There’s a particular part of my brain that only ever lights up when I read Calvino. I don’t know quite how he does it. The stories are often absurd, abstract and utterly unmoored from reality—and yet they always end up saying something simple and profound about what it means to be human. I suppose that’s the trick, isn’t it?

I stumbled across Cosmicomics more or less by accident: I hadn’t even realised there was a Calvino I hadn’t read. Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics edition caught my eye, and I ended up reading it across a smattering of cafes, Metro journeys, and odd pockets of time. It’s a collection of short stories, each inspired by a scientific theory—most of which have since been disproven. But the facts are irrelevant. The stories are timeless.

In one, the moon is so close to Earth that people climb up to it on ladders and gather moon milk. In another, a generational culture clash is played out between an amphibian and his fishy uncle. In yet another, dinosaurs become mythical creatures whose presence haunts the collective imagination long after their actual threat has vanished. There’s even a story about a message that travels between planets over millions of years—a surprisingly prescient allegory for social media and the gnawing anxiety of being seen but not understood.

The stories sound bonkers. And they are. But they are also beautiful. There’s a real emotional clarity running through them—a sort of quiet, reflective core that anchors the whimsy. Calvino plays everything straight, and that’s part of what makes it work. If anyone else tried to write a story about a shy dinosaur feeling displaced in a post-dinosaur world, I’d probably scoff. But in Calvino’s hands, it becomes a meditation on trauma, resilience, and the shifting nature of memory. It reminded me of the way intense fears can linger long after the actual danger has passed. Over time, those feelings mellow and morph. Some traumas fade into something almost mythical: half-remembered, oddly unreal, occasionally even a little funny. Calvino captures that process perfectly.

The story Light Years, about delayed communication across space, struck a similar chord. It starts with a message—‘I saw you’—and unfolds into a deeply resonant exploration of guilt, miscommunication, and the irrelevance of context once enough time has passed. That gap between action and response, intention and perception, felt painfully familiar. It’s extraordinary how a story written in the 1960s can feel so bang on about our digital present.

If Calvino’s better-known work feels like fairy tales for grown-ups, Cosmicomics is something slightly different: more cosmological, more playfully abstract. And yet, it’s still unmistakably him. The whimsy. The philosophical undertow. The gentle humour and unshowy wisdom. It’s all there, just seen through the lens of space and time rather than gardens and cities.

The edition itself is a treat—a pocket-sized hardback in Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics range, with the original William Weaver translation. It felt like an indulgent thing to hold and read, which added to the pleasure.

I’ve read too much Calvino to have any sensible opinion about whether this is a good place to start. But for me, it was a joy—amusing, moving, intellectually playful, and oddly comforting. Like all the best Calvino, it made me feel more human. And a little more okay with the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing.

There aren’t many areas of life where I agree with Kemi Badenoch—but, like her, I haven’t seen the Netflix series Adolescence. But I have seen, watched and listened to seemingly endless commentary about the dangers of boys being radicalised online by men with toxic views of masculinity… an issue which is hardly new, but which suddenly has a lot of cultural currency.

The tone has been broadly sympathetic: a chorus of concern, some hand-wringing, even a parliamentary debate. These boys, we’re told, are victims. Vulnerable. Impressionable. It could happen to anyone.

What’s striking is how rarely this is recognised as a familiar story.

Take the case of Shamima Begum. A British girl, groomed online as a teenager, who left the country at 15 to join ISIS. It’s the same story: a child radicalised online who goes on to take unwise actions. Yet her story is not seen as a cautionary tale, but as a scandal. Somehow, not a failure of safeguarding, but of loyalty. She wasn’t failed; she was treacherous. And so, she was stripped of citizenship and left stateless, as though none of this—her age, her vulnerability, the context—were relevant.

The contrast is hard to miss. When a fictional white boy is radicalised, it sparks a national conversation about prevention and empathy. When a real brown girl is radicalised, it becomes a question of punishment and blame. One is a victim; the other, a threat.

There is, of course, a racism to this. A gendered lens, too. But beyond that, there’s a practical cost to the inconsistency. Because when we fail to see the underlying similarities between different forms of radicalisation, we limit our ability to respond effectively to any of them.

