speech reminded the public that if he was delivering the vision they’d demanded, then they should back it in the spirit of “unity and positivity”. 

Most notably, Burnham has set his sights on slaying the monster of a fractured, dysfunctional social care system to prove he’s got what it takes to be prime minister and lead the country from rancour to revival. He has committed to establishing what he calls a “landmark” National Care Service (NCS), free at the point of need for anyone who wishes to use it in England.

This is radical stuff that aligns squarely with his anti-neoliberal philosophy. Burnham appears passionate and determined: two qualities he will need in truckloads if this is to be the totemic issue of his premiership. What he will also need, in even bigger quantities, is funding. The Health Foundation has estimated a universal social care system in England, with the government funding all support, could cost around £18.5bn a year. Burnham rejects this figure, though he has not supplied an alternative number. In Scotland, free personal and nursing care is already available, conditional upon appropriate assessment. In Wales, social care is usually paid for by a mix of the person receiving it and the local authority, again dependent upon a financial assessment.

At this point, I could chuck in a load of statistics to prove just how ruinous the decrepitude of the English social care system is to our public finances and NHS waiting times. Instead, I want to tell you that – like Burnham, who recently lost his father to dementia – I too have lived through the ravages of the speciously named “care system” with my own parents in the years preceding their deaths in 2015. Based on our experience in London, the process that provided essential care to the most vulnerable in society was, in fact, a Kafkaesque series of bureaucratic tunnels that led to a deeply dehumanising experience for all those involved, be it the elderly and disabled, their families or care workers. 

It seemed to me the dangerous nature of what we were experiencing was the dirty secret of politics. No one in power was prepared to deal with it because those in need were often hidden behind the closed doors of nursing and care homes or their own residences: out of public sight, out of political mind. 

It led me, back in 2015, to investigate the state of domiciliary care in England for BBC Radio 4. My programmes, with the help of brave whistleblowers, exposed the wholesale privatisation of essential services, the abuse of vulnerable people, and the pay-per-minute exploitation of low-paid workers doing important skilled work helping our loved ones. It also suggested solutions: best practice that cost little more with disproportionately positive effects. 

Over a decade on, I’m sorry to report that little, if anything, has changed. Instead, an ageing population, starved budgets, an exodus of foreign care workers caused by Brexit and the pandemic, and ever-tightening immigration rules has left social care in a calamitous state. 

The ideological driver of the current crisis can be traced back to the Hannibal Lecter of public spending, George Osborne. It was the Tory chancellor’s 2010 spending review that introduced the era of “austerity” which cannibalised local authority budgets – including that of adult social care. According to the magazine LocalGov, consecutive funding cuts “resulted in an over 60% cumulative fall in funding between 2010 and 2019. Taking into account other sources of funding like council tax, overall spending power fell by 25% on average over the same period.”

I am pleased that Burnham has the guts to describe what has happened as “devastating”, and conclude that parliament has ignored this issue because it is “just too difficult”. In a recent BBC interview, he rightly pointed out that this postcode lottery of care has diminished trust in government. “Is it any wonder that politics is in such low esteem with the public when it can't fix something as basic as the care that we give to each other? So, it can't carry on. Somebody needs to grasp the nettle.”

Of course, one of those to be potentially stung is the new chancellor, John Healey, who will have to find the pot of gold that will fund the NCS. In his party conference speech, delivered from behind a lectern with Labour’s latest logo, “Hope Again”, stamped on it, he told the audience: “The money we had in the 1990s is simply not there; it’s not progressive to allow a bigger benefits bill in the system which offers an income but doesn’t offer a future. We must act; it’s not just an economic must, it’s a moral duty”. Was this a hint that welfare reform might be on the cards to help pay for the NCS? The truth is, we don’t know. With less than a month to go until Healey’s first budget, he cannot be specific; however, what we do know is that the government already faces huge challenges. To name but a few, UK taxes are at their highest since 1945, our debt interest payments are running to billions of pounds a month and growth remains sluggish. 

A clue may, however, lie in an overlooked indication Burnham gave in a BBC interview In it, he said that while setting up an NCS was his ambition – the how to do it (and presumably some indication of cost) would be revealed via a piece of work being undertaken by every government’s go-to grown-up in the room: the formidable Dame Louise Casey. It was after that, he said, that he would take his plan to the public to be voted on at the next general election in 2029.

If Burnham really is serious about a much-needed revolution in social care, then what we need is for him to stick to his guns, spend the personal political capital he says he’ll sacrifice and, most importantly, face down the enemy – including the rightwing media, opposition parties and internal critics – and avoid kicking the issue into the long grass in the hope it’ll be someone else’s problem. It's only then that the public can genuinely “hope again” that the King of the North can conquer the UK’s biggest problems. 

Sangita Myska is an award-winning journalist and presenter best known for her political and social commentary. She writes a twice-monthly column for the Nerve.

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Elinor Dashwood) and George MacKay (Edward Ferrars) in Sense and Sensibility. Photo: Universal

FILM

Sense and Sensibility

(PG, 131 mins, in cinemas now)

Billed as a “fresh take” for a new generation, this wild and windblown new Sense and Sensibility, directed by Blue Jean’s Georgia Oakley, feels like the perfect Jane Austen adaptation for our tempestuous times. Three decades on from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s classic 1995 version, but by no means in its shadow, it stars a luminous Daisy Edgar-Jones as sensible Elinor and a magnetic Esmé Creed-Miles as emotional Marianne. George MacKay makes a thoughtful, charming Edward Ferrars and Frank Dillane a wonderfully caddish John Willoughby, while a hilarious Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings all but steals the show.  It’s beautifully shot but far from chocolate-box: the disinherited Dashwood women’s Barton Cottage is small and dimly lit, underlining the way their security and choices are shaped by inheritance laws and marriage prospects. We see them damp and dishevelled, their hair un-done. Crucially, the film’s emotional centre is not simply the sisters’ romances but their tender and touching relationship with each other. 

Lisa O’Kelly, writer

Sunil Gupta, Diepiriye from Mr Malhotra's Party (2007). Photo: Sunil Gupta/ © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2025.

ART

Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970-Now

(Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 31 January 2027)

Sunil Gupta’s commitment to exploring queer love, everyday life and politics has been unerring. Many of the key projects in his more than 50 years of photographic endeavour feature in this survey. It begins with his early forays with the camera in Montreal and New York, which set the tone for a practice informed ever since by a documentary impulse allied to a profound and moving personal intimacy. Among much else, Gupta has explored clandestine gay love in Delhi, the movement against Section 28 in the UK, his own HIV diagnosis, and most recently (with his partner, the photographer Charan Singh) contemporary queer coupledom. And Gupta is as experimental with form as he is rigorous in exploring his subjects. It adds up to one of the most original and inventive bodies of work in contemporary photography, which makes this show essential.

Ben Luke, Nerve art critic

Lara Ricote as Lil and Samuel Bottomley as Ben in Break Clause. Photo: Channel 4

TV

Break Clause

(Channel 4, from Thursday 1 October)

When young couple Lil (Lara Ricote) and Ben (Samuel Bottomley) break up seconds after signing the lease on their new London flat, they’re stuck with each other in this entirely charming new comedy from writer Jess Bray. Ricote made an impact last year as a cast member on Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping and is already a high achiever on the live circuit, but this is her first acting role. You wouldn’t know it. There’s something insanely appealing and naturalistic about her performance; it’s difficult to take your eyes off her. The supporting cast of friends and new love interests bulges with brilliant comedy talent including Charlie Clive, Catherine Cohen and SNL UK’s Jack Shep and Hammed Animashaun. A tender, spiky and ultimately adorable addition to the Channel 4 comedy stable.

