Alexei Navalny The critic who exposed a rotten Russia 16

A week in the life of the world | Global edition

23 FEBRUARY 2024 | VOL .210 No.8 | £5.95 | €9

Ukraine’s
lonely
road
After two years,
is there a way out
of Putin’s war? 12

Hip op, Ghost Martin

hooray! machines Scorsese
The science Is it time On making
behind to say no movies and
new joints 30 to AI? 34 morality 51
Eyewitness  Zest stroke
France A sculpture of an Olympic swimmer made with lemons at the 90th Lemon Festival
in Menton, on the French Riviera. This year’s theme is From Olympia to Menton, to
support the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. More than 200,000 visitors are expected
PHOTOGRAPH:
DANIEL COLE /AP in Menton, which is renowned for its citrus fruit industry.

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and
Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia
The Guardian Weekly The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North
Founded in Manchester, America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power
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6
GL OBAL REP ORT
Headlines from
the last seven days
United Kingdom ..................10
Science & Environment ....... 11
The big story
Ukraine/Russia What is the
endgame for Putin’s war? ..... 12
19
SPOTLIGHT
In-depth reporting and analysis
Europe
Anxiety grows at the Munich
Security Conference ............ 19
Israel/Palestine
Would the release of Marwan
Barghouti aid a ceasefire? .....22
 Environment
February on course to break all
temperature records ........... 24
Italy
The changing face of bluefin
tuna fishing .........................26
Science
Technology’s cutting edge in
joint replacements .............. 30
US
Trump’s self-styled pivot from
business hero to victim ........32
Join the community
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SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
MATT BLEASE
A week in the life of the world
23 FEBRUARY 2024
34
F E AT U R E S
Long reads, interviews & essays
The neo-luddites who say ‘no’
to artificial intelligence
Tom Lamont........................ 34
On the menu: inside the $150bn
pet food industry
Vivian Ho ............................ 40
45
OPINION
John Harris
51
C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre, art,
Keir Starmer’s silence won’t architecture & more
work if he gets to No 10 ........ 45  Screen
▼ Claire Cohen Martin Scorsese – is he talking
Why it’s time to close the to us? ................................... 51
gender swear gap .................47 Visual arts
Paul Taylor Ukrainians reveal their secret
Brussels is panicking over the fears and desires ..................55
farmers’ protests ................ 48 Books
The 1970s couple who were all
at sea for four months...........57
 Books
The best recent crime and
A well-placed thriller releases....................59
profanity is the
60
perfect way to
reject outdated
ideas about
female delicacy LIFESTYLE
Ask Annalisa
and polite My partner’s in denial ......... 60
society Kitchen aide
Perfect one-pot pastas .........61
Recipe
Aubergine curry ..................61
On the cover Kyiv-based illustrator Sergiy
Maidukov’s haunting cover artwork reflects the
deep uncertainty facing Ukrainians after two
years of inconclusive conflict. “This war is the
hardest test of my life, similar to an endless
ultramarathon,” says Sergiy. “It is good to try to
not think about the finish when running long
distance. This is important knowledge to endure.”
Illustration: Sergiy Maidukov
6

Global
2 EUROPEAN UNION 4 H U N G A RY

Orbán courts Beijing as

report Nato and EU alliances fade

China has offered to deepen
security cooperation with
Hungary, underscoring Budapest’s
warming ties with Beijing just
Headlines from the as Hungarian officials snubbed
last seven days a visiting delegation from
Washington.
Prime minister Viktor Orbán
1 RUSSIA EC president von der Leyen
met China’s minister of public
to run for a second term security, Wang Xiaohong, last
Widow of Alexei Navalny
Ursula von der Leyen is to seek a Friday. The aim, according to
vows to continue his fight second term as president of the the Chinese minister, would
Copyright © 2024 Yulia Navalnaya has vowed to European Commission and head be “to make law enforcement
GNM Ltd. All rights continue her late husband’s of the most powerful institution in and security cooperation a new
reserved political work and called on Brussels. Speaking at a Christian highlight of bilateral relations”.
Russians to rally around her as Democratic Union (CDU) party Hungary is a member of the EU
Published weekly by Alexei Navalny’s family were told meeting in Berlin on Monday, and Nato, making China’s offer
Guardian News & they would not get access to his von der Leyen, 65, confirmed her highly unusual.
Media Ltd, body for another two weeks. candidacy for another five years, The prospect of greater
Kings Place, “I call on you to stand with me. the first step in a four-month battle security cooperation with Beijing
90 York Way,
To share not only grief and endless for election that could involve a comes at a time when Hungary’s
London, N1 9GU, UK
pain … I ask you to share with me wider field. Some speculate that relationship with its EU and Nato
Printed in the UK, the rage. The fury, anger, hatred Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja allies is at a low point. Budapest’s
Denmark, the US, for those who dare to kill our Kallas, could also stand. decision to renege on a promise
Australia and future,” she said in a nine-minute After being selected by the not to be the last to ratify Sweden’s
New Zealand video published on social media. CDU, von der Leyen must get Nato application has further
On Monday, Navalnaya the backing of two other parties undermined trust. However,
ISSN 0958-9996 accused the Russian authorities within the European People’s in a speech on Saturday, Orbán
of murdering her husband. She party, the centre-right grouping announced that “we are on course
To advertise contact said she knew “why exactly Putin in the European parliament, to ratify Sweden’s accession
advertising.
killed Alexei three days ago”. “And which also includes ruling parties to Nato at the beginning of
enquiries@
we will tell you that soon.” in Greece, Ireland, Lithuania parliament’s spring session”.
theguardian.com
Earlier, Navalny’s aides said and Sweden. Spotlight Page 19 
To subscribe, visit his mother and his lawyers had
theguardian.com/ not been allowed into the morgue
gw-subscribe near the prison colony where
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manage
initiated by the Russian human associates were ordered to pay the assassination in 2021 of
rights group OVD-Info. more than $350m plus interest President Jovenel Moïse charged
USA and Canada
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The Kremlin said it had by a New York judge who found 50 people including his widow and
@theguardian.com “nothing to add” to the news on them guilty of intentionally a former prime minister, according
Toll Free: the death of Navalny and denies committing financial fraud over to a leaked document.
+1-844-632-2010 any involvement. the course of a decade. The 122-page document from
The big story Page 16  Arthur Engoron also barred Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire,
Australia and Trump and two other executives made public by AyiboPost, states
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+44 (0) 330 333 6767

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024

 9 C U LT U R E
UK headlines p10

6 CANADA

Police of f icer charged with

passing data to Rwanda
A member of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police has been arrested
and charged with accessing police
records and passing information
to the Rwandan government.
The federal police force said last
Tuesday it had arrested Constable
Eli Ndatuje, who was stationed
in Alberta. He has been charged
with breach of trust, unauthorised
use of a computer and breach of
trust with respect to safeguarded
information, an alleged violation
of the country’s Security of
Information Act.
Ndatuje was born in Uganda
but is of Rwandan descent,
moving to Canada when he was
14. He is due to appear in a Calgary
court on 11 March.
1
Artefact aims to spark
colonial blind spots debate 2, 8
A statue depicting the angry spirit 4
of a Belgian officer beheaded
during a 1930s uprising in the
3 Congo will go on display at the
Dutch pavilion of this year’s
Venice Biennale, seeking to spark
a debate about colonial blind spots
in the art world.
The carved wooden figure
of colonial administrator
Maximilien Balot will be shown
via a livestream from a gallery
5 in Lusanga, in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, where the
on-loan artefact will be on display
for the six-month duration of
the festival.

7 AMAZON 10 GREECE

Same-sex marriage legalised

Rainforest could hit ‘tipping
point’ by 2050, scientists say
Up to half of the Amazon
rainforest could hit a tipping
point by 2050 as a result of water
stress, land clearance and climate
disruption, a study has shown.
The paper warned the forest
had passed a safe boundary and
urged remedial action to restore
degraded areas and improve the
resilience of the ecosystem.
Bernardo Flores of the Federal
University of Santa Catarina,
Brazil, lead author of the study,
was surprised by the results,
which projected a potential shift
from slow to rapid forest decline
earlier than he had expected.
8 EUROPEAN UNION
EU policies ‘partly to blame
for Mediterranean deaths’
Several groups running rescue
missions in the Mediterranean
are calling for a change in the EU’s
policies, which they say are partly
to blame for the drownings of
more than 3,000 people last year.
A 2023 decree states that once
a rescue has been completed, civil
fleets must head straight to an
assigned port without delay, using
the most direct route.
Italy has begun assigning rescue
boats to ports far away from where
they operate. According to an SOS
Humanity report, in 2023, these
vessels wasted 374 days making
longer journeys. The Italian
government said such measures
help distribute arrivals, but NGOs
argue it costs lives.
by landmark legislation
Greece has become the world’s
first Christian Orthodox nation to
legalise same-sex marriage after
the Athens parliament passed the
landmark reform amid scenes of
jubilation and fury in the country.
In a rare display of
parliamentary consensus, 176 MPs
from across the political spectrum
voted in favour of the bill on
Thursday. Another 76 rejected the
reform while two abstained from
the vote and 46 were not present.
Despite facing formidable
pushback from within his own
centre-right New Democracy
party, prime minister Kyriakos
Mitsotakis had championed the
bill, saying it would end a “serious
inequality for our democracy”.

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly


11 IRAN
Mahsa Amini’s uncle gets
jail sentence over protests
The uncle of Mahsa Amini, the
young Iranian-Kurdish woman
whose death in custody sparked
protests, has been sentenced to
more than five years in jail for his
criticism of the government in
2022, rights groups have said.
Safa Aeli, 30, was sentenced
to five years and four months in
prison by the revolutionary court
in the family’s home town of
Saqez in north-western Iran, the
Norway-based Hengaw group and
US-based Human Rights Activists
News Agency said.
He was also punished with
sanctions, including an unusual
demand to produce a biography
of a member of the security forces
killed in the protests.
12 SUDAN
Army moves on Omdurman
for first time since war began
The Sudan armed forces (SAF)
have advanced in Omdurman for
the first time since the beginning
of the war with the paramilitary
Rapid Support Forces in April
last year. Omdurman is considered
to be the twin city to Sudan’s
capital, Khartoum.
This came after reports of Iran
helping the SAF with new Mohajer
6 drones after a visit by the leader
of the army, Gen Abdel Fattah
al-Burhan, to Tehran.
A week before the army’s
advancement, people in Ombada,
in the north-west of the city, were
ordered to evacuate their homes.
The SAF allegedly arrested about
100 men, who were said to have
been lashed before being released.
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
14 T A I WA N / C H I N A
China coastguard boards
Taiwan tourist vessel
China’s coastguard boarded
a Taiwanese tourist vessel, as
tensions rose in the waters between
China’s mainland and Taiwan’s
Kinmen islands after a capsizing
killed two people last week. The
sight-seeing ferry King Xia was on a
tour around Kinmen’s main island
on Monday when it was intercepted
by a Chinese coastguard patrol.
Six officers boarded the boat
before disembarking after 30
minutes, Taiwan’s Coast Guard
Authority said.
The incident came amid
heightened tensions after a
17 Chinese fishing boat, which
15
was being pursued by Taiwan’s
coastguard, capsized last
Wednesday. Two of the four
people on board died, and the
other two were detained.
16
13 AFRICA
20 18
Ill-judged tree-planting ‘is
threatening ecosystems’
Misguided tree-planting projects
are threatening crucial ecosystems
across Africa, scientists warn. 19
Research reveals that an area
the size of France is threatened by
forest restoration initiatives taking
place in inappropriate landscapes.
One project in particular,
the African Forest Landscape
Restoration Initiative, aims
to plant trees across 100m
hectares of land by 2030. The
research found 52% of tree-
planting projects are occurring in
savannahs, with almost 60% using
non-native tree species, which
brings the risk of introducing
invasive species.