The mechanisms—algorithmic echo chambers, the lure of certainty, the slow drip of ideology dressed up as empowerment—are the same for all forms of online radicalisation. It’s antivaxxers, it’s far-right conspiracists, it’s neighbourhood group chats convinced the local council has ‘gone woke’. It’s your parents claiming a local schoolchild identifies as a cat and is fed milk at school—it must be true, they saw it on Facebook.

The narratives may differ, but the structure is the same: beguiling lies which spread and manipulate people toward specific beliefs and actions.

Yet, our response too often focuses on the content rather than the common architecture. So much of the commentary around Adolescence has been focused myopically on online misogyny, and so many of the proposed solutions have been about building siloed strategies based on tackling that. We fail to see the core, underlying issues—not least because we insist on reducing some people to their ideology while elevating others above it.

In his particularly incisive podcast episode on Adolescence—the topic really is inescapable—Ryan Broderick suggests that the answer to all of this is love. If we’re really going to properly understand and tackle the problem of radicalisation, we need warmth, understanding and empathy, not just for certain groups of people who are affected by online radicalisation, but for all of them. If we can only muster empathy selectively—if we only see a radicalised child when they look like our own—we’ll never truly get to the root of the problem. We’ll just keep reacting to the symptoms that make the headlines, while the underlying conditions go untreated.

It’s not that the response to Adolescence is wrong. It’s that it reveals the limits of who we’re willing to care about. And when empathy is rationed, so is any real hope of solving the problem.

The image at the top was generated using GPT-4o.

I’ve read a few books from The School of Life recently, and when I spotted this one described as “a therapeutic novel”, I was curious. It’s not a phrase I’d come across before, and I wondered what exactly they meant. A novel that soothes? One with a diagnosis and a treatment plan? As it turns out, A Voice of One’s Own is a fictional story with an overtly therapeutic aim: it sets out to explore the emotional legacy of growing up without space to speak freely or feel heard.

The story centres on one woman’s life, and through her, the book explores some universal themes—particularly the long shadow cast by early parenting, and the difficulty of expressing oneself when that hasn’t been modelled or encouraged. The plot is relatable, though the tone of the omniscient narrator is more didactic than literary. It’s gentle and readable, but a little heavy-handed in parts, and I found that its simplification of messy, complex human experiences occasionally jarred. There’s insight here, but it often feels pre-digested.

Structurally, it’s an unusual book: each of the short chapters is accompanied by an illustrative photograph. These didn’t add much for me. They weren’t especially beautiful or evocative, nor did they feel meaningfully connected to the narrative. They were very literal and representative. If anything, they disrupted the flow. I found myself wishing the book would just get on with telling its story.

That said, there were moments that gave me pause. The book gently illustrated how lacking confidence in one’s own voice can manifest in small, ordinary moments—reluctance to correct a mistake, silence in a meeting, deferring to others without even realising it. These aren’t revolutionary insights, but they prompted a little personal reflection. I just think the same ground has been covered elsewhere with more subtlety and spark.

In the end, this didn’t land as strongly for me as other titles from The School of Life. It’s a short and well-intentioned read, and I suppose if someone wanted a very soft, undemanding introduction to this sort of emotional territory, it might be a good starting point. But for most readers, I think there are better, deeper options out there.

Back in March, James O’Malley wrote about the UK Government Digital Service’s (GDS) ‘One Login’ and the conceptually related Government ‘tell us once’ service. The thesis behind these services is that the Government should appear essentially monolithic from the perspective of a UK resident: information should be extensively shared across agencies, and if one updates one’s details with one agency, that update should propagate across the rest.

I agree with much of this: there is a lot to be said for simplifying interactions with Government. However, one underplayed cost is how linking data across services reduces individuals’ control over their own information. This can create murky trade-offs and unintended consequences.

