The Weekend Essay

Why hasn’t an anti-technology movement emerged? It seems to me that we face two overlapping crises. One is obviously climate change. AI, if it doesn’t wipe us out, is supposed to help us fix that. But artificial intelligence leads us to the other crisis, one that is harder to name: let’s call it alienation-through-technology. Are they, at root, one and the same? Imagine that Elon Musk solves climate change next month. He develops a totally clean energy source so everything can continue much as we are with no need for apocalyptic anxiety. It would be wonderful news, I suppose. But part of me would feel a bit miffed. Because there

As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neo-classical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually projects tedious, if reliable, stolidity.  But that, for my purposes, is the thing. Washington DC is nothing if not boring. And pompous. And self-consciously serious. And yet, over the last few years, months, even days, a story has been emerging, from this same ponderous city, which is mind-bustingly crazy, possibly world changing, yet often unnoticed or airily

Cassava is a woody shrub native to South America. For people living in drought-prone tropical regions, it is a godsend: delicious, calorie-dense, and highly productive. The indigenous peoples of the Americas who first cultivated cassava are reliant on it and have developed an arduous, days-long process of preparation that involves scraping, grating, washing, and boiling the plant before it is eaten. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Portuguese introduced cassava to the Old World. But they did not import the ancient methods of processing, assuming that indigenous people were wasting their time. Progress swats away benevolent traditions because the usefulness of traditions can be subtle and hard to

In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art.  His contemporaries, he said, had ‘taken as their subject the disintegration of forms’. Their pictures, ‘abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their “meaninglessness” as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator’. Artists ‘have immersed themselves,’ wrote Jung, ‘in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganised fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill’. ‘It is the beauty of

In the Kunsthalle Praha, a smart new gallery in Prague, a Scottish professor from UCLA called Russell Ferguson is trying to explain to me the meaning of bohemia. Like a lot of fashionable buzzwords, it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down. Is a bohemian an artistic rebel? Or merely a pretentious layabout? Ferguson is an expert on the subject, and even he can’t quite sum it up. However, unlike most academics (and most journalists, for that matter) Professor Ferguson isn’t content to just sit around and chat. As well as writing a book about bohemia, he’s mounted an exhibition about bohemians here at the Kunsthalle – and after he’s shown me

Stroll around the elegant capitals of Georgia and Armenia and you could be almost anywhere in Europe. The grand boulevards, familiar luxury brands, fast-food outlets, smart restaurants and gridlocked traffic suggest that you might be in Hungary or the Czech Republic. Only the cruciform shape of the domed and ancient churches place you elsewhere; that, and in Georgia’s Tbilisi at least, the ubiquitous anti-Russian, anti-Putin graffiti. The Ukraine conflict has meant large numbers of Russians have arrived in Georgia – not to everyone’s delight. ‘What makes them so maddening is their arrogance,’ my hostess said one night. ‘A friend of mine lent a Russian refugee family her flat – for free. But when she went round with home baked bread to welcome

The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims. But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive shorthand for ‘feminised male’, Jones’s assertion contains a glimmer of truth. Chemicals really are going into the water that so disrupt the endocrine systems of small aquatic creatures, including frogs, that males sometimes undergo sex reversal or adopt homosexual behaviour. It’s just that the synthetic estradiol that damages fish and amphibians isn’t being added to

When I was a small boy, I had a favourite book: The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Given that my own family life not was not untroubled, the story of how a bunch of regular kids travel, via this wonderful tree, to a sequence of fantastical places, where they meet lovable characters like the Saucepan Man, Moon-Face, and Silky the Fairy, seemed to embody a childish version of heaven. An escape, and a Utopia. Yesterday, many decades after reading Enid Blyton under the bedcovers, I encountered the opposite of the Magic Faraway Tree. A tree that is still faraway in time and conception (and growing evermore so), but a tree

If you don’t live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise. A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to ‘transphobe’ J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out and was instantly a phenomenal success – the most popular game ever on the streaming platform Twitch, physical sales of 12 million in its first two weeks of release, earning its makers $850 million (£709 million) in revenue. These cold, hard, commercial facts are like a glass of cold water in the face. The balance

Fifty years ago, one of the most controversial books of the late 20th century was published. Camp of the Saints was written by Jean Raspail, a French travel writer, who explained decades later that the idea for the novel had come to him one day in 1972, as he looked out at the Mediterranean from the Côte d’Azur. ‘I don’t know what went through my mind,’ he said. ‘The immigration problem didn’t exist yet. The question suddenly arose: ‘What if they came?’ The book is the story of a million migrants from India, who landed on the south coast of France in an armada of boats. They were welcomed by