Terwijl de lente is aangebroken, zitten de bewoners van de Weberflat in Rotterdam al meer dan een maand in de kou. Voor de bewoners, vooral 55-plussers, is de maat vol. Zeker voor Shirley, die vanwege een spierziekte letterlijk achteruitgaat door de lage temperaturen in zijn woning.
De 22-jarige Julia uit Almere is letterlijk letterlijk. Dus niet like, gewoon letterlijk, weet je wel, maar echt letterlijk letterlijk.
Vriendinnen van Julia vermoedden het al een tijdje. “Julia is letterlijk letterlijk”, zegt haar beste vriendin Britt. “Het is letterlijk haar flex, of hoe zeg je dat, haar vibe. Het is letterlijk haar vibe. Letterlijk alles aan Julia is letterlijk letterlijk.”
Julia vindt het lastig om aan anderen uit te leggen wat haar nou zo letterlijk letterlijk maakt. “Hmm, I guess gewoon als iemand stuk gaat niet letterlijk stuk gaan, maar gewoon letterlijk letterlijk, snap je?”, probeert ze haar 58-jarige vader Ton uit te leggen. “Het is gewoon letterlijk letterlijk. Iykyk.”
&
Primary School Bangers caused a sensation on TikTok, then at Glastonbury, and now it’s gone nationwide. Is it harmless nostalgia – or a symptom of an increasingly conservative culture?
He’s got the whole Warwick Arts Centre in his hands. It’s Friday night and the 550-capacity venue is sold out. The theatre is full of adults singing the school assembly hymns you may remember from childhood. They are rising and shining, conducting gleeful hand actions of wiggly worms and fish in the sea. Just what is going on?
James B Partridge’s Primary School Bangers is the hit show that is storming UK arts centres, originally a viral video that has become a defiantly IRL phenomenon. “It just brings back memories of primary school, sitting in the hall,” enthuses Hayley, 40. She is one of many teachers attending tonight. “We don’t sing in primary schools much any more,” mourns Katie, 33. She is right: in the 2010s, funding cuts, Conservative policy and a crisis in teacher retention caused an ongoing fall in music at primary level. At her school, children sing just once every three weeks. Some of tonight’s pull is communal. “You go to a show and you have to sit and watch,” says Frank, 61, “but you’re actually participating in this, that’s the big difference.”
Continue reading...Actor Katie Leung narrates this genre-bending debut in which an Victorian Arctic explorer is catapulted into our brave new world
The Ministry of Time opens in the middle of a job interview. The applicant, a nameless British Cambodian civil servant, is in line for a role that involves working with expats of “high-interest status and particular needs”. When she asks where these expats come from, she is told: “History.” The interviewer adds, casually, “We have time travel.”
Listeners concerned about the practicalities of this time-hopping tale will be reassured by our protagonist’s observation that contemplating the physics leads to a “crock of shit”, so it is best not dwelled upon. “All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.” Her job, then, is to act as minder or “bridge” to individuals removed from their eras and bounced into the present.
Continue reading...In his new book, the celebrated author explains why we need ‘consciousness hygiene’ to defend ourselves from AI and dopamine-driven algorithms
Each day when you wake up, you come back to yourself. You see the room around you, feel your body brush against your clothes and think about your plans, worries and hopes for the day. This daily internal experience is miraculous and mysterious, and the subject of Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears.
It also may be under siege, Pollan said. He recently suggested that people need a “consciousness hygiene” to defend our internal world against invaders that are trying to move in. Our ability to sit with our thoughts and perceive the world, he argues, is increasingly disrupted by algorithms engineered to tickle our dopamine receptors and capture our attention. Meanwhile, people are forming attachments to non-human chatbots, projecting consciousness on to entities that do not possess it.
Continue reading...