Global report
15 PA K I S TA N
Coalition of rival parties
agrees to form government
A coalition including the Pakistan
Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)
and the Pakistan People’s party
(PPP) have agreed to form the next
government, ensuring the party of
former prime minister Imran Khan
will not take power.
At a press conference in
Islamabad last Tuesday night,
it was confirmed that the rival
parties had agreed, with two
smaller coalition partners, to
form a joint government and
that PML-N’s president, Shehbaz
Sharif (above), would be their
sole nominee for prime minister.
Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf
(PTI) party hit out at the coalition,
calling them “mandate thieves”.
The announcement followed
days of wrangling after Pakistan’s
election this month delivered the
most votes to PTI.
16 THAILAND
Former leader Shinawatra
paroled from hospital
Former prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra has been freed on
parole, six months after he was
jailed for eight years on graft and
abuse-of-power charges. The
government said last week the
74-year-old was eligible for release
because of his age and health.
The billionaire was ousted in
a 2006 military coup. His Pheu
Thai party was beaten in May’s
election by the progressive Move
Forward party (MFP) but the
senate blocked MFP’s leader, Pita
Limjaroenrat, from becoming
prime minister and Pheu Thai’s
deal with military-linked parties
then shut MFP out of government.
The big story p12 
9
17 I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E 19 NEW ZEALAND D E AT H S
Assault on Rafah will go Fertility rate hits record low
ahead if hostages not freed as number of births falls
A member of Israel’s war cabinet The national fertility rate slumped
said the country will launch its to a record low in 2023, as the
ground offensive against Rafah, number of births also dropped. Alexei Navalny
the last place of relative safety in Official data released on Russian politician,
Gaza, if Hamas does not release Monday found there were 1,932 activist and critic
its remaining Israeli hostages by fewer babies born in 2023 than the of Vladimir Putin.
the beginning of the holy Muslim year before, the lowest number of He died in prison
month of Ramadan, which begins registered births in 20 years. The on 16 February,
on 10 March. drop was despite a 3% increase in aged 47.
“The world must know, and the number of women between 15 The big story,
Hamas leaders must know – if by and 49 years old, the ages at which page 16 
Ramadan our hostages are not most births occur.
home, the fighting will continue The combination of fewer Edward Lowassa
everywhere, including the Rafah births and more women in the Former prime
area,” Benny Gantz, a retired population led to the fertility rate minister of
Israel Defense Forces chief of staff hitting a record low of 1.56 births Tanzania. He died
said last Sunday. per woman. In 2022, the rate was on 10 February,
As Israeli forces have expanded 1.66, and it remains far below the aged 70.
ground operations steadily 2.1 needed to replace population
southwards in their war against numbers in the long term. Steve Wright
Hamas over the past four months, Declining fertility rates reflect British radio
Rafah – situated on the border international trends, particularly presenter. He died
with Egypt, and before the conflict in the west. on 12 February,
home to about 280,000 people aged 69.
– has become the last refuge
for more than half of the strip’s Margaret Power
population of 2.3 million. Economist who
Continuing fighting across the raised women’s
territory, two-thirds of which is status in Australia
under Israeli evacuation orders, leading to equal
means it is unclear how civilians pay demands.
are expected to flee the offensive. She died on 10
Spotlight Page 22  February, aged 82.
Robert Badinter
French lawyer and
18 PA P UA N E W G U I N E A 20 INDONESIA justice minister
who campaigned
Dozens killed in outbreak of Activists warn Prabowo
to abolish the
tribal violence in highlands victory is ‘a dark chapter’ death penalty.
Dozens have been killed in a fresh The presumed election victory He died on 9
outbreak of tribal violence in the of presidential candidate February, aged 95.
remote highlands of Papua New Prabowo Subianto – a former
Guinea, local police have said. army general with a history of Steve Ostrow
George Kakas, Enga provincial alleged involvement in torture US opera singer
police commander, said the men and disappearances – marks a dark and icon of New
were killed by heavy gun fire last chapter in the country’s history, York’s gay scene.
Sunday. He said men from two activists have warned. He died on 4
tribes attacked another group. Prabowo, 72, a former special February, aged 91.
Authorities initially said at least commander under the Suharto
53 people were killed, but later dictatorship, is the apparent Andreas Brehme
said they had miscounted and 26 winner of Indonesia’s presidential German footballer
men had been killed. election after unofficial counts who scored the
Tribal fighting is not unusual in gave him a strong lead. Last winning goal in
parts of Papua New Guinea though Wednesday night he told the 1990 World
trouble in the Enga province has supporters that his win would be a Cup final. He died
escalated and attracted attention “victory for all Indonesians”. on 19 February,
in recent months. Spotlight Page 23  aged 63.
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
10 Global report
United Kingdom
C O N S E RVA T I V E S
Rebel Tory MPs pushing
for PM Rishi Sunak to quit
Tory MPs critical of Rishi Sunak’s
leadership are hoping he will
stand down voluntarily to avoid
the spectacle of a damaging coup
and are looking to May’s local
elections as a potential crunch
point, the Guardian has been told.
A former minister said several
Conservative MPs had contacted
Graham Brady, who heads the
1922 Committee of backbench
Tories, to say they want the prime
minister to quit, but that they had
not sent in letters of no confidence
yet. The former minister said
they believed Sunak’s Downing
Street was too complacent about
the risk he faces after no new
public challenges emerged after
two heavy byelection defeats for
the party last week.
“I know it’s happening,” they
said. “The magnitude of it is
difficult to say. It avoids the pain
of removing a PM and might even
prevent a protracted leadership
contest, if one person emerges as a
successor, like Rishi did.”
The situation was less like
the removal of Boris Johnson,
they said, than “a slower-motion
270
and less contentious Liz Truss”.
“It’s not that they think Rishi is
terrible, like she was. But he’s had
The distance in a go for 18 months and the plan
kilometres that isn’t working,” they said.
a cat named Since Labour won the
Blueberry was Kingswood and Wellingborough
found to have seats, overturning sizeable
wandered from his Conservative majorities, Sunak
home in Bangor, has faced renewed calls from some
Northern Ireland. of his MPs to tack further to the
Four years after right, especially after Reform UK,
going missing, the formed by Nigel Farage, won 10%-
cat was identified plus of the vote in both contests.
by his microchip As yet no MPs have joined
in Co Galway, Simon Clarke and Andrea Jenkyns
in the Republic in calling publicly for Sunak to go.
of Ireland
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
LABOUR
Keir Starmer says Gaza
fighting ‘must stop now’
Keir Starmer said the “fighting
must stop now” in Gaza, warning
Israel not to extend its military
offensive to the city of Rafah
ahead of another potential crunch
point for his party over the crisis.
The Labour leader made the
comments in a speech to the
Scottish Labour conference in
Glasgow, where he faced renewed
pressure ahead of a Commons
vote this week over a motion
calling for an immediate ceasefire.
In a stance that has caused deep
divisions across the Labour party,
Starmer has previously refused to
support calls for an “immediate”
end to the violence. His speech
came a day after the conference
passed a motion calling for an
immediate ceasefire on both sides.
Opinion Page 45 
C U LT U R E
Oppenheimer wins top
Baftas – with first for Nolan
Christopher Nolan, below, finally
won his first Bafta award, as
Oppenheimer, his biopic of the
man behind the atomic bomb,
took best picture and best
director. His Imax epic dominated
the British film industry’s most
prestigious prizes, winning seven
Baftas, including leading actor for
Cillian Murphy and supporting
actor for Robert Downey Jr.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor
Things took five awards, including
leading actress for Emma Stone.
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of
Interest won three awards, for
best sound, outstanding British
film – and best film not in the
English language.
C U LT U R E
Jungle Book painting to go
on show at Kipling’s home
A rare watercolour depicting
the aftermath of a climactic
moment in Rudyard Kipling’s The
Jungle Book is to go on display at
Bateman’s, the author’s country
home in Burwash, East Sussex.
The Return of the Buffalo Herd,
is one of 16 paintings created by
twin brothers Edward and Charles
Detmold, who were just 18 when
they were commissioned to
illustrate Kipling’s story.
C O N S E RVA T I V E S
Sacked Post Office chair
accused of seeking revenge
Kemi Badenoch accused the
Post Office chair she sacked of a
“blatant attempt to seek revenge”
after he made allegations about
the government’s handling of the
Horizon scandal.
The business secretary
launched an extended attack on
Henry Staunton in the Commons
on Monday, and claimed that
he was under investigation for
bullying when she fired him.
The war of words began last
weekend after Staunton gave an
interview to the Sunday Times
accusing the government of
wanting to stall compensation
payments to victims of the
Horizon scandal until after the
general election. Badenoch
dismissed Staunton from his
role last month.
Badenoch accused Staunton
of a series of “completely false”
accusations, telling MPs there
was no proof that Staunton had
been told to delay payments
and that such an approach
would be “mad”.
 Do you have a recently taken picture you’d like to share with
Guardian Weekly? Scan the QR code or visit theguardian.com/
pictures-guardian-weekly and we’ll print your best submissions
 Reader’s
eyewitness
Flap happy
‘Chasing the
gulls in an
Amsterdam
park – my
18-month-old
granddaughter
is in love
with them.’
By Sima Asvadi,
Amsterdam, the
Netherlands
SCIENCE AND
EN V IRON M EN T
ANIMALS
Juvenile great apes love to
tease and annoy their elders
Footage of great apes reveals they
endure bouts of teasing dished out
by their smaller and weaker young
who appear intent on pushing
their luck, according to a study in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Recordings of chimps,
orangutans, bonobos and gorillas
found the animals to be masters
of the dubious art, embarking on a
range of playful and occasionally
aggressive acts. From 75 hours of
footage taken at San Diego and
Leipzig zoos, scientists documented
142 clear instances of great apes
teasing their compadres, with most
instigated by juveniles.
A RCH A EOLOGY
Stone age wall may be oldest
megastructure in Europe
A stone age wall discovered beneath
the waves off Germany’s Baltic
coast may be the oldest known
megastructure built by humans in
Europe, researchers say.
The wall, which stretches for
nearly a kilometre along the seafloor
in the Bay of Mecklenburg, was
spotted when scientists operated
a multibeam sonar system from a
research vessel 10km offshore.
Closer inspection of the structure,
named the Blinkerwall, revealed
about 1,400 smaller stones that
appear to have been positioned to
connect nearly 300 larger boulders.
The submerged wall, described as
a “thrilling discovery”, is covered by
21 metres of water, but researchers
believe it was constructed on land
next to a lake or marsh more than
10,000 years ago. Scientists say
in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences they suspect it
served as a driving lane for hunters
in pursuit of herds of reindeer.
POLLU TION
Rise in wood-burning stoves
offsets anti-pollution efforts
A rise in harmful emissions from
wood-burning stoves has largely
offset decreases in particulate
pollution from road and energy
sources in the UK, government
data reveals.
11
Emissions of PM2.5 and PM10
from domestic combustion
increased by 19% between 2012 and
2022, counteracting efforts made
to travel and produce commercial
energy in less polluting ways.
Despite their environmental
menace, wood-burning stoves are
soaring in popularity. According to
the Stove Industry Alliance, sales
were up by 67% in the last three
months of 2022 compared with the
previous year. SIA says an estimated
1.5m homes in the UK have one.
15
H E A LT H
Existing drug could prevent
Percentage of or slow rheumatoid arthritis
Americans who Scientists have discovered a jab that
don’t believe could prevent rheumatoid arthritis
climate change (RA), a development experts say
is real, according could offer hope to millions.
to a new study About 18 million people globally
by the University are affected by RA, according to the
of Michigan. World Health Organization.
Denialism is Abatacept is prescribed to people
highest in the who already have RA, but a team
central and led by King’s College London found
southern US, it to be “effective in preventing the
with Republican onset” of RA. Researchers said the
voters less likely results, published in the Lancet,
to believe in could be “good news for people at
climate science risk of arthritis”.
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
The big story

