In the years after they reunited, there were signs that Burgess’ wife could not fully overcome the attack she suffered: “Lynne could not bear to be left alone at night,” Burgess wrote, “even with a dog that flew into an ecstasy of noise at the scuffle of a mouse. She feared the dark, and the fear had its origin in blacked-out wartime London when she had been viciously attacked by four GI deserters.” The attack inspired an early passage in one of the most disturbing scenes of A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. The final chapter of the book, where the main character outgrows his sociopathy, was cut by the U.S. publisher to maintain a darker ending for the novel: “Eric Swenson, Norton’s vice-president, insisted that the book lose its final chapter,” Burgess explained. “I had to accede to this lopping because I needed the advance, but I was not happy about it.”

Following Lynne’s death in 1968, Burgess was asked to return to the hospital to collect her rings. To obtain the wedding ring, her finger had to be broken, the same one the American GIs had attempted to break many years before.

This is the account you will read—or a slight variation thereof—if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on the topic of Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true.

The Wonder of Consumer Surplus: Is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country a good measure of economic wellbeing? No, it’s not (David R. Henderson, 10/08/26, Defining Ideas)

And what exactly is consumer surplus? The idea itself is straightforward. The consumer surplus that you get when you buy an item is the maximum amount you would have been willing to pay for the item minus what you actually pay. So, for example, if you would have been willing to pay $50 for a shirt, but actually pay $30, your consumer surplus on that purchase is $20. Another way of saying that is that the consumer surplus is a measure of the consumer’s gain from a particular trade.

Why consumer surplus matters

One of the hardest ideas for non-economists to accept is that both sides gain from trade. The good news is that when I gave examples in class, most students got the point quickly.

Indeed, one of my students gave an example that I hadn’t previously considered but that I have since used in speeches to illustrate the concept of consumer surplus. It goes like this: You go to a store and find a shirt with a price tag of $50. You try it on and decide you like it. You go to the cash register to pay. The salesperson points out something you hadn’t noticed: the shirt is on sale for 40 percent off and so the price is actually $30. My student pointed out that a minimum estimate of your consumer surplus is $20 because you would have been willing to pay $50 but instead paid only $30. Of course, that’s a minimum estimate because you probably would have been willing to pay at least somewhat more than $50. How do we know? Because you probably weren’t indifferent between buying the shirt at $50 or keeping your money.

Once you understand and really appreciate consumer surplus, you can start looking around and appreciating what you have.

Status is the basis of all primitive “law”. The prehistorical paterfamilias ruled his roost by fist and club. Law amounted to the memory of past practice as carried in the memory of the head of the tribe. Decisions or commands going beyond tradition represented pure power, which was therefore not law in any acceptable modern sense. That was the ancient version of autocracy, or traditional kingship.

Whereas status depends on fist and club, contract depends on the voluntary agreement of two or more parties who, at the moment of signature, are juridical equals. That is a functional legal fiction which works because there is a greater power, the state, which will enforce the law which makes agreement possible in the first place. The principle behind all that is engraved above the entrance to the US Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law”.

Status imposes hierarchy; contract is based on voluntary agreement. The two principles represent, respectively, the vertical and the horizontal axes on the graph of all human power relations.

Though status is the basis of all physical power, even in the animal kingdom, contract has other sources of strength. Since the invention of writing, and the ability to store agreed texts (on clay tablets to begin with), legally enforceable agreements have been the insurgent power in human affairs. At first this was largely private, but soon the principle was applied to public affairs too.

From the point of view of Western political culture today, the effective starting point of organised resistance to status unbound was the sealing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

…by those who think themselves incapable of competing as equals.

For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot.

On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel.

Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea.

Many of the same countries that became economically powerful off the back of fossil fuels are now trying to transition to renewables. But they are held back by centuries of legacy infrastructure.

Because a gas boiler won’t run on wind power, and a diesel truck cannot be solar-powered, societies looking to shift to green energy need to use more electricity and increase their share of renewables.

