Arts + Culture – The Conversation

How politics, technology and the environmental crisis turned these movies into horror films in 2026

2026-02-04T18:19:45Z

A famous expression, often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, states that comedy is merely tragedy plus time. This theory highlights how our response to films can depend on the context in which we see them.

We tend to think of the genre of a film as something very fixed, decided by a combination of studio producers and marketers. But, in the right context, films can move across many different genres in the span of their lifetime, depending on the audiences that watch them.

To demonstrate this idea, here are five scary films for 2026. The twist, however, is that none of these films were ever intended to be horror films. Most on the list were satire or comedy when they were made. Instead, they have become horrific due to the way they touch on contemporary issues surrounding the global politics of President Donald Trump, impending environmental disaster, ever-accelerating technology and contemporary attitudes towards gender.

1. Duck Soup (1933)

The finest film produced by the famous Marx Brothers comedy troupe, Duck Soup is an anarchic political satire that tells the story of an unserious playboy president named Rufus T. Firefly. Beloved by film enthusiasts, the film showcases a series of mishaps and misdeeds caused by his selfish, erratic behaviour which inadvertently led his country of Freedonia into a war with its neighbours.

Duck Soup is considered a classic of Hollywood slapstick and quick-witted verbal comedy. But, in an era of a genuine unserious president, its central joke might not feel funny any more. Nor indeed is the idea that, nearly 100 years after its release, this biting satire on the politics of rising authoritarianism would be as timely now as it was then.

2. The Apartment (1960)

People often say “they don’t make them like they used to any more” when trying to articulate a nostalgia for the films of the past. That description can be aptly applied to Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy-drama The Apartment. They do not make films like this any more. But in this case, that’s a good thing.

Jack Lemmon’s “Buddy Boy” Baxter is the bachelor who routinely loans his apartment out to his bosses for them to conduct extra-marital affairs. Shirley MacLaine’s Fran is the loveable but down-on-her-luck elevator operator involved in a tawdry situation with Baxter’s boss. Their own romance emerges out of a suicide attempt, workplace harassment and abuses of power. It feels like the film is set not just in the past, but in some creepy alternative world.

To be fair to The Apartment, it hardly treats some of the more problematic behaviour of its characters as virtues we are supposed to admire. But it never quite attacks the deeply unpleasant nature of its central conceit either. Baxter is not just a loveable goof unaware of what he’s got himself mixed up in. He’s a complicit enabler. And Fran is not a ditsy but loveable woman mixed up with the wrong crowd. She’s a victim.

3. Idiocracy (2006)

Idiocracy was something of a box office bomb, given neither the marketing campaign nor the reviews it needed to ensure success. The fact it has since become a cult hit speaks to how startlingly prescient the film is for contemporary audiences now discovering the film in droves 20 years later.

Idiocracy tells the story of a young man put into suspended animation who wakes up 500 years in the future. The average intelligence of the population has severely decreased, to the extent that the world has become increasingly consumerist, vulgar, crass and prejudiced in its thinking. America has even elected a former pro wrestler and porn star, Dwayne “Mountain Dew” Camacho, as its leader.

Made in 2006 during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency and set against the rise of Barack Obama, the film failed initially as a comedy. It now works perfectly as a terrifying exaggeration of what the world looks like in 2026.

4. Wall-E (2008)

Wall-E is part of a long history of animations with an interest in the environment, from Princess Mononoke (2001) to Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992). That part of its dystopic vision still stands up. The film’s vivid opening of Wall-E wandering around a silent world of trash is still its best moment.

The film’s vision of the humanity that has left the garbage-strewn world behind, however, has become increasingly concerning over time. Predicting a world of humans who are dumb, obese and screen-obsessed, it is increasingly difficult to watch Wall-E as a nostalgic childhood treat.

5. Her (2013)

The amazing feat pulled off by this absurdist romantic drama was to somehow get an audience to root for the idea of a romantic pairing between a lonely middle-aged man and an AI-enabled operating system. More than a decade later, Her’s open-minded approach to AI seems far more fraught.

As the romance develops between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), it is difficult not to imagine the fingerprints of powerful but not necessarily benign tech moguls turning the screws tighter, manipulating Theodore further into spurning human contact for his digital desires.

Equally, it is difficult not to wonder whose voice has been stolen to create her warm, affectionate tones, or to ask what the company might do with the recording of their conversations. The dangers in our current technological reality have once again spoilt a perfectly good film.

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Alexander Sergeant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis: how digital circulation boosts the impact of a protest song

2026-02-04T18:19:37Z

In moments of creeping authoritarianism, culture sometimes reacts faster than institutions. Bruce Springsteen’s rush-released song in the wake of killings of two Minneapolis residents by agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not just an act of commentary, but a deliberate intervention in public discourse.

Streets of Minneapolis operates as an alarm signal, its directness placing it in the public square, where naming and narration carry political weight. What also distinguishes Streets of Minneapolis is not just its fidelity to the tradition of the protest song, but its mode of circulation as a rapid response in the digital age.

This is Springsteen at his most declarative, operating not in the interior emotional space of the confessional singer-songwriter but in the outward-facing register of public address. His specificity – naming people, streets, organisations and the “winter of ’26” – marks the song as political communication rather than personal reflection.

His framing of the killings involves a shift from individual tragedies towards a shared civic injury. The repeated invocation of “our Minneapolis” performs rhetorical work, translating private loss into a shared collective experience and situating it as a wider public concern that extends beyond the city itself.

That movement from the individual to the collective places Streets of Minneapolis within a wider lineage of protest song, creating narratives out of real events so they can be remembered and acted upon. In this sense, the song does not simply respond to politics, but actively participates in political thought and action. “We’ll take a stand” is not a metaphorical flourish but a direct appeal.

Springsteen makes this lineage explicit through the early acoustic section, replete with insistent harmonica, and a vocal delivery and intonation that consciously signal Bob Dylan’s early protest music. Structurally, too, Springsteen’s call to action echoes Dylan works like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – moral force emerging through the accumulation of detail and reportage.

While Dylan’s later career moved away from direct protest toward the personal and allegorical, Springsteen here leans into that more direct mode of storytelling. It follows the protest song logic whereby narration becomes an engine of persuasion, reshaping contemporary events into historical record.

The reference carries added resonance given Dylan’s Minnesota roots, serving as a reminder that place, memory and music have long been intertwined in American protest culture.

Springsteen quotes himself, too, both musically and thematically, with a clear nod in the title to Streets of Philadelphia and a closing musical call-back to Born in the USA, its own tub-thumping aesthetic belying the portrait of a disillusioned Vietnam veteran in the lyrics.

These are not just nostalgic gestures but also markers of continuity. By folding earlier works into this new song, he situates the current moment within a longer trajectory of American struggle, via musical linkages between himself and Dylan – and Woody Guthrie before that.

Digital circulation and rapid response

Where protest songs once depended on live performance, radio play and physical distribution, they now travel through platforms. Within hours of release, Streets of Minneapolis was embedded in news coverage, shared across social media and dissected in comment threads and reaction videos.

Listeners encounter it not only as a song but as a reference point to be reposted, quoted, argued or aligned with. In that process, its energy comes less from a single, fixed message than from how it is used, repeated and spread through ongoing conversations.

This dynamic places protest music alongside other contemporary forms of political communication, particularly those shaped by meme culture and the logic of the online platforms through which much creative work is experienced. Short excerpts, lyrical fragments and recognisable musical cues circulate easily across feeds, videos and posts, where they are paired with captions, visuals and commentary.

In recent election cycles, for instance, music has functioned less as a background soundtrack or simple celebrity endorsement than as material that can be repurposed – looped in clips, used ironically, set against images, or mobilised to signal approval or dissent. In this environment, music functions as a part of the communicative infrastructure, enabling participation as much as persuasion.

This also comes amid growing political conflict around culture itself. While there is a longer history of public disputes between the Trump administrations and the artistic community, these tensions have recently escalated into direct interventions, including the cancellation of shows and the temporary closure of the Kennedy Center, pointing to an environment in which music and performance are increasingly politicised and directly entangled with power.

Seen in this context, Streets of Minneapolis is both traditional and distinctly contemporary. It draws on the narrative starkness and moral framing of folk protest, but gains traction through digital circulation. The killings in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti were the immediate catalyst, but the song’s significance lies in how it carries that moment forward.

As authoritarian power shifts gear, from creeping practice to open and violent assertion, the protest song adjusts its form and reach. Streets of Minneapolis reflects that transition, drawing on Springsteen’s longstanding role as a public narrator of American life. It can’t halt state action, but it can help to prevent it from going unnoticed and unrecorded.

Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

Bridgerton: why not knowing how to dance could ruin your reputation in Regency Britain

2026-02-04T13:53:29Z

When a silver-clad stranger admits she cannot dance at a masquerade ball in the first episode of Bridgerton’s new season, Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) is both entertained and mystified.

“A lady who cannot dance? Is this a part of the character you are playing tonight? A silver ingenue?” he asks Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha). A lady of the Ton who is unequipped with the vital accomplishments for the “season”? Unthinkable. Today, we are no longer defined by our ability to dance, but in the world of Bridgerton, dance is central to identity and a signifier of social status.

In Regency Britain (1795-1837), dance was a vital accomplishment for elite society. The skill was regularly deployed in assembly rooms and the London townhouses of the beau monde – the pinnacle of metropolitan fashionable society.

From an early age, boys and girls in polite society were trained in deportment (posture and bodily carriage), etiquette and dancing by dancing masters – a role assumed by Benedict at the Bridgerton masquerade.

Dancing in Regency Britain

The real Prince Regent of the time (the future George IV) started to learn from his dancing master at the age of six, becoming so renowned for his prowess that he was celebrated as “the life of the dance”. Dancing masters were crucial to transforming girls and boys into ladies and gentlemen, equipping them with the skills necessary to perform when they made their entrance into society around the age of 18.

At a dance lesson in fashionable Queen’s Square, the German traveller, diarist and novelist Sophie von la Roche observed that the six-year-old girls “are eager to learn, as they are already quite advanced and promise to make good dancers”.

Le Bon Genre, La Walse by unknown artist (1812). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

However, not everyone in elite society was an accomplished dancer. Writing about the Duke of Devonshire, the press diplomatically observed that dancing was “not his forte”. Meanwhile, the real Queen Charlotte’s eldest daughter struggled with her dance lessons as a teenager. The Princess Royal pleaded in a letter to her governess: “I have behaved well in every occasion except last Wednesday, that I danced ill … However, I hope that you will not give me quite up, since I have done everything else well, and that I dance[d] better last Friday.”

A lack of skill would only lead to ridicule and disgrace, as Lord Mansfield observed of the 19-year-old Lord Titchfield in a letter: “To set out in London raw as he is seems to be Ruin.”

Dance was a prized accomplishment for building reputation and staking a claim to inclusion in elite society, especially since “narrow examination[s]” and “thoro’ inspection[s]” were integral to the ballroom. Learning to dance was so ubiquitous in polite society that those who did not – or could not – dance stood out from the crowd.

The societal waltz

In Bridgerton, as the illegitimate daughter of an earl, Sophie is disadvantaged, but has not have been entirely excluded from society. We’re told that she was allowed to watch lessons with her stepsisters, but was not directly included and taught.

Unaware of Sophie’s background, Benedict is perplexed by her “puzzling” inability to dance, assuming that she was raised like the other young ladies of the Ton. And it is precisely this inability to dance that becomes a defining characteristic in his search for her in the following episodes. Indeed, Benedict’s hopes are raised when he hears of Mrs Mondrich’s (Emma Naomi) neighbour, who had not been taught to dance – certain she must be his mysterious lady in silver.

The trailer for Bridgerton season four.

As Sophie’s dancing master, Benedict teaches her the waltz – a scandalous dance newly introduced to the British ballroom from France and Germany.

Unlike the lively and communal country dance and graceful minuet, which revolved around distance, the waltz featured a couple in a close embrace whirling around the ballroom. While quite a tame dance form today, the Regency waltz’s close physical contact shocked society. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” poet, Lord Byron even wrote a poem about it in 1812:

Hot from the hands promiscuously applied,

Round the slight waist, or down the glowing side;

Where were the rapture then to clasp the form,

From this lewd grasp, and lawless contact warm?

Benedict teaches Sophie the waltz box step (which actually emerged in the late 19th century), but the Regency waltz was even more daring, with the dancers stepping between their partner’s legs. With a new, fashionable dance to master, diarist Thomas Raikes observed: “Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home … whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz.” He continued: “The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention” – a marked contrast to the ball scenes we see in Bridgerton.

Despite being raised as a social outcast, Sophie learns the waltz with ease like the other ladies in elite society, showing her compatibility with this season’s hero, and, perhaps, hinting at her true belonging in the Ton.

Hillary Burlock receives funding from the British Academy as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

My unsung hero of science: Frank Malina – fearless rocket engineer, groundbreaking artist and communist ‘traitor’

2026-02-04T13:53:25Z

Test crew for the Jato prototype solid rocket booster including a dapper-looking Frank Malina (centre), August 1941. Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Wikimedia

Frank Malina was a lot of things. The Texas-born aeronautical engineer co-designed the first jet-assisted take-off (Jato) rocket and the US’s first operational high-altitude rocket. He co-founded and became director of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – and along the way, joined a team of rocket engineers who became known as the “suicide squad” for their risk-taking approach.

Malina was also a pacifist and anti-fascist, a card-carrying member of the Communist party, and a painter and pioneer in the field of kinetic art – where motion, be it mechanically or naturally produced, is critical to the artwork. His efforts to bridge science and technology with the creative arts led to him launching Leonardo, MIT press’s world-leading journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music.