Ukraine/Russia

 A sculpture
in the Park of
Eternal Glory
in Kyiv
KASIA STRĘK

Shock, On the second anniversary of
UKRAINE
anger Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the
and fall of Avdiivka has given Russia
war cracks in morale are showing.
its first gain in months. In Kyiv,
fatigue What happens now?
By Shaun Walker
C
lose to the frontline
in Ukraine’s Donetsk
region, a bumpy road
passes through half-
abandoned hamlets. It
morphs into a muddy
track, snakes through fields, and even-
tually leads to an army base.
There, as a kettle boiled on a gas
heater, a weary 39-year-old soldier,
who wished to be known only by his
callsign, Titushko, spoke about the
problems of fighting the Russians amid
a serious ammunition shortage, as the
sound of fire from nearby positions
echoed around the base.
In November, Titushko’s men, part
of an artillery division in Ukraine’s
First Tank Brigade, received a supply
of about 300 shells every 10 days, but
they now have a firing limit of just
10 a day. “Back then, we could keep
them on their toes, fire all the time, aim
every time we saw a target. Now we
fire exclusively for defence,” he said.
The ammunition reserves at the
base are thin, and partly made up of
Iranian shells – part of a shipment
▲▲ A wall seized in the Gulf apparently en route
commemorates to Houthi rebels in Yemen. They are
soldiers who have “extremely problematic and don’t
died fighting for
Ukraine since
Back then, we could work well”, another soldier at the
base said.
2014 keep them on their Along the frontline, Ukraine is on
the defensive, short of ammunition
▲ Ammunition at toes, fire all the time. and soldiers. Last week, Ukraine’s
a forest base west
of Avdiivka
Now we fire exclusively military command announced it was
withdrawing from Avdiivka, further
KASIA STRĘK for defence east in Donetsk region, handing
13
Russia its first major territorial gain
since May last year. Ukrainian officials
have described the loss as a direct
consequence of the shortage of ammu-
nition from the west.
The grim news, as the second
anniversary of Russia’s full-scale inva-
sion approaches, is another sign that
the third year of the war could be the
hardest yet for Ukraine. The mood is
very different from that of a year ago,
when amid the horror Ukrainians
remained buoyed up by the extraordi-
nary consolidation of national society.
In Kyiv, the cultural historian
Natalia Kryvda attributed the remark-
able coming-together in the first
year of the war to Ukraine’s past as a
nation that lacked the infrastructure
of a state. “Because we have this long
history of a stateless nation, we organ-
ised these horizontal links to start the
defence. People took responsibility,
they didn’t wait for orders,” she said.
Those first months saw almost
all segments of society unite, said
Kryvda, creating a powerful new
Ukrainian identity and a pride in being
Ukrainian after years of denigration of
the concept from Russia. “It was some-
thing very beautiful, but I’m worried
that this unity is starting to crack now,”
she said.
Last week, President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy reminded the Munich Secu-
rity Conference of how much Ukrain-
ian society had achieved over the past
two years: “Ukrainians have been
holding [out] for 724 days – 724 days,
would you have believed 725 days 
ago that this was even possible?”
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
Ukraine/Russia
But with casualties mounting, army
ranks and artillery supplies depleted
and US financial aid stalled – and with
the potentially devastating prospect
of a Donald Trump presidency on the
horizon – Ukrainians greet the second
anniversary with trepidation about
what the future might hold.
At the base in Donetsk region,
Titushko talked about the unease
he felt on his recent two-week home
leave. In peacetime, he worked as a
combine harvester driver in Ukraine’s
northern Chernihiv region, before he
signed up to fight in the first days
after the invasion, in February 2022.
He spent half of January this year
back at home – his first break from
the front for more than a year, giving
much-needed respite from the nightly
artillery and air attacks, the winter
cold and the giant rats that make life
in the trenches hard to bear.
But instead of finding the
experience rejuvenating, Titushko
The resources to
call up half a million
people at once
simply aren’t there
found the sight of civilians enjoying
a semblance of normal life in cafes and
restaurants difficult to stomach, and
the questions they asked when they
saw his uniform to be irritating.
“They ask you stupid things.
‘What’s it like there? How many
Russians have you killed? How many
of ours are dead?’” he said. He looked
around at life back home, and won-
dered why the men he saw on the
streets were not with him, at the front.
“I don’t really understand it. There’s
enough work here, even if you don’t
want to be firing a gun. You could dig
a trench, cook the meals. Everyone
helped at the start, everyone cared,
but now it’s a different time. You look
at these people and you want to say,
‘What will you do if the Russians come
back and come to your towns? Do you
think they’re going to be handing out
Chupa Chups?’”
At this stage of the war, finding
people who will go willingly to fight
is becoming ever harder. It was one
thing to sign up when it seemed like
the Ukrainian army might advance and
retake all the lost territory swiftly and
triumphantly. Now, the calculation
looks different.
Kyiv has been mobilising men for
the war effort constantly over the past
year, and there are plans to add hun-
dreds of thousands more over the next
year. Some are willing to go, but many
more stay in hiding at home for fear of
receiving a summons in the street, or
try to escape the country.
“Mobilisation is unpopular in
society. The self-preservation instinct,
the understanding that the war is
going to drag on – nobody wants to
risk the lives of their close ones,” said
the Kyiv-based political analyst Volo-
dymyr Fesenko. “On the other hand,
there is no doubt that we need mobi-
lisation, so it’s a difficult situation.”
He said he expected the authorities
to solve the problem on a month-to-
month basis, rather than by mobilis-
ing a large number of people at once.
“The resources to call up half a million
people at once simply aren’t there,
plus it would hit the economy hard,
and there’s already a problem with
labour reserves,” he said.
There is also the question of how
well newly mobilised soldiers can
fight. An army source said plans were
under way to increase the training
period from one month to two, but this
is still not long to prepare for trench
warfare. “It’s more a question of psy-
▲ Smoke rises chological problems than skills,” said
from buildings in Valentyn, the deputy commander of
Avdiivka the artillery division. “People from
LIBKOS/GETTY civilian life have no experience of
being at the front, of being away from
 Soldiers in new home and loved ones for so long.”
defence lines Millions of Ukrainians who are not
on Ukraine’s fighting still help the war effort with
northern border volunteer work or donations, but the
KASIA STRĘK divide between people who have had
very different experiences over the
▼ A Ukrainian past two years is growing.
soldier, known by Anastasiia Shuba, a lawyer who
callsign Titushko sits on the defence ministry ’s
KASIA STRĘK anti-corruption council – and who
frequently travels to the front as a
volunteer to bring supplies to troops
and visit her husband, a commanding
officer in the east – said she had cut
off contact with friends who seemed
indifferent to the war effort.
After visits to the frontline, she finds
the contrast in Kyiv – where, despite
frequent missile attacks, shops and
restaurants are open and the streets
are bustling – to be jarring.
“My husband says to me, ‘We are
here exactly so you can all live nor-
mally.’ He tells me to go shopping, to
go on holiday to the sea with our son,”
she said. “But it’s hard. Of course not
everyone can fight or volunteer, and
Why Alexei
we need a functioning economy. But
when your country is in such a difficult
Navalny chose situation, only a parasite would go on
to stay in Russia living without thinking how to help.”
Page 16  There are certainly some bright

spots amid the gloom – Ukraine’s
recent military dominance of the Black
Sea, despite not having a navy, and its
audacious special operations behind
Russian lines, as well as the mas-
sive ramping-up of domestic drone
production, which has played a key
role in the fighting.
B
ut the international back-
drop makes it hard to be
confident about longer-term
prospects for liberating ter-
ritory. The EU finally overcame oppo-
sition from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán
and ratified a €50bn ($53.8bn) fund-
ing package, but a huge US package
is still stalled.
Even if it passes, Trump is likely to
change the tone of the debate just by
becoming the Republican nominee,
let alone the president.
In the third year of the war, the
domestic political scene may also
fracture. The unity of the first year has
been steadily dissolving over recent
months, with political opponents of
Zelenskiy becoming increasingly vocal
and a sense that politics has returned.
Ordinarily, a presidential election
would have been due this spring,
though there is a broad consensus
that holding one at the moment is
impossible. But there is concern that
Zelenskiy has not found a new way
of ruling after the initial period of
consolidation, in order to bring more
people into the tent. “There are only
two people who make decisions in this
country,” said another diplomat, refer-
ring to Zelenskiy and his chief of staff,
Andriy Yermak.
The dismissal of army chief Valerii
Zaluzhnyi earlier this month was
widely seen as being at least partly
motivated by Zaluzhnyi’s high popu-
larity ratings. The change has passed
If we survive the next
year, then we will
probably be forced
to negotiate some
kind of ceasefire
15
without significant protest for now,
but many see Zaluzhnyi as a potential Two years
future challenger to Zelenskiy. of conflict
As the 24 February anniversary
approaches, Zelenskiy’s team will
be keen to remind western leaders Four key
of those first days of the war, when moments in
Russian troops bore down on Kyiv and the war
many in the west assumed Ukraine’s
days as an independent state were • 24 February
numbered. Despite the slow west- 2022
ern response, Ukraine stood firm, Ukrainians
and few now believe Russia has the wake up to full-
capability to launch a renewed assault scale Russian
on the capital. invasion, with
On a breezy recent morning not far troops arriving
from Ukraine’s border with Belarus, from three
digger trucks clawed muddy earth directions.
from the ground, and a group of men
toiled with spades, working to add • 30 September
to a network of sturdy trenches and 2022
concrete fortifications as part of a Vladimir Putin
formidable new defensive line. announces the
Two years ago, columns of annexation of
Russian armour sped through this four Ukrainian
area meeting little resistance as they regions –
headed towards Kyiv. “There were Luhansk,
a few guys with Javelins [anti-tank
missiles] at the border but otherwise
Donetsk,
Kherson and
they just went straight through,” said Zaporizhzhia –
Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier work- despite the fact
ing on the fortifications. “That won’t that Russian
happen again.” forces do not
Total defeat for Ukraine now looks fully control any
like an impossible dream for Vladimir of them.
Putin, but total victory – including the
reclaiming of Crimea, which Russia • 11 November
annexed in 2014 – is also harder to 2022
imagine in the near term. Negotia- Ukraine
tions with Russia have long been a liberates the
taboo subject, mainly because nobody city of Kherson,
believes Moscow would keep any occupied since
agreement and would simply use it as a the first days of
pause for breath before pushing again. war, prompting
But fighting on indefinitely is also celebrations.
hardly sustainable. “If we can survive
the next year, then we will probably • 17 February
be forced to negotiate some kind of 2024
ceasefire,” said Fesenko. Ukraine
For many at the front, agreeing to a announces
fragile and imperfect peace would be withdrawal
an unthinkable concession after the from the city
efforts and losses of the last two years. of Avdiivka
At the frontline, Titushko said the in Donetsk,
thought of returning home to peace- handing Russia
ful life once more, only to be called its first major
up again when Russia recommenced gain since it took
hostilities, was too much to bear. “In Bakhmut in
2014, we thought it was over and they May 2023.
came back. This time we have to finish
them off for good,” he said. Observer
SHAUN WALKER IS THE GUARDIAN AND
OBSERVER’S CENTRAL AND EASTERN
EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
16 The big story
Ukraine/Russia
A L E X E I N AVA L N Y
1 9 7 6 -2 0 2 4
‘I have to stay’
Why exile was
never an option
for Putin’s
leading critic
Had he remained outside
Russia, Navalny may have
been able to coordinate a
powerful anti-war movement.
Instead, he is silenced for ever
By Shaun Walker
F
or years, Alexei Navalny
remained clear on a key
message: he was a Russian
opposition politician and
he was determined to stay in Russia.
Exile, he believed, would lead to
political irrelevance, and calling on
Russians to oppose Vladimir Putin
from the safety of the west would
mark him as a hypocrite.
Navalny, who died last week aged
47, while serving a lengthy prison
term in an Arctic penal colony, stuck
to this belief as the political climate
in Russia deteriorated and the space
for dissent narrowed ever further,
and even after he was poisoned
with novichok in 2020, leading to
his ill-fated decision to return early
the next year.
Russian authorities had tried
various methods to shut Navalny
up for more than a decade. Initially,
some in the Kremlin thought he
could be allowed to remain on the
political scene as a release valve
for disgruntled urban Russians.
A dangerously good performance
in the 2013 Moscow mayoral
vote put paid to that. Instead,
authorities moved to launch various
criminal cases against him.
In 2014, Navalny was put under
house arrest and his brother, Oleg,
was given a three-and-a-half-year
jail term, widely seen as a way to put
pressure on him. Some suggested he
might be more use to the opposition
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
movement abroad and at liberty
rather than in Russia and potentially
sent to join his brother in jail.
Late that year, padding around his
small apartment in a Moscow suburb
wearing an ankle tag, Navalny
scoffed at the idea that it might be
better to leave. “If I want people to
trust me then I have to share the
risks with them and stay here. How
can I call on them to take part in
protests and so on if they are risking
things and I am not?” he said.
And so he stayed. For years,
Navalny and his Anti-Corruption
Foundation worked out of a suite
of offices in a business centre not
far from Avtozavodskaya metro
station, just outside the centre of
Moscow, where he would greet
visitors with a roguish grin and
seemingly endless resources of
energy, as he and his team put
together investigations into the
corruption of Putin’s inner circle.
There are many brave and
intelligent Russian opposition
figures but none have the natural
political talent of Navalny. After
starting out as a hardline nationalist,
making statements about minorities
that would lead many liberals to
be wary of him for years to come,
Navalny later became known for
his anti-corruption work and fiery
oration at opposition rallies.
Navalny was dangerous to the
Kremlin because he did not just talk
about human rights and democracy,
although he talked about them as
well. His main danger to the regime
lay in the way he showed, in slickly
produced and well-researched
videos, how the rot of corruption
started at the top.
That many officials are corrupt is
something most Russians can agree
on, and part of Putin’s cunning was
Murmansk
Arkhangelsk
Russia
St Petersburg
Moscow
Ukraine
portraying himself as a fighter
against this corruption rather than
the creator and main beneficiary
of a system that encouraged it. Far
from being a “good tsar fighting
bad nobles”, Putin was the worst of
them all, Navalny showed.
D
uring his attempt to stand
against Putin in the 2018
presidential election,
Navalny did grassroots
politics in a more authentic way than
anyone over the past two decades
in Russia, even if he was predictably
kept off the ballot in the end.
He set up local headquarters
across the country and travelled
far and wide to spread his
message, often winning approval
in unexpected quarters from
a population starved for years
of political alternatives. On the
campaign trail in the industrial
city of Chelyabinsk, Navalny
gave a speech at a protest over
the construction of a new
processing plant that would
If I want further pollute the city’s air.
A group of people, presumably
people sent by local authorities, started
to trust chanting loudly to disrupt his
speech. Navalny brushed them off
me then with his characteristic humour,
pointing out that he had a
I have to microphone and they didn’t, so it
share the was pointless to keep shouting.
“Look, if you don’t like me, don’t
risks with vote for me. I’ve come today and
them I’ll be leaving this evening. But the
plant will stay here and it’s going to
poison you and your families. Is that
what you want? Keep chanting if
that’s what you really want,” he said.
The protesters piped down,
looking sheepish, and began to listen
to Navalny as he launched into one
of his diatribes about corruption
in Putin’s system.
Even though authorities made
sure Navalny did not get on to the
ballot in 2018, for many people
it was a mystery that he had
even been allowed to campaign.
IK-3 penal colony There were always those who
Notorious prison wondered whether Navalny was
where Navalny “someone’s project”, allowed to
died, 1,900km
from Moscow
continue his work as an outlet for
people to let off steam, or used by
one of the Kremlin clans to wage
vendettas against others.
It was a question that Navalny got
Kazakhstan a lot, and unsurprisingly it tended
to annoy him. “Fucking morons,”