Julia Raeside, writer

BOOK

Exit Party by Emily St John Mandel

(Picador)

Emily St John Mandel has a real knack for taking the biggest, scariest dangers of our modern world (pandemics, extreme wealth, technology) and exploring them through gripping speculative fiction. Her 2014 breakthrough novel Station Eleven was a perfect literary dystopia, which was turned into a pretty much perfect TV drama. Her latest, Exit Party, doesn’t hit those heights but it’s completely absorbing. It weaves together the themes of climate collapse and surveillance tech, and the settings are a near-future Paris, covered in a protective weather dome, and an Orwellian LA where, for the price of stability, citizens are subject to total surveillance. There’s some tricksy, not entirely successful, multiverse plotting, but this will make you read news stories about Palantir with new levels of anxiety.

Sarah Donaldson, Nerve co-founder

Simon Russell Beale (centre) in I'll Be Seeing You. Photo: Tiu Makkonen

THEATRE

I'll Be Seeing You

(Pitlochry Festival theatre, Scotland, until 11 October)

Last September, Simon Russell Beale was forced to pull out of a production of Titus Andronicus following a colon cancer diagnosis. Now, he returns to the stage at Pitlochry Festival theatre in some style, starring as Liberace in Martin Sherman's meta-theatrical fantasia about the legendarily extravagant musician. Under Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti's direction, Fra Fee plays a hedonistic young writer who wants to take Liberace to task for his desecration of classical music, his shameless materialism and his refusal to publicly admit his sexuality. Beale's lurid Liberace, though, would rather entertain the audience with a stream of innuendo, OTT acting and flamboyant recitals. It is a witty, wacky exploration of art, identity and legacy – and what a joy it is to see Beale back on stage, having such fun.

Fergus Morgan, writer

Sienna Miller and Dominic West in War. Photo: Sky

TV

War

(Sky Atlantic/Now, from Friday 2 October)

Not to be confused with The Wargame, also on Sky, which sees Michael Gove cosplaying as the prime minister during a Russian attack on Britain, this legal thriller is less disturbing – and way more glamorous. A sharply scripted and soapily addictive eight-parter follows the bitter divorce battle between a fading film star (Sienna Miller) and her slimy tech-billionaire husband (Dominic West). When the high-profile couple’s marriage breaks down, they hire rival divorce lawyers to play dirty. Cue ruthless tactics, courtroom fireworks and copious plot twists. A second season, chronicling a different case, is already filmed. Enjoyably juicy, with not a Gove in sight.

Michael Hogan, writer

Jamael Westman (Dallas) & Marisha Wallace (Jada) in Table 17. Photo: Steve Gregson

THEATRE

Table 17

(Kiln theatre, London NW6, until 14 October)

It’s a rare treat to see an 85-minute romcom on stage and Douglas Lyons’s Table 17, a hit in New York and LA, is a real charmer. Flight attendant Jada and music producer Dallas meet for dinner years after a broken engagement to thrash out what went wrong and see if there’s anything worth reviving. A rotating banquette and clever lighting break up the conversation to whisk us through their relationship, from meet-cute to proposal to death spiral, and the actors regularly turn to the audience to reveal what they’re really thinking. Musical theatre star Marisha Wallace and Hamilton alumnus Jamael Westman make for a winning ex-couple, while scene-stealer Michael Rishawn does triple duty as a douchebro barman, a smooth love rival and a bitchy waiter with a buffet of zingers. Slickly directed by Zhailon Levingston, Table 17 isn’t a play of big ideas or hidden depths but it’s a hell of a crowd-pleaser.

Dorian Lynskey, Nerve theatre critic

Adrian McElwee in Remake. Photo: MetFilm

DOCUMENTARY

Remake

(116 mins, 15, in selected cinemas now)

Ross McElwee is one of the world’s top documentarians so here’s an early admission… I was pretty ignorant of his 50-year back catalogue when I saw an early preview of his devastating, elegiac new film. Always an artist who has turned the camera on himself and his family, here McElwee uses archive footage of his son Adrian interwoven with scenes of a Hollywood attempt to recreate his classic 1985 documentary Sherman’s March. We watch Adrian as a young kid catching crayfish, continue through his college years and his own burgeoning film-making efforts, up to his desperate struggles with drugs and final tragic death from a fentanyl overdose, aged just 27. Remake won the Golden Globe’s impact award at last year’s Venice Film Festival. I emerged from the cinema keen to see more of McElwee’s work – which sadly is hard to track down, at least in the UK.

Jane Ferguson, Nerve co-founder

BOOKING NOW

THEATRE
The Bed and Breakfast Star
(Polka Theatre, London SW19, 25 March-25 April 2027; Mercury Theatre, Colchester, 29 April-2 May 2027 – with further tour venues and dates to be announced)

The pioneering theatre company Cardboard Citizens, which has spent over three decades making work exploring themes of homelessness and poverty, has joined forces with Crisis to present its first show for children. The Bed and Breakfast Star, an adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson’s much-loved book, explores homelessness from a child’s perspective. With more than 177,000 children living in temporary accommodation in England today, the show promises to be incredibly timely.

PERFORMANCE
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith: Correspondences
(Southbank Centre, London SE1, 4 February 2027)

Part of a decades-long collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, this live performance is billed as “a singular encounter between sound, poetry, film and installation… through fragile landscapes, human histories and the invisible forces that bind them.” Tickets are selling fast!

PODCASTING/TALK
The Blindboy Podcast Live
(UK tour starts 18 October, Brighton Dome, ends 1 November in Nottingham)

Combining history, psychology, politics, art, science, music and storytelling, Blindboy’s podcast has more than 60 million listeners globally and he’s been described as “one of Ireland’s most distinctive cultural voices”. He’s now taking the show on the road for his biggest tour to date and promises a special guest and thoughtful conversation at every venue.

(l-r): Clive Lewis and Tom Watson

Palantir, the data surveillance company at the heart of the British state, has warned its most outspoken parliamentary critic, the Labour MP Clive Lewis, that it has been surveilling his anti-Palantir activities.

Lewis, who read out the warning at a fringe event at the Labour party conference, organised by tech non-profit The Citizens, described it as an “implicit threat” to his activities as an MP. 

Arriving at the event on Monday, he explained that he had just received a letter (reproduced in full below) from his former shadow cabinet colleague Tom Watson, now Lord Watson of Wyre Forest.

Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, announced his new job as senior vice-president UK for Palantir Technologies earlier this month. Taking up the role, he said that part of his remit was to combat “propaganda” about the firm. The letter is his first public intervention and was sent in response to an article Clive Lewis wrote in the Guardian. 

Lewis said he had only “skimmed” the letter before the livestreamed event and addressed the camera to say: “Tom if you’re watching, I don’t think it’s a private letter: you’ve sent it to a member of parliament in response to a very public article in the Guardian.” He added he had kept his criticisms to the “structural issues” around Watson’s appointment, and how his “defection – for want of a better term – to Palantir” affected “democracy and confidence in the political class”.

In the letter, Watson notes that he has taken a “long-term leave of absence” from the House of Lords and goes on to enumerate Lewis’s statements about Palantir both in and outside parliament.

“For years, especially over the past year, you have made the case against Palantir itself more or less continuously – in the Commons, in written questions, in early-day motions, in interviews and opinion pieces, and on social media. By my count, you’ve spoken about Palantir almost 130 times since 2020; around 50 in the past year alone.” 

“I’m quite impressed by that, actually,” Lewis interrupted to say, before continuing to read the letter from Watson out: “You have called us a ‘spytech firm’, said our ‘business is death and destruction’, called the NHS contract a deal that ‘stinks’, and urged the Health Secretary, the FCA and others to cut ties with us entirely.” 

After the event, Lewis said: “It’s an incredibly defensive response. There’s a level of detail there that I didn’t even know. That, to me, was an implicit threat. They’re saying: ‘We are watching you. We are monitoring you. And that’s what we do. Your card is marked’. 