This series is dedicated to little-known but highly influential scientists who have had a powerful influence on the careers and research paths of many others, including the authors of these articles.

His exceptional approach leant a credibility to research at the intersection of art and technology, opening the door for generations who would follow in his footsteps – including my work in sound and music computing, combining media engineering and music composition techniques to produce auditory displays.

Today, such systems for presenting information through sound are ubiquitous, from our mobile devices to our cars. Yet if it wasn’t for the efforts of figures like Malina, building bridges between the arts and sciences, fields like mine wouldn’t exist at all.

The suicide squad

Malina is said to have disappointed his musician father when he expressed interest in science and maths as a child – eventually opting for a career in engineering. In 1935, two amateur rocket enthusiasts, Jack Parsons and Ed Forman, approached the young graduate student about forming a new rocket research group at the California Institute of Technology.

Parsons, the group’s self-taught chemist, was an avowed occultist and a leading light within the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult secret society that was headed by Aleister Crowley – the British occultist and ceremonial magician sometimes described as “the wickedest man in the world”. Forman was the mechanic and focused on the material construction of the rockets. Some early fumbles soon earned them the “suicide squad” tag.

Frank Malina was part of a team of rocket engineers who were dubbed ‘the suicide squad’. Video: Propulsion+

The unorthodox pair adopted an intuitive, hands-on approach to rocketry which relied heavily on trial-and-error, and resulted in more than a few near misses. Malina provided the academic rigour, ensuring that experiments were designed and carried out to a high scientific standard.

Rocketry was still considered science fiction as the world approached the brink of war in 1938, so Malina was careful to describe their approach as “jet-assisted takeoff” when pursuing the US military for funding.

In fact, Malina was an avowed pacifist who claimed reluctance at “making rockets for murdering purposes”. It might seem strange, then, that he would align himself with the US Army – but against the backdrop of rising global fascism, and limited options for funding, he had few other options to pursue his engineering ambitions.

Declared a fugitive

Having been thoroughly convinced of the complete failure of capitalism by his experiences of the Great Depression, Malina became a member of the Communist Party of the United States in 1938 – holding meetings at his home until the early 1940s as war raged across Europe.

But this proved problematic as he rose up the ranks of Nasa’s newly founded Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By the time he took over as director in 1944, he was coming under increased surveillance from the FBI, who had been watching him since Parsons – secretly an FBI informant – had reported Malina’s communist associations in 1942.

After the war, Malina became increasingly distressed with attempts by the army at JPL to co-opt his rocket designs to deliver nuclear weapons – confiding this to his psychoanalyst, who was also monitoring him for the FBI.

Malina became aware of the FBI’s investigations after a run-in with an agent on a train journey in 1945. Increasingly disillusioned with the weaponisation of his rocketry research, he left for Europe in 1947 to take up the position with the new international agency Unesco in Paris. As its deputy science director, he hoped to find a more peaceful way of furthering the common global good through science.

In the US, he was branded a traitor as McCarthy era tensions heightened. At the height of this “red scare” in 1952, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had him indicted and declared a fugitive, and his passport was revoked.

Pushing the possibilities of art

Throughout his scientific career, Malina produced paintings and drawings in his spare time. In 1953, at the age of 41, Malina resigned from Unesco to pursue a full-time career as an artist in Paris.

Initially, he explored the moiré effect, meticulously crafting overlapping grids of wire mesh, steel cords and metal components to reveal unique patterns when viewed from different angles. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris soon acquired one of his first major abstract paintings, Deep Shadows (1954), which used these string-and-mesh techniques.

Increasingly drawing on his engineering background, Malina began integrating mechanical systems and lighting assemblies into his art, producing pioneering works that spanned the fields of light art and kinetic art. Not unlike his early rocketry work, Malina’s art was rejected by traditionalists but celebrated by the European avant-garde for integrating cutting-edge science in art, and opening up radical new artistic possibilities.

Frank Malina oversees his Cosmos installation in the Pergamon Press lobby in Oxford, 1968.

In 1965, Malina’s kinetic installation for the Pergamon Press building in Oxford, Cosmos, cemented his reputation as an artist. This labyrinth of fluorescent lights and painted plexiglass rotor wheels integrated his expertise as both rocket scientist and artist. It was restored and installed at Oxford Brookes University in 2019.

Malina applied the same sytematic rigour to all his engineering and artistic experiments. This unusual combination saw him launch Leonardo in 1968 – an academic journal that enables artists to explain their work and methods in a manner similar to scientists. It has subsequently expanded into a torch-bearing organisation that publishes books, runs talks and provides support for an international network of researchers and artists.

The extraordinary career of Malina – who died in Paris in 1981 – blazed a trail for generations of interdisciplinary researchers who have followed in his wake. Yet both his scientific and artistic achievements were suppressed because he was labelled a communist traitor in the US.

For many years, Malina’s significant contributions to rocketry – critical in putting a man on the Moon – were erased from official histories. The damage to his reputation also made it difficult for US institutions to publicly embrace his artwork.

Malina said he felt betrayed by a system that had raised up a former Nazi engineer like Wernher von Braun to the status of hero, while erasing the contributions of scientists such as himself for their links to communism. Thankfully, Malina’s vision of interdisciplinary collaboration has outlived the harshest critiques of his detractors – a testament to the originality and ingenuity of his work.

Stephen Roddy is affiliated with the IEEE and the Radical Humanities Laboratory (UCC) his work has been supported by the Irish Research Council.

The Playboy of the Western World: National Theatre staging ensures Irish play remains essential viewing

2026-02-03T17:31:46Z

A revival of a beloved and notorious Irish play from 1907, Catriona McLaughlin’s production of The Playboy of the Western World treats J.M Synge’s play as a work with urgent contemporary force, creating a story with resonance in 2026.

Reuniting Derry Girls Nicola Coughlan and Siobhan McSweeney at the National Theatre, the play is set in a shebeen (an illicit drinking den) in western Mayo. The plot centres on Pegeen (Coughlan), whose life is jolted by the arrival of Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke).

On the run and boasting that he has murdered his father, Christy becomes an instant local hero. His violent, wild tale of defying his father’s supposed tyranny captivates a community in need of a hero. Christy’s notoriety is quickly complicated by the arrival of his very-much-alive father (Declan Conlon) in act two, collapsing the young man’s carefully constructed myth.

First staged in 1907 in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, The Playboy of The Western World famously enraged audiences who booed and rioted. At this time, Ireland was moving towards independence and national pride was growing. Irish audiences expected homegrown theatre to showcase a serious, disciplined national character.

Synge’s play, depicting a foolish man whose boasts of patricide are hailed as heroic by a drunken, sexually available community was deemed morally offensive, a direct affront to Ireland itself.

In the intervening century, the play has become recognised as a masterpiece of Irish literature. Synge’s biting dark humour and ear for richly authentic dialogue has endured, with the play now recognised as a classic of modernist drama.

Humour, cruelty and urgency

Told in Hiberno-English (the Irish version of English, influenced by Gaelic) dialogue, The Playboy of The Western World depicts rural life as complex and brutal. Almost 120 years later on a London stage, it rejects a nostalgic view of rural Ireland in a bygone era. These characters are human and imperfect, and just as susceptible to a tall tale as anyone in 2026.

Director Catriona McLaughlin has assembled a cast of familiar Irish names. Nicola Coughlan sparkles as Pegeen. Her sharp tongue and fortitude in a shebeen full of men is edged with frustration and a deep yearning for something exciting to happen.

Éanna Hardwicke’s Christy Mahon begins tightly wound, loosening as he basks in female adoration. His performance is infused with a coiled, elastic physicality giving Christy an electric intensity; Hardwicke dares the audience to fall in love with him, too.

Siobhan McSweeney, characteristically sharp and wickedly funny, is unmissable as the Widow Quin. Providing welcome comic relief are Marty Rea as a slyly humourous Shawn Keogh, and Lorcan Cranitch’s uproariously funny and drunken Michael James.

McLaughlin frames the Irish western coast as haunted and mysterious, reinforced by Katie Davenport’s straw mumming costumes (see image below) worn by musicians and extras, and the recurring use of the caoineadh or “keening” – mourning in song.

These design choices create an atmosphere which feels suspended rather than anchored to a particular period. The timelessness sharpens the impact of Christy’s unmasking: the community’s sudden turn against him when they witness a violent act mirrors a familiar real-world pattern. Violence absorbed as story, gossip or spectacle becomes intolerable once its physical reality intrudes.

The crowd’s horror is not prompted by the act itself, but by its visibility. In this way, the production speaks directly to contemporary audiences accustomed to consuming violence at a distance, yet quick to condemn when confronted with its immediate consequences.

Some critics have reported difficulty following Synge’s language, revealing how strongly expectations of “standard” English shape reception. Such dismissals reveal not a failure of intelligibility in the play, but a critical resistance to engaging with Hiberno-English on its own terms.

This requires attention to rhythm, tone and repetition, and dismissing it as unintelligible echoes the play’s broader concern with how stories are received and misread.

Dynamic and intellectually alert, McLaughlin’s production refuses to treat The Playboy of the Western World as a museum piece. It trusts both Synge’s language and its audience, allowing the play’s humour, cruelty and urgency to land without apology. So much more than a revival, this staging reasserts the work’s enduring relevance and makes a compelling case for why it remains essential viewing.

The Playboy of the Western World is at the National Theatre, London, till February 28

Laura O'Flanagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A brief history of table tennis in film – from Forrest Gump to Marty Supreme

2026-02-03T17:31:43Z

Table tennis and film have a surprisingly entangled history. Both depended on the invention of celluloid – which not only became the substrate of film, but is also used to make ping pong balls.

Following a brief ping pong craze in 1902, the game largely disappeared and was widely assumed to have been a passing fad. More than 20 years later, however, the British socialite, communist spy and filmmaker Ivor Montagu went to great lengths to establish the game as a sport – a story I explore in my current book project on ping pong and the moving image.

He founded the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) and codified the rules of the game in both a book and a corresponding short film, Table Tennis Today (1929).

Montagu presided over the ITTF for several decades. In 1925, the same year he founded the ITTF, Montagu also co-founded the London Film Society. The society helped introduce western audiences to experimental and art films that are now considered classics.

The game of table tennis has subsequently appeared at a number of moments when filmmakers and artists were experimenting with new technologies. An early example appears in one of the first works of “visual music”: Rhythm in Light (1934) by Mary Ellen Bute.

Table Tennis Today (Ivor Montagu, 1929)

Meanwhile, an early work of expanded cinema, Ping Pong (1968) by the artist Valie Export, invited audiences to pick up a paddle and ball and attempt to strike a physical ball against the representation of one moving on the cinema screen. Atari’s adaptation of the game into the interactive Pong (1972) is often considered the first video game.

Perhaps the most familiar cinematic example of all, however, is the digital simulation of a photorealistic ping pong ball – made possible by a then-new regime of computer-generated imagery. It helped Tom Hanks appear to be a ping pong whiz in the Academy-Award-winning Forrest Gump (1994).

The ping pong scene in Forest Gump.

There are a number of other fascinating moments in which the game surfaces meaningfully: in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Jacques Tati’s M Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), and Agnes Varda and JR’s Faces Places (2017).

And every day for more than two years, from 2020 to 2022, one of the world’s most beloved filmmakers, David Lynch, uploaded YouTube videos in which he pulled a numbered ping pong ball from a jar and declared it “today’s number”. It was a fittingly Dada-esque gesture that stands among the last mysterious works he shared with the world.

Enter Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. The title sequence alone discovers a new way of visualising the game’s iconography, as we see a sperm fertilise an egg, which then transforms into a ping pong ball (the digital effects first witnessed in Gump are now fully integrated into popular cinema).

Why Marty Supreme is different

Marty Supreme is very loosely based on the real-life player Marty Reisman (here Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet). What sets it apart from earlier cinematic appearances of table tennis is that it centres the game as a sport.

When table tennis has previously appeared in film, it is usually to help show off new special effects or as a brief plot device. Or it frequently appears in the background, helping to furnish the mise-en-scene of an office, basement, or bar. In these instances, we might not notice the game or its materials at all. When it does have a narrative function, it usually occupies a single scene, frequently serving to stage or resolve fraught interpersonal relations between the characters who are playing.

In Marty Supreme, however, table tennis seems neither tethered to special effects nor, certainly, to the game’s “background” status. Chalamet trained extensively over the seven years he spent preparing for the role, even taking his own table to the desert while filming Dune (2021). And despite the film’s sometimes compelling eccentricities, Marty Supreme in many senses follows the generic blueprint of a sports film.

The trailer for Marty Supreme.

Safdie has made a sports film, coincidentally or not, like his frequent collaborator and brother Benny Safdie, whose wrestling film The Smashing Machine was also released this past year. Marty Supreme, though, revolves around an athlete who plays a game that generally has been assumed to not have enough gravitas to command a place in the genre or to hold an audience’s interest.

The absence of sports films about ping pong certainly speaks to ways in which it is perceived as something not worth taking too seriously, for reasons that are surely at least partially linked to the same reasons for which the game is often celebrated. It is perceived to be what I refer to as an “equalising” sport, open to people and bodies of all backgrounds and types.

As actor Susan Sarandon, who founded her own chain of ping pong bars, puts it: “Ping pong cuts across all body types and gender – everything, really – because little girls can beat big muscley guys. You don’t get hurt; it is not expensive; it is really good for your mind. It is one of the few sports that you can play until you die.”