he told the Guardian in 2017 when
asked about people who were
suspicious of his liberty. “‘Why
haven’t they killed you, why haven’t
they locked you up?’ People are
always asking me this. Look, I have
no answer to that question.”
Those questions receded after his
poisoning. In a 2022 documentary
shot in Germany during his recovery
from the novichok attack, Navalny
was asked to record a message in
case he was killed on his return to
Russia. The clip of his answer was
much shared after the reports of his
death broke on Friday.
“The only thing that is needed
for the triumph of evil is the
inaction of good people. So you
should not remain inactive,” he
said, looking straight into the
camera with a serious expression.
Then, unable to keep taking the
question seriously, he cracked
a smile, turned away from the
camera and began laughing.
After the poisoning, Navalny
returned to Russia defiant and
was swiftly locked up. Isolated
in prison, his absence from the
public space has been acutely felt,
especially after Putin launched the
full-scale invasion of Ukraine in
February 2022.
W
hile his messages
from prison in the
last three years have
still contained his
trademark wry humour, there was
a sense of a lost opportunity as
wartime Russia became a darker and
more dangerous place.
Perhaps, if Navalny had not
returned, he would have been able
to coordinate the million-plus recent
Russian émigrés into a powerful
anti-war movement. Instead, much
17
to the anger of many Ukrainians, the
Russian emigration has remained
fragmented and often apolitical.
Now, Navalny’s voice has been
silenced for ever. It is too early to
say if his death was a result of the
toll on his health from a nerve agent
poisoning followed by three years in
harsh Russian prison conditions, or
if he was helped on the way.
Putin has fewer constraints than
ever as he seeks another six years
in office in elections next month in
which even mild opposition figures
have been barred from running.
Bridges with the west are burned
over the war in Ukraine, there is
an international criminal court
warrant for his arrest and his regime
is subject to rounds of sanctions.
His rants in a recent interview with
former Fox News presenter Tucker
Carlson suggest a leader who has
retreated far into his own world. He
may believe there was little to lose
by settling an old score.
The Kremlin always claimed
Navalny was a minor political
figure but clearly he loomed large in
Putin’s consciousness, as shown by
the Russian leader’s longstanding
refusal to utter his name, which
bordered on the pathological, and
by the lengths to which the FSB hit
squad went to poison him.
In recent months, there have been
murmurs that western leaders might
try to include Navalny’s name in a
list of people to be part of a potential
prisoner exchange between
PAVEL GOLOVKIN/AP/
GUARDIAN DESIGN
Russia and the west.
Sergei Guriev, an economist
and longtime Navalny ally, said
in September that he knew
from “direct and indirect”
correspondence with Navalny that
the politician’s insistence that he
would remain in Russia no longer
applied. Guriev called on western
leaders to lobby Putin to include
Navalny in any exchange.
“The situation has changed.
He cannot work in Russia, he
cannot employ anyone. If he were
to be exchanged or somehow
managed to leave, he would stay
away,” Guriev said.
Navalny was now prepared to
live the life of an exile that he had
Putin can’t be dreaded for so long, rather than
allowed to kill die in prison. But it was not to be.
with impunity Instead, he has become the latest
The Guardian in a long line of people to die at the
view, page 49  hands of the Putin regime.
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
18 The big story
Ukraine/Russia
C OM M E N TA RY
RUSSI A
‘The sun is gone’
After Navalny’s
death, many fear
what an even
bolder Putin
may do next
By Pjotr Sauer
V
ladimir Putin smiled and
looked unusually festive
last Friday as he praised
factory workers and joked
with state reporters at an industrial
plant in the Ural city of Chelyabinsk.
Putin’s confidence was
unmistakable – a sign of his belief he
would get away with the death that
day of his biggest critic in jail while
outlasting Ukraine on the battlefield.
The world might never know what
specifically happened on the day of
Alexei Navalny’s death at a remote
prison above the Arctic Circle.
Navalny spent years enduring some
of the worst excesses of the Russian
prison system. The country’s penal
colonies are notorious for their grim
conditions and the opposition leader
was singled out for particularly
cruel treatment.
Whatever the circumstances of
his death, years of mistreatment
support the widespread view
held by his supporters that the
Kremlin was responsible.
“Putin killed Alexei Navalny,” said
Georgy Alburov, a Navalny ally and
a researcher for his Anti-Corruption
Foundation. “How exactly he did it
will certainly be exposed.”
Leaders across the west similarly
echoed Alburov’s view, laying the
blame for Navalny’s death directly at
the feet of Putin. “Make no mistake:
Putin is responsible for Navalny’s
death. Putin is responsible,” said the
US president, Joe Biden.
But these statements are likely
to leave the Kremlin shrugging its
shoulders at best.
Already a wanted man after the
international criminal court ruling
charging him with overseeing the
abduction of Ukrainians, Putin has
long stopped seeking the approval
of the west.
With the death of Navalny, he
has inflicted a devastating blow to
the country’s already suppressed
opposition. His control over
domestic politics now appears total.
After next month’s elections, he
will be crowned for another six-year
term as president, and his tenure
could surpass that of Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin. Putin has been in
charge for 24 years, while Stalin died
in 1953 after ruling for 29 years.
As the second anniversary of
Putin’s invasion nears, Ukraine is
deprived of vital aid, and cracks in
morale are showing.
Last Saturday, Ukraine’s army
was forced to retreat from Avdiivka,
a key frontline Ukrainian city, a
decision that dealt Kyiv a military
blow and handed the initiative of the
war firmly to Putin.
In the long term, Donald Trump,
who has yet to comment on
Navalny’s death, has a real chance
of becoming the next US president,
which could give Putin carte blanche
in Ukraine and beyond.
The western plan to isolate Putin
and his country, to make him a
pariah and to inflict sanctions that
would cripple the Russian economy
have not had their desired result.
Putin has cultivated new allies and
courted the global south, receiving
a grand welcome in the United Arab
Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Biden last Friday admitted
that after Navalny’s death it
would be hard to inflict the
“devastating” consequences on
Russia he promised in 2021. “We’re
contemplating what else could be
done,” he said.
This hesitancy is only likely to ‘Having
bolster Putin’s confidence. “The
more impunity Putin has, the more destroyed
aggressive he inevitably becomes,” opposition
said Boris Bondarev, a former at home,
senior Russian career diplomat who
defected from the Kremlin after the he will
start of the war in 2022. focus on
“Having destroyed opposition at
home, he will focus on those who
those who
dare speak abroad,” Bondarev said. dare speak
This mood appears infectious abroad’
among Putin’s allies. “Russia owes
nothing to anyone – let’s start there,”
Margarita Simonyan, head of state-
controlled broadcaster RT, wrote,
commenting on Nato’s statement
that Putin has “serious questions to
answer” over Navalny’s death.
Simonyan, seemingly unfazed by
the optics, continued by saying that
five people who had fallen “victim”
to Navalny’s anti-corruption
investigations had already called her
to celebrate his death.
After his killing, many fear for  Vladimir Putin
what is to come. “With no checks on visits a factory
his capacity to make fatal mistakes, in Chelyabinsk
an ageing Russian ruler surrounded last week
by sycophants may embark on more ALEXANDER RYUMIN/AP
reckless moves in coming years than
anything we’ve seen so far,” wrote
Alexander Gabuev, director of the
Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
The Russian sociologist Greg
Yudin put it more grimly: “In Russia,
they like to say that it is darkest
before dawn. I think it’s true – it’s
just that we hardly know the real
darkness yet. Looks like it’s only
starting to get dark. The sun is gone.”
PJOTR SAUER IS A RUSSIAN AFFAIRS
REPORTER FOR THE GUARDIAN
 19
In-depth reporting and analysis

ISRAEL/PALESTINE
The prisoner
who may be key
to a ceasefire
Page 22 

EU ROPE

Shadow of
O
n the top floor of Litera-
turhaus in Munich, the
Ukrainian veteran Yuliia
upol. “I had children die in my hands, ▲ Pro-Ukrainian
civilians, elderly. I do not know how protesters hold
you can forgive that. Thousands of up placards

Ukraine war Paievska was asked to speak

to the elite of the transatlantic security
and political establishment, including
soldiers have gone through my hands,
thousands of civilians, streams of
blood, rivers of suffering.”
in German
outside the
Munich Security
looms over Hillary Clinton and the Estonian prime
minister, Kaja Kallas, as they lunched
She had herself been captured,
beaten and tortured, and said every
Conference
ANNA SZILÁGYI/EPA

security on a three-course meal, served with

military precision.
“We are the dogs of war,” Paievska
day had been a psychological and
physical humiliation. “War, you know,
it drinks our blood. It is never satisfied

conference said as she introduced herself,

explaining how she had started out
as a volunteer and then worked as
the chief medic at a hospital on the
By Patrick Wintour MUNICH frontline during the siege of Mari-
with our blood. It is always hungry.
The more you give, the more she
wants. But we made a commitment
to our people.
Continued 
She haltingly ended with an appeal.
20 Spotlight
Europe
“To stop the war, we need to kill the
war. Give us weapons to murder the
war. We will manage, just help us a
little bit.”
It was a moment when those at the
Munich Security Conference, a meet-
ing of western politicians, defensive
officials and academics, sensed what
was at stake. It rephrased the ques-
tion that the Ukrainian president,
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had put to the
conference. In phraseology reminis-
cent of President John F Kennedy, he
had said: “Please don’t ask Ukraine
when the war will end. Ask yourself
why Putin is still able to wage this war.”
With Alexei Navalny dead, the
Ukrainians retreated from Avdiivka,
the US Congress deadlocked over sup-
plying a further $60bn in aid and the
shadow of Donald Trump’s return to
the White House hovering over any
discussion, Zelenskiy’s question could
not have been more pertinent.