“Honestly, it feels very Palantir. Very Big Brother. ‘We are watching you. We know what you are saying.’ There’s definitely a sense of power there. ‘This is what you are up against’. If ever I needed a reason to fight harder for democracy, they’ve just given it to me.

“But it’s pretty concerning. They have access to my health records. What else do they have access to? And how could they use it?”

Clara Maguire, the executive director of The Citizens, the tech non-profit that organised the event and which has campaigned against Palantir in the NHS since 2020, said: “It was a pretty shocking moment. Palantir is a data surveillance company. That’s its business model. And yet here’s their latest hire, a Labour lord, [inferring to]  his former colleague that they are actively surveilling his activities. It’s obviously a threat. Particularly given how vulnerable Palantir is suddenly looking with the change of government.” 

The letter comes at a crucial moment for the future of Palantir in the NHS. Its contract running the Federated Data Platform – worth up to £330m over seven years – is up for renewal and parliament’s cross-party science, innovation and technology committee has recommended against it. In June, it stated that the UK public sector is over-reliant on Palantir and urged the government to develop the UK’s own capabilities. 

An investigation by the Nerve has revealed that Palantir has £670m of contracts with the UK government. It gained a foothold through a no-bid contract during the pandemic and has rapidly expanded across multiple departments. However, Watson’s appointment comes amid growing unease about the company’s role in the British state, just as a change of government makes its UK business more vulnerable. 

Tech justice and patient support groups have planned a protest outside Palantir’s offices in London on Thursday and further action is expected at the Labour party conference. 

In his Guardian article, Lewis pointed out Watson had joined the surveillance company having previously had a high-profile role tackling “mass surveillance” during the phone-hacking scandal – a signal to the public, he wrote, of “how far the rot in our democracy has spread”. He said Watson’s argument that he had taken a leave of absence was a “smokescreen”. 

“He hasn’t burned his contacts book,” Lewis said. “He understands how the system works and where the bodies are buried. Palantir aren’t the good guys. I think it’s really important people pick a side. You need to either commit yourself to public service or you need to commit yourself to working for them, and you can’t do both and you shouldn’t do both.”

Carole Cadwalladr is a co-founder of The Citizens and spoke alongside Clive Lewis at the event – a launch for a new Citizens film club focused on tech issues

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An under-construction Equinix data centre in Slough, England. Photo: Getty

At two or three in the morning, Susan can sometimes feel her bed begin to move. 

“The floor was vibrating,” she says. “And then my whole bed was vibrating so I was up for hours.”

It is not, she says, the sort of vibration that produces a visible ripple in a glass of water; it is a sensation faint enough to be difficult to demonstrate but enough to feel when you are lying awake in the small hours.

The whirring of a data centre can be heard 10 metres from the entrance to her home because she lives in the country’s data centre capital: Slough.

Since last year Susan – not her real name – has been living in social housing in the Berkshire town that, for a certain generation of Brits, remains indelibly associated with David Brent and the grey office parks of The Office. The joke, of course, was always partly about the place.

Slough has long been the magnificently unglamorous landscape of modern corporate Britain, but since 2021 it has a new claim to fame. It’s home to the second largest data-centre cluster in the world. 

The rapid expansion of data centres is hugely controversial, because facilities require enormous amounts of electricity to run servers and cooling systems, threatening to strain power grids and increase reliance on fossil fuels. More than 10 public protests against data centres have taken place across the country this year, with an estimated 500 data centres now in the UK, and a further 173 in the planning stage. 

With an estimated 40 facilities packed tightly together, primarily on the Slough Trading Estate, it’s Europe’s answer to the vast cluster of around 250 in Northern Virginia. In the US’s “Data Center Alley”, residents experience constant industrial-scale noise pollution from round-the-clock cooling fans and air chillers.

The comparison with the Berkshire town is not hard to make. Between Slough’s residential streets stand thick pockets of the windowless buildings, run by companies such as NTT, Equinix, Digital Realty, Kao Data, Virtus and Global Technical Realty (GTR). These are highly secure compounds that keep servers running which Big Tech depends on 24/7. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are among the major companies known to rely on the infrastructure in the town. 

“It’s hard to tell what these buildings even are and you never see any office workers,” Susan tells me. What you can see from the pavement are high metal fences, security guards, CCTV cameras and private property signs, but rarely any indication of who is inside and what they are processing.

Five minutes’ walk away from Susan’s home is a cluster of hyperscale data centres known as GB One, run by GTR, which has a total of 40.5MW of capacity (or enough to power 142,000 homes for a year). They have been leased in their entirety to a single customer, but GTR has not publicly named who it is. 

The ownership of these buildings can be complex and hard to trace. But GTR is backed by KKR, a New York investment giant that helped make the “leveraged buyout” one of the defining financial instruments of the late 20th century. Its billionaire co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis, is a major Republican donor; his gifts include $1m to Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inaugural committee. But it’s not clear in Slough that the data centre is backed by one of the most powerful firms in American finance, and the identity of the company occupying those three buildings is not advertised.

Living inside the cluster

Susan’s social housing block is located within a one-mile radius of at least 10 data centres. One, operated by NTT, is roughly 50 metres from her home, with several more facilities nearby.

Susan has chronic health conditions, which makes the unpredictability of these soft vibrations particularly problematic. Some nights, Susan says, the disturbance begins at 1.30am, disappears at 3am, and then returns before five, by which point the possibility of anything resembling an ordinary night’s sleep has vanished. “How are you supposed to sleep when your whole flat is vibrating and your bed is vibrating?”

“I’m having symptoms that don’t line up with my chronic illness,” she says. And because she has been living with multiple diagnoses for years, disentangling cause from coincidence is especially difficult. She does know, however, that something has changed. Her asthma, normally dormant, has become active; she describes periods of breathlessness, dizziness and nausea, along with headaches and ear pain. On one occasion, she went to hospital with chest pain. Whether any of this was caused or exacerbated by the infrastructure surrounding her home, she cannot know – and neither, at present, can her doctors.

What she can describe with certainty is what the past year has felt like. “My whole life has been destroyed over just a year,” she says. “My quality of life.”

And there is an oddity about where she lives. Though her building was converted to residential homes in 2021, it was originally intended for early 2000s commercial office use, with disused foyers a reminder of its corporate heyday. 

Susan is not the only resident here who describes a disturbance. Another family in the building, including two children, told me they too had experienced vibrations and disrupted sleep.

A hum that never stops 

It would be wrong to draw a firm conclusion about cause and effect for Susan’s experience: “data centres arrive, resident becomes ill”. The evidence does not support a conclusion as simple as that. But as with all residents living close to such facilities, a good place to start is with the noise.

“There’s a lot of low-frequency noise where you get a body reaction rather than a hearing reaction,” says noise pollution expert John Stewart. “It can disturb your entire nervous system.”

For 20 years, he chaired the campaign that successfully defeated plans for Heathrow’s third runway; and, he says, Slough is an interesting place to build aircooled data centres given that it’s under Heathrow’s flight path. “It may not be deliberate, but if I was cynical I’d think it was intentional,” he says. “It already gets a lot of noise; will they worry if there’s more noise?” 

There is remarkably little research into the effect of data centres’ low-frequency acoustic emissions on the people living around them. A 2026 review by researchers at the University of North Texas found that, despite the rapid expansion of the industry, no published study had yet measured the full infrasound and low-frequency spectrum of an operational data centre and simultaneously examined health outcomes among workers or neighbouring communities. 

The World Health Organization’s night-noise guidance recommends an annual average of less than 40 decibels outside bedrooms to protect public health. While in Slough to interview Susan, I measured the decibels outside her home using a sound meter app on my phone for a few minutes in the middle of the day. It averaged around 62.8 decibels, with peaks of 66.8. 

Not all noise behaves in quite the way we imagine it does; low-frequency sound travels efficiently and can be harder for buildings to keep out.