This perception of the game has perhaps also led it to appear in more comedic contexts, with athletes embodied by actors we might more readily laugh at, as source material for visual and sonic gags, from a slapstick scene in You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939) to the widely panned Balls of Fury (2007).

The tension between the game’s perceived triviality and Mauser’s extreme dedication lends Marty Supreme a vast blank canvas – or ping pong table – onto which its oscillations can be painted, or played… and in turn felt by the audience, with its high highs and low lows.

While it’s great that a talented director has poured his heart into a cinematic treatment of Reisman for the screen, I’m holding out hope for an Ivor Montagu film, which could be even more beholden to its real-life character – and even more wild.

Jeff Scheible does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Not an artefact, but an ancestor: why a German university is returning a Māori taonga

2026-02-03T13:17:31Z

Restitution debates – the question of whether a cultural object should be returned from a museum or other collection to a person or community – often begin with a deceptively simple question: who owns an object?

In colonial contexts, this question rarely has a clear answer. Histories of acquisition are often incomplete, disputed and overwhelmingly recorded from European perspectives. Legal documentation, where it exists at all, usually reflects unequal power relations rather than mutual consent. As a result, many restitution claims cannot be resolved through law alone.

This raises a fundamental question: should the spiritual, social and ancestral significance of an object for its community of origin outweigh unresolved legal arguments about possession?

The case of the Hinematioro pou, which is now being returned from the University of Tübingen to the Māori community Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island, illustrates a restitution process grounded in cultural values. It shows what happens when decisions are guided primarily by spiritual meaning and relational responsibility, rather than by legal uncertainty surrounding colonial acquisition.

A pou is a carved wooden pillar that acts as a marker for tribal boundaries, stories or ancestors. The Hinematioro pou is an early carved panel depicting a standing ancestral figure.

For the Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, the pou is neither a historical artefact nor a work of art in the western sense. It is the material presence of an ancestor, Hinematioro, who was an ariki (high-ranking leader). The pou is part of a living social order, not a testimony to a distant past.

Within Māori cultural logic, such an object is a taonga: a treasure that carries not only material, but also spiritual, social and genealogical value. Taonga possess mana and mauri – agency and life force – and require ritual relationships as well as responsibility.

This meaning became clear when the pou returned in 2019, for the first time in over 250 years, to Ūawa (Tolaga Bay). It was met with a formal pōwhiri (welcome ceremony) with singing, speeches, tears and embraces – as if a long-absent relative had come home.

Witnessing this special moment made us and many others who were part of the event understand that the question of the pou’s future location is not a museological one for the community, but an existential one. It is not about possession, but about relationship.

How the taonga came to Germany

It is not possible to conclusively reconstruct how the taonga came to Europe. What is certain is that, in October 1769, it was taken from Ūawa to Europe aboard the HMS Endeavour during James Cook’s first Pacific voyage.

The panel is widely regarded as one of the earliest surviving carved pou associated with Māori chiefly genealogies to have entered European collections. This occurred within a colonial context of profound power asymmetries.

The Watering Place in Tolaga Bay, Ōpoutama, Cooks Cove sketch by James Cook 1769. British Museum, London

It is also not possible to establish how the pou was transferred. A range of possibilities exists, including gifting, coerced handover, exchange or theft. European sources provide no clear evidence, and perspectives from the source community are not sufficiently recognised in Europe. Therefore, a lack of documented violence cannot be taken as evidence of a voluntary transfer.

The object’s later path to Tübingen can only be partially traced. It may have circulated through several 19th-century scientific and collecting networks connected to the Cook expedition.

What is certain is that, in 1937, the pou entered the Ethnological Collection of the University of Tübingen through Emma von Luschan (1864–1941, wife to the anthropologist, explorer, archaeologist and ethnographer, Felix von Luschan) when their collection was curated by the anthropologist and ethnologist Augustin Krämer.

A turning point came in the 1990s, when the panel was identified using a drawing from the Cook expedition held at the British Library. What proved decisive, however, was the establishment of direct relationships with the Hauiti Iwi (tribe or people).

In the following years, close cooperation developed between the University of Tübingen and the Hauiti Iwi. In 2019 the pou was loaned back to the Māori. A jointly curated exhibition Te Pou o Hinematioro (2025–26) at Hohentübingen Castle back in Germany followed – an expressions of a partnership in which trust could grow. The restitution of the pou is therefore not the outcome of conflict, but the result of a long-term relationship that deepened during the exhibition process.

From a legal perspective, the university was not obliged to return the object. Under German civil law, the pou is considered university property, and no binding restitution framework exists for colonial contexts.

Nevertheless, political approaches to colonial collection material in Germany have shifted in recent years. Recent national guidelines encourage transparency, provenance research, dialogue with source communities and restitution as a possible outcome. This reflects a shift away from narrow legal ownership toward acknowledging colonial power imbalances in collection histories.

Decisions about restitution are primarily political and institutional in nature. These decisions raise questions of responsibility: what obligations do present-day collections have towards the circumstances in which their holdings were acquired, and what role do institutions wish to play in global debates on heritage, memory and justice? Universities, with their extensive collections and deep involvement in colonial knowledge production, are particularly affected by these issues.

Where legal histories are inconclusive – as they often are in colonial contexts – restitution cannot be decided by ownership alone. For source communities to be genuine partners, their social, spiritual and ancestral relationships with heritage must be recognised. Otherwise, restitution debates risk perpetuating the very hierarchies it aims to dismantle.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Medieval women used falconry to subvert gender norms

2026-02-03T13:17:23Z

Hawks are taking cinematic flight. In two recent literary adaptations, they are entwined with the lives and emotions of their respective protagonists – Agnes Shakespeare (née Hathaway) and Helen Macdonald.

Birds of prey and their symbolism are explored in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, and H is for Hawk, based on Macdonald’s 2014 memoir. In these films, hawks become complex and multifaceted figures, articulating gendered relationships to grief, nature, humanity and selfhood.

Hamnet is set in the Elizabethan period, and H is for Hawk in the modern day. However, the relationship between women and birds of prey has an even longer history. My research shows that in the medieval period, too, that relationship was multilayered. Far more than fashionable accessories, hawks offered women both real and symbolic means to express gender, power and status within a male-dominated world.

The mirror case from the British Library collection. The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC

In the middle ages, the process of training hawks, with its delicate dance of control and release, was popularly associated with the game of courtship between men and women.

Falconry’s romantic connotations are emphasised in art, objects and literature from the time. Images of men and women hunting together with birds of prey feature across a wide range of medieval material culture, from tapestries for castle walls to decorative cases used to contain and protect hand-held mirrors.

The largest of four fifteenth-century tapestries, known collectively as the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, takes falconry as its subject. Lovers are depicted strolling arm-in-arm as their birds hunt prey.

On a smaller scale, two fourteenth-century mirror cases from the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art show scenes of lovers riding on horseback, each holding falcons. The mirrors may have been gifted as love tokens. Literary texts are also filled with references to women with, and even as, hawks.

The trope of the woman as a hawk needing to be tamed and controlled, however, was not a straightforward one of female submission. Falconry and its symbolism offered elite medieval women mastery and autonomy.

Defining themselves

Where high-status medieval women had the opportunity to represent themselves through visual culture, they often chose to include birds of prey. This is most obviously seen in seals, which were used by a wide range of medieval people to authenticate legally binding documents. Seals represented the sealer’s endorsement, identity and status.

The iconography of seals, and the matrices or moulds used to create them, provides important evidence of how women of status wished to be perceived and remembered. Elizabeth of Rhuddlan, the youngest daughter of King Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, chose the most popular motif among 13th-century women as the matrix for her personal (privy) seal. It shows a woman standing upright, her body tilted towards an obedient bird of prey in her left hand.

In another seal-matrix from the same century, Elizabeth, Lady of Sevorc is shown in a more energetic pose. She rides side-saddle, a falcon in one hand and a large eagle’s claw in the other.

Through their seals, medieval women showed their mastery over their birds of prey and affairs, and their belonging to a fashionable and powerful female collective.

A lady observing her hawk fly towards a duck, from the Taymouth Hours. British Library

Beyond imagery, records show that queens and noblewomen created and managed parks and hunting grounds. They also hawked together, trained birds of prey, and even gave them as gifts.

Smaller birds, such as merlins, were considered appropriate for women. In the film adaption of H is for Hawk, Claire Foy’s Helen refuses to settle for a merlin, dismissing it as a “lady’s bird”. It seems that medieval women similarly refused to be limited by the options conduct manuals offered them.

Henry VIII’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, had many birds of prey. These included merlins and lannerets as well as larger species such as goshawks and lanners.

The deer park Beaufort created at her palace at Collyweston in Northamptonshire, with its terraces, ponds and water meadows, was ideally suited to falconry. Her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth of York, who had her own room at the palace, hunted with goshawks.

In some cases, women appear to have been recognised as authorities on falconry-related matters. The Taymouth Hours, an illuminated 14th century book likely produced for a queenly reader, shows women with billowing headdresses hunting mallards with large birds of prey. The women adopt authoritative stances, demonstrating their skill, command and control over the birds.

In the following century, Dame Juliana de Berners, a prioress from Sopwell Priory, is thought to have authored at least part of the Boke of St Albans, which contains treatises on hunting and hawking.

A lady observing her hawk bringing down a duck in the Yates Thompson manuscript. British Library

Research by English Heritage has identified that women could even make a living from their expertise in training hawks. In the mid-13th century, a woman named Ymayna was the keeper of the Earl of Richmond’s hawks and hounds at Richmond Castle. In exchange for her expertise, she and her family were permitted to hold land nearby.

Ymayna stands out as a woman in a male-dominated profession, but her example suggests that there were probably other women like her, whose names are unidentified or absent from the historical record.

Women falconers may have been among the owners and users of knives, the handles of which survive in museum collections across Europe. An exquisitely carved example from the 14th century, now displayed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, takes the form of a noble lady with a tiny bird of prey clutched close to her heart.

Literary texts reveal that falconry offered opportunities for female socialisation and bonding. In the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, Orfeo spies a collective of 60 women on horseback, each with a hawk in hand.

A lady hawking for a hare in the Yates Thompson manuscript. British Library

In Hamnet, Agnes tells her husband William Shakespeare that her falconry glove was a gift from her mother. Medieval and early-modern women certainly gave gifts to one another, including gloves. My research, however, suggests that birds of prey were more commonly gifted between women and men.

Margaret Beaufort gave and received birds of prey to and from male relatives and associates, including her young grandson, the future Henry VIII. Birds of prey were considered suitable gifts for special occasions and life milestones. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, gave her nephew, Henry Courtenay, three falcons to mark his elevation to the title of Marquess of Exeter in 1525.

That powerful women landowners participated in rituals of gift exchange with men suggests falconry was not a straightforwardly feminine expression of power and status. Through their ownership of parks and the giving and receiving of birds of prey as gifts, women also used the culture of falconry to show their belonging to a masculine world of hunting and lordly largesse.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Rachel Delman received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2013-2016) and the Leverhulme Trust (2019-2022).

Men rule the Grammys as women see hard drop in wins at 2026 awards

2026-02-02T16:33:11Z

In her acceptance speech for best pop vocal album at the 68th Grammy Awards ceremony last night, Lady Gaga shone a light on the challenges that women face in studios. “It can be hard,” she said. “So, I urge you to always listen to yourself and … fight for your songs, fight for yourself as a producer. Make sure that you are heard, loudly,” she continued, placing the onus on women to take control of the fight for equality in music.

Many well-established and new female superstars were indeed heard loudly last night in the broadcast, which clearly made sure to display gender balance in front of the camera. However, when it comes to awards, nominations and the wider industry the picture is much different.

Working with my business partner, strategist Richard Addy, I looked at gender representation across all 95 of this year’s Grammy categories. Our analysis reveals that women and female bands sustained a dramatic fall in winners compared to last year. They received less than a quarter of all Grammys (23%), a 14 percentage point drop from last year’s high of 37% and the lowest level since 2022.

This fall has been partly a reflection of women’s declining recognition as Grammy nominees. Women’s representation peaked at under a third (28%) of all nominations last year, and this year just one in four nominations (24%) were given to women.

Despite Lady Gaga’s encouraging words for women to own their music as producers, their fight for a seat at the producers’ table is yet to yield results. Since its introduction 51 years ago, no woman has ever won the coveted Grammy for producer of the year, non-classical. Last year, Alissia became only the tenth woman to even earn a nomination in the category but lost out to Daniel Nigro. This year, all five nominees were male.

Addy and I have previously conducted a year-long data-led investigation of over 9,700 Grammy nominations and over 2,200 wins between 2017, revealing that it takes a village of men to raise a superstar, female or male. The winners of record, album and song of the year – three of the four most coveted Grammy awards – typically come on stage to collect their trophy alone.

In reality, however, they share their award with numerous producers, engineers and mixers, who are overwhelmingly male. So music icons like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift collecting their individual awards masks the male dominated structures behind these wins. For example, Bad Bunny, this year’s album of the year winner, has received it alongside 12 male producers, songwriters and technicians who were not on stage with him.

Despite women’s consistently high visibility at the Recording Academy nominee announcements and broadcasts over the year, their recognition across the Grammys has remained peripheral compared to men’s. Since 2017, 76% of nominations and wins across all categories have been awarded to men. By contrast, women have been nominated for and won only one in five Grammys in the same period.

Research consistently shows that the reasons women remain marginalised in the Grammys and in music more generally, are deeply structural and multifaceted.

Although the Recording Academy’s mission is to advance a strong culture of diversity, inclusion, belonging and respect in the music industry, women remain marginalised as Recording Academy members. The proportion of Grammy voting members who are women has grown from 21% (2018) to 28% (2024). But this growth rate will only deliver gender parity in 2051.