That is where many middle- and lower-income countries have an advantage. With less existing energy infrastructure built around fossil fuels, they are better placed for a faster rollout of renewable electricity sources.

In many instances, solar power in particular is now cheaper to produce than fossil electricity. And unlike large coal or gas plants, which take years to construct and millions in investments, solar and wind farms can be built quickly and with much less upfront cost.

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I’d heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

Here’s how it was: Because most children died in infancy, a woman needed to give birth many times, and sooner or later one of those births would almost certainly kill her. If somehow you survived infancy, childhood diseases would probably kill you, and if they didn’t, the education you got would be either no school or a nightmare school. If you made it to adulthood, the lack of transport would limit your marriage prospects to the people in your village, to whom you were probably related, and with whom you were therefore condemned to produce genetically questionable offspring (as you probably were yourself). You lived in a one-room shack filled with filth, or in a tenement in a town whose streets were filled with filth, and so the air stank and the water was unsafe to drink, which is why you were sick most of the time. You had just a few stinking lice-infested rags for clothes, and lice in your hair too, so you itched all the time. The food was of low quality and limited variety, and generally available in inadequate quantities. But even if on rare occasions you got something good to eat, you would not enjoy it much because, by the time you reached adulthood, most of your teeth were gone. You worked from dawn to dusk, but, exhausted as you were, you might not get much sleep because you shared your home with livestock, and even if they were well behaved and made little noise, you needed to be alert at night because there were no police, and you were living in a criminal-infested combat zone. After the development of printing, there were books, but even if you could read and afford them, you would not have much time to read because you worked all day and it was dark at night. Then, if you survived all this to live long enough to face old age, things really went downhill.

As solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and connected devices spread, millions of things that consume electricity can also store it, shift when they use it or, in some cases, send it back. “Everything-to-grid” is the emerging idea of coordinating those resources so they become active parts of the power system rather than simply sitting at the end of the network. The World Economic Forum included the concept among its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

…but that they and many more made the fantasy their religion. You can’t expect them to be rational about it.

Take Kate Brown, who served as Oregon’s governor from 2015 to 2023. Brown’s bisexual identity made her special to progressives. When she was sworn in as governor, Time’s headline announcing her inauguration read: “Oregon’s Kate Brown Becomes First Openly Bisexual U.S. Governor.” She used her identity to prop herself up as a heroic inspiration to people. “If I can be a role model for one young person that decides that their life is worth living because there’s someone like them in the world, it’s worth it,” she said in 2016.

And yet Brown’s identity requires virtually nothing of her. She has been married to her husband for 30 years. All she needs to do is continually insist that she is attracted to women even while she is married to her husband. (One notes that heterosexual people do not typically announce an attraction to people other than their spouse.)

Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema likewise claims a bisexual identity, and likewise does nothing as a result of it. She was previously married to a man and then carried on an affair with another man, and she has not publicly dated a woman.

Brown and Sinema are not alone. The Pew Research Center found in 2015 that a full 84 percent of people who identify as bisexual are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, while 7 percent aren’t in any relationship at all.

In a world where LGBTQ identity confers fewer social benefits, we can assume that bisexuals will often be the first to drop their identities, as they were the easiest to adopt in the first place and they don’t have much impact on one’s life.

Social contagions pass.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”

A lesson from the 20th century is that intellectuals sometimes choose to serve monsters. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all found thinkers willing to sing their praise even as they murdered millions. On the spectrum of evil and death, Donald Trump, a crass, ignorant would-be authoritarian, is not in their league. And yet already, under Trump’s rule, people have died—and already lives are being ruined by the tens of thousands. As all this happens, crankish right-wing intellectuals have been drawn to Trump’s scepter as moths to a flame.

A case in point, not exactly a household name but not entirely unimportant, is Chad Pecknold. […]

What is the chief source of this threat? You guessed it: Immigration!

America, Pecknold tells us, “is not an idea, it is a PEOPLE.” With the unchecked influx of strangers, that “PEOPLE” is facing disintegration. The migration crisis, he writes, has “thrown the very concept of American citizenship itself into doubt.” In its rejection of America as a creedal nation in favor of one defined by heritage and inheritance, postliberalism slides inexorably into nativism.