Susan has struggled to find healthcare professionals who know what questions to ask about living beside this new industrial neighbour. “I think GPs should be more aware of this, especially in this area when we’ve got 40 data centres,” she says. “I can’t be the only one being affected.”

Why Slough? 

The town’s industrial inheritance has proved to be useful in real-estate terms. The trading estate near Susan was once home to factories that turned out Citroën cars and Dulux paint. The old industries moved on, but the land remained industrial on paper, giving data centres a useful planning headstart. The council says their legacy simplified planning system still allows industrial development to proceed in the area with greater “speed and certainty”.

The BBC also reports that Slough’s unusually fast fibre-optic connections are one reason so many data centres have clustered in the town.

But the cluster is making its way outside the old industrial footprint. At Manor Farm in Poyle, developers proposed a vast data centre on green belt land. When the council failed to reach a decision in time, the developer appealed. The case was then “recovered” by the secretary of state for housing, taking the final decision out of local hands and into Westminster. In June 2026, the government granted permission.

“I think there’s a reason it would be harder to build a data centre if it was in the range of Windsor Castle than if it was here,” says Stewart. 

Today, Slough is the third most densely populated local authority in the south-east, with 160,000 residents within 13 square miles and 52 schools educating more than 31,000 children. Yet some data centres can be approved without going through the conventional planning process of other local authorities. 

Chandra Muvvala, a local independent councillor, introduced a motion to Slough borough council on 24 September asking the government to carry out a cumulative impact assessment on communities living in and around data centres. 

“Not having a data centre is certainly better than having a data centre,” he says, arguing that there is no benefit at this stage to building more of them. “You’re talking about going into marginalised populations that already have a lower life expectancy,” he says, pointing out that on average, men in Slough start living in poor health at 58 years old, compared to 61 as the national average. 

I asked Slough council what they planned to do about residents’ complaints about living close to data centres. A council spokesperson said: “If there is an issue in any temporary accommodation property the resident would report it to us, we visit and inspect, and if the complaint is upheld and the agents/landlords can’t improve the environment with something like air conditioning, triple glazing or dampeners, we would offer the customer a transfer.”

For local people campaigning against data-centre expansion, there is no respite. Next up are proposals for a facility owned and run by Microsoft at Langley Business Centre, on a site where an earlier scheme had proposed both a data centre and 60 affordable homes. 

That permission has since lapsed, and Microsoft says its new proposal is instead “focused on data center use”, with a building reaching around 26 metres high, no homes and a power substation requiring a separate planning application. 

As one proposal follows another, locals are worried why so much of the infrastructure is being concentrated near them. “Why do we allow the zoning of warehouses to decide the location of these?” says one resident close to the Langley site, John Willis. “What is it that says all of this needs to destroy one town? There’s no joined-up thinking here.” 

“And what’s it for? Is it so someone can make an AI company?”

Susan’s name has been changed to protect her identity. 

If you have further data centre information or stories please contact brenna.spain@thenerve.news

Evening all! 

Jane here, introducing this weekend’s edition, while multitasking madly. 

This weekend, we’re celebrating the Nerve’s first birthday with The Nerve Live – a festival stint that brings our journalism to the stage. New Nerve T-shirts are being packed ready to be sold, our anniversary “zine” is at the printers. We even have our life-size cardboard cut-out of Nigel Farage packed and ready to go... what could possibly go wrong?

But first, our weekend newsletter, featuring Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, talking with journalist and documentary-maker Ramita Navai. Also, we have an interview with a true original, the US artist and musician Laurie Anderson, and more.

Today, two of our writers tackle the rapidly deteriorating discourse around immigration in the UK – and indeed globally. Regular Nerve contributor and author Natasha Walter has interviewed Piddington resident Rachel Marsh. Rachel spoke emotionally on Newsnight about confronting the xenophobia of her neighbours after they voted to “secede” from the UK in protest at the proposed housing of male asylum seekers in a local repurposed army barracks. 

Natasha reports: “The reaction she [Rachel] has encountered has been vicious and horrifying. And while the media spotlight has now moved on from Piddington, it would be wrong to think that anything has been resolved.” Although Rachel has received much support, both online and in real life, she worries that “how I’ve been treated by far-right activists will prevent a lot of good people from speaking out”. 

Meanwhile, our brilliant resident satirist Stewart Lee takes a sideways look at where we are heading, and the collapse of compassion in post-Brexit Britain. He wonders whether it’s time to live like the Romans and stage grand public spectacles to satisfy public appetites? “Perhaps the RNLI should offer ordinary British people the opportunity to be taken out to sea to watch the migrants drown, while RNLI heroes poke the desperate with billhooks?”

Just to say that we have a few remaining tickets for The Nerve Live. They’re £12 and just £3 for members. Regular readers of the newsletter can possibly recite the line-up by heart, but in brief it is John Sweeney talking to Sangita Myska; the Recommender featuring actor/comedian Kiell Smith-Bynoe talking comedy and sharing his culture tips; and a panel discussion on “Fighting Hate With Humour” with comedy “newsfluencer” Cody Dahler, the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr and – just announced! – the Guilty Feminist herself, Deborah Frances-White, fresh from her own event at the Vision Festival this evening. 

And now for the links to this week’s stories from the Nerve team. Oh – and please click on our ad from Proton Mail at the bottom; we get some pennies for every one.

Ramita Navai and Omar El Akkad at the Nerve talk in Bristol on Wednesday

Omar El Akkad on those who look away

Egypt-born, US-based, the journalist and author Omar El Akkad has written one of those books that shifts the discourse. 2025's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This focused not on the monstrous scale of the violence in Gaza, but instead on the hypocrisy and double standards of western governments – and the wilful ignorance of the average western liberal who chooses to “just look away”. Omar is currently in the UK for the publication of One Day… in paperback and the Nerve hosted a live talk with him this week in Bristol, chaired by documentary-maker Ramita Navai. This edited transcript of their fascinating conversation covers everything from the failures of journalism to the Ed Sheeran debacle; read it here.

Stewart Lee on the end of compassion

“Apparently, the phrase ‘let them drown’,” writes Stewart – after witnessing footage of a young girl chant those words – “merely represents what politicians are calling ordinary people’s ‘legitimate concerns’.” If compassion for migrants has really collapsed to that extent, perhaps it’s time to lean into the spirit of the moment, he suggests, and organise the drownings as a public spectacle? Of course, there is one other way to resurrect British decency, which would be “an organised effort to stop malign foreign influence stirring up trouble”  – but it might be too late for that. Read his furious column here. (And don’t forget that you can buy Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, in our bookshop. Copies have been selling like hot cakes!).

Rachel Marsh talking to Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire on 15 September (screengrab)

The woman at the heart of the Piddington storm

The media narrative around the village of Piddington “declaring independence” over immigration has been a lighthearted one. But that wasn’t the experience of villager Rachel Marsh after she courageously voiced anti-racist views in a BBC interview. As she tells Natasha Walter, she has since been doxxed, abused and threatened with death. With far-right campaigners having gathered in Oxfordshire from around the country, the atmosphere has become increasingly poisonous, but, Rachel says: “I can’t let this kind of rhetoric dominate the whole conversation. There has to be a way of talking about this issue without denying people’s humanity.” Read the interview here.

Laurie Anderson. Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

The Nerve Q&A: Laurie Anderson

Composer, performance artist, avant-garde pop star… at 79, the unique Laurie Anderson is still as busy as ever, and breaking new ground as she prepares to play her first ever show in Wales at the Cardiff Music City Festival. But she found time to talk to Jude Rogers in a wide-ranging conversation covering Trump’s fixation with the Kennedy Center (and threats to the arts generally), young women being inspirational, and “cutting yourself some slack” when being self-critical. And how about life lessons? “I don't mind making blunders. I learned a lot through blunders!” Read the Q&A here.