This slow growth is likely linked to 69% of voting members being songwriters, composers, producers and engineers, roles in which women’s marginalisation has repeatedly been reported to be highest. For example, the latest Inclusion In the Recording Studio report from from USC Annenberg Initiative revealed the overall ratio of men to women songwriters in Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts across 13 years is 6.2 to 1.

Our assessment of 67 academic papers and reports in our report, The Missing Voices of Women in Music and Music News, revealed that gender discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual violence consistently hinder women’s success in music, as do pay gaps, women’s cultural exclusion from the “boys club” and limited discovery and promotional opportunities. According to Be The Change: Gender equity in music, a 2024 report from consultancy Midia based on research conducted across 133 countries 60% of women in the music industry have experienced sexual harassment while one in five women have survived sexual assault.

The evidence points to a reality in which no matter women’s talent or determination to succeed, they will only be able to do so if the music industry changes. Until then, we are unlikely to see women achieving recognition parity at the Grammys or any other music awards.

Luba Kassova is a co-founder of AKAS, an audience strategy consultancy which works with primarily purpose led not-for-profit organisations. In the past AKAS has received funding from the Gates Foundation for researching the Missing Perspectives of Women reports published between 2020 and 2025. The research of 2026 Grammy nominations and winners, which will form the backbone of a forthcoming report, has not received any external funding.

To cry or not to cry: how moving the audience to tears can backfire

2026-02-02T12:55:39Z

“One must have a heart of stone not to read about the death of little Nell without laughing” was Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to the emotional onslaught of Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Having watched two films in two weeks about the death of a child, it offers a clue as to why I cried in only one.

In her journals, the novelist Helen Garner writes: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Is the presence of sentiment the reason I was dry-eyed at the end of one film and in pieces at the end of the other?

Chloe Zhao’s acclaimed adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet promises tears aplenty, given its focus on how the death of Shakespeare’s son influenced the writing of Hamlet. Child mortality is inescapably tragic, and yet too often I found myself wincing at Max Richter’s insistent score or scoffing at scenes of groundlings at the Globe blubbing. I left without shedding a tear, only to find the cinema full of weeping couples comforting each other.

I knew Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab – a forensic account of the last hours of a six-year-old girl under fire in Gaza in January 2024 – was going to be a tough watch. This time, by the credits, I was on the floor, choked with tears of rage.

There’s an obvious explanation for these opposing reactions. Hind Rajab was a real child caught up in the IDF’s assault on Gaza whereas Hamnet’s death is distant in time. However I suspect my emotional dissonance stems from Zhao working flat out to make me cry, as opposed to Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab’s director, forcing me to get over myself and bear witness.

A brief history of art and weeping

How do we evaluate such manipulations? In the history of drama the place of weeping is ambivalent. Tragedy’s tendency to elicit and “purge” emotion is first described in Aristotle’s Poetics, his anatomy of the power of drama in 5th century BC Athens. Aristotle suggests that plays such as Oedipus Tyrannos provoke katharsis in the audience – a collective raising and purging of feeling.

The trailer for Hamnet.

From then on, the literature of crying is sparse, although cultural historian Tom Lutz’s book Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears usefully defines it as “a surplus of feeling over thinking”, eliciting a “gestural language of tears”.

In the late 18th century, a cult of “sensibility” pushed back against conventional notions of emotional restraint and “reason”. Instead, writers and taste-makers favoured heightened sensitivity and emotional fluency. This is epitomised in the heroes of novels such as The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie (1771), which made hitherto indecorous public displays of abjection fashionable.

Yet around the same time, the French philosopher Denis Diderot outlined the paradox of the actor (smiling as they weep or weeping as they smile), challenging the idea that to induce emotion art must express emotion. This notion is definitively expressed in Roman poet Horace’s long reflective poem Ars Poetica which suggests: “If you would have me weep, you must first feel the passion of grief yourself.”

There’s a gendered dimension to this debate. In parading my resistance to tearing up, am I simply contributing to a tradition of patronising melodrama? Terms such as “weepies” or “tearjerker” or “the woman’s picture” reveal a disdain for emotion which risks writing off cinematic masterpieces by filmmakers like Douglas Sirk or George Cukor, such as Imitation of Life (1959) or A Star is Born (1937).

But there may be a simpler answer to this question: is the direct representation of emotion to provoke emotion in fact a turn-off? Watching Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal give way to their grief in Hamnet made my own feelings surplus to requirements. It left me yearning for German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s push-back on what he called “the narcotics industry” of Hollywood. Puzzling over my resistance to Hamnet, called to mind an observation made by director Peter Hall in his 2000 lectures Exposed by the Mask. In them, he argues that if you wish to reduce an audience to tears, you don’t show a child crying – you show a child attempting not to cry.

The trailer for Hamnet.

That insight explains the force of The Voice of Hind Rajab, with its eponymous heroine braving out her terrifying circumstances. The film has the tact to evade direct representation of her predicament. As Hind speaks, we’re exposed to a naked screen where the raw audio recording is experienced as mere sound waves. The tact of that refusal to represent places the burden on the viewer to question their own emotional response.

After the shock of this trauma, we turn our attention to the paralysed “rescuers” who painstakingly seek to coordinate an eight-minute ambulance journey into the zone of combat. Their reactions – rage and grief – and their attempt to maintain their cool both governs and splits our feelings. For them, crying is an indulgence, they are too busy trying to save a life. We do the crying for them.

The poet John Keats suggested that we “hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”. Well, these two films evidently have designs on us; and yes, we all feel better after a good cry. But The Voice of Hind Rajab invites us to sit up and pay attention – and sometimes, tears are not enough.

Steve Waters has received funding from the AHRC.

Industry’s Faustian pact, a Welsh detective drama, and the return of Bridgerton – what to watch, read and listen to this week

2026-01-30T16:59:12Z

I don’t think my new year’s resolution – to take a lunch break every day – would much impress the cast of Industry. In the BBC show’s fourth series, the idea that work might pause politely at midday feels almost quaint, like a relic of a slower moral universe.

As our reviewer Peter Watt, who researches the philosophy of work culture, explains, when Industry first aired in 2020 it seemed ostensibly to be a drama about a recent cohort of ambitious young graduates entering the cut-throat world of investment banking. But as the opening season unfolded and its central characters were established, it became clear that although the trading floor of the fictional-but-all-so-familiar Pierpoint and Co. was its setting, this was not just a show about finance.

Now returning for season four, the show is exposing the Faustian pact of modern work culture. For the Industry cast (and so many of us in the real world) life no longer interrupts work – work is life.

Industry season four is streaming on BBC iplayer

Off-beat mysteries

A grizzled former detective reunites with their former partner to solve a case uncomfortably close to the one that got them kicked off the force. On paper, it’s familiar detective territory. But the new Sky Arts drama Under Salt Marsh quickly subverts expectations.

Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly) isn’t a chain-smoking, jaded old hand, but a middle-aged woman driven by the search for her missing niece. Her former partner Eric Bull (Rafe Spall) is no rigid rule-follower either: he’s a queer man with an encyclopaedic grasp of local flora and fauna. And he’s happy to investigate using all his senses, tasting ditchwater and chewing samphire.

Set against the rugged north-Welsh coast, our reviewer calls it “an excellent, environmentally engaged detective drama”.

Under Salt Marsh is streaming on Sky Arts

The trailer for Under Salts Marsh.

Mysteries of a more esoteric nature abound in Glyph, the new novel from Ali Smith with the same – yet different – title as her last novel, Gliff. While not obviously connected through either characters or subject matter, the characters of Glyph have read the novel Gliff, and discuss it.

While I don’t profess to always understand her novels, I love reading Smith. She’s one of the most experimental mainstream writers working in the UK, and I always find myself thinking about her work months – and in some cases even years – after turning the last page.

Bonnet season

Mark your calendars and don your best bonnet – Bridgerton is back. This season the focus is on bohemian second son Benedict who loves his freedom and is loath to settle down. For every person lapping up the drama, however, there’s another (usually very vocal) cynic.

Period drama expert Shelley Galpin explains why it’s a mistake to dismiss Bridgerton as fluffy period drama. To her mind, the show represents a complex interplay of the real – whether historical moments or relatable issues – with the fantastical, in its deliberately heightened aesthetics and swoonworthy romantic resolutions.

Bridgerton is streaming on Netflix

Bridgerton season four trailer.

For episode seven of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, we’re doing something a little different. Rather than putting Austen under the microscope ourselves, we’re handing the questions over to you. We’ve received a virtual sack full of letters from you, ranging from questions about Austen’s religious beliefs to her grasp of contemporary science, and even what she might have made of social media.

Unlike Jane’s sister Cassandra Austen, however, we have no intention of throwing your letters into the flames. Instead, three experts join me to debate them – and, where possible, to settle them.

Mock the Week’s return can’t compete with memes in the new age of political satire

2026-01-30T16:53:15Z

Shot Stalker/Shutterstock

Just as jokes wear thin by repetition, the return of Mock the Week to TV screens via Freeview channel TLC is unlikely to excite many beyond a small circle of fans. The format is the tried and tested panel quiz, where two teams of comedians compete by improvising witty takes on global events. But this light entertainment model of news satire is a throwback, conceived in a world where politics was only a background buzz for people’s day to day lives.

With 24/7 news and social media, the digital relay of politics is continuous, interactive, and, thanks the circulation of memes, already suffused with irony and satire. For good or ill, we experience global politics intimately and instantaneously via our smart phones.

We will have already forgotten the best memes about Donald Trump long before one of Mock the Week’s panellists gets up to wryly ask if he will change the name of Greenland to Orange-Land?

Indeed, as the host Dara O’Briain quipped about the previous cancellation of the show in 2022: “The storylines were getting crazier and crazier – global pandemics, divorce from Europe, novelty short-term prime ministers … We just couldn’t be more silly than the news was already.”

The implications of this “commodification of politics” are vast and go well beyond the fortunes of Mock the Week. Critical commentators have noted the usual list of issues with the format, including the difficulty of being original when the best online jokes regularly go viral, a potential for political clubbish-ness, and legal and commercial constraints about obscenity and offence. There is also the deeper shift in the nature of humour and politics to comprehend.

The digital form of humour in global politics has migrated to memes, their production, circulation and, importantly, their interactive potential. For instance, the ecology of memes about J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States, includes both the ridiculous images (fat-Vance, goth-Vance, for example) but also, AI extensions where he dances while drinking hot dog juice.

With widely available and easy to use apps, anyone can play along, contributing to and amplifying satirical currents. In the process, online meme-makers are changing our understanding of how the public engage with global politics.

An ability to use memes effectively is fundamentally reshaping several areas of global politics including digital diplomacy, foreign policy and nationalist politics.

While we’re used to thinking about satire as a check on political excess or corruption, like a form of “comic resistance”, the trend in recent years has seen politicians like Boris Johnson and Trump “take the lead” in deploying jokes and memes.

It has become commonplace, if slightly unfair, to blame the rise of Johnson on his regular appearances on Have I Got News for You, the comedy panel news show taught him, according to writer Jonathon Coe: “The best way to make sure that satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself.”

This is part of a broader shift in digital diplomacy whereby politicians and political institutions have used humour to communicate their messages through social media. On one hand, this is because jokes and memes can circulate beyond the traditional demographics of politics to engage the young, the old, and the increasingly important “conspiratorial” vote.

On the other hand, humour can both communicate across as well as deepen the cognitive divides that permeate contemporary events. Think of the emergence of racist humour throughout the COVID pandemic, which targeted Chinese people, or, relatedly, the central role of ridicule in disciplining “anti-vax”.

In that sense, it’s no surprise that humour has also been a key language in the growing use of hybrid warfare by states like Russia, China, and Nato in relation to the Ukraine war. Russian media has often delighted in the ability of its leading satirical pranksters to get access to and record conversations with senior British politicians about their (nuclear) strategy in Ukraine.

Of course, nowhere is this satirical agency more pronounced than in the current return of nationalist politics in general and the rise of Maga, in particular. Trump’s genius in this may be an ability to play both sides of the joke to his advantage.

Take the recent memes about US imperialism that saw “the stars and stripes” placed on a map over Venezuela, Canada and Greenland, which did two things.

First, they gratify and mobilise a base that enjoys a strong image of America, one that acts, because, to use the online catchphrase, “you can just do things”. Second, as supporters of Trump never tire of reminding us, much of his foreign policy follows the negotiating technique famously mapped out in his book The Art of Deal: aim high, don’t worry if things get messy, wait until people meet you half way.

With the addition of memes, this technique is able to reach previously unimaginable levels of effectiveness. It’s a signal form of politics, where satire is the agent of sovereign power.

Ironically, of course, these growing synergies between humour and global politics may lead some to seek sanctuary in the comfort of light entertainment. After all Mock the Week is just some comedians having fun and telling jokes. Some regard news satire within the larger educational function of critical journalism, an affective space where audiences can reflect on the high stakes of global politics.

James Brassett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The Aztec empire’s collapse shows why ruling through coercion and force fails

2026-01-30T16:53:10Z

When Aztec emissaries arrived in 1520 to Tzintzuntzan, the capital of the Tarascan Kingdom in what is now the Mexican state of Michoacán, they carried a warning from the Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc.

They cautioned that strange foreigners – the Spaniards – had invaded the land and posed a grave threat. The emissaries requested an audience with the Tarascan ruler, known as the Cazonci, King Zuanga. But Zuanga had recently died, most likely from smallpox brought by the Spaniards.

