Six great reads: Swiss bunkers, what Alexa heard and red-pill manosphere hucksters
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Bethan McKernan spent four years as the Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent, a period marked by the horrors of 7 October 2023 and what has followed in Gaza. As she begins her new role as the Guardian's Wales correspondent, she looked back at her period in the Middle East and how it has shaped her and her understanding of the region.
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Switzerland is home to more than 370,000 nuclear bunkers – enough to shelter every member of the population. But, asked Jessi Jezewska Stevens, if the worst should happen, would they actually work?
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'In September 2016, a new presence appears in our house, squatting on the kitchen counter between the kettle and the coffee machine. It is blandly futuristic, a minimal cylinder with an LED ring that glows blue to alert us to the fact that it is ready, poised to answer our questions or carry out our instructions, as long as those instructions are clearly stated and fall within a narrow band of available 'skills'.'
For nearly a decade, Alexa has been listening to Jeremy Ettinghausen and his family's questions and instructions. What had she heard? And what did it tell him about the role Amazon's smart speaker plays in so many of our lives?
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After 380 games and more than 1,000 goals the 2024-25 Premier League season came to an end last weekend. Jonny Weeks told the story of a dramatic (in parts) season via the work of the best sports photographers in the game – including our own brilliant Tom Jenkins. Read more
'When I first met Nick in 2019, at a dating and self-improvement summit in Miami, it wasn't immediately obvious why he was paying so much money to pseudo-authority figures from the manosphere. He had looks, cash and some of the easy swagger of London done good … '
So writes James Bloodworth in his fascinating (and worrying) profile of a friend who went down the digital rabbit hole. Nick's story is a cautionary tale of what happens when someone who feels inadequate listens to the new generation of masculinity salesmen
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Daily Mail
7 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Woman named after Mickey Mouse urges parents to stop picking 'crazy' monikers for their children
A woman who was named after Mickey Mouse has urged parents to stop choosing 'crazy' monikers for their own children. Mickie Austen Rollins - who was born Mickie Lettuce - shared her thoughts on unusual names after US influencer Trisha Paytas revealed her very divisive choice for her newborn son. Paytas, 37, who is already mother to daughters Malibu Barbie and Elvis, decided to name her first son Aquaman - after the DC superhero. Addressing the trend of unusual names, Mickie said she legally changed her name 'because my middle name, I was named after a vegetable, and my surname was a swear word'. She added: 'As someone who was named after Mickey Mouse, I want to talk about Trisha Paytas calling her new kid Aquaman and what effects that has on someone growing up, becoming an adult and having a f*****g mental name. 'It's always people that have really boring names that pick those names for their kids. 'No offence if you're called Emily or Sarah or Hannah, but you don't understand what you're doing - it does hold you back massively, you're just asking to get bullied and asking for that kid to have a really s*** life in school.' Mickie went on to talk about her own experience being named after a Disney character. She said her mother was from a working class background - and her 'feral' name was a consequence of 'clambering' to be middle class. Her older sister was named Buddie Mercedes, while Mickie says her twin 'got off lightly' with India Holly. 'My real name is Mickie, not Michaela, not Michelle, everyone always thinks that I've shortened it, no, no, I was named after the mouse,' she explains. Those in the comments were sympathetic to Mickie's plight, with most pointing out the unusual choice for her middle name - Lettuce Mickie added that her mother thought the unusual spelling was 'more feminine' than the traditional way of spelling Mickey Mouse. She said she had a 'rough' time growing up, and decided to change her name after being 'so sick' of 'constantly explaining' the moniker to people she met. Those in the comments were sympathetic to Mickie's plight, with most pointing out the unusual choice for her middle name - Lettuce. One person said: 'Mickie is pretty normal but lettuce...' Another added: 'My middle name is the letter 'T'. That's it. Just a 'T'.' A third person said: 'I'm sorry WHAT. To have India Holly as your twin (which is at least two real names) and you get LETTUCE?!'
Telegraph
7 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Starmer: Britain will evacuate children from Gaza
Britain will evacuate critically ill children from the Gaza Strip, Sir Keir Starmer has said, as aid groups warned that around a third of Palestinians in the war-torn enclave have gone without food for days. The Prime Minister said the starvation inflicted by Israel on Palestinians is 'absolutely horrifying' and suggested that the Government could start airlifting the worst affected children to Britain. 'I know the British people are sickened by what is happening. The images of starvation and desperation in Gaza are utterly horrifying,' Mr Starmer said. 'We are urgently accelerating efforts to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance – bringing more Palestinian children to the UK for specialist medical treatment,' he added in the article for the Daily Mirror. It came as the World Food Programme (WFP) said that one in three Gazans have gone without any food for days, as France, Germany and the UK all demanded that Israel 'immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid.' 'Nearly one person in three is not eating for days. Malnutrition is surging, with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment,' the WFP said in a statement. Palestinians are now collapsing in the street and 'wasting away' from mass starvation, a group of 100 NGOs said. Another charity, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), warned that Israel was using 'starvation as a weapon' as part of its ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, launched in response to the October 7 Hamas massacre. The MSF said that 25 per cent of young people and pregnant women in Gaza were malnourished, as it strongly criticised food distribution by the controversial US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 'Those who go to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's food distributions know that they have the same chance of receiving a sack of flour as they do of leaving with a bullet in their head,' said Dr Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF's deputy medical coordinator in Gaza. According to the United Nations, more than 1,000 people had been killed by Israeli troops in the vicinity of the purpose-built distribution sites. The Israeli military says it 'categorically rejects the claims of intentional harm to civilians' and is investigating the deaths. In his article for the Mirror, Mr Starmer went on to demand that Hamas release the hostages currently held in Gaza and called for a two-state solution to the conflict, including UK recognition of a state of Palestine. 'The denial of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people – to children and babies – is completely unjustifiable. So is the continued captivity of the hostages. And so is Israel's disproportionate military escalation in Gaza,' the Prime Minister wrote.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