To give one example: I know of a public sector organisation in the health field that went all-in on ‘one person, one record’. Superficially, this made a lot of sense, as it makes contextualisation much easier if you can see every interaction an individual has had with the organisation in a single list. _Except_… that’s not really how life works. If a journalist contacts that organisation, should that professional query really be stored alongside their personal medical data? The same applies to other professionals, say a headteacher contacting the service for advice about a pupil. Most people would have a reasonable expectation of a ‘firewall’ between personal and professional interactions, but that’s the antithesis of a ‘one person, one record’ approach. This led to a load of workarounds—appending people’s profession to their surname to create distinct ‘professional’ records, for example—that ultimately made the underlying data worse.

James cites Google as an example:

If you update your address on Gmail, you don’t need to then go and do the same thing separately on Google Maps, Google Drive and YouTube – all of those other services that are owned by the same company, and updating one will update the rest.

Yet, viewed from a different angle, this is a clear counter-example: many people have multiple Google accounts to keep their personal and professional lives separate, and they reasonably expect to update each one independently. When the Government ties all interactions to a single real-world identity, that separation becomes impossible.

‘Tell us once’ can quickly morph into ‘tell the entire state at once’—and this is often undesirable. For example, we offer free tuberculosis treatment to everyone, regardless of whether they are entitled to NHS care, because this is the best way to protect the public. This means that there will be people in the country illegally who are sharing personal information, like their address, with the NHS. If we link that data up with the Home Office, the net effect is to prevent people from accessing treatment for an infectious disease—thereby increasing risk to the public. We’ve been here before, and not that long ago.

Similarly, you might register a particular, private phone number for your interactions with services where you need a reasonable expectation of privacy—for example, if you’re reporting a safeguarding concern about a member of your family. Disaster might follow if all of your different phone numbers are thrown into a single identity—or, more likely, services find workarounds and store phone numbers in unexpected places, which exacerbates the very problem the data sharing is meant to solve. It becomes very difficult for anyone to reliably update all of their data, even within a single service.

James uses the word ‘citizens’ five times in his article. I feel a certain sense of trauma when I hear that word used in this way, borne from experience during COVID. This terminology seems to be the default within GDS. People who live in the UK but who are not citizens often have more frequent and complex contact with the Government than citizens, yet the service frequently defaults to terminology that excludes them. That feels revealing.

One would hope that the social contract is about Government giving the greatest support and most careful thought to the neediest, the most vulnerable, and the most marginalised. Yet, at least from my far-away vantage point, it often reads as though Government technology conversations begin with ‘let’s make this easier for people like me’.

So, while the direction of travel is probably right, it’s an area that needs careful thought and planning. We need to be open about the fact that ‘convenience’ often comes at the cost of personal control over data. This trade-off might sometimes be justified, but it deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. These kinds of changes often have unintended consequences—especially for the most vulnerable in society—and the first duty of any Government ought to be to put those very people first.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.

I finished A Luminous Republic with a slight sense of unease—not because the novel had let me down, but because I wasn’t entirely sure what I had just read. That’s part of its brilliance. Andrés Barba’s short novel is one of the most unsettling and enigmatic books I’ve encountered for quite some time. I read the English edition translated by Lisa Dillman, whose crisp, controlled prose perfectly matched the unsettling restraint of Barba’s story.

Narrated by a civil servant with the sort of cool detachment that would be admirable in the minutes of a council meeting but feels almost surreal when describing mass hysteria, societal collapse, and the mysterious deaths of children, the novel recounts the extraordinary events that unfolded when thirty-two feral children appeared seemingly from nowhere in the fictional South American city of San Cristóbal. No one knew where they came from; no one knew how to handle them. The city, naturally, fell apart trying.

The dry, documentary style of narration is inspired. It doesn’t just describe the events — it actively withholds emotional clarity. The more inexplicable things become, the more the narrator recedes into procedural memory, reports, newspaper clippings, and bureaucratic euphemism. It’s a little like reading the minutes of the apocalypse.

What the novel is about is harder to pin down, and therein lies much of its power. Is it an allegory for how societies treat ‘outsiders’—a reflection on racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia? Is it a parable about the viral spread of dangerous ideas, about how fear and misinformation can sweep through an ostensibly civilised population? Is it something else entirely? The novel doesn’t deign to offer answers. Different interpretations seem to fit neatly at different moments, and this slipperiness made the book linger in my mind long after I closed it. That one of the characters (the mayor of San Cristóbal) is named Victor Corbán surely must be an echo of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán— perhaps it is coincidence, but I could help thinking that it must be a clue to the sorts of unpleasant ideas Barba was targeting.