Relations between the two empires had long been tense. They had clashed on the western frontier since 1476, fighting major battles and fortifying their borders. The Tarascans viewed the Aztecs as deceitful and dangerous – a threat to their very existence.

So, when the emissaries arrived to speak with a king who was already dead, they were sacrificed and granted audience with him in the afterlife. In that moment, the fate of the Aztecs was sealed in blood.

The Aztec empire did not fall because it lacked capability. It collapsed because it accumulated too many adversaries who resented its dominance. This is a historical episode the US president, Donald Trump, should take notice of as his rift with traditional US allies deepens.

The Aztec (grey) and Tarascan (green) empires in what is now Mexico. El Comandante / Wikimedia Commons

Carl von Clausewitz and other philosophers of war have distinguished the concepts of force and power in relation to statecraft. In the broadest sense, power is ideological capital, predicated on military strength and influence in the global political sphere. In contrast, force is the exertion of military might to coerce other nations to your political will.

While power can be sustained through a strong economy, alliances and moral influence, force is expended. It drains resources and can erode internal political capital as well as global influence if it is used in a way that is perceived as arrogant or imperialistic.

The Aztec empire formed in 1428 as a triple alliance between the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with Tenochtitlan eventually dominating the political structure. The empire exerted force through seasonal military campaigns and balanced this with a power dynamic of sacrificial display, threat, tribute and a culture of racial superiority.

In both its use of force and power, the Aztec empire was coercive and depended on fear to rule. Those subjugated by the empire, and those engaged in what seemed perpetual war, held great animosity and distrust of the Aztecs. The empire was thus built on conquered people and enemies waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow their overlords.

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who ultimately brought large parts of what is now Mexico under the rule of Spain, exploited this hostility. He forged alliances with Tlaxcala and other former Aztec subjects, augmenting his small Spanish force with thousands of indigenous warriors.

Cortés led this Spanish-indigenous force against the Aztecs and besieged them in Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs had only one hope: to persuade the other great power in Mexico, the Tarascan empire to the west, to join forces with them. Their first emissaries met an ill fate. So, they tried again.

In 1521, Aztec envoys arrived once more in Tzintzuntzan and this time met with the new lord, Tangáxuan II. They brought captured steel weapons, a crossbow and armour to demonstrate the military threat they faced.

Aztec emissaries presenting Spanish weapons to the Tarascan king as proof of the threat. Codex Michoacan, CC BY-NC

The Tarascan king paid attention. He sent an exploratory mission to the frontier to determine whether this was Aztec trickery or truth. As they arrived at the frontier, they met a group of Chichimecs – semi-nomadic warrior people who often worked for empires to patrol borders.

When told the mission was heading to Tenochtitlan to scout the situation, the Chichimecs replied that they were too late. It was only a city of death now, and they were on their way to the Tarascan king to offer their services. Tangáxuan submitted to the Spanish as a tributary kingdom the following year before being burned to death in 1530 by Spaniards trying to find where he had hidden gold.

Had the Tarascans maintained normal political relations with the Aztecs, they might have investigated the report of the first emissaries. One can imagine how history would be different if, during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 40,000 Tarascan warriors – renowned archers – had descended from the mountains to the west. It is unlikely that Cortés and his army could have prevailed.

American foreign policy

The failings of the Aztec empire were not due to a lack of courage or military prowess. During their battles with the Spanish, the Aztecs repeatedly demonstrated adaptability, learning how to fight against horses and cannon-laden ships.

The failing was a fundamental flaw in the political strategy of the empire – it was built on coercion and fear, leaving a ready force to challenge its authority when it was most vulnerable.

The foreign policy of the US since 2025, when Trump entered office for his second term, has emulated this model. Recently, the Trump administration has been projecting coercive power to support its ambitions for wealth, notoriety and to project American exceptionalism and manifest superiority.

This has manifested in threats or the exercise of limited force, such as tariffs or military attacks in Iran, Syria, Nigeria and Venezuela. Increasingly, other nations are challenging the effectiveness of this power. Colombia, Panama, Mexico and Canada, for example, have largely ignored the threat of coercive power.

As Trump uses American power to demand Greenland, his threats are becoming more feeble. Nato nations are abiding by their longstanding pact with economic and military resolve, with their leaders saying they will not give in to Trump’s pressure. The US is being pushed towards a position where it will have to switch from coercive power to coercive force.

If this course persists, military engagements, animosity from neighbours and vulnerabilities arising from the strength of other militaries, economic disruptions and environmental catastrophes may well leave the world’s most powerful nation exposed with no allies.

Jay Silverstein received funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Foundation for the Advancment of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI), and The Penn State Hill Foundation that supported his doctoral studies.

Four early medieval swords found in Kent – child graves reveal they were more than just weapons

2026-01-30T16:53:08Z

Four early Anglo-Saxon swords uncovered during a recent archaeological excavation I took part in each tell a story about how weapons were viewed at the time. There was also a striking discovery of a child buried with spear and shield. Was the child an underage fighter? Or were weapons more than mere tools of war to these people?

Weapons are embedded with values. Would, for example, the Jedi knights in the Star Wars franchise have as much nobility if they were armed with knives instead of light sabres? Today, modern armies fight remotely with missiles and drones, or mechanically with guns and armour. Yet in many countries, an officer still has a ceremonial sword, which worn incorrectly might even reveal an imposter.

The excavation, which I carried out with archaeologist Andrew Richardson, focused on an early medieval cemetery and our swords were found in graves. Our team from the University of Lancashire and Isle Heritage has excavated around 40 graves in total. The discovery can be seen in BBC2’s Digging for Britain.

One of the swords we uncovered has a decorated silver pommel (the rear part of the handle) and ring which is fixed to the handle. It is a beautiful, high status 6th century object sheathed in a beaver fur lined scabbard. The other sword has a small silver hilt and wide, ribbed, gilt scabbard mouth – two elements with different artistic styles, from different dates, brought together on one weapon.

This mixture was also seen in the Staffordshire Hoard (discovered in 2009) which featured 78 pommels and 100 hilt collars with a range of dates from the 5th to the 7th centuries AD.

In medieval times, swords – or their parts – were curated by their owners, and old swords were valued more highly than new ones.

The Old English poem Beowulf (probably composed between the 8th and early 11th century) describes old swords (“ealdsweord”), ancient swords (“gomelswyrd”) and heirlooms (“yrfelafe”). As well as describing “waepen wundum heard” – “weapons hardened by wounds”.

There are two sword riddles in the Exeter Book, a large codex of poetry written down in the 10th century (although the texts within it may describe earlier attitudes). In riddle 80, the sword describes itself: “I am a warrior’s shoulder-companion”. It’s an interesting turn of phrase given our 6th century discoveries. In each case the hilt was placed at the shoulder and the arm of the deceased appeared to hug the weapon.

A comparable embrace has been seen in burials at Dover Buckland, also in Kent. There were two in Blacknall Field, Wiltshire, and one in West Garth Gardens, Suffolk. It is, however, unusual to see four people buried like this in one cemetery, and interestingly they were found in close proximity.

The part of the cemetery we have excavated includes several weapon burials placed around a deep grave with a ring ditch enclosing it. A small mound of earth would have been built over the top of the grave marking it out.

This earliest grave – the one that the others weapon graves used to guide their location – contained a man without metal artefacts or weapons. Weapon graves were more popular in the generations either side of the middle 6th century, so it is likely this person was buried before the fashion to dress the dead with weapons was established. Perhaps because during the tumultuous later 5th century and earliest years of the 6th century weapons were valued too highly for the defence of the living.

Our further discovery of a 10-12 year old child’s grave with a spear and shield adds to this picture. The child’s curved spine made it unlikely he could use these weapons comfortably.

A second grave of a younger child contained a large silver belt buckle. This looks to have been far too large to be worn by the boy who was just two to three years old. Graves with objects like these usually belong to adult men, large buckles were a symbol of office in later Roman and early Medieval contexts, for example the spectacular gold examples from Sutton Hoo.

So why were these objects found in the graves? Recent DNA results point to the importance of relatedness, particularly within the Y chromosome that denotes male ancestry.

At West Helsterton in east Yorkshire, DNA results point to a biological relationships between men buried in close proximity. Many of these men had weapons, including one with a sword and two spears. Many of the other male graves were placed around their heavily armed ancestor.

We are not saying that ancient weapons were purely ceremonial. Dents on shields, and wear on bladed weapons speak of practice and conflict. Injury and early death seen in skeletons testifies to the use of weapons in early medieval society and early English poetry speaks of grief and loss as much as heroism.

As Beowulf shows, feelings of loss were bound up in the display of the male dead and their weapons as well as fears for the future:

The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf, Beowulf’s funeral

stacked and decked it until it stood four-square,

hung with helmets, heavy war-shields

and shining armour, just as he had ordered.

Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it,

mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.

The weapons in our graves were as much as an expression of loss and grief, as they were a physical statement about strength or masculinity and the male family. Even battle hardened and ancient warriors cried, and they buried their dead with weapons like swords that told stories.

The spear, shield and buckles found in little graves spoke of the men these children might have become.

Duncan Sayer would like to thank Dr Andrew Richardson who is a co-director of the east Kent excavation project.

Rethinking Troy: how years of careful peace, not epic war, shaped this bronze age city

2026-01-29T12:36:49Z

Imagine a city that thrived for thousands of years, its streets alive with workshops, markets and the laughter of children, yet that is remembered for a single night of fire. That city is Troy.

Long before Homer’s epics immortalised its fall, Troy was a place of everyday life. Potters shaped jars and bowls destined to travel far beyond the settlement itself, moving through wide horizons of exchange and connection.

Bronze tools rang in busy workshops. Traders called across the marketplace and children chased one another along sun‑warmed footpaths. This was the real heartbeat of Troy – the story history has forgotten.

Homer’s late eighth‑century BC epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, fixed powerful images in western cultural memory: heroes clashing, a wooden horse dragged through city gates, flames licking the night sky. Yet this dramatic ending hides a far longer, far more remarkable story: centuries of cooperation embedded in everyday social organisation. A story we might call the Trojan peace.

This selective memory is not unique to Troy. Across history, spectacular collapses dominate how we imagine the past: Rome burning in AD64, Carthage razed in 146BC and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán falling in AD1521. Sudden catastrophe is vivid and memorable. The slow, fragile work of maintaining stability is easier to overlook.

The Trojan peace was not the absence of tension or inequality. It was the everyday ability to manage them without society breaking apart, the capacity to absorb pressure through routine cooperation rather than dramatic intervention.

When catastrophe outshines stability

Archaeology often speaks loudest when something goes catastrophically wrong. Fires preserve. Ruins cling to the soil like charcoal fingerprints. Peace, by contrast, leaves no single dramatic moment to anchor it.

Its traces survive in the ordinary: footpaths worn smooth by generations of feet; jars repaired, reused and handled for decades, some still bearing the drilled holes of ancient mending. These humble remnants form the true architecture of long‑term stability.

Troy is a textbook example. Archaeologists have identified nine major layers at the site, some of which are associated with substantial architectural reorganisation. But that isn’t evidence of destruction. Rather it simply reflects the everyday reality of a settlement’s history: building, use, maintenance or levelling, rebuilding and repetition.

Instead, I argue that Troy’s archaeological record reveals centuries of architectural continuity, stable coastal occupation and trade networks stretching from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and the Balkans – a geography of connection rather than conflict.

The only evidence for truly massive destruction that can be identified dates to around 2350BC. Against the broader archaeological backdrop, this stands out as a rare, fiery rupture – one dramatic episode within a much longer pattern of recovery and continuity.

Whether sparked by conflict, social unrest or an accident, it interrupted only briefly the long continuity of daily life – more than a thousand years before the events portrayed by the poet Homer in his tale of the Trojan war were supposed to have taken place.

But what actually held Troy together for so long? During the third and second millennia BC, Troy was a modest but highly connected coastal hub, thriving through exchange, craft specialisation, shared material traditions and the steady movement of ideas and goods.

The real drivers of Troy’s development were households, traders and craftspeople. Their lives depended on coordination and reciprocity: managing water and farmland, organising production, securing vital resources such as bronze and negotiating movement along the coast. In modern terms, peace was work, negotiated daily, maintained collectively and never guaranteed.

When crises arose, the community adapted. Labour was reorganised, resources redistributed, routines adjusted. Stability was restored not through force, but through collective problem solving embedded in everyday practice.

This was not a utopia. Troy’s stability was constrained by environmental limits, population pressure and finite resources. A successful trading season could bring prosperity; a failed harvest could strain systems quickly. Peace was never about eliminating conflict, but about absorbing pressure without collapse.

Satellite image of the bronze age citadel of Troy. Over more than two millennia, successive phases of construction accumulated at the same location, forming a settlement mound rising over 15 metres above the surrounding landscape. University of Çanakkale/Rüstem Aslan, CC BY

Archaeologically, this long-term balance appears as persistence: settlement layouts maintained across generations, skills refined and passed down, and gradual expansion from the citadel into what would later become the lower town. These developments depended on negotiation and cooperation, not conquest, revealing practical mechanisms of peace in the bronze age.

Why we remember the war

Stories favour rupture over routine. Homer’s Iliad was never a historical account of the bronze age, but a poetic reflection of heroism, morality, power and loss. The long, quiet centuries of cooperation before and after were too distant – and too subtle – to dramatise.

Modern archaeology has often followed the same gravitational pull. Excavations at Troy began with the explicit aim of locating the battlefield of the Trojan war. Even as scholarship moved on, the story of war continued to dominate the public imagination. War offers a clear narrative. Peace leaves behind complexity.