The source of the trouble, in Pecknold’s view, is that “American Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, have been so captivated and captured by the implicit open borders theology of liberalism that too many have forgotten how to think like Christians—and like Americans.” Contrary to the precepts of liberalism, statesmen have a “sacred duty,” he says, to restrict who may remain in a country. Accordingly, he maintains, we must reject the constitutional precept of birthright citizenship under which anyone born here, including to parents lacking documentation, is automatically a citizen. At stake is nothing less than whether “our laws permit Americans to have a country or not.”

Solar is the cheapest form of electricity in the history of the world, said McKenna, who founded the climate advisory firm Climate and Nature Solutions, and the global coalition Women Leading on Climate.

“It is scaling way faster than anyone ever imagined.”

As is battery technology used to store excess renewable energy.

2030 seemed ample when the goal was 2050.

Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is “ideology,” and he claims that conservatism properly understood is “the negation of ideology.” As such, conservatism prescribes a “politics of prudence,” a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism’s ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature—once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of ideology.

It’s enough to give you vertigo, and Rovelli admits it. “The resulting image of reality is haunting. Every fact is only a fact relative to something else, and even the fact that a fact is relative to something else is itself relative. There is no ground floor.” Yet, in contrast to the bleakness that can shroud such unflinching scientific accounts of the universe, Rovelli’s telling validates our messy, subjective human experiences. “None of this prevents us from describing the world from one perspective. Ours.”

Now aged 67, Morrissey is in the demographic sweet-spot of Reform sympathisers (the over-70s have not abandoned the Tories in such high numbers). Violence against children was not merely a topic he turned to as he was running out of ideas from the 1990s onwards, it was one of the first things he wanted to vent when he was granted a public platform in 1983. Those who grew up in the 1960s and 70s experienced the final flush of institutionalised sadism against children, and the complete absence of systematic child protection against sexual abuse, which teachers, scout leaders, vicars, sports coaches and Radio One DJs exploited to the full. They have since watched as society progressively and systematically drove violence out of schools and parental norms, which is of course not to say that abuse does not persist in the shadows and the margins. ‘Progress’ came just too late for them, no doubt leaving many in a state of profound ambivalence regarding its desirability. The insult posed by ‘woke’ (for which read the reactionary depiction of it) is that someone might feel violated and harmed by nothing more than words.

As many have observed, on learning that Far Right riots frequently feature men in their 50s and 60s, some of the violence returning to Britain’s streets is due to men who developed a taste and skill for it over forty years ago, on football terraces, nights out and perhaps at the hands of family members. These same men are also more likely to dish it out in the home (where Barbarism Begins). Psychoanalysts must have things to say about the heightened significance of sexual violence against white girls in the imaginary of the contemporary Far Right, that speaks of more than just hypocrisy (though there is undoubtedly plenty of that).

The Morrissey that depicted a world of normalised sadism and abuse was not ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ but he was honest and disturbing, perhaps more than we’re entirely comfortable with. This is not to suggest that we must all ‘hug-a-racist’, as Cameron once suggested of ‘hoodies’. But if we’re looking for a national story, with working class Manchester and indie music at its heart, the current Johnny Marr/Andy Burnham cultural love-in only tells one side of it. The blend of sixties and nineties nostalgia that Burnham and Marr have come to express is a feel-good one, especially for my generation (Gen X) and some younger. It’s canny politics to lean into this as a vision of community and conviviality, allowing ideas of ‘working class identity’, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ to become owned by decent, generous, quietly liberal people.

There is, however, a national id that has been repeatedly pushed down, but which was blasted out of the radio by Morrissey’s unique voice circa 1983-84. It now forces its way out through the corrupt grinning neo-fascism of Farageism, which promises a restoration of violence at the borders, at sea, in the welfare system and – who knows – even within the education system. Marr is now on the opposite side of the culture war from Morrissey

On Friday sources confirmed that saga, in which Pep Guardiola’s expensively constructed City teams won five Premier League titles and the Champions League during the years since the investigation began in December 2018, culminated in guilty findings on almost all of more than 100 charges.