Police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and officer Sung Ae (Hoyeon) in Hope. Photo: Neon

Review of the Week: Hope

It’s been a decade since Korean director Na Hong-Jin released his word-of-mouth hit supernatural thriller The Wailing, and since then Korean cinema has gone truly mainstream – including Bong Joon-ho’s social satire Parasite becoming the first non-English-language film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Now Na Hong-Jin is back with Hope, a high-energy, bonkers-sounding creature feature that was a hit at Cannes and is reported to be the most expensive Korean film of all time. Does Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones think it’s going to be a monster hit? Read her review to find out.

Clint Dyer. Photo: Sam Simpson/Dave Benett/Getty

Clint Dyer’s Recommender

The actor, writer and director Clint Dyer currently has his production of Tracey Scott Wilson’s newsroom thriller The Story running at the National Theatre. He shares his current cultural highlights, which include watching his friend Goldie’s artistic journey; the album that chimes with his memory of being a young Black man growing up in London; and “two equally brilliant plays with very different budgets”. Read the full list here.

The Weekend Dish: Jeremy Lee’s celery and lemon risotto

As a middle-class, London-dwelling cooking enthusiast with no garden, I groan when my vegetable box contains celery and sometimes – sorry! – end up chucking it out when it goes floppy. No more. In his new book Kitchening, Jeremy Lee, the erudite chef behind Soho’s Quo Vadis, guides us through the seasons with dishes such as baked asparagus and braised shin of beef. Here he shares instructions to make a delicious-sounding risotto – something I will definitely try this weekend. Get the recipe here.

Thanks for reading; see you on Tuesday,

Jane

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

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

Rachel Marsh talking to Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire on 15 September (screengrab).

“I’m feeling fairly disgruntled by this. And also heartbroken to discover that I am living among some very bigoted, xenophobic people.”

When I saw a video of a woman saying those words to Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight last week, I was stopped in my tracks, as so many people were, by her evident emotion. Rachel Marsh lives in Piddington, the quiet Oxfordshire village which has recently been rocked by a massive furore about the proposed development of the next-door barracks into accommodation for men seeking asylum. 

In that furore, one side has taken up most of the oxygen, the side that not only objects to the development, but demonises migrant men and states that “mass immigration from cultures that do not operate the same way that we do has caused a misogynist, violent environment for women and girls to live in”. In such a context, Rachel Marsh’s voice was notable not just for its emotion, but because she was swimming against the tide in her neighbourhood by speaking up against xenophobia at all. The reaction she has encountered has been vicious and horrifying. And while the media spotlight has now moved on from Piddington, it would be wrong to think that anything has been resolved. 

Another village, in Suffolk, is said to be ready to follow Piddington’s lead in holding an independence referendum as a stunt to protest against proposed asylum accommodation. And with far-right actors like Daniel Thomas (known as “Danny Tommo”) and Dan Wootton calling Piddington the “ground zero of the coming civil war”, the tinderbox is waiting for a spark. There are lessons here that need to be learned by all of us who share Marsh’s heartbreak about the rise of open xenophobia in Britain. 

What gave Rachel Marsh the courage to speak out in this way? She has been living in Piddington for over 20 years, and she obviously loves the place. She and her husband, a DJ born in the UK with Jamaican heritage, moved there from London and renovated an old house with a great view of the bucolic landscape from its back garden. Marsh worked at a local stables for years – although now her job as a chef usually takes her elsewhere – sent her sons to local schools, and has good friends among her neighbours. 

Undoubtedly, her determination to speak up against racism is partly personal. “I have two mixed-heritage sons,” she has said. “When I hear people around here talking in such a dehumanising way about black and brown men, I do wonder what they think of my family.” 

Marsh talks to me about growing up in New Zealand, and coming to understand the depth of racism against Maori and Pacific Islander people there. She is worried that things are going backwards in Britain. “We are seeing the same kind of racism now that we saw in the 70s and 80s – but maybe it never went away, maybe we just thought it went away.” And – something that has become absolute anathema now for the far right – she feels empathy for the people who are coming to the UK to seek asylum. 

One of the first moments when she became aware of the growing extremism in her community was when she shared in a local Facebook group a report from the Helen Bamber Foundation detailing the harms to asylum seekers caused by being kept in military-style accommodation. Even though she was sharing the report partly as an argument against the proposed development of the centre, she received a backlash simply for showing sympathy with migrants. “The vilification took me by surprise. I don’t know why more people don’t recognise that you can be against this centre for humanitarian reasons, not for xenophobic reasons.” 

This darker side to the debate has been encouraged by outside interests. Many politicians who are hoping to exploit the furore for their own profile and campaigns have turned up in Piddington: Chris Philp from the Conservatives, Suella Braverman from Reform and Rupert Lowe from Restore Britain have photographed themselves here and recorded interviews with residents, particularly amplifying women who say that they will be too scared to walk alone if there are migrant men housed in the centre. 

More poisonous still was the intervention of the British Security Project, a far-right group who camped nearby for a few days saying that they were there to protect Piddington, and Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo. Thomas first promised to bring in thousands of supporters, but after Marsh spoke about how he was not wanted, he visited the village on his own. He has recorded videos asking residents to agree that they need the support of the Patriot Platform – the masked, black-clad men who mobilise against migrants. 

In such a febrile atmosphere, Marsh is brave to keep speaking up. “I really sat with it,” after the first backlash, she says, “but I can’t let this kind of rhetoric dominate the whole conversation. There has to be a way of talking about this issue without denying people’s humanity.” 

The reaction has been shocking, even in these almost unshockable times. 

When the Newsnight interview went out, a deluge of anger and mockery came flooding back. One anti-immigrant campaigner, Orla Minihane, visited her home and started shouting at her from the street, an encounter that was filmed and shared across social media even though it clearly identifies where Marsh lives. Tommy Robinson shared that video online, and others on X have shared her street address. Despite complaints to the platforms and reports to the police, those posts are still visible. She has received rape threats and death threats. “We will Jason Arday both of you,” said one; others call her skank and whore, shit-skin lover and n----- lover. 

These social media platforms that are refusing to take action against the doxxing and the abuse are clearly complicit in this growing extremism. But mainstream media is also sanitising those who spread dehumanising narratives. Everyone has now heard about how Piddington residents held their mock referendum on independence from Britain, egged on by the chair of the parish council, Tim McNally. McNally has even said that he might rename the village Trumpington, hoping for Trump’s support for its hard-right stance. McNally’s antics have been covered by every single media outlet in Britain, and over and over again he has been seen as rather charmingly eccentric. Even the New Statesman described him as “energetic”, as “joking” and “smiling”, and when he used the term “indigenous” to describe the villagers, simply commented that such language is not “traditionally” used. 

At the same time, every right-leaning outlet repeats xenophobic narratives in their coverage of Piddington, circling constantly around the fears of women and the dangers of migrant men, constantly repeating the idea that those coming into the accommodation will be sexually rapacious criminals. As I read and watched the deluge of coverage of Piddington’s plight, I realised that there is now a massive rightwing communications ecosystem, stretching from Tommy Robinson with his near-2 million X followers, to Dan Wootton with nearly three-quarters of a million million YouTube subscribers, along with GB News and the Daily Express, to more mainstream outlets such as the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Times, which is constantly strengthening this divisive rhetoric – and few people are challenging this.

Yet there have been some silver linings, Marsh says. Many people have rallied around her. She says that local friends of her children, who are now in their 20s, have been messaging their support for her constantly. She has received support online and in real life from people in the music industry, from old friends and new acquaintances, and from the local MP. “My intention of speaking out, beyond Piddington, was to hopefully give courage to others to speak and stand up to racism. But I’m concerned that how I’ve been treated by far-right activists will prevent a lot of good people from speaking out.”

That concern is justified. While I am visiting, three of Marsh’s local friends also come into the house and sit down with us for tea. They are happy to talk to me about how they support her, but they do not want to be identified. “I see what’s happening to Rachel,’ one says, ‘I see the vitriol and the backlash. It scares me and it scares me for my family.”