Reexamining Troy through the lens of peace shifts attention away from moments of destruction and towards centuries of continuity. Archaeology shows how communities without states, armies, or written law sustained stability through everyday practices of cooperation. What kept Troy going was not grand strategy, but the quiet work of living together, generation after generation.

The real miracle of Troy was not how it fell – but for how long it endured. Rethinking the cherished narrative of the Trojan war reminds us that lasting peace is built not in dramatic moments, but through the persistent, creative efforts of ordinary people.

Stephan Blum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Did a tsunami hit the Bristol Channel four centuries ago? Revisiting the great flood of 1607

2026-01-29T12:36:42Z

People living on the low-lying shores of the Bristol Channel and Severn estuary began their day like any other on January 30 1607. The weather was calm. The sky was bright.

Then, suddenly, the sea rose without warning. Water came racing inland, tearing across fields and villages, sweeping away the homes, livestock and people in its path.

By the end of the day, thousands of acres were underwater. As many as 2,000 people may have died. It was, quite possibly, the deadliest sudden natural disaster to hit Britain in 500 years.

More than four centuries later, the flood of 1607 still raises a troubling question. What, exactly, caused it?

Most early explanations blamed an exceptional storm. But when my colleague and I began examining the historical evidence more closely in 2002, we became less certain that this was the full picture. For one, eyewitness accounts tell a more unsettling story.

The flood struck on January 30 1607 – or January 20 1606, according to the old Julian calendar, which was still in use at that time. The flood affected coastal communities across south Wales, Somerset, Gloucestershire and Devon, inundating some areas several miles inland. People at the time were no strangers to storms or high tides – but this was different.

Churches were inundated. Entire villages vanished. Vast stretches of farmland were ruined by saltwater, leaving communities facing hunger as well as grief. Memorial plaques in local churches and parish documents still mark the scale of the catastrophe.

Much of what we know about how the event unfolded comes from chapbooks, which were cheaply printed pamphlets sold in the early 17th century. These accounts describe not just the damage, but the terrifying speed and character of the water itself.

One such pamphlet, God’s Warning to His People of England, describes a calm morning suddenly interrupted by what witnesses saw approaching from the sea:

Upon Tuesday 20 January 1606 there happened such an overflowing of waters … the like never in the memory of man hath been seen or heard of. For about nine of the morning, many of the inhabitants of these countreys … perceive afar off huge and mighty hilles of water tombling over one another, in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds.

Our interest in the event arose from reading that account. It gives a specific time for the inundation – around nine in the morning – and emphasises the fair weather and sudden arrival of the floodwaters.

From a geographer’s perspective, this description is striking. Sudden onset, wave-like forms and an absence of storm conditions are not typical of storm surges. To us, the language was reminiscent of eyewitness accounts of tsunamis elsewhere in the world. This suggested a tsunami origin for the flood should be evaluated.

Until the early 2000s, few researchers seriously questioned the storm-surge explanation. But as we revisited the historical sources, we began to ask whether the physical landscape might also preserve clues to what happened in 1607. If an extreme marine inundation had struck the coast at that time, it may have left geological evidence behind.

In several locations around the estuary, we identified a suite of features with a chronological link to the early 17th century: the erosion of two spurs of land that previously jutted out into the estuary, the removal of almost all fringing salt marsh deposits, and the occurrence of sand layers in otherwise muddy deposits

These features point to a high-energy event. The question was what kind?

Testing the theory

To explore this further, we undertook a programme of fieldwork in 2004. We examined sand layers and noted signatures of tsunami impact such as coastal erosion, and analysed the movement of large boulders along the shoreline. Boulder transport is particularly useful, as it allows estimates of the wave heights needed to move them.

Some fieldwork was filmed for a BBC documentary broadcast in April 2005, which featured other colleagues too. It included an argument for a storm, but also another suggesting it isn’t fanciful to consider that an offshore earthquake provided the trigger.

Our results were published in 2007, coincidentally the 400th anniversary of the flood. In parallel, colleagues published a compelling model supporting a storm surge. The scientific debate, rather than being resolved, intensified.

An updating of wave heights based on boulder data using refined formula was published in 2021, suggesting a minimum tsunami wave height of 4.2 metres is required to explain the coastal features – whereas, according to the calculations, storm waves of over 16 metres would be required. This is perhaps unlikely within the relatively sheltered Severn estuary.

The low-lying coasts around the Bristol Channel remain vulnerable to flooding. Storm surges occur regularly, though usually with more limited effects. Climate change is now increasing the risk through rising sea levels and more intense weather systems.

Tsunamis, by contrast, are rare. A report by the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs found it unlikely that the 1607 flood may have been caused by one. However, it also noted that offshore southwest Britain is among the more credible locations for a future tsunami, triggered by seismic activity or submarine landslides.

This distinction matters. Storm surges can usually be forecast. Tsunamis may arrive with little or no warning.

Scholarly and public interest in the flood has not waned. In November 2024, a Channel 5 documentary brought together several strands of recent research, concluding that the jury is still out on the flood’s cause.

That uncertainty should not be seen as a failure. Evaluating competing explanations is essential when trying to understand extreme events in the past – especially when those events have implications for present-day risk.

Whether the flood of 1607 was driven by storm winds, unusual tides or waves generated far offshore, its lesson is clear. Coastal societies ignore rare disasters at their peril.

The sea has come in before. And it will do so again.

Simon Haslett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Industry season four exposes the Faustian bargain of modern work culture

2026-01-28T16:32:10Z

When Industry first aired in 2020 it seemed, ostensibly, to be a drama about a recent cohort of ambitious young graduates entering the cut-throat world of investment banking. But as the opening season unfolded and its central characters were established, it became clear that although the trading floor of the fictional-but-all-so-familiar Pierpoint and Co. was its setting, this was not just a show about finance.

In 2021, I had the opportunity to speak to the show’s co-writers and creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. In this conversation, Down described the show as “a universal take on workplace culture”, which, he explained, was why they gave it such a generic title.

For the first time, a television drama was treating contemporary corporate cultures and graduate work with an unprecedented seriousness, sensibility and insight. It managed to capture, in heightened form, pressures that are recognisable far beyond the world of the trading floor and the corporate boardroom.

Indeed, Industry is about work, and how central work has come to all facets of our lives. As it heads into its fourth season and beyond the trading floor, the show is set to expose the all consuming nature of work more than ever before.

Industry was, and remains, a show about how work has become more than a mere site of economic activity. For some people, work is the main arena in which a person’s self-worth is awarded or withdrawn. In this, ambition is sharpened into pathological obsession and the employment contract contains a Faustian logic where total submission to work will be answered with “more” – more money, more power, more life.

In its fourth season, Industry continues to capture the tragic underbelly of modern professional life. The tone is set in the opening episode by Harper Stern, the series’ most vivid engine of ruthless ambition.

Early on she announces: “The story of our lives – giving everything to something that kills you.” If the previous seasons are anything to go by, this line works as a verdict not only on her, but on the entire grammar of contemporary professional life.

With Pierpoint collapsing in the finale of season three, the pathology of work that Industry has shed a light on is definitively revealed as a universal issue – the trading floor was simply its first and most visible stage. As the workplace drama grows outward beyond the office, the conditions of competition, appraisal, self-preservation and self-assertion are set to be revealed as something even more totalising.

In episode one, Harper is introduced on her 30th birthday as heading her own fund. By episode two, she has already alienated her investors. And, by episode three, she is starting again – back alongside her old Pierpoint mentor, Eric Tao, pitching a new venture to investors.

Harper may be an extreme case, but she shows, in concentrated form, what a constantly changing and increasingly insecure job market: the imperative of perpetual reinvention and self-assertion to gain and maintain employment. These characters and real world workers do all of this in the pursuit of a future that is always promised and never quite possessed.

Indeed, a dark irony and dramatic tension in Industry is that it so often places its characters near power – money, titles, access, invitations – only to show how little control they possess.

For instance, the two remaining characters from the first season have risen in status: Harper begins season four as head of an asset management fund and Yasmin is now tied to the peerage through her marriage to Sir Reginald Henry Ferrers de Chartley Norton Muck, the failed green-tech prince of season three.

However, they remain perpetually devoured by the same forces that shaped their self-destructive trajectories (and relationship) from the beginning. The difference now is that these forces have extended beyond the office and have spilled over into the intoxicating worlds of politics, start-ups, high-finance, aristocracy and celebrity.

The spilling over of work culure is most clear in episode two where Harper attends a birthday party hosted by Yasmin. As ever, the lines between work and play, networking and socialising, intimacy and leverage blur into a heady mix of debauchery, embarrassment and new business opportunities.

Only those who refuse to keep any part of life separate from the job are set to gain: “It starts and ends with work. And being proven fucking right”, Harper tells Eric in episode three.

Season four will likely be bigger and glossier but also the bleakest yet: more wealth, more ambition, more politics, and more reputational warfare. But, more subtly, we can expect Industry to reveal more of what has been its deepest cruelty and deepest truth from the beginning: that for so many, life no longer interrupts work – life is work.

Peter Watt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ali Smith’s Glyph is an exhilarating and excoriating follow-up to Gliff

2026-01-28T16:32:07Z

White Horse in a Green Meadow by Edvard Munch (1917) and the cover for Glyph. Munch Museum/Penguin

Ali Smith’s Glyph is the companion novel to her earlier novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff was set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, meanwhile, is set in the present. But like Smith’s earlier Seasonal Quartet, it offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the past.

The novel focuses on two sisters, Petra and Patricia (aka Patch). The action moves between scenes from their childhood in the 1990s and their present-day estrangement.

Two chance family anecdotes of wartime tragedy have a shaping influence on their imaginative lives. One is the story of a first world war soldier who deserted the army, fleeing with a blinded horse he wished to save. We learn that he was eventually court-martialled and executed.

The other is the curious account of how a female agent, travelling under cover through France in the second world war, discovered a mysteriously flattened corpse on the road.

When young Patch becomes distressed by the fate of the flattened man, Petra pretends that she can communicate with him in the afterlife. Episodes from his life are presented in vivid detail, and the reader is invited to speculate that the ghost may be real.

Smith teasingly draws attention to the different levels of reality at work in the novel. The image of a flattened corpse becomes a metaphor for other kinds of flattening, including that of characters in fiction. At one point the narrating voice, with apparent authorial detachment, refers to “the flat character / literary device called Patricia”.

It is then revealed that Patricia herself is narrating this section. And the ghost of the flattened man – who may simply be Petra’s invention – remembers reading a book in which books are described as “flattened flowers at best”.

The novel also asserts a powerful link between stories and ghosts: “Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it.”

Glyph v Gliff

Although it can be read as a standalone work, Glyph inevitably invites the reader to explore its relationship with Gliff (2024), adding yet a further dimension to this multilayered novel.

In many ways Petra and Patch’s relationship mirrors that between Gliff’s siblings, Briar and Rose. Both younger sisters share a fondness for puns and sly malapropisms. And the soldier’s doomed escape with the horse seems to echo the mysterious disappearance of Rose on the back of a horse she rescued from being slaughtered.

Smith adds a further complication into the mix when it is revealed that the novel Gliff exists in the world of Glyph. A brief discussion of its merits (and weaknesses) between Petra and Patch offers a humorous reflection of real-world reader responses to Gliff: “A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel.”

The presence of Gliff within Glyph also complicates the meaning of some of the links between the two novels. Petra is sure she is being haunted by the blind horse of family legend. But Patch suggests that this is a delusion sparked by reading Gliff. The duology forms a kind of textual Möbius strip – a mind-bending twisted loop with just one side – perhaps nodding back to the double strands of Smith’s 2014 novel How to be Both.

Alongside all this playful twistiness sits a passionate commitment to a more just society. Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is central to this element of the novel. She resembles young Florence in Ali Smith’s earlier novel Spring (2019). Both are charismatically exuberant Greta Thunberg-style campaigners for social justice.

The future world of the earlier novel Gliff seemed horrifyingly absurd in its unfairness. Viewed through Smith’s bitterly satirical lens in Glyph, our own present world seems little less surreal in its destructiveness, its attacks on creativity, freedom and the environment, and its addiction to war and violence.

Like all of Smith’s works, Glyph is multifaceted. She is equally adroit at capturing the emotional nuances of family life, mapping out the larger political landscape, or beguiling the reader with joyfully witty metafictional and linguistic games.

Readers often feel pulled in two directions when reading her novels. There is so much to pause on, so many startling turns of phrase or clues to hidden mysteries. Yet there is also an irresistible compulsion to turn the pages, to find out what happens next.

Sarah Annes Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Under Salt Marsh: detective drama uses the Welsh coast to explore climate anxiety

2026-01-28T13:51:38Z

Morfa Halen means “salt marsh” in Welsh. This tidal island is a delicious invention of Sky Arts’ new detective drama, Under Salt Marsh, although it has very real antecedents in north Wales. Shell Island on the Mochras peninsula, near Harlech, inspired writer and director Claire Oakley.

Morfa Halen is cut off from the mainland nightly, when the tide swamps the causeway. This isolation is emphasised through an overhead shot of a car cutting a foamy, white swathe through the blues and browns of saltwater and sunken grasses. Immediately, Morfa Halen is established as the kind of closed community on which the detective genre thrives: think monasteries, country houses and Oxbridge colleges.

Under Salt Marsh uses familiar detective tropes to tell a story about environmental precarity and community displacement – but its treatment of Welsh language and identity is more conflicted than its ecological politics.