T
hroughout the weekend, the
Ukrainian delegation faced
a hard enough job in trying
to pitch the fierce urgency of
their plight without tipping over into
defeatism. One French official noted
the dilemma: “A year ago ahead of the
counter-offensive we had too much
euphoria, and now perhaps too much
depression.”
The French talk down suggestions
that Ukrainian morale, supply lines
and logistics are so stretched there
may be a collapse this summer. The
most likely future this year is stale-
mate, and a long war, Paris believes.
But not everyone agrees and there are
so many variables.
Ukrainian officials, for instance,
were reluctant, unlike the Europeans,
to speculate about the implications of
a Trump victory, or how they could
fight on with only European support.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the
Ukrainian president’s office, Andriy
Yermak, insisted, at least in public.
The aim instead was to convince
Europeans that Putin posed a threat
not just to Ukraine but to their homes,
too. Ukraine’s foreign minister,
Dmytro Kuleba, said: “Every time the
Ukrainian armed forces abandon yet
another city that they cannot defend
due to a lack of ammunition, don’t just
think about it in the context of peace
and democracy. Think about the fact
that it means Russian soldiers are a few
kilometres closer to your homes and
your children.”
 Candles are
left in memory of
Alexei Navalny
in front of the
Russian consulate
in Munich last
week
JOHANNES SIMON/GETTY
A debate inside Europe, sometimes
angry, is also stirring about its
own inertia.
The EU recently conceded it would
only be able to deliver half the 1.15m
artillery shells it had promised by the
March deadline it had set itself. Olaf
Scholz, the German chancellor, has
become irritated by the efforts of some
‘Don’t ask EU contributions. French officials,
sometimes in the German chancellor’s
when the sights, say it is not just about billions.
war will “We need greater military clarity. We
need to articulate a more operational
end. Ask and coordinated package of support
why Putin to Ukraine. If you are sending tanks
is still able that you cannot put on the battlefield
because they are too fragile, manoeu-
to wage it’ vreable or do not coordinate you are
Volodymyr not achieving anything,” one said,
Zelenskiy pointing to the damage French Scalp
missiles have inflicted in Crimea.
France is supporting the idea of
Euro defence bonds in which member
states could pool what could amount
to €600bn ($646bn) over the next 10
years to give Europe’s defence indus-
try certainty to invest in production
capabilities. The idea, first raised by
Kallas from frugal Estonia, has not yet
found favour in Germany.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish
prime minister, has become the new
articulate hawk of Europe. “We, Den-
mark, have decided to transfer all our
artillery to Ukraine. So, excuse me, but
the issue is not just about production.
Europe still has military equipment.
We have weapons, ammunition,
air defence systems that we are not
using yet, and we need to transfer
them to Ukraine.”
Petr Pavel, the Czech president,
said his country had identified about
800,000 artillery shells abroad that
could be sent to Ukraine within
weeks, if funding was provided from
other partners.
The message over and over was
to stop obsessing about Trump, and
instead for Europe to put its own house
in order. “It doesn’t matter what the
US comes up with, but we, Europeans,
have to defend ourselves,” Frederik-
sen said. Mark Rutte, the outgoing
Dutch prime minister and tipped to
be the new head of Nato, adopted a

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024


similar tone, urging Europeans to stop
“whining, nagging and complaining
about Trump”.
But however much Europe manages
to shake itself from its torpor, or think
outside the box, as Kallas urged, US
help is essential. “We are on a knife-
edge because Europe, even with all
the financial resources, is not at the
moment capable of producing all the
equipment and ammo that is neces-
sary,” said the Polish foreign minister,
Radosław Sikorski.
Clinton believes Congress will
eventually back the aid package but
the few Republicans present in Munich
seemed unrepentant. It took an iso-
lated and isolationist US senator, JD
Vance, an Ohio Republican, to reflect
that part of America. “The problem
in Ukraine … is that there’s no clear
end point,” he said, adding that the
US did not make enough weapons to
support wars in eastern Europe, the
Middle East and potentially east Asia.
He said he backed “some negotiated
peace” in Ukraine, but any reward for
Putin remains anathema in Europe.
“Yes, we too are democracies,” said
a French official. “We are fragile and
exposed to public opinion. But we
must be crystal clear. There is no
scenario when Ukraine loses, and
when we win.”
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
German U N I T E D S TAT E S
chancellor Olaf
Scholz, front right,
and Ukrainian
Nato-sceptic
president
Volodymyr
Zelenskiy sign
a security
agreement
Trump fires
MICHELE TANTUSSI/GETTY
a wake-up
call to Europe
By Julian Borger WASHINGTON
T
he annual meeting of western
leaders and security officials
in Munich was held this year
under a dark cloud of fore-
boding surrounding Donald Trump’s
potential return to the US presidency.
European governments have been
shaken by Trump’s apparent strength,
and Joe Biden’s weakness, in swing
states, and what the former president
has said this month about Nato.
Trump reportedly contemplated
withdrawal from Nato in his first term,
and in recent statements he has made
clear that, at the very least, he would
not order American troops to go to
the defence of any alliance member
against Russia that had not spent the
Nato target of 2% of GDP on defence.
“No, I would not protect you,”
Trump recalled telling an unnamed
head of state of an important Nato
member. “In fact, I would encourage
them to do whatever the hell they
want. You got to pay your bills.”
Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant
general who was chief of staff of
▼ Donald Trump Trump’s national security council
is said to have
(NSC), echoed this. Kellogg, who is still
considered
one of Trump’s foreign affairs advis-
withdrawing from
ers, suggested to Reuters last week
Nato in his first that any Nato member that fell short
spell in the
of the 2% threshold would have the
White House mutual defence guarantees, in article
GINTS IVUSKANS/
five of the alliance’s founding charter,
AFP/GETTY stripped from them.
Trump’s legal travails p32 
21
“It’s not so much a coalition of the
willing, as a coalition of the billing.
It turns on its head the whole idea of
mutual defence,” said Fiona Hill, who
served as senior director for Russia in
Trump’s NSC but has since been an out-
spoken critic of his approach on Russia.
Speaking from the Munich Security
Conference, Hill said that the growing
prospect of a Nato sceptic in the Oval
Office had concentrated minds among
European officials. “He gave them a
wake-up call,” she said.
In December, Congress passed a
bipartisan bill, with the prospect of a
Trump restoration in mind, prohibit-
ing a US president from unilaterally
withdrawing from the alliance. But by
suggesting he would not honour US
article five obligations, Trump could
significantly damage Nato’s credibility.
Michael McCaul, Republican chair
of the House foreign affairs committee,
suggested last Friday that Trump was
acting as a transactional businessman,
making threats to get Nato partners to
meet their defence spending pledges.
In office, McCaul said, Trump could be
persuaded out of his most destructive
instincts when it came to the alliance.
However, US political observers
predict that if he wins a second term
in November, loyalty will far outweigh
competence or experience in the selec-
tion of a national security team.
Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador
to Nato, said there was a range of sce-
narios for the alliance under a second
Trump presidency. One would be a sort
of passive indifference.
“He could not have an ambassador
and provide no instructions to the
mission, which would largely remain
silent, in which case business contin-
ues,” Daalder, now president of the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said.
Alternatively, Trump could seek to
actively undermine Nato. “As an organ-
isation that operates by consensus,
he could refuse to allow Nato to make
decisions – either by saying no or not
showing up,” Daalder said. “He could
undermine Nato in other ways – refus-
ing to participate in operations, train-
ing, command structure. All this could
bring the alliance to an effective halt.”
He said nothing much could be
done to “Trump-proof” the alliance
in the next few months, but argued
that Europeans should move quickly
to establish a more self-reliant Euro-
pean pillar in Nato.
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
22 Spotlight
Middle East
I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
The jailed
leader who
could be key
to ending
Gaza crisis
By Oliver Holmes
and Peter Beaumont
A
t times of great upheaval in
Palestine, people start to
talk about Marwan Barg-
houti. The 64-year-old pol-
itical leader serving multiple life sen-
tences in an Israeli prison for murder
represents the prospect of a shake-up
to the status quo. Palestinian towns
– and the Israeli-built concrete walls
that cut them up – are covered in graf-
fitied images of Barghouti, his hand-
cuffed hands held high above his head.
Virtually every opinion poll since
his imprisonment two decades ago
show Barghouti to be the favourite
presidential candidate for the Palestin-
ian people, were they able to hold free
elections. A December survey showed
him 40 points ahead of the deeply
unpopular current leader Mahmoud
Abbas but also beating Hamas candi-
dates, including the Islamist militant
group’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh.
With Palestinian factions deeply
divided, Barghouti operates in a mid-
dle ground – respected by secular
nationalists but also Islamists, many
of whom he formed close relation-
ships with in jail. Even Hamas, which
despises the western-friendly circles
he is part of, has called for his release as
part of a proposed Gaza ceasefire deal.
One of seven children born to a poor
farming family in the tiny West Bank
village of Kafr Kober, as a teenager
Barghouti led student movements for
Fatah, the political party founded by
Yasser Arafat of which President Abbas
is now chairman.
In and out of prison during his uni-
versity years, Barghouti was deported
by the Israelis to Jordan during the first
intifada to prevent him from engaging
in the uprising. He was allowed back
during the optimism of the 1990s
peace talks, which he supported.
But when those failed, leading to the
second and much bloodier intifada,
Barghouti played a high-profile public
role as a protest organiser.
It was at that time when Barghouti
came to wider international atten-
tion. A familiar figure at funerals and
protests, Barghouti was sought out by
Palestinian and international journal-
ists for comment.
Patient, self-deprecating and artic-
ulate, he called himself a “normal guy
from the Palestinian street”. His man-
ner suggested he was anything but.
Across the divide Barghouti has backed peaceful
In Israel, Barghouti resistance but also not renounced vio-
is viewed as a lence as a means to end the occupation.
founder of the From jail, he has played a central role,
al-Aqsa Martyrs
and has continued to call for a Palestin-
Brigade, an ian state to be created alongside Israel.
offshoot of Fatah, His letters from jail, some smuggled
which conducted a
series of killings and
suicide bombings.
out, suggest he has abandoned the idea
that negotiating directly with Israel will
end the crisis. Writing in the Guard-
The Israeli ministry
of foreign affairs
ian in 2015, he said: “The real problem
is that Israel has chosen occupation
published an
article accusing
the “terrorist” of
over peace, and used negotiations as
a smokescreen to advance its colonial
project. Every government across the
“spearheading
the bloody second
intifada” as leader
globe knows this simple fact and yet so
many of them pretend that returning
to the failed recipes of the past could
of armed groups
achieve freedom and peace.”
before his 2002
He has long been seen as a succes-
arrest. Barghouti
sor to Abbas, the 88-year-old ailing
did not offer a
leader who heads the internationally
defence at his
trial, where he was recognised Palestinian Authority (PA)
convicted in 2004 but has blocked elections, and who
of involvement Palestinians consistently say should
in five murders, resign. Abbas is deeply unpopular
refusing to because of corruption within the PA
recognise the and because of his coordination with
court’s authority. the Israeli army, leading to claims the
PA is a self-interested organisation that
effectively operates as a “subcontrac-
tor” for the occupation.
Still, Abbas has blocked Barghouti’s
ambitions. Tahani Mustafa, a senior
▼ Israeli soldiers Palestine analyst at the International
patrol in the Crisis Group thinktank, says Abbas “has
West Bank city destroyed any institutional avenue to
of Ramallah in guarantee a legitimate successor”.
front of a Marwan “Abbas does recognise that he is in
Barghouti mural an incredibly weak position. He has
NASSER SHIYOUKHI/AP effectively centralised his power,” she
said this month.
More importantly, Israel has shown
no willingness to free the popular poli-
tician. Notably, it refused to include
him in a 2011 exchange of more than
1,000 Palestinian prisoners for a single
soldier held by Hamas. Yahya Sinwar,
a key planner of the 7 October attack
and Hamas chief in Gaza, was freed in
that exchange.
Barghouti’s release, if it ever came,
would be seen as a moment to shake
up Palestinian politics. Khalil Shi-
kaki, who has polled Palestinians for
more than two decades as director of
the Palestinian Centre for Policy and
Research, puts it simply: “Barghouti
is the single most popular Palestinian
leader alive.” Observer
OLIVER HOLMES IS A GUARDIAN
AND OBSERVER INTERNATIONAL
JOURNALIST; PETER BEAUMONT IS A
SENIOR INTERNATIONAL REPORTER
 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
INDONESIA
‘Betrayal’
A mother’s
anguish as
ex-general
wins power
By Rebecca Ratcliffe and
Richaldo Hariandja JAKARTA
E
very Thursday for the past
17 years, in searing heat and
pouring rain, Maria Catarina
Sumarsih has stood outside
the Indonesian presidential palace,
demanding justice for her son. He was
shot dead in 1998, when authorities
opened fire on students protesting
against the rule of dictator Suharto.
Soon, it is assumed, the palace
behind her will be inhabited by
Prabowo Subianto – former son-in-law
of Suharto and a special commander
under his 32-year brutal and corrupt
regime. He is accused of involvement
in a series of rights abuses, including
enforced disappearances and torture
in the Suharto era, which ended in the
same year that Sumarsih’s son died.
At last week’s vigil, held the day
after Prabowo declared victory in
Indonesia’s presidential election,
Sumarsih vowed to continue her fight
for accountability not only for her son,
Wawan, but for all of the victims killed
under Suharto.
“When Wawan was shot, my grief
transformed into love for others,” she
said. “What I am fighting for is not
only the shooting of Wawan and his
friends, but all cases of serious human
rights violations.”
Sumarsih said she was worried that
the prospect of accountability for past
abuses would fade further under a
Prabowo-led government, and that the
country’s democracy could weaken.
“The possibility of Indonesia returning
to an authoritarian, militaristic and
corrupt country is very open, very
wide open,” she said.
Sumarsih’s son was 20 years old
when he was shot dead. He was a stu-
dent at Atma Jaya Catholic University,
Jakarta, majoring in accounting eco-
nomics, and was part of a volunteer
group that helped injured protesters.
On 13 November 1998, students had
gathered at their campus. Someone
opened fire, she was told, and Wawan’s
friend was shot. Wawan asked permis-
sion to help him. As he tried to do so, a
bullet struck him in the chest.
That day, she had cooked his
favourite food – tamarind vegetable
soup and empal. It was left untouched.
Wawan was buried the next day.
Seventeen people were killed at the
protest. Nine police personnel were
sentenced over the killings, but human
rights groups say that senior figures
have not been held to account.
Muhammad Isnur, head of the Legal
Aid Institute Foundation of Indonesia
nesia
(YLBHI), pointed to National Commis-
mmis-
sion on Human Rights findings that
23
Maria Catarina there may have been serious human
Sumarsih holds rights violations. “This is not an ordi-
up a red card nary incident,” Isnur said.
during a weekly There is no suggestion that Prabowo
protest outside was implicated in the shooting of
the presidential Wawan, but he has been accused of
palace in Jakarta involvement in other acts of violence.
DITA ALANGKARA/AP Of more than 20 activists kidnapped,
13 are still missing. Prabowo admitted
in a 2014 interview with Al Jazeera that
he was involved in kidnappings, but
said he was under orders and that his
actions were legal. He was discharged
from the military over the allegations
and banned from entering the US for
two decades. He is also accused of
involvement in rights abuses in Papua
and Timor-Leste, which he has denied.
In recent years, Prabowo has
softened his image. His campaign post-
‘What I am ers featured a cuddly cartoon version of
him, and at rallies he danced on stage.
fighting Joko Widodo , the outgoing
for is all president, known as Jokowi, has
cases of acknowledged that serious human
rights violations occurred in the
human past, including the incident in which
rights
violations’
Wawan was shot. But Sumarsih, who
previously supported Jokowi, said
he had failed to provide justice and
Maria Catarina
Sumarsih
had instead prioritised personal inter-
ests. Jokowi’s son ran on a joint ticket
Victim Solidarity
Network for
Justice
with Prabowo, and the president’s
tacit support provided a huge boost
to his campaign.
“This is not only a betrayal of justice,
but also tramples on the struggle of the
Indonesian people who are fighting for
democracy and reform,” Sumarsih’s
group Victim Solidarity Network for
Justice said in a statement.
The group urged Jokowi to order
the attorney general to review inves-
tigation files collated by the human
rights commission and form an ad hoc
human rights court to address cases
of enforced disappearances in 1997-
98. It also called for victims and their
families to have access to justice, repa-
ration and guarantees that such events
would not be repeated.
Sumarsih said her weekly vigils
▼ Prabowo would continue. Similar actions had
Subianto has spread to 65 cities across Indonesia,
declared victory she said, and young people had also
in Indonesia’s become involved. “When I am old, or
presidential even when I’m dead, I believe they will
election continue the fight to create an Indone-
TATAN SYUFLANA/AP sia with a just, wealthy and prosperous
society,” she said.
socie
REBE
REBECCA RATCLIFFE IS THE GUARDIAN’S
SOUTH-EAST ASIA CORRESPONDENT;
SOUT
RICHA
RICHALDO HARIANDJA IS A JOURNALIST
BASED IN JAKARTA
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
M ET EOROLOGY
High pressure
UK forecasters
to boldly go a
month ahead
By Robin McKie
T
he mainstay of British casual
conversation – the unex-
pected state of the weather
– is under existential threat.
Scientists plan to make forecasts so
accurate they will be able to deter-
mine weather patterns a month
into the future.
Barbecue misery and Wimbledon
washouts could take a serious hit
– thanks to the new 15-year research
programme that has been launched
by Reading University, in partner-
ship with the UK’s Met Office and the
European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts. The aim is to trans-
form the ability to unravel the minute
influences that determine weather
patterns and uncover the limits of
predictability in the real world.
“A major goal of our work is to be
able to say what the weather will be
like a month ahead,” said Prof Rowan
Sutton, research dean for the environ-
ment at Reading – though he stressed
that it would not be possible to predict,
precisely, a month ahead whether a
particular day would be sunny or rainy.
“However, we would hope to be
able to say we are likely to experience a
period of very wet and windy weather
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
▼ Tennis fans – or enjoy sunny weather – four weeks
sheltering at in advance of a given date,” he added.
Wimbledon last “That will not guarantee you have
summer during sunshine for your wedding day but it
a predictably will undoubtedly have lots of useful
seasonal rain applications – for farmers or energy
delay companies, for example.”
HANNAH MCKAY/
REUTERS
Accurate advance weather forecasts
will become increasingly important
as the planet heats and more extreme
weather events occur, say scientists.
Worsening storms and droughts will
mean that highlighting their arrival
time will be increasingly important
in saving lives and property.
Meteorologists can currently make
forecasts more than a week ahead
with reasonable accuracy – a major
improvement since the 1970s, when
forecasts were only accurate for a day
or two in advance.
To achieve this precision, massive
streams of data are collected from
automated weather stations that dot C L I M AT E C R I SI S
the countryside, deepwater buoys
that warn of incoming Atlantic storms,
weather balloons, transponders on air-
February
craft and ships and satellites. Billions
of bytes of information are then chan-
nelled into some of the world’s most
powerful supercomputers, which
create models of weather patterns.
The result has been the creation of
on course to
‘We are
forecasts of astonishing accuracy for
many days in advance.
be hottest
starting
to resolve
Now scientists want to push these
developments further – though
meteorologists acknowledge there
in human
things will be limits to such improvements.
The number of variables involved in history
at finer calculating weather patterns is vast,
and finer and will eventually combine and over-
whelm efforts at long-term prediction. Unusually hot days and a
resolutions’ However, there are ways to overcome
rapid rise in ocean surface
Prof Pier some of these uncertainties, they
Luigi Vidale say, and the new Reading University temperatures as global
Reading programme – entitled Advancing the heating combines with El Niño
University Frontiers of Earth System Prediction
– is designed to tackle them. By Jonathan Watts
“We are starting to resolve things
F
at finer and finer resolutions, not ebruary is on course to break
just in the atmosphere but in the a record number of heat
oceans, which gives us a much bet- records, meteorologists
ter understanding of how they trans- say, as human-made global
port heat from the equator to the heating and the natural El Niño climate
pole and influence the ways that pattern drive up temperatures on land
storms develop and bring winds and and oceans around the world.
rain to our shores,” said Prof Pier Luigi A little over half way into the
Vidale, the programme’s science direc- shortest month of the year, the heat-
tor. “If we get this right, we are going ing spike had become so pronounced
to make a huge, huge difference to that climate charts were entering new
people’s lives.” Observer territory, particularly for sea-surface
ROBIN MCKIE IS THE OBSERVER’S temperatures that have persisted and
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT EDITOR accelerated to the point where expert