I suspect it’s a book that reveals more with each re-reading—and I’m looking forward to testing that theory.

Despite its potentially science fiction premise—feral children spontaneously appearing, a society crumbling in response—the book feels grounded and painfully plausible. There’s no sense of magic or fantasy here. Just human frailty, fear, and the haunting realisation that sometimes, there are no satisfying explanations.

I don’t often seek out science fiction, and I wouldn’t ordinarily be attracted to a novel that sounds this peculiar. Yet A Luminous Republic captured me completely. It didn’t change the way I view the world, but it certainly furnished me with some new metaphors for thinking about it. For a short book, it is luminous indeed.

I try not to be too judgy. Nothing good comes of it. But some things grind my gears—like seeing chocolate torsades described as chocolate twists. Or so I thought.

I wanted to write about how the word torsade has plummeted in use (it has). I wanted to rant about our waning connection to the original torsade aux chocolat (we’re losing it). I wanted to spiral into etymology—torsade, tort, the beautifully tortuous splenic artery—and not come up for breath.

But then I had a shattering realisation.

Retailers call them “chocolate twists” when they omit the traditional crème pâtissière. There is, if you will, a functional difference between the chocolate twist and the chocolate torsade.

This isn’t a dumbing-down of the language. It’s a dumbing-down of the pastry itself.

I’m not sure what’s worse.

This was a book Wendy and I read together over the course of a month—just a few short essays before bed each night. That context probably matters: I suspect that reading it slowly, letting the ideas settle, and chatting together about them gave it a resonance that I might have missed had I powered through it on my own.

The book is a series of short, thematic essays intended, as the title suggests, to inspire a little hope. Each reflection begins with a story, often drawn from art, literature or history, and builds into a modest argument or observation about what might make life feel a little less bleak. That structure—anecdote, idea, note of optimism—could easily have become formulaic, but I found it surprisingly satisfying. The source material is varied, and the tone strikes a compelling blend of melancholy and grace.

The first section, ‘reasons of darkness,’ is the one that stuck with me most. It’s unusual to find a self-described book of hope that begins in the mud: suffering is inevitable; people lust for vengeance; we are all profoundly flawed. But instead of glossing over these, the book leans in. These darker reflections feel honest rather than heavy, and it’s from this honesty that their hopefulness arises. I found that strangely comforting.

If you’ve read much from The School of Life, you’ll know the tone: measured, thoughtful, gently philosophical. But this volume stood out to me for its coherence: while none of the ideas felt new to me, seeing them collected and loosely stitched together under the banner of hope lent them fresh significance. It was less about new insights and more about the quiet joy of recognition, of seeing well-worn thoughts in new light.

Compared to On Confidence, which I read in one go, Reasons to be Hopeful felt more textured and rewarding. That may be less about the content and more about the way I read it: this is a book that benefits from being slowly savoured. Read too quickly and you might miss the point entirely.

I’m not sure it radically changed anything for me, but it did recalibrate the tone of my internal monologue a little. And that’s no small thing. At the end of a long day, it reminded Wendy and me of the good in the world, and helped us both frame those pre-sleep ruminations with a little more tenderness and a little less despair.

It turns out that hope, when served in measured doses, can be rather potent after all.

A commonly heard refrain from officialdom:

Smoking and the use of e-cigarettes is prohibited at any time whilst on board.

About a decade ago, I was asked to comment on some public health messaging around e-cigarettes. There was—and still is—debate about the trade-offs: there’s clear harm reduction compared to smoking, but increased prevalence might bring new harms, as using these products is more harmful than choosing to do neither.

My concern, though, was about language. I’d never heard anyone outside the health world refer to them as e-cigarettes—people talked about vapes. The odds of a media campaign landing seem vanishingly small if it doesn’t use the language its audience actually speaks.