The opening moments establish that central character, Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly), cares. We see it when the primary school teacher soothes her pupils’ troubles. It is evident when she discovers her student Cefin’s body face down in a drainage ditch, breaks the news to his parents, then babysits their other children. She cares because something similar has happened before. Her niece, Nessa, disappeared at the same age, from the same town, and is presumed dead. A police officer at the time, Ellis was unable to solve the case.

Ellis immediately interferes in the investigation, questioning witnesses and ordering the police team around. They are led by Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall). He was Ellis’s junior partner when her niece went missing. She wants him pulled from the case, saying he messed up the investigation then betrayed her. He claims Ellis was suspended for gross professional misconduct.

The trailer for Under Salt Marsh.

Their antipathy is complicated: she lies for him on her own initiative, getting him out of a scrap with a local lad. The gesture pays off. By the end of episode two, Ellis drags a reluctant commitment out of Bull to an illicit co-investigation. So far, so standard detective fare: a professional v amateur odd couple.

Furthermore, Bull’s encyclopaedic knowledge of flora and fauna; willingness to work viscerally by tasting ditchwater and chomping on samphire; and queer sexuality repackage classic detective traits from the likes of Sherlock Holmes. However, Bull’s character updates his aristocratic precedent with an urban English accent and football club tattoo.

Imagined communities

Place and its influence on people’s thinking and behaviour has long made for compelling detective television, from the Oxford of Inspector Morse to the Scandinavian borderland of The Bridge.

Morfa Halen’s community faces displacement due to climate change. This is a reality along the north Wales coast. In the short term, a severe storm threatens a forced evacuation. Evidence of the crime will be washed away, making the investigators’ work a race against time.

Sea defences are being built by workers who temporarily swell the village’s population and offer additional lines of inquiry. The earliest clues come when Cefin’s autopsy detects the salinity of the water in his lungs although he drowned in a rainwater ditch, and acid on his skin associated with landfill sites. Illegal dumping is discovered in a former quarry on land owned by Cefin’s grandfather, Solomon Bevan (Jonathan Pryce).

The community’s “deep connection to the land” is both materialised on the corpse and called into question. The series feels fresh in its ecological concern, but salty in its environmental critique. Oakley told the audience at the preview I attended: “Salt marsh stores carbon, it is a buffer from erosion. If we don’t protect it, it can’t protect us.”

Oakley clearly loves the setting. She nails the rise and fall atmosphere of neglected seaside towns: the seasonal highs of ice cream parlours and lows of seasonal unemployment, the pretty painted cottages and drab pebble-dash bungalows. Oakley pours herself into the speech of a fellow incomer, an Irish engineer who has been motivated to oversee the flood defences by memories of childhood summers.

North Wales is established visually through a familiar repertoire: sea-to-mountain views; heavy rain and sheep. Though the rain was faked by machines, the sheep are real enough. However, the scene in which Solomon herds them into his own village pub to protest resettlement is fantastical (don’t sheep where you eat).

Characters of colour momentarily promise to redress the usual white default in constructions of Welsh identity, especially in the countryside. However, except for Irene, we barely hear from these characters in the first few episodes.

Audibly, the show is dominantly English. There are the Welsh accents of some actors, such as Pryce, although these are mainly south Walian. The few identifiably “Gog”/north Walian accents include those of Cefin’s cousins and mother. This reinforces the skew in media representation to Wales’ southeast.

The Welsh language is spoken occasionally, though more fleetingly than in the show’s nearest geographical and generic rival Hinterland (2013). The latter’s bilingual version was credited as the first BBC television drama featuring dialogue in both Welsh and English.

Sometimes Under Salt Marsh reinforces the Anglophone stereotype of the Welsh language being used as “code speak” to evade English ears. A family discusses what to do with evidence as the English-speaking police pass by unaware. Road and street signs make fleeting contributions but the scarcity of bilingual shop fronts, menus and display boards in the village undercuts its resemblance to north Wales.

Author Saunders Lewis’s proclamation that “Wales without the Welsh language will not be Wales” applies to the sight of Welsh, as well as its sound. The omission is, however, unlikely to be noticed by Sky Arts’ far-flung audience.

Watch Under Salt Marsh because it promises excellent environmentally engaged detective drama, not to learn about Wales or Welshness.

Sarah Olive is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Bangor University and has received Welsh Government funding for research on teaching literature.

How much can we really know about Jane Austen? Experts answer your questions

2026-01-28T09:10:32Z

A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1770). National Gallery of Art

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is a podcast from The Conversation celebrating 250 years since the author’s birth. In each episode, we investigate a different aspect of Austen’s personality by interrogating one of her novels with leading researchers. Along the way, we visit locations important to Austen to uncover a particular aspect of her life and the times she lived in.

For episode seven of Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, we’re doing something a little different. Rather than putting Austen under the microscope ourselves, we’re handing the questions over to you.

Jane Austen is a curious author because the more we learn about her, the more elusive she seems to become. She left behind a remarkably slim paper trail for someone so influential, and much of what we “know” about her has been filtered through family memory, biography and, sometimes, wishful thinking. As Jane Austen’s Paper Trail draws to a close, there are still loose ends to tie up – and that’s where you, our listeners, come in.

We’ve received a virtual sack full of letters from you, ranging from questions about Austen’s religious beliefs to her grasp of contemporary science, and even what she might have made of social media. Unlike Jane’s sister Cassandra Austen, however, we have no intention of throwing your letters into the flames. Instead, three experts join me to debate them – and, where possible, to settle them.

For our first panellist, we’re welcoming back Emma Claire Sweeney from episode four about Austen’s friendships. Sweeney is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Open University and worked collaborated on a interactive experience with the BBC as part of the Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.

Returning from episode six about whether Austen was happy is John Mullan, professor of literature at University College London and author of What Matters in Jane Austen. Completing the panel is Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire.

Together, they take your questions seriously, testing what can be answered from the novels, what can be inferred from historical context, and where Austen herself remains stubbornly silent. From faith and feminism to fame and future technology, these questions remind us why Austen continues to fuel our curiosity 250 years after her birth.

Jane Austen’s Paper Trail is hosted by Anna Walker with reporting from Jane Wright and Naomi Joseph. Senior producer and sound designer is Eloise Stevens and the executive producer is Gemma Ware. Artwork by Alice Mason and Naomi Joseph.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here.

Saipan: Roy Keane World Cup drama is a highly entertaining slice of Irish football history

2026-01-27T16:34:06Z

In the summer of 2002, a dispute inside the Republic of Ireland’s football camp spiralled into a national controversy. Few sporting rows have lodged themselves in the Irish imagination as stubbornly as Keane v McCarthy in Saipan, culminating in Keane’s departure from the Irish World Cup squad.

Directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, Saipan takes a deliberately narrow focus of the saga, centring on the breakdown of the relationship between Ireland captain Roy Keane and manager Mick McCarthy, framing it as an intimate power struggle. This choice grounds the film and keeps it from slipping into nostalgia or easy hero worship.

Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) is all coiled intensity. The film captures his sense of grievance and moral rigidity without smoothing over the damage it causes. Keane’s frustrations centre on what he sees as a lack of professionalism within the Irish setup in Saipan, from inadequate training facilities to a broader culture of complacency and indulgence.

Keane is a man driven by standards that feel absolute, and the film is careful to show how those standards inspire as much as they alienate. Hardwicke’s terrific performance sits in the space between principle and obsession. He never softens Keane into a misunderstood martyr, nor does he paint him as a simple villain.

Steve Coogan plays Mick McCarthy with a quiet, pained restraint, but the portrayal is far from generous. His McCarthy is isolated and increasingly evasive, a man struggling to assert authority while appearing overwhelmed by events of his own making. He is framed as a figure losing control, unable or unwilling to meet Keane’s demands head on. Coogan avoids outright caricature, but the balance of sympathy is clear, and Saipan’s version of events leans decisively in Keane’s favour.

Saipan also addresses Keane’s questioning of McCarthy’s Irishness, a move that shifts the dispute beyond football and into the terrain of identity. The film does not endorse this line of attack, instead pointedly setting it against the legacy of Jack Charlton (Ireland manager from 1986 to 1995), another English-born figure, but one whose leadership was rarely challenged. (Charlton is one of only 11 honorary Irish citizens.)

McCarthy was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire, but is one of many second-generation Irish players who qualified for the team through their Irish parents. By framing his criticism in these terms, Keane attempts to undermine McCarthy’s legitimacy, using Irishness as a tool in a conflict about standards and authority, and gesturing towards the complexity of Ireland’s relationship with Englishness.

Celtic Tiger excess

When the film shifts its focus to the Football Association of Ireland, its patience wears thin. Saipan portrays an administration steeped in Celtic Tiger excess, treating the 2002 World Cup as a jolly rather than a professional obligation.

In the film version, brown envelopes are slipped out with ease, camp followers hover with no clear purpose, and champagne bottles appear in saunas as preparation drifts into farce. The depiction is unmistakable: this was an organisation cushioned by boom-time arrogance, insulated from consequence, and wholly unprepared for a player who demanded standards it had little interest in meeting.

Balancing the drama, there are scenes of unexpected humour, particularly in scenes involving the squad, where downtime, routines and shared spaces are closely observed. Visually and tonally, these moments recall Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, with comedy in proximity and rhythm rather than punchlines. That lightness is always shadowed by the dangerous edge of Keane’s disapproval, which hangs over the group and gives even the quietest scenes a sense of latent threat.

The film’s use of archival footage and music leans heavily into nostalgia, situating Saipan firmly within its early-2000s moment. The opening notes of Oasis’ Acquiesce land purposefully, a song built around unity and defiance, and sung by two brothers whose own feud would become legendary. It is an on-the-nose choice, particularly coming from an English band with a strong Irish heritage, but an effective one, framing the film around themes of loyalty, fracture and unresolved conflict before a word is spoken.

Saipan is a highly entertaining slice of both Irish and football history. This fallout was never really about one training session or one confrontation. It was about standards colliding with systems, and a country watching itself argue in public. That the dispute still provokes such certainty and division is part of the film’s point. Some rows are simply never settled.

How interwar fiction made sense of an increasingly noisy world

2026-01-27T12:32:34Z

The logo of the Anti-Noise League. Quiet/Noise Abatement League Catalogue

Noise was first considered a public health issue in interwar Britain – called the “age of noise” by the author and essayist Aldous Huxley. In this era, the proliferation of mechanical sounds, particularly the rumble of road and air traffic, the blare of loudspeakers and the rising decibels of industry, caused anxiety about the health of the nation’s minds and bodies.

Interwar writers, such as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and Jean Rhys, tuned in to the din. Their fiction is not just an archive of past sound-worlds but also the place where sound became noise and vice versa. As sound historian James Mansell has argued: “Noise was not just representative of the modern; it was modernity manifested in audible form.”

We now have more data and scientific evidence on the effects of environmental noise. The World Health Organization recognises noise, particularly from road, rail and air traffic, as one of the top environmental health hazards, second only to air pollution.

In the interwar period, without comprehensive data on noise and health, early campaigners relied on narrative. They created a particular story about noise and nerves to galvanise the public into keeping it down.

A comic strip mocking the Anti-Noise League by Ernie Bushmiller (1941). Swann

In 1933, the first significant UK noise abatement organisation, the Anti-Noise League, was founded by physician Thomas Horder. The league consisted of doctors, psychologists, physicists, engineers and acousticians (physicists concerned with the properties of sound) who lobbied government for a legislative framework around noise.

They sought to educate the public on the dangers of needless noise through exhibitions, publications and their magazine, Quiet.

Their campaigns drew attention to the very real health effects of environmental noise. But they also saw noise as waste: something to be eliminated in the pursuit of a maximally productive and efficient citizenry.

They drew on ideas of Britishness associated with what they called “acoustic civilisation” (or teaching the nation to be quieter) and “intelligent” behaviour to enact a programme of noise reduction as sonic nationalism.

Noise in modernist fiction

This interwar preoccupation with unwanted sound is also a sonic legacy of the first world war. Exposure to the deafening din of artillery, exploding shells and grenades caused catastrophic auditory injury. So much so, that the din was associated with loss of life and the devastating effects of shell shock.

The extreme noise of warfare also pushed doctors and psychologists to study how sound affects health. This work continued into the 1930s through government-backed bodies such as the Industrial Health Research Board. As a result, people in the interwar years became much more aware that the everyday sounds of machines and traffic could also be harmful.

But it wasn’t only doctors and acousticians who wrote about noise. Authors such as Rebecca West and H.G. Wells worked with the Anti-Noise League, while others, like Winifred Holtby, publicly refuted their findings. But more broadly, in the pages of interwar fiction, modernist writers engaged deeply with the shifting noisescapes around them.

The unprecedented noise levels of the wars, together with the proliferation of sounds in urban and domestic spaces and the auditory training required by new forms of sound technology, caused an attentiveness to sound and hearing. This was harnessed both metaphorically and structurally in the period’s literature.

Modernist writers such as Woolf, Orwell and Rhys listened intently to machines and the sound worlds they created. Once we start to listen for it, noise is everywhere in fiction of the period.

Proletarian factory novels of the 1930s such as Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) or John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) draw new attention to toxic and harmful high decibel industrial environments.

Interwar novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), each with first world war veteran protagonists, register urban noise via the auditory effects of the conflict zone, or a kind of communal noise sensitivity, as well as through the healing or connective properties of sound. In Dorothy Sayers’ Nine Tailors (1934) a character is (spoiler alert) killed by the sound of a church bell.

Rhys’ short story Let Them Call It Jazz (1962) is set in London in the years following the second world war. It depicts the hostile environment faced by immigrants, such as those arriving from the Caribbean on HMT Empire Windrush, as protagonist Selina Davis is imprisoned for noise disturbance. She has been singing Caribbean folk songs in a “genteel” suburban neighbourhood.