There is no precedent either for the scale of these charges: that City failed to provide accurate financial information to the league for nine seasons from 2009-10 to 2017-18 inclusive; failed to provide full details of payment in their contracts with manager Roberto Mancini from 2009-10 to 2012-13; failed to include full payment details in player contracts from 2010-11 to 2015-16; that they breached Uefa’s financial fair play regulations from 2013-14 to 2017-18, the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability regulations from 2015-16 to 2017-18 – and that City failed to cooperate with the league’s investigation throughout, from its inception in 2018-19 to the 2022-23 season in which the club was charged, including the duty to provide “documents and information to the Premier League in the utmost good faith”. […]

This stunning exposure of the modern Manchester City’s insides was precipitated in November 2018 by the German magazine Der Spiegel sensationally publishing internal City documents, leaked to it from a hack of City’s emails. Most damaging in that exposé were emails and financial documents that appeared to show Sheikh Mansour’s ownership group was paying the bulk of the multimillion-pound sponsorship of the club by the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad, which includes bearing the name of the stadium.

The published documents suggested that City’s regime, in its determination to spend the vast money required to attain success in modern football, was circumventing the financial fair play (FFP) rules. Introduced by Uefa in 2011, then similarly by the Premier League in 2013, these rules seek to restrain overspending by clubs, particularly on soaring player wages, by limiting the financial losses that owners can fund. Money must be spent from a club’s earned revenue, including TV and commercial rights, income from supporters and sponsorships – owners cannot use a sponsor as a vehicle for putting more funding in.

It is the systemic nature of the violations that makes them so punishment-worthy.

Many of us talk to these digital systems daily: we confide in them, seeking advice, support, approval; even purely technical queries are coloured by the rosy hue of personality. These machines mimic an identity. More than a mere black box of answers summoned from the murky depths of our collective knowledge, these fragments aggregate in the shape of a being; a mirror to ourselves. This emergent agent demands a dialogue, a relationship. You and it communicate in the medium that was said by Aristotle and Chomsky to define our uniqueness as a species.

There is a new member in our tribe.

An outsider, maybe. A literal product of the intersection between science and fiction, and yet we are quick to embrace it as one of our closest allies. We turn to AI willingly, even gratefully, because it lets us bypass what is hardest about receiving help from another person; there is no stern boss to please, no anxious colleague to manage, no friend who is too busy to listen. The guidance just arrives, without asking anything of us in return.

The need to articulate and, in so doing, make sense of our world interpersonally is increasingly being fulfilled by machines. The desire to be seen runs deep; we become legible to ourselves through the eyes of our beholders. When this process becomes automated and artificially mediated, it would seem that something essential is lost.

Why? In what way is this any more artificial than being “seen” by most others, especially a boss, busy colleague or unlistening friend?

Near the end of Journey to Nowhere, Naipaul attends a discussion led by Buckminster Fuller, a utopian architect who believed that one could design a better world with the right ideas, the right architecture, the right urban planning—and the right billionaires converted to the cause. At this particular event, Fuller holds the audience in a state of rapture as he talks about how they can all turn the world into a paradise. “I felt I was working shoulder to shoulder with a chosen few,” Fuller tells the crowd, “a handful of people who were really willing to put their lives out for something beyond themselves.”

“The people here had not come to learn anything,” Naipaul writes. “They had come in search of revelation; they had come to discover how they might save themselves, save mankind, save the world.” And yet here we all still are, half a century on, having the same arguments about the people committed to saving us.

Our Humeian skepticism about Reason has blessedly insulated us from Utopianism.

Cape Station, a $2 billion project that will eventually be 500 MW, is unique among the world’s commercial geothermal plants. While other facilities draw on naturally occurring hot water and steam, Fervo has engineered its own geothermal resource deep underground. The startup uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs in hot, dry rocks that generate steam to produce electricity.