observers are struggling to explain
how the change is happening.
“The planet is warming at an
accelerating rate. We are seeing rapid
temperature increases in the ocean,
the climate’s largest reservoir of heat,”
said Dr Joel Hirschi, the associate head
of marine systems modelling at the UK
National Oceanography Centre. “The
amplitude by which previous sea sur-
face temperatures records were beaten
in 2023 and now 2024 exceed expecta-
tions, though understanding why this
is, is the subject of ongoing research.”
Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Haus-
father said the world was on track for
the hottest February in human his-
tory, after a record January, Decem-
ber, November, October, September,
August, July, June and May. He said
the rise in recent weeks was on course
for 2C of warming above pre-industrial
levels, though this should be the brief,
peak impact of El Niño if it follows the
path of previous years and cools in
the months ahead. That would nor-
mally be good news if a temperature-
lowering La Niña follows, but climate
behaviour had become more erratic.
“[Last year] defied expectations so
much that it’s hard to have as much
confidence in the approaches we have
used to make these predictions in the
past,” Hausfather said. “I’d say Feb-
ruary 2024 is an odds-on favourite
to beat the record set in 2016, but it’s
not a foregone conclusion as weather
models suggest global temperatures
will fall back down in the coming
week. So while I think these extreme
temperatures provide some evidence
of an acceleration in the rate of warm-
ing in recent years – as climate models
expect there to be if CO2 emissions do
not fall but aerosols do – it’s not neces-
sarily worse than we thought.”
The first half of February shocked
weather watchers. Maximiliano
Herrera, who blogs on Extreme Temper-
atures Around the World, described the
surge of thousands of meteorological
Rising temperatures
The first eight days of February
were the hottest on record
Daily average 2-metre global surface temperature, C
18
8 February
2024
16
14
12
1991-2021 average
10
1 Jan 1 Apr 1 Jul
25
140
station heat records as “insane”,
“total madness” and “climatic history
rewritten”. What astonished him was
Number of not just the number of records but the
countries that extent by which many of them sur-
broke monthly passed anything that went before.
heat records in He said Morocco had seen 12
the first half of weather stations register over 33.9C,
February which was not only a national record
for the hottest winter day, but also
more than 5C above average for July.
Last week, monitoring stations as far
apart as South Africa, Saudi Arabia,
Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan,
Colombia, Japan, North Korea ,
the Maldives and Belize registered
monthly heat records. In the first half
of this month, Herrera said 140 coun-
tries broke monthly heat records, simi-
lar to the figures of the last six record
hottest months of 2023 and more than
three times any month before 2023.
O
cean surface heat continues
to astonish seasoned
observers and raises the
prospect of intense storms
later in the year. The hurricane spe-
cialist Michael Lowry tweeted that sea
surface temperatures across the Atlan-
tic main development region, where
most of the US category 3 or stronger
hurricanes form, “are as warm today
in mid-February as they typically are
in middle July. Incredible.”
▲ A wildfire
Sea surface temperatures are in
near Prodromos, “uncharted territory”, said Hirschi,
Greece, in August
who expects March to break last
2023
August’s record by 0.1C to 0.2C. March
SPYROS BAKALIS/
is typically the hottest time of the year
AFP/GETTY for oceans because it is late summer
in the southern hemisphere, which is
home to most of the world’s great seas.
The temperature spikes were
expected, though their amplitude
came as a surprise. Climatologists
are now studying how to attribute
weight to the different causes behind
such anomalies.
Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist
for The Nature Conservancy, said the
2023
uncertainty about the interaction of
the different factors was a reminder
that we do not fully understand how
the complex Earth system is respond-
ing to unprecedented radiative forc-
ing. “This is happening at a much
faster rate than ever documented in
the past,” she said. “If anything, we
are much more likely to underestimate
the impact of those changes on human
All years 1940 to 2022
society than to overestimate them.”
1 Oct 31 Dec JONATHAN WATTS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Environment

O
OCEANS n an overcast morning, sev-
eral kilometres off the east
coast of Sardinia, four men
jump into a net where 49
“We carry on a tradition that’s thou- ▼ Death comes
sands of years old,” Biggio says. “We quickly, in a tech-
continue it with pride.” nique that, while
The harvest is violent and can seem bloody, may be

Traditional
giant Atlantic bluefin tuna are fight- barbaric, as the dying tuna are hooked more humane
ing for their lives. with a gaff, stabbed and hoisted on than suffocation
For more than 30 minutes, the men to boats. However, fishing experts in trawler nets

fishers in struggle in a frenzy of nets, tails, fins

and sleek silvery bodies before finally
securing a metal hook through the gills
regard it as a rare sustainable method
of catching bluefin tuna, one of the
world’s most overfished species.