The tale is one of cultural identity, the resistant power of sound, and the politicisation of noise. Black music is a form of sonic resistance; noise is both a silencing strategy for bodies and practices deemed “aberrant” and a resistant practice that exceeds and disrupts exclusionary codes of value and hierarchy.

These works, and many more, demonstrate that modernist writers, if we listen carefully, are theorists of sound who responded in complex ways to their shifting soundscapes. They counter the association of noise with negative affect or “unwanted” excess, by finding aesthetic and political possibility in noise.

Anna Snaith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The BBC once made the arts ‘utterly central’ to television – 100 years later they’re almost invisible

2026-01-26T20:24:52Z

On the evening of January 26 1926, members of the Royal Institution and other guests climbed three flights of draughty stairs to a tiny workshop in Soho’s Frith Street. They were there to witness the first public presentation of what inventor John Logie Baird called “true television”. A hundred years later, we are now marking the centenary of British television.

Throughout the following 13 years, until the second world war imposed a seven-year hiatus, television developed rapidly. From November 1936 onwards, a regular “high definition” service was transmitted from the BBC’s television station at Alexandra Palace. Alongside countless variety performances and outside broadcasts of pageantry and sports, television established a productively rich relationship with the arts of 1930s Britain.

More than 300 plays were broadcast in these years, including productions of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, with appearances by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Valerie Hobson and Sybil Thorndike among many others. West End productions were restaged in the studio and outside broadcast cameras relayed shows such as J.B. Priestley’s When We Are Married, and the Lupino Lane musical comedy Me and My Girl, to tens of thousands of viewers across London.

This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

Artists and architects made frequent appearances, as did a regular selection of classical and contemporary works from London galleries. Other visual artists who featured included Paul Nash, Laura Knight and Wyndham Lewis, along with architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Berthold Lubetkin and Serge Chermayeff. There were numerous performances of opera, including excerpts of contemporary work like Albert Coates’ Pickwick and an ambitious staging of Act 2 of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

Ballet once appeared regularly on the BBC.

Once the transmissions could present a full-length figure on the tiny portrait-format screens of the first receiving sets, ballet enjoyed a central presence in TV schedules. Prima ballerinas who performed in the studios included Alicia Markova, Lydia Sokolova and the young Margot Fonteyn.

Touring companies like the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the Ballets Jooss made appearances. The troupes benefited from modest fees, exposure and association with modernity’s latest marvel, while television gained cheap access to the best classical dancers of the day as well as cultural credibility.

In so many ways the end of television as we have known it – when YouTube has topped the BBC in viewing share for the first time – could hardly be more different from its pre-war beginnings. But there are also clear continuities across more than half a century, even if early ballroom dancing lessons have morphed into Strictly, and EastEnders is the soap du jour rather than the sedate five-part romance Ann and Harold. One of television’s left behinds, however, is a close relationship with the arts.

The arts on the BBC today

Writing in The Stage in January 2026, critic Lyn Gardner lamented the limitations of television’s coverage of theatre, arguing that “the BBC remains more interested in Glastonbury than the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival” and that the corporation is “more interested in sport rather than culture”.

She also recalled director general Tim Davie’s words from a speech at the Royal Academy in autumn 2024: “The arts remain utterly central to the BBC’s mission. We want to send out a strong signal, that arts and culture matter, they matter for everyone, and they matter even more when times are tough.”

Yet there is no sense that Davie’s words are borne out by the current television schedules. There is no regular slot for imaginative and creative arts documentaries, such as Omnibus which lasted from 1967 to 2003, nor space for reviews and debate, like The Late Show, a nightly arts magazine show that ran throughout the early 1990s. Today’s and tomorrow’s visual artists and performers have only the most minimal presence.

The vanishingly rare presentations of stage work, whether dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that provided most of the funding and all of the production expertise. Complexity and challenging contemporary creativity are almost entirely absent. Far from being “utterly central”, the arts are today utterly marginal to BBC television.

Times are tough, of course, and the BBC faces numerous problems, many of which are the result of a precipitous fall in available funds. Streamers are cannibalising audiences and the licence fee is threatened. The BBC’s response has been to funnel what monies there are to news and current affairs and to high-end drama, which increasingly has to rely on co-production deals.

Television in the pre-war years faced a comparable funding crisis, and yet its producers and executives had confidence and belief in the arts, and were prepared to work collaboratively in partnerships with the cultural institutions of the day. Today, that vision is absent, with little sense of a deep commitment to, or passion for, the arts.

Last year, the BBC sought the views of its audiences with an online questionnaire, and in October a collated report of responses was released as Our BBC, Our Future. In neither the questionnaire nor the report was discussion of the arts “utterly central”.

The arts had next-to-no presence, and as I noted at the time only deep into the report was it acknowledged that: “Among the bigger areas [for which respondents asked] for ‘more’ were: educational content, films and then science and technology, arts and culture and history.”

Fortunately, there is currently a much more substantive and less biased consultation underway. In December, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport published Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter – BBC Royal Charter Review, Green Paper and public consultation, which invites us all to “begin the conversation about how to ensure [the BBC] remains the beating heart of our nation for decades to come”.

In this centenary year for television, this is an important opportunity to express a desire to see the arts returned to the “utterly central” place they occupied in the early years of BBC television.

John Wyver has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

What the Beckham family feud reveals about social media and our love of ‘mess’

2026-01-26T17:12:09Z

My social media feed has been full of Brooklyn Beckham memes. That is, since January 19, when David and Victoria Beckham’s eldest son posted a series of Instagram stories criticising his parents, their curated public personas and what he described as long-standing slights towards him and his wife, actress Nicola Peltz.

As a researcher of online harms and freedom of speech, I’m less interested in whether the memes are funny than in what Brooklyn Beckham versus brand Beckham tells us about how social media – and public shaming – are changing.

After months of rumours of a rift between the Beckhams and their eldest, in his posts Brooklyn publicly accused his parents of a lifetime of carefully managed media narratives about the family. He alleged that family love hinged upon engaging with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships”.

The memes posted by the public in response range from critiques of Brooklyn’s shortlived stint as a photographer to parodies of Victoria Beckham’s alleged “inappropriate” first dance takeover at Brooklyn’s wedding.

Some are undeniably funny. But taken together with other recent outbreaks of celebrity “mess”, the episode highlights social media’s shift from a space of connection to one of spectacle – where intimate conflict becomes collective entertainment, with real-world consequences.

No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

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In a recent study, my colleague Pam Briggs and I found that social media users are becoming disillusioned with digital spaces where their belonging depends on an algorithm’s whim. Participants described feeling overwhelmed by targeted commercial content while struggling to see posts from friends and family.

Brooklyn alleged that for the Beckhams: “Family ‘love’ is decided by how much you post on social media.” That logic sits uneasily at a moment when social media platforms are no longer primarily “social” spaces, but increasingly function as sites of entertainment, surveillance and sales. Our collective appetite for viral celebrity mess appears closely connected to this shift.

Public betrayals, viral memes

Late last year, singer Lily Allen made a return to our playlists with West End Girl, a self-described work of “autofiction” originating from the breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.

The album played with dissonance by blending fast-paced beats and clinically detailed, seemingly personal tales of infidelity. In the process, Allen rode the wave of memes as a marketing strategy. Allen herself recently posted an image of her album cover with Brooklyn’s head photoshopped onto it to her Instagram story, suggesting she recognised parallels in how they each shared their “mess” online.

These viral instances of celebrity mess don’t happen in a vacuum. The case of Brooklyn Beckham is connected to the internet’s never-ending obsession with “nepo babies”, the children of famous people who are often seen to be benefiting from their fame and wealth, and who are frequently maligned in times of rising inequality. Add to this the recent Netflix documentaries that reintroduced the Beckhams to gen-Z audiences, and the conditions for virality were already in place.

This passion for mess that doesn’t involve us personally marks a shift from the polished, “brand safe” aesthetic of Millennial social media. We’re in the era of “goblin mode” (the rejection of social norms through behaviour that is unapologetically unpolished), in a climate of disillusion with an “always on” life.

Traditional social media platforms and dating apps alike are losing subscribers and users to hobby apps. Audiences crave reality, imperfection and mess – all more relatable than marketing.

In times of rising inequality, schadenfreude can feel like guilt-free entertainment. But this shift also carries serious emotional and legal implications for those caught in the viral spotlight.

The dark side of the (viral) public eye

In my work on online abuse against people in the public eye, I found that mainstream media narratives about public figures were often repeated, amplified and reworked by trolls, gaining a new lease of life online. When thousands of users participate in reinforcing these narratives, the experience can feel indistinguishable from harassment for those targeted.

So think before you share: is the post you’re amplifying playful or is it made to hurt the person at the centre of it? Is it factual, or can it contribute to creating damaging narratives?

This matters not only because speculation can worsen a public figure’s mental health, but because it can also have consequences for those who post. When online commentary veers into allegedly unsubstantiated claims or questionable opinions, posters may expose themselves to defamation risks, particularly when the subject has the means to pursue legal action, as Justin and Hailey Bieber have previously done.

If the start of 2026 is anything to go by, we are in for a turbulent year in politics, on television and online. Audiences’ thirst for messy drama reflects broader uncertainty and fatigue with digital spaces that thrive on comparison, division and commercialisation. Gossip can be cathartic. But the challenge is not whether we enjoy mess, but whether we can do so without turning real people into collateral damage.

Carolina Are does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

On Being Ill at 100: Virginia Woolf’s ‘best essay’ still shapes how we read sickness

2026-01-26T17:12:07Z

The year is 1926. Queen Elizabeth II is christened. Wage cuts and increased working hours for coal miners precipitate a general strike of workers. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. The League of Nations accepts Germany as the sixth permanent member on the council deeming it a “peace-loving country”.

It is also the year that Virginia Woolf published her essay, On Being Ill, in January’s volume of The New Criterion – the literary review headed up by T.S. Eliot. The essay had been written from her sickbed, as Woolf lay recovering after fainting at her nephew Quentin’s 15th birthday dinner months before.

In the essay, Woolf argues that illness is “the great confessional” which is never talked about in literature because of the “poverty” of language when it comes to sickness and disease. Books on influenza, poetry on pneumonia and tomes on toothache and typhoid are “null, negligible and non-existent”, she declares, reckoning with Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Proust, Donne and Keats.

Eliot was ‘not enthusiastic’ about Woolf’s essay. National Portrait Gallery

Recounting a conversation with her husband Leonard Woolf about the essay in her diary a month before its publication, she remarked it was the “article which I, & Leonard too, thought one of my best”. However, not everyone was of the same opinion.

Woolf’s diaries reveal that a postcard sent by Eliot illustrated that he was “not enthusiastic” about the piece, prompting her to write: “So, reading the proof just now, I saw wordiness, feebleness, & all the vices in it.” It “increased” her “distaste” for her own writing and “dejection at the thought of writing another novel”.

Nevertheless, a revised version of On Being Ill was published months later, in April 1926, in an American magazine called The Forum. This time it was under the title Illness: An Unexploited Mine. Despite her critics, Woolf persisted with the topic, believing the absence of our ailments in literature called for censure.

In November 1930, a slim quarto of 250 numbered and signed copies of On Being Ill was hand-printed by the Woolfs’ printing press, The Hogarth Press. It was printed in an original vellum-backed green cloth with marbled endpapers, woodcut vignette on final leaf and an original dust jacket designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell. Woolf set the type herself. She spent Sunday June 15 1926, in the full swing of summer doing so, writing in her diary: “I was so methodically devoting my morning to finishing the last page of type setting: On Being Ill.”

On or about December 2019, human character changed

Two years before the writing of On Being Ill, in one of the most quoted lines in literature, Woolf wrote “on or about December 1910, human character changed”, in her essay, Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), continuing that when “human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature”.

Human character changed in December 2019, when SARS-CoV-2 was discovered and the COVID pandemic began in earnest.

Pandemic Pages, the podcast that I founded and co-host with Dr Catherine Wynne at the University of Hull, charts this tectonic shift in our lives and literature through interviews with authors, creatives, academics and medical professionals. Previous guests include Booker Prize winner and chair Roddy Doyle; NHS doctor and award-winning author, Dr Roopa Farooki and Professor Lucy Easthope, the UK’s leading expert on disaster recovery and advisor to the Prime Minister’s office during COVID.

The podcast has just launched its third season, which aims to create a living dialogue with the centenary of Woolf’s On Being Ill. In one episode, I chat to associate professor of Graphic Design from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Ane Thon Knutsen, a letter press print artist who printed one sentence of On Being Ill every day in the early days of lockdown.

Knutsen, whose wedding was postponed due to COVID, said this project “fell into her life” when lockdown began in Norway after everything she had planned fell apart: “A couple of days into the pandemic, I read On Being Ill. I’d read it before and I had planned to work on it, but I read it again and I was just like, my God, this essay is about just what’s happening right now.”

In the introduction to Knutsen’s book, Mark Hussey, emeritus professor of English at Pace University in New York, writes that her daily meditations on a single sentence painstakingly rebuild Woolf’s words one letter at a time, resulting in a collective slow reading. Her work urges us to savour words, to ponder them, to roll them around on the tongue before swallowing.

In the UK’s National Year of Reading 2026 – a UK-wide campaign designed to inspire more people to make reading a regular part of their lives – Woolf’s essay and Knutsen’s diary feel particularly poignant to press books into the hands of everyone we can – to regift ourselves the slowness of suspended pandemic time, the stillness in that season of survival.

Lucyl Harrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.