One of them says to me: “I do feel vulnerable now in this village. I feel anxious. That isn’t about asylum seekers coming into the centre. That’s about the far right. They are creating an uproar, they’ve hijacked this discussion. Yes, we all agree that this isn’t the right place for this accommodation centre. But that isn’t because women are at risk from migrant men. They talk about women as if we don’t have a voice.” 

Another says: “There are a lot of people too scared to express their opinion who are in total support of Rachel.”

I know that for the left, voices like Marsh’s can feel marginal. As a white, middle-class woman, her voice may well carry less weight than those people who are actually bearing the brunt of the racism right now. But as she herself says in the Newsnight interview, we can’t expect visible minorities to be the only ones speaking up; white people need to be more vocal. The divisions are widening and the stakes are getting higher. And in a debate where the fears of white women are so often being used to whip up hatred of migrant and minority men, it’s vital that women who refuse that framing of our experiences can be heard.

At the moment, those who want to resist the far right are often put in an impossible position. They are expected to speak up as individuals, rather than as part of a collective movement, to bear all the backlash and hate by themselves, both online and offline. Unless they have some paid role in a charity or political party, there is no structure to hold them or care for them, and others see that fragility, and are scared to speak up in turn. 

But Marsh and her friends say that they hope that something good might still come of this episode. One parish councillor, Michael Nixon, also spoke to me with more optimism. “There are good people in this village who say that the way Rachel has been treated is not OK on any level, who do believe in free speech.” He feels that there is still the possibility for conversation and understanding across the divide.  “We think that if people could sit down together and talk about this, we could get somewhere. There has to be room for nuance.” There has to be, but we will all have to work together to build that room, and urgently. 

Natasha Walter is an author and founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her most recent book, Feminism for a World on Fire, is published by Virago. You can buy it at the Nerve Bookshop at a discounted price. 

“Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown!”, a small girl was encouraged to chant through a megaphone in an anti-migrant protest in Gosport this week. It will be a nice thing for her to look back on at her 18th birthday, or at her wedding, when family and friends screen the footage of the moments that have defined her life, and made her the person she is today. 

Perhaps her parents could further entertain the family and their party guests by projecting film of the dead body of the two-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015, and prompted a lot of soul-searching that seems now to belong to a different and more sentimental age. Today, the images of his dead body would doubtless provoke delight, and the warm and satisfying feeling that justice has been done.

But the shocking sight of children chanting “Let them drown!”, with the encouragement of their proud parents, will still spark anxious feelings in all right-thinking liberal Nerve readers and north London intellectual elitists, and marks a turning point in the changing social attitudes of post-Brexit Britain. The scenes are shocking not least because they have been largely unremarked upon by the rightwing press, or “the press” as I call it. 

Apparently, the phrase “Let them drown”, rather than being an incitement to murder, merely represents what politicians all across the increasingly monochromatic spectrum of Westminster opinion are calling ordinary people’s “legitimate concerns”. I don’t know how we come back from this moral cliff-edge. But maybe we don’t need to. Maybe we need, like Thelma and Louise at the end of the rather marvellous Thelma and Louise musical your news-satirist-about-town was lucky enough to see at the Young Vic this week, to just slam down the accelerator and, in the interests of creating a socially cohesive society, drive off it.

It’s probably too late to regulate and counteract the unfettered social media misinformation and Russian bot propaganda that has created the climate in which children chanting “Let them drown”, and wishing a watery death on people they don’t know, coagulates into a popular meme. But what can we extract from the situation that might be remotely useful to our society? Every cloud, I believe, has a silver lining.

The RNLI have come under fire from anti-migrant activists for saving people from dying in the sea, perhaps rightly. But the RNLI remains broadly a British boon; most of the people its heroic volunteers save are British citizens, the majority of them white. Is there some way of monetising this awkward situation to benefit Britain? Perhaps, rather than saving drowning migrants outright, the RNLI should offer ordinary British people, for a fee, the opportunity to be taken out to sea on an RNLI launch to watch the migrants drown, while the RNLI heroes fail to intervene, and perhaps poke the desperate with billhooks. 

It is already exciting and fun to chant “Let them drown!” on land. How much more fun would it be, and how much more exciting would it feel, to see your legitimate concerns addressed by being able to chant “Let them drown!” into the wet faces of dying migrants as they actually drown in front of you? An onboard champagne breakfast option for wealthier ordinary people with legitimate concerns about immigration could help raise further funds for the RNLI to use in rescues of indigenous people pre-approved by local Reform councillors. And the money accumulated could also be ploughed back into projects to benefit the white community, such as a series of communal walk-in refrigerators where unwanted processed breakfast meats could be exchanged for vapes. Or gated-off areas of grass near the shops where dogs can just shit at will and you don’t have to pick it up. Or lunches of Guinness and oysters in private members’ clubs, for social balance. 

But would it be fair that the opportunity to enjoy migrant death is disproportionately offered only to those with legitimate concerns who live near the sea? In Ancient Rome, a classical civilisation from which we still take many of our ideas about law and philosophy and orgies, the opportunity to witness the death of enemies of Roman society as a form of entertainment was offered to any citizen who could make the trip to their local arena, and this communal sense of seeing justice done doubtless helped to bind Roman society together.

All around the UK there are the abandoned ruins of Roman theatres, at Caerleon, St Albans and Chichester for example, and in the Sadler’s Wells pleasure ground in north London in the early 1800s, a vast tank was constructed that enabled ordinary people, doubtless with legitimate concerns, to witness “aquatic dramas” featuring real dolphins and faux mermen at low low prices. Would it beyond the wit of man for the RNLI to catch a selective sample of migrants in nets, and transport them to large specially built water tanks in repurposed Roman amphitheatres all round Britain, to enable those with legitimate concerns living inland to also enjoy the thrill of making children chant “Let them drown!” as migrants die in front of them; perhaps while Katie Hopkins does an alluring dance on a podium and mouthy women are beaten with crutches by disabled pensioners.

These suggestions may seem brutal to tofu-munching Nerve readers, but perhaps, if ordinary people with legitimate concerns felt those legitimate concerns were being legitimately addressed, in a way that is both spectacular and fun, we can head off a far worse fracturing of society. The only alternative is an organised effort to counter disinformation, stop malign foreign influence stirring up trouble and funding violence, and to draw a line in the sand about language and attitudes that we consider unacceptable in a civilised society. But I think it may be too late for that. So fill up the tanks, round up the migrants and let’s party! All together now! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown! Let them drown!

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.

Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee. 

And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October,  and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October

Ramita Navai and Omar El Akkad on stage at the Station in Bristol. Photo: the Nerve

Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in Portland in the US. He worked as a staff reporter at the Canadian Globe and Mail for 10 years, covering major stories including the war in Afghanistan, military tribunals in Guantánamo Bay, the Arab spring and the Black Lives Matter protests, and winning several journalism awards for his work. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. He's won several literary awards, and his non-fiction debut, 2025’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is a deeply personal reckoning with Gaza and western liberalism. It became an international bestseller, won the National Book Award for non-fiction, and has just been published in paperback.

In a Nerve live event in Bristol earlier this week, Omar was interviewed by the award-winning foreign affairs journalist, documentary-maker and author Ramita Navai, who won a Bafta for her film Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.

Ramita: Omar, your book just floored me. So many of us who watched the genocide in Gaza unfold related to it so much. The title of the book started as a tweet not long after 7 October 2023. What sparked that tweet that went wildly viral?

Omar: It didn't seem like a particularly profound thing when I was writing it. I tend to work in terms of pattern recognition and so I was thinking about certain patterns throughout history: for example, it's very hard to find a well-meaning South African liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favour of apartheid. It's very hard to find a well-meaning American liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favour of segregation. And so I cast forward and found myself thinking of the good liberal who is going to look back at this and shake their head at how unpleasant and awful it all was. And I wrote something to that effect, and for some reason it caught on in the way these things sometimes do.