Italy fight of the nearest fish. From one of the

seven wooden boats that frame this
càmira dâ morti (“chamber of death”),
Despite its merits, Italy’s tonnare
face extinction. But they are not dis-
appearing because of a lack of fish.

for right to Luigi Biggio yells for his men to pull.

catch tuna
Tonnare and their ancient
practices face extinction as a
few big fleets hold the lion’s
share of quotas and permits
By Sandali Handagama
Photographs by Agostino Petroni
CARLOFORTE, SARDINIA
As 28 men look on, a majestic crea-
ture about three metres long, weighing
120kg is raised out of the water with a
pulley. On the biggest boat, one man
swiftly cuts its jugular and the vessel
fills with blood.
Biggio, 57, runs a tonnara, the Ital-
ian version of an ancient Mediter-
ranean fishing custom, which traps
and harvests bluefin tuna in the grue-
some struggle known in Italy as the
mattanza (or “killing”). Biggio comes
from a long line of raís (from the Ara-
bic for chief), almost sacred leaders of
the hunt – a mantle passed down from
father to son in designated families.
While the practice was threatened in
the early 2000s by a collapse in tuna
populations due to commercial over-
fishing, EU regulations have helped
recover these numbers over the past
decade. But Italy’s small-scale and
traditional fishers have largely failed ‘We take
to secure permits under successive
governments since the start of the pride in
quota system, and are now struggling carrying on
to compete with big fleets.
While in the 1920s, there were more
a tradition
than 50 groups fishing this way across that is
Italy, Giuliano Greco and his family, thousands
who own the tonnara that Biggio runs,
also own half of the only other such of years
fishery that is still active. old’
 Seascape: the state of our oceans
A series drawing attention to the dramatic 27
changes taking place in our oceans, and
the innovations under way to tackle them

Unlike the modern seiners and
trawlers that catch everything in their
paths, the nets used by the tonnara are
meticulously designed to let fishers
select only the adult tuna of a shoal,
which ensures the fish return the
next season. It also employs dozens
of people in the community.
With its brutal but swift harvest, the
fish may suffer less compared to the
slow suffocation they face in trawler
nets. However, even the WWF – which
considers the tonnara to be a sustain-
able practice – has warned against
making a spectacle of the slaughter.
Today the tuna quotas in Italy are
held by a few boats. “They fish tuna
with Italian quotas and then sell the
fish through Malta all over the world
– except in Italy,” says Fabio Micalizzi,
a Sicilian fisher fighting for the fair
distribution of fishing quotas.
The Atlantic bluefin tuna is one of
the most expensive and sought-after
fish in the world, selling for thousands
of US dollars in Asian markets. In the
1960s, as global demand grew, large-
scale fishing methods, such as purse
seine fishing and longline fishing,
entered the scene.
Purse seine, the most common
method used for commercial tuna fish-
ing, involves dropping a cylindrical
net “curtain” enclosing entire shoals
and closing it up at the bottom. These
methods are also known to result in
the highest bycatch, the unwanted fish
and other sea creatures that become
trapped in the nets.
As a result, bluefin tuna popula-
tions plummeted. By the early 2000s,
numbers in the Mediterranean had
dropped to critical levels.
Each tuna
is promptly
weighed once the
boats go back to
the Carloforte
canning factory
So far, a positive tale of fish stock
recovery – but the quotas have been
“truly disastrous” for small fishers,
says Greco. The EU plan anticipated
member states distributing the quo-
tas among their local fishers. But in
Italy these became skewed toward
larger companies. As a result, it’s ille-
gal for many small fishers in Italy to
catch tuna. Even tuna bycatch could
spell penalties for those responsible.
“Whether you want it or not, the tuna
jump into your boat,” says Sicilian
practice because it’s easily controlled
and highly selective, he adds.
Today, much of the wild tuna
caught in Italy is slowly transported
in large floating cages to places such as
Malta, Spain and Croatia. There, they
are fattened for up to six months to
appease lucrative markets like Japan
that seek out large fish with high fat
content. “There is nothing illegal in
this practice,” Buzzi says. “But the
impact of farming a tuna in a cage is
not even comparable to the environ-
mental impact of catching a wild tuna
and consuming it.”
This year, before the harvest, Greco
says his team released a shoal of 1,200
young tuna from their nets because
they were too small. But running a ton-
nara isn’t quick or cheap. While a big
seiner can go out with a few fishers and
make the entire year’s catch in a week,
the preparation and execution of the
tonnara takes about six months. The
multi-chambered nets spanning 3km
(and 40 metres deep) take two months
to prepare and two days to mount at
sea using 122 anchors.
Greco says he invests €1.5m ($1.6m)
each year to run the tonnara, and
employs about 50 people. However,
to fund what is one of the last two
remaining tonnara in Italy, he reluc-
tantly sells 75% of his trapped tuna to
large-scale tuna cagers.
“I don’t like fattening them – it
doesn’t create first-rate fish and it pol-
lutes,” says Greco. “If I had the choice,
I would have declared cages illegal.”
But he is also hopeful. His tonnara
is open to tourists who want to learn
about the practice – and it doesn’t hurt
that they buy his premium-quality
canned tuna for €25 a pop.

I
n an effort to stop the overfishing,
in 2009, the EU implemented an
extensive recovery plan. It allo-
cated fishing quotas to member
states, put limits on the number of
fisher Micalizzi. “If we professional
fishermen catch it we become killers
and thieves.”
In 2023, the Italian government
redistributed 295 tonnes (out of a total
At sea, the harvest is done, and one
of the fishers calls for silence. “May
the holy sacrament be thanked. In the
name of Saint Anthony, let go,” he says.
The others respond: “Aoooohh!” Most

boats allowed to fish and mandated a
30kg minimum weight for fished tuna.
The ambitious plan seemingly paid
off. Tuna populations rebounded so
successfully that, since 2014, there
have been large boats “which manage
to capture their yearly tuna quota in a
day”, according to Alessandro Buzzi,
the regional manager of fisheries at the
WWF Mediterranean Marine Initia-
tive. “Many newspapers still report
that tuna is an endangered species.
Luckily, the tuna can’t read the stu-
pid things that humans write because
otherwise it would get worried.”
of 5,282 tonnes) to small fishers. But
Micalizzi says it’s far too little, espe-
cially since most of the Italian tonnes
are allocated to a handful of seiners
and longliners.
The tonnara represents one of the
oldest human industrial activities,
according to Antonio Di Natale, a
former director of the tuna research
programme at the International
Commission for the Conservation of
Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), who says it
deserves to be protected by Unesco as
an “intangible asset of humanity”. It’s
also invaluable as a sustainable fishing
€25
of Biggio’s team return to land with
their 49 giants – six tonnes in total.
But one boat stays behind. On it,
Price of a can several exhausted fishers sip local
($27) of Tonnara Ichnusa beer and bask in the sun. “In
di Carloforte these last few years, the tuna have
tuna. It takes got bigger and bigger,” says Stefano
about six months Sanna, lost in thought. He has worked
to prepare and as a tonnara fisher for 25 years. “So in
execute a catch, that sense, the quota worked.”
and around SANDALI HANDAGAMA IS A WRITER
€1.5m to run the AND EDITOR; AGOSTINO PETRONI IS
tonnara, which AN ITALIAN JOURNALIST
employs about This story was produced in
50 people partnership with the Pulitzer Center

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

28 Spotlight
South America
BR A ZIL
Hot-air balloon fans
flying in face of law
By Tom Phillips RIO DE JANEIRO
C
ats chased shadows through
the pre-dawn gloom as the
men hit the streets of subur-
ban Rio and set off towards
their objective. “I’ve not slept,” said
one early riser, a bushy-bearded
office worker called Arthur Araújo, as
he emerged from his home to fulfil a
“dream” one year in the making.
The group’s convoy navigated
mountain roads and country lanes,
before stopping at a farmstead in the
rainforest-cloaked sierra separat-
ing the city from the rest of Brazil.
They got out of their cars, jumped
a barbed wire fence and hiked into
the meadows. Onlookers might have
mistaken them for landless activists
occupying an unproductive ranch,
or ravers flocking to an underground
event. In fact, they were hot air balloon
fanatics known in Brazil as baloeiros
who gather once a year to send their
enormous kaleidoscopic creations
into the skies.
“Balloons are my life – they’ve been
my life ever since I was a kid,” said
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
a 46-year-old balloon freak and kite
maker called Márcio Júnior. He caught
the balloon bug off his mother while
growing up in 1980s Rio. She took
him to balloon festivals where Júnior
would sprint after the balloons as they
drifted away. “I went nuts … I was head
over heels in love!” he recalled.
Launching balloons is a tradi-
tion brought to Brazil by its former
coloniser, Portugal. It took root in
Rio’s working-class suburbs in the
1950s before spreading to São Paulo
and cities in the south. Today Brazil
has hundreds of competing balloon
turmas (crews or gangs) who hold
annual tournaments.
As the movement flourished, Rio
became the cradle of gigantismo – the
construction of astonishingly flam-
▲ Balloon boyant balloons, some the size of
enthusiasts,
known as
baloeiros, rise
before dawn
to launch their
creations at an
annual event
 The team use a
blowtorch to fill a
balloon with hot
air before launch
Photographs by
Alan Lima
10-storey buildings, others laden with
fireworks to ensure they go up with a
bang. After the balloons are released,
recovery crews give chase in cars and
speedboats hoping to gain prestige or
a prize by salvaging them before rivals.
Guided by GPS trackers attached to
the balloons, the rescuers track them
(sometimes for days) through the
countryside or out to sea during per-
ilous Wacky Races-style adventures.
“Sometimes you’ll have 10 cars giving
chase but perhaps only three will make
it to the end,” said one rescue driver,
who called his balloon-hunting esca-
pades “an inexplicable love”.
Araújo, 30, whose crew is named
Balo Céu (Heavenly Balloons), called
ballooning a key part of suburban cul-
ture and a family obsession passed
from generation to generation. “It’s
a passion – we just love it. We love
the adrenaline,” he said.
But ballooning was outlawed in
1998 because of the risk to public
safety and the environment, and is
punishable with up to three years
in jail. A hotline exists for citizens
to snitch on baloeiros – whom many
consider foolhardy tearaways who
put their own pleasure before other
people’s lives.
Speaking to the newspaper O Globo
last year, the police chief tasked with
foiling Rio’s baloeiros insisted balloon-
ing was a crime, not a cultural practice.
As well as endangering aircraft and
vehicles, balloons landed on homes,
power lines or petrol stations, causing
explosions, forest fires and death.
Balo Céu’s members played down
such concerns as they prepared
to launch the group’s largest crea-
tion since it was founded in 2012:
an 18-metre-tall balloon made up
of nearly 150,000 5cm x 5cm tissue-
paper tiles that had been painstakingly
stitched together.
“It’s true there are balloons that
might come down and start a fire,”
Araújo admitted. “But when a bal-
loon’s released properly … has the
correct weight and [flies at] the right
height, its flame will have gone out by
the time it comes down.”
There was a family atmosphere as
young children and their balloon-mad
parents gathered before Christmas to
see off Balo Céu’s balloon. “This is all
about union and companionship,”
said Natio Santos, 38, who is one of
the group’s newest members.
TOM PHILLIPS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT
30 Spotlight
Science

Some of the first hip

and knee replacements
were done in the late
19th century. Many
were carried out by Prof
Themistocles Gluck in
Germany, who put ivory
implants in patients.

H E A LT H

Hip op, I
an Doncaster is remarkably chip-
per for a man about to undergo
major surgery. “I have a busy life.
So it’s nice to have a break,” he
Pre-op, he has the air of someone
who has watched a YouTube video
or two. “It’s brutal stuff. They cut the
knee in half. They rip it apart. I mean,

don’t stop jokes. It is 8.30am on a chilly December

morning and here at Warwick hospi-
tal he is about to receive a new knee
orthopaedic surgery is carpentry, isn’t
it?” Doncaster says. He’s not wrong:
when it comes to joint replacements,

Inside the – or part of one.

At 62, Doncaster has always been
active: he played rugby when young,
the tools of the trade wouldn’t look
out of place in a workshop.
After donning a gown and receiving

world of joint until a knee injury and subsequent

operation meant he had to trade that
in for other sports. But now the knee
anaesthetic into his spine, Doncaster
is wheeled into the theatre and his
leg swiftly wrapped in a yellow anti-
ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPHE GOWANS/GUARDIAN DESIGN

replacements
is causing problems again. As a self-
employed chartered engineer, he
needs to be able to get up and down
tower blocks. Even going hiking
with his wife seems a wistful dream.
“Going forward, it’s only going to get
microbial film.
Half a dozen or so nurses clad in
blue scrubs and masks are ready for
action. What is undoubtedly a big day
for Doncaster is just a normal morning

A new hip or knee is no longer just for older
people. With thousands of operations in the UK
each year, can technological advances help?
By Nicola Davis
59
worse,” he says.
Which is why Doncaster is having a
patellofemoral replacement, a partial
knee replacement in which the worn-
out cartilage that covers the end of the
femur and underside of the kneecap Waiting time in weeks for a knee
will be removed and implants inserted. replacement in West Suffolk