Others disagreed. They wanted to maintain an explicit association between these devices and the harms of cigarette smoking. In their view, calling them e-cigarettes was a helpful way to reinforce that link.

As it happens, I lost that argument—but I think history has vindicated me. The only time I hear e-cigarettes mentioned these days is in what I think of as official communic-ese—that peculiar dialect of unnatural, stilted phrasing found in corporate scripts and organisational policies. As above, whilst often falls into this category too.

Another ‘official’ script from a certain company includes the line:

Electronic devices with a ‘flight safe’ mode feature should have this enabled now.

‘Flight safe mode feature’? It’s such an ugly and unnecessary noun-phrase it makes me wince slightly every time I hear it. It’s not uncommon to hear whoever’s reading it stumble.

The basic function of this sort of scripted communication is, well, to communicate. Yet, it’s astonishing how frequently these messages are signed off, duplicated in their thousands, and broadcast across the world without anyone pausing to ask whether they’ll actually land. If the words don’t sound like something a real person would ever say—or hear—then they probably aren’t doing the job.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o. AI image generation’s handling of text has clearly improved considerably of late.

I’ve long admired Annie Ernaux’s writing for its relentless honesty—her refusal to flinch from the rawest corners of human experience. That fearless openness drew me to The Use of Photography, co-authored with journalist Marc Marie and translated by Alison L. Strayer. It’s a brief, piercing book, documenting an unlikely intersection in the early 2000s of two intense experiences: Ernaux’s chemotherapy for breast cancer and a passionate affair with Marie.

The book’s central device is strikingly intimate: photographs depicting the aftermath of their encounters, typically showing clothes discarded around their apartment or other settings. Each photograph is paired with independent reflections from both authors, exploring the memories and emotions these snapshots evoke.

Ernaux and Marie beautifully intertwine two contrasting experiences: the deeply challenging reality of cancer treatment, usually viewed as purely negative, and the exhilaration of their affair, typically seen as positive. The intermingling of these experiences felt profoundly true to life—highlighting the complexity of our emotional landscape, where joy and sorrow coexist in constant interplay.

As ever, Ernaux’s writing is exceptional. Her prose remains reflective, vivid, and emotionally honest, making the book not just insightful but deeply moving. The narrative flows effortlessly—I found myself eagerly turning the pages, absorbed by the nuanced interplay of reflection and vulnerability.

I found this both compelling and poignant—an exceptional exploration of intimacy, memory, and life’s contradictory beauty.

I recently overheard two younger people talking on the bus. One said to the other:

I really struggle to use it: I don’t know how to use circle time.

At first, I assumed they meant some strange new productivity technique, or perhaps a revival of the classroom ritual where children sit cross-legged in a circle to share their feelings. But for some reason, my mind jumped to the Spirograph. I was simultaneously intrigued by this modern rebrand as Circle Time and not a little perplexed that teenagers would be discussing it with such gusto.

Weeks later, I read some idiotic commentary about smartwatches. Seeing the phrase mentioned again, I had an epiphany: ‘circle time’ was a baffled teenager’s term for reading an analogue clock—a face with hands, if you will. A concept once so basic it was used to teach toddlers, now esoteric enough to require translation.

And I realised: perhaps I’m not moving with the times. I spend a large proportion of my life at a desk with a tiny digital clock in the corner of several screens… and yet, I also have a little analogue clock sitting on my desk. If a meeting is approaching, I find it much easier to intuit whether I have the time to complete a task beforehand with a glance at an analogue clock than at one of the many digital ones. I’m from a different century.

As I wander around these days, my eye is often caught by civic clocks—at least half the time, they’re showing the wrong time. When society at large has given up on proper clocks, can we really blame individuals for no longer understanding them?

Perhaps it’s not just that we’re losing the ability to tell time, but that we no longer expect time to be told to us. It’s become something we interrogate individually, pixel by pixel, rather than something shared. The clock tower becomes ornamental. The watch, decorative. Time dissolves into digits.

Accurate, but only twice a day.

But there is one bright side in all of this: the aphorism ‘he has more faces than the town clock’ makes a whole lot more sense when those faces are saying different things.

You win some, you lose some.

The photos in this post are all my own.