But originally, the writing of the book was completely unconnected [to the idea in the tweet]. I often talk about writing as my first avenue of retreat when the world doesn't make sense to me. And so that's what I was doing from mid to late October onwards: I was keeping this running diary of these things I was seeing, partially because I thought a lot of the stuff would be memory-holed – it would be as though it never happened – and I wanted to remind myself so I wouldn't feel like I was losing my mind later. Then I went to dinner with my editor at [publisher] Knopf, John Freeman. I was raving and ranting about not knowing what the hell it meant to be in this part of the world and to be someone named Omar who sounds like this.

I think probably he just got so sick of listening to me talk about this that eventually he said “you should be writing about this”, and that's when it became a formal project.

Omar El Akkad and Ramita Navai in Bristol. Photo: the Nerve

I've done quite a few panels [about Gaza] in the last two years, and somebody quotes your book every single time. It's quite extraordinary.

I think this speaks to something else. I think it's because people feel like they're losing their minds. You wake up every day and you see evidence of the worst thing imaginable and you're told by the people who are supposed to represent you in positions of power, who could do something about this, that in fact this is good and necessary, and that if you oppose it in some way, you're the bad guy. That is crazy-making. So I think whatever value this book has had, if it has had any value at all, has been in the creation of spaces.

People come up to me and say: “I can't talk about it at work because I'll get fired. I can't talk about it with my friends because they might stop being my friend.” And so I think the creation of that space has had a lot to do with why it's got the traction that it has.

The book is part polemic and part memoir, and one of the themes running through it is the theme of belonging. What did it mean to grow up in the west as a brown Muslim immigrant? And did you always question whether you belonged?

I think when you're a kid, whatever the hell is happening is what's normal. When I was five, my dad had to get the hell out of Egypt, and we followed. From the age of five, I've been a guest on someone else's land and so there are certain relationships with belonging that are no longer accessible to me and never will be. I've learned to live with that. There's never going to be a situation where I can point to any one piece of ground, any culture, any root system, narrative root system, and say “this is mine, I feel ownership of this”. 

That includes the country of my blood. When I go back to Egypt, I have this bizarre experience at security where I hand them my American passport or whatever the case may be, and they look at it and they see “Omar” and they're like: “Come on, buddy.” And then I'll start speaking Arabic and they'll know instantly that my Egyptian accent is flawless and that I have the vocabulary of a five-year-old, because that's when I left and started going to British and American schools. I don't lament these things. This is just the nature of what my life is, and there's nothing I can do about that.

I think actually it would have been different if I had grown up in the west. I didn't grow up in the west. Now I live in the west, and I wake up every day and realise I don't understand the United States at all. Every day, I understand it a little bit less, but I have conditioned myself to become acceptable to it, and I've been rewarded endlessly for that. 

You talk about this disillusionment, with you turning away from what was seen as the pursuit of western liberal democratic ideals, but also your disillusionment with journalism pre-Gaza. You talk about covering the Twin Towers attacks [as a journalist on the Globe and Mail in Toronto] and that being seen by many as a kind of turning point?

The entirety of my journalism career, all 10 years, were basically in this post-War on Terror era, and there are things that you see that you want to believe desperately are unique to that situation, but what they are is, in fact, very intense derangements of something that has been happening for a long time. For example, the term “collateral damage”, I think, dates back at least to the Vietnam war.

There were lots of moments where, again, if I was a braver or less naive or less oblivious person, I would have seen that as my breaking point. 

We were in Guantánamo covering the prison camps. For decades Guantanamo Bay was just this sleepy naval base, Marine base, whatever it was. Nobody cared. And then all of a sudden they got this note saying: “Hey, you're about to get the War on Terror prisoners. Figure it out.” And so they have to build this thing as quickly as they can. It's called Camp X-Ray. They tore it down shortly afterwards and built more permanent facilities. They built Camps One, Two and Three. A bunch of people killed themselves in One, Two and Three. So they shut down One, Two and Three. They built Four, Five and Six.

Four is medium security. That means that you get these things called “comfort items”. Four is for the highly compliant. So if you played ball, you got put in Camp Four. You get eyeshades, because the lights never go off in this place. You get pens, but they're rubber pens so you can't stab someone with them. But the chief perk is communal living.

Five and Six are supermax: 23.5 hours a day in a solitary cell with a metal toilet, a cot and a little coat hanger that, if you put too much pressure on it, will flip down so you can't hang yourself.

There's also Camp Seven, which we found out about by accident. It was in a court filing that was not classified. They forgot to classify it. Camp Seven is where they keep the so-called high-value detainees. Nobody knows what the hell goes on in Camp Seven. We've never seen it.

So we're touring Four, Five and Six, and at one point I turn to the officer and I say: “So when do the prisoners …” And he stops me immediately. He says: “We don't have prisoners here, sir. We have detainees.” And it was very, very important to that person and to the entire enterprise that there be no prisoners, because a prisoner implies a prison sentence, which somebody has to define at some point. A detainee you can just hold forever.

When these folks who were the detainees went on hunger strike to protest the conditions of their detention, they were described by the US military as having engaged in “asymmetric warfare” because the soldiers can't go on hunger strike back. So it's an asymmetric form of warfare. 

I did two very short stints in Afghanistan, and those showed me the physical layer of warfare. This is what the bombs do. This is what the bullets do. And that is obviously grotesque in its own right, but it can't exist in a vacuum. You need other layers of violence to hold it up, to make it acceptable. You need linguistic violence, an example of which I just described: euphemistic violence. You need the violence of bureaucracy.

All of this stuff existed before the 9/11 era. It was heightened during the War on Terror years, and it was brought, at least in my mind, to an even greater state of derangement during the genocide, where you're watching people essentially turn to pretzels trying to figure out a way to not say the thing. For example: “The bullet found its way into the van and collided with a four-year-old young lady.” I defy anyone in this room to tell me what a four-year-old young lady is.

It's not the absence of meaning. It's the deliberate unmaking of meaning. And I think anyone who works in journalism or works with words generally has some obligation to oppose that. Or else what the hell are we doing here? 

You write powerfully about the cognitive dissonance between what we were seeing happen in Gaza on the social media pages of Palestinian journalists and how it was being reported. I think the contrast was probably starker in America. What was happening?

I think everyone in their lives has certain moments where they say: “I was this kind of person, and then this happened. Then I became this kind of person.” And one of the reasons that I find it difficult to talk about some of those moments with respect to my life is (a) who the hell cares? I'm sitting on the launching side of the missiles talking about how sad it makes me to see this happen. [My taxes are] paying to kill those kids, I'm doing that.

But then also you start to realise that the most insidious thing is that you're not even being asked to support this; you genuinely aren't. I think there's a very limited group of human beings who actively support what is happening, and they're quite proud to make that known. What you are being asked to do is just look away. Just look away, it'll be fine. We can't all be sane in this situation.

I can't ask anyone in this room to go and listen to the audio recording of Hind [Rajab] begging for her life shortly before Israeli soldiers shoot up the car she's in with at least 355 bullets, killing her, killing her family members and then killing the medics who came to try and rescue her. I wish everybody would listen to it. I can't in good conscience tell you to do that to yourself; I want you desperately to do it.

A protester in Bangkok holds a placard with a photo of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza in 2024. Photo: Ploy Phutpheng / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty

The crazy-making thing is to see the worst thing imaginable and then walk out into the world that is still overwhelmingly concerned with returning the email on time and continuing to do whatever needs to be done to progress one's own career aspirations, or whatever the case may be. 

The vast majority of people who I ran into who became the subject of most of my rage – and I know this is irrational – are not the people who are cheerleading for this. It's the people who would say: “Well, it's very complicated. They've been fighting for thousands of years.” It's like, your tax money is paying to kill these kids, at least have the guts to take a stand on it. 

Certainly in the US, you were presented every day with evidence of what real, true obliviousness looks like and how incredibly beneficial it is to the people engaged in it – both at a professional level, at a social level, but at a personal, psychic level. It feels like floating through the world.

But I say all of this stuff at the same time I'm watching kids – I call them kids because they're half my age; these are young adults – at universities risking their futures to stand up against this. In US universities they routinely brutalise these kids. The central thing a university is supposed to do, ahead of educating you, is keep you safe. And they immediately abdicated that responsibility because a couple of these kids decided to put up encampments to argue that killing kids was wrong. So there's been immense bravery.

In the writing world, which is the one I operate in and obviously is relatively “who cares?”, the writers who first stood up and said anything about this at all, and the ones whose careers were largely destroyed as a result, were the ones who had the most to lose. Meanwhile, the folks in the stratosphere, with very few exceptions, just kept quiet. Because that was the smart thing to do. And I know it's irrational, but that engages a kind of fury in me that even the openly monstrous doesn't.

How do you feel about journalism now?

The reason we know anything about what is happening in this genocide is because of Palestinian journalists, 200 of whom at least are dead. And so I keep coming back to this idea of institutional abdication. 

I talk about really horrific journalism, of which there have been so many examples over the last few years. But we also have seen incredibly, incredibly courageous journalists, and a lot of the folks who did that reporting are dead because of it. They were targeted and they were killed and then our institution decided to say nothing about it. That can't be without consequences. It can't be without consequences with respect to how we feel about our profession, but also how that profession is trusted or not trusted going forward.

Protesters in Madrid in March hold signs displaying names of journalists killed in Gaza. Photo: Olmo Blanco / Getty

And I can tell you that every time I go do an event at a college, or with younger folks generally, the level of general trust in what is overarchingly called “mainstream media” is plummeting. That is not a good thing. The purpose of this institution is to let you know things you don't know, and if you lose faith in that, that giant shadow-space of things you don't know can only grow; and so this institution, which is vital to any functioning society, is damaging itself in the process. This is unsustainable. 

And on top of that, again, I don't know what the case is here [in the UK], but in the US, generally speaking, the more deranged a news outlet is, the less likely they are to have a paywall, whereas the more serious and “objective”, quote-unquote, the more likely, because they need to pay for that journalism. You hire somebody to go halfway around the world and do six months of reporting. You need to pay for it. Whereas Fox News is not asking you to pay for anything. So you have that asymmetry.

But none of this changes the fact that, over the last three years now, we've seen what the foundational principles of a certain kind of journalism, when taken advantage of and when exploited, can do. 

I was driving home from an event last year listening to NPR, our public broadcaster, and there was an interview with this woman who studies Medicare, our public health system. The interviewer was asking her about something that a Republican lawmaker had said. He had made the claim that 50 per cent of expenditures in Medicare are fraud. This claim has no basis in reality. It's a complete fantasy number. And you could tell that this woman desperately wanted to say: “Hey, this is bullshit. I don't know what else to tell you.” But she couldn't do that because she was on NPR. So instead she said: “Well, when we do our studies, we find that sometimes 5 per cent of expenditures are billing errors.”

And then the interviewer said something that stuck with me. She said: “Well, this gentleman says 50 per cent. You say 5 per cent. Is there not a middle ground there?” And I felt like this is the model that I was brought up with. “You say the moon is made out of cheese. This person says it's not. Maybe the moon is 50 per cent cheese?” This mode of journalism only works when you have an even playing field, you don't have a power asymmetry, and nobody is actively lying to you. Once one or both of those things becomes untrue, it is actively detrimental to what journalism is supposed to do. 

You say that you are turning away from something you were always orientated towards, and that's western liberal democratic ideals. So what are you now turning towards?

I'm turning towards what people much braver than me are doing individually and in community with one another. As much as I've become fully disillusioned with so many load-bearing institutional beams of the west – journalistic, academic, cultural, you name it – I've been just as inspired by what people are willing to do with no expectation of benefit. And, in fact, the opposite is true.

How many times have I seen footage from this country where an 80-year-old is being dragged off by police because they're carrying a Palestine Action sign? What do you think is the photo caption under that photo in a future history book? “Cops doing right thing”? Again, one way or another, everything in this book is going to be proven right or wrong. Maybe not during my lifetime.

I have seen people do the bravest things. I've seen people chain themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers. I was in Iceland, and I heard about this writer who was trying to get government support to get folks out of Gaza, and they wouldn't support her. And so she went on the Iceland Facebook page and people were like: “Yeah, here's my bank account number, go for it”. And she raised enough money to start bribing Egyptian crossing guards. At one point, I think she was going to be charged with treason or something for doing this, and the government was so embarrassed that they eventually had to back her.

People are going out and doing incredible things, and overwhelmingly the people doing it are the ones with the most to lose, and I leach immense courage from that. 

There are days when I wake up and all of the joy has gone out of the world. I've seen too many dead kids for that not to be the case. And I'm killing, I'm doing that, my tax money, my Amazon packages keep arriving faster, I keep killing more kids. And there are days I don't want to get out of bed and then I'm reminded of a few things. 

One is that I live in a position of immense privilege, and I have a multiplier effect that other people don't. That's what this book is: it's a multiplier effect.

Also, if the people who have been on the receiving end of this carnage, who have faced unimaginable things not just for the last three years but for three-quarters of a century at least – if they're not willing to give up hope, then who the fuck am I to be sitting here being dejected?

And then I look at what people are doing every single day, and I am reminded that whatever institutional power hovers above us, elected or corporate officials or whatever the case may be, we have each other. I firmly, firmly believe that there are more people in this world who can tell the difference between right and wrong than those who can't. And that's fundamentally where I draw anything resembling courage.

I see this stuff every day, and it is fully unsustainable to me that the world should continue to operate this way. We're at the threshold of power. Everything that is demanded is suddenly inverted. I don't think we can continue that way. And if I have to bet on those institutions or on the people, I will always bet on the people.

Is there hope? Because people talk about a big shift and a big change happening. A Pew poll in April this year said, I think, that 60% of American adults now have an unfavourable view of Israel. So specifically when it comes to Gaza and Israel, is there a shift happening?

There's very little doubt in my mind that there is. It's glacial relative to the carnage. Every form of power is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards this direction. But it is happening. 

The most instructive thing about this whole Ed Sheeran thing – and I genuinely don't really give a shit about anybody involved in this situation, but it is instructive – if you are in that world and you are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and your prospects are very much intertwined with the thick middle of the culture, you have to make it your business to know what the acceptable, bland, vanilla middle is. 

And what we saw there was somebody who thought it was “here” and then found out, in a very jarring way, that it had moved “over there”. Again, it's in this very frivolous arena of whatever it is – adult contemporary, Walgreens music, whatever you want to call it – but it is instructive. 

There's a ripple effect that goes out from that because, again, I think we're in this situation not as a result of overwhelming ranks of the openly monstrous. I think we're in this situation because many, many people have become deeply accepting of the idea that you just look away. You just shrug it off. You say: “I'm not political. I don't take sides.” You take sides. You take sides when it's acceptable to take sides. You take sides when it's good for the brand. 

And so where I derive hope is not so much in the rehabilitation of the politician who keeps telling me that I'm a threat to western civilisation, and not the openly monstrous. I derive an immense sense of hope from the idea that obliviousness is being demolished all around us. The idea of existing in all positions and no positions all at once, I think, is being seen for the farce that it is.

This idea of wandering through the world deliberately and very lucratively oblivious – I feel like that's coming to an end. 

The paperback edition of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is out now, published by Canongate (RRP 10.99; buy it at a discount in the Nerve Bookshop)

Ramita Navai’s new documentary Dispatches: Britain's Gaza Secrets Exposed screened on Channel 4 on Thursday 24 September and is available to watch here.