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024


98k
The number of first-time knee
replacement procedures in 2022
for the team: typically, such opera-
tions are finished in just over an hour.
The nurses check they have the right
patient, and the right procedure, and
ensure all the instruments – from hefty
power tools to delicate scalpels – are
primed for use.
Somewhere in the room, a radio is
playing Dusty Springfield as the con-
sultant orthopaedic surgeon, Moham-
mad Faisal, picks up a scalpel and cuts
into Doncaster’s knee. The tissue peels
to the sides and is hooked back. Next,
Faisal dissects the muscle and some-
thing white becomes visible: the bone.
He taps the knee. From the sound, he
says, it is clear the cartilage between
the kneecap and femur has eroded.
He flips Doncaster’s kneecap over and
picks up a large power drill to secure
a jig and cutting guide to the femur.
Then Faisal reaches for the power saw.
Off comes the top of the femur, with
flecks of bone flying around the blade.
Faisal fits another guide before pick-
ing up a trial implant, a hammer and
a rod-like instrument. He applies the
latter to the former and hits it. Hard.
According to the National Joint
Registry (NJR), which covers Eng-
land, Wales and Northern Ireland, the
Isle of Man and Guernsey, there were
99,043 primary hip replacement pro-
cedures in 2022 and 98,469 primary
knee replacement procedures, a fig-
ure that includes partial replacements.
(“Primary” meaning it is the first time
that particular joint has been replaced
in the patient.)
Prevalence is highest in people in
their mid to late-70s. Data from NHS
England for 2021/22 reveals that,
among women aged 75 to 79, the
rate of hip replacements was 621.8
per 100,000; while for knee replace-
ments, including partial ones, it was
649.2 per 100,000. For men of a similar
age, the figures were 420.6 and 587.7
per 100,000 respectively. But these are
no longer operations of old age.
“Hip and knee replacements are
getting more and more common
because we are doing them earlier,”
says Faisal.
People are also becoming heavier:
the NJR statistics reveal the average
BMI of a hip-replacement patient
is 28.7 – overweight – while for knee
replacement patients it is 30.7,
which is obese.
“If you’re heavy you’ll wear your
joints down quicker,” says Faisal.
F
aisal’s second patient –
78-year-old Lesley Gisbourne
– is about to have her hip
replaced. Her tissues glis-
ten as a huge incision is held open by
retractors, the light illuminating a ball
and socket that has never before seen
the light of day.
In what seems like a blink of an eye,
Faisal has taken the electric saw and
the top of Gisbourne’s femur is in his
hand. About the size of a plum, it rolls
around his palm like a huge, gleam-
ing marble. Again, the power tools are
wielded: a huge drill with a fearsome
attachment removes tissue from the
socket of the joint, and a hammer
knocks new components into place.
The refined skill, knowledge and
dexterity required is startling. Yet as
Faisal picks up the new ball for the joint
– a smooth, polished, silvery sphere –
there is a sense of hope. Because when
Gisbourne wakes up, she will finally
have the chance to walk without pain.
Data from NHS England reveals 93%
of hip replacement patients thought
the results of their operation were
excellent, very good or good. “They
are called ‘forgotten hips’,” says
Faisal. “Because after a year patients
are able to get back to all their nor-
mal activities.” Satisfaction with
knees is lower, Faisal notes, because
the joint is more complex. Yet 87%
of patients rate te ttheir outcomes
similarly positively.
siti
But there er is room for
improvement.
me Researchers
have been n developing mate-
rials that wear
w down slower
GRAEME ROBERTSON
31
‘They are yet remain biocompatible. The latter,
Faisal notes, is crucial. “In the lab,
“forgotten metal-on-metal hips were thought to
hips”. be the best thing because they would
last for a very long time,” he says. “But
After a year in the body, because of the metal shed-
patients ding, they caused a reaction.” The
are back upshot was a medical scandal.
Prof Richard M Hall of the Univer-
to normal’ sity of Birmingham says that new
Mohammad materials such as highly cross-linked
Faisal polyethylene have boosted the life
Surgeon of implants.
Other researchers, including Dr
Edgars Kelmers of the University of
Leeds, have been working on “smart
joints” that, says Kelmers, could
allow researchers to gather data on
the stresses and strains in the joints.
There are also potential advances
in how knee and hip replacements are
carried out. “We have robotics, and
navigation, to put components in more
precisely, to try to help us balance the
knee better,” says Chethan Jayadev, a
consultant orthopaedic knee surgeon
at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hos-
pital in Stanmore, London.
Experts are also finding ways to
avoid knee and hip replacements –
be it through cartilage transplants or
stem-cell therapies. However, several
national regulatory bodies have dis-
continued the use of stem-cell thera-
pies for joints amid concerns over a
lack of evidence that they work.
Unfortunately, by the time most
people see a surgeon about their joint
pain, osteoarthritis has set in.
“Joints can be considered as organs
for movement,” says Jayadev. “Like
other organs of the body, [such as]
the kidney or liver, joints can
In the 1960s, John undergo failure. That’s what osteo-
Charnley, a British arthritis is.”
orthopaedic surgeon, Once eligible for a replace-
revolutionised joint ment, many have to endure
replacements with a new
lengthy waiting lists . The
“low-friction” hip and
website of West Suffolk NHS
devised the technique
for the operation. Foundation trust – one of the few
to clearly publish its waiting times
– reveals the average wait for a hip
or knee replacement is currently 57 or
59 weeks respectively. This, despite
the NHS constitution including a right
for patients to receive such surgery
within 18 weeks.
But it can be worth the wait. For
patients such as Gisbourne, the out-
look is bright, with a new hip offering
her the chance to be pain-free at last.
“Pain-free and jiving,” Faisal smiles.
NICOLA DAVIS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America
A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Boom to bust?
How Trump
recast himself
from business
tycoon to victim
By Callum Jones NEW YORK
From Trump Tower
on Fifth Avenue to the
Trump Building on Wall
Street, the Trump World
Tower by the United Nations to the
Trump International overlooking
Central Park, Donald Trump has
stamped his name on skyscrapers
across New York City.
This real estate empire was the
springboard for Trump’s ascent
from tabloid fodder to reality
TV stardom, and ultimately the
presidency, all built on his self-
projected image as America’s most
famous businessman.
While the reality of Trump’s
business acumen – and the true
extent of his wealth – have long
been questioned, last Friday Judge
Arthur Engoron for ever tarnished
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
his gilded image, finding Trump
and his allies guilty of frauds that
“shock the conscience” and a “lack
of contrition and remorse [that]
borders on pathological”.
Trump was ordered to pay
$354.9m plus pre-judgment interest
and was banned from leading a
New York business for three years
after a court found that he and his
associates fraudulently overstated
his net worth. The Trump
Organization was wrenched from
his family’s control – and its future
looks far from certain.
For decades, the former president
has portrayed himself as a brash,
bronzed, brilliant businessman
who ruled the Manhattan skyline.
Whether lecturing Apprentice
contestants, charming voters, or
bragging to fellow world leaders,
he could point to more than a
dozen Trump-branded towers as
evidence of all he had achieved. But
the outcome of the civil fraud trial
leaves the Trump Organization, and
the real estate career of its founder,
on the brink of failure.
Yet, just as he is separated from
his business empire, his political
machine is gearing up to propel him
back into the Oval Office.
Trump has marched closer to
the Republican nomination amid –
not despite – these legal woes. He
has tried to utilise this trial, and
the others he faces, to bankroll his
comeback campaign. They amount
to politicised “witch-hunts”, he has
told loyal supporters.
 Donald Trump Minutes after Trump left the first
opens Trump day of his civil fraud trial in October,
International his machine sent out a fundraising
hotel in 1997 email. “I just left the courthouse,”
JAMES HUGHES/NEW it began, claiming that politicians
YORK DAILY NEWS /GETTY
were “weaponising the legal system
to try and completely destroy me”
and requesting contributions “of
ANY amount – truly, even just
$1 – to peacefully DEFEND our
movement from the never-ending
witch hunts”.
Now, having heard the evidence,
Engoron has imposed an eyewatering
financial penalty. How Trump foots
this bill is an open question. While
his fortune has been estimated at
around $2.3bn, most of this is tied
up in the very business empire at
the heart of this case.
The money is still coming in.
Public scrutiny Trump has proven to be a highly
Over 11 weeks effective fundraiser. His campaign
in a Manhattan raised about $44m in the second
courtroom, half of last year. His legal battles
appear to have provided an
the Trump
Organization was additional boost.
publicly exposed Beyond his race to regain the
to forensic scrutiny
for the first time.
presidency, Trump is now grappling
with legal penalties that could
This is a business
that has said it has
“set new standards
destroy the personal cash pile he
has said is at his disposal. Even
before last Friday’s decision, he
of excellence”.
Judge Arthur
had been ordered to pay $83.3m to
E Jean Carroll. The former president
Engoron took
an altogether
different view.
claimed in a deposition last year to
have “substantially in excess” of
$400m – a huge sum, but one that
Before the trial
would be wiped out by these bills.
even started, he
This process has a long way left
ruled that the
to run. “There’s enough uncertainty
former president
that it’s not an immediate concern,”
had committed
said Gregory Germain, a professor of
fraud for years by
law at Syracuse University. Trump
exaggerating the
has already appealed Engoron’s
value of his assets.
initial ruling, and is widely expected
to do the same with this decision.
The former president has
repeatedly pledged to fight what
he argues is a gross injustice. Last
Friday, Trump once again attacked
the “tyrannical Abuse of Power”
he claims is arrayed against him
and the “liquid and beautiful
Corporate Empire that started in
New York, and has been successful
all around the world”.
In November, the American
people will deliver their verdict on
whose story they believe.
CALLUM JONES IS DEPUTY BUSINESS
EDITOR FOR GUARDIAN US
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Cellphone
generation
hung up on
a landline
renaissance
By Alaina Demopoulos
L
andlines are nearing obso-
lescence. For many young
people, they’ve gone the way
of CD-Roms, cassette tapes
and the humble printer. On TikTok,
parents film their children holding wall
phones like archival pieces, unsure of
how to place a call. Payphones are long
gone, too. But not everyone’s ready
to hang up the curly-corded receiver.
Nicole Randone, a 24-year-old
from Westchester, New York, takes
calls from her bedroom using a purple
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen-branded
landline first sold in 2003, when she
was three years old. “One of my first
memories is the tan landline that my
parents had mounted to the kitchen
wall,” Randone said. “I always fan-
tasised about the day I’d have one in
my own room.”
All of Randone’s style takes
influence from what she calls “2000s
nostalgia” – on Instagram, she posts
to her audience of 118,000 followers
showing off a bedroom decorated with
a bright pink boombox, Von Dutch
accessories and Chad Michael Murray
wall posters. “Having a landline really
bridges that gap between reality and
my childhood fantasy,” Randone said.
“I feel like the main character in my
favourite TV shows – One Tree Hill,
The OC, Gilmore Girls – when I use it.”
The overwhelming majority of
American adults do not own land-
lines. According to the Washington
Post, barely a quarter of Americans
lived in homes that had one in 2022.
The number has basically death-
dropped since 2010, when about 63%
of Americans had both wireless and
landline options.
Service providers are closer than
ever to phasing out landlines: in Cali-
fornia, AT&T proposed doing away
with landline phones altogether,
appealing to the state’s public utilities
commission for permission to cut ser-
vice. The telecommunications giant
called landlines a “historical curiosity
that’s no longer necessary”.
Maybe so, but that’s exactly why
some gen Z customers are so charmed
by the analogue tech. They don’t need
the service; they still use cellphones
for most daily tasks. Instead, they
appreciate the aesthetic of the land-
line. It reminds them of a simpler, pre-
digital era. Landlines are how you talk
to your friends for hours, where con-
versations go deeper than the standard
“wyd” text message.
“When people see my landline,
they treat it like a toy,” Randone
added. “Since I’m an influencer, I’m
constantly online, so it’s really nice
to disconnect and it almost feels like
an escape.”
Sunny bought her Hello Kitty
landline after seeing someone on Tik-
Tok show off their frog-shaped phone.
(Sunny asked that her last name not
be used for privacy reasons.) She later
learned that she could buy an adapter
to connect her iPhone to the landline,
which makes it more convenient; the
adapter connects to Bluetooth and
 Sunny paid $30
for her Hello Kitty
landline after
seeing a frog-
shaped phone on
Tik-Tok
SUNNY
▲ Sam Casper’s
landline setup
at home in West
pairs with her mobile phone, which
means the landline shares a number
with her iPhone, and calls go to both
Hollywood
SAM CASPER
devices. “I love the novelty of talking
to my friends and sitting in one place,”
Sunny said. “When I’m having a long
text conversation with a friend, I’ll
just ask if we can speak over the phone
and catch up.”
Sam Casper, a 27-year-old singer-
songwriter who lives in West
Hollywood, owns a light pink Crosley
landline. “It was my mom’s husband’s
grandma’s phone,” she said. “But it’s
hilarious, because saying that makes
you think it would be old, but she
bought it from Urban Outfitters a
▼ Nicole Randone few years ago.”
says having a Casper uses the phone to speak
landline allows with friends, some of whom have
her to live ‘my their own landlines, too. “It’s so cute
childhood dream’ and romantic,” she said. “It’s very Sex
NICOLE RANDONE and the City, which is why we started
doing it. I really loathe cellphones,
because everyone cancels at the last
minute these days through text, which
I find so absurd.”
Casper keeps her friends’ phone
numbers listed on a napkin from the
Chateau Marmont that sits next to her
phone. Another part of her setup: “I
have a tape – what’s it called? – a voice
box thing … a voicemail machine,” she
added. Her phone service combined
with wifi used to cost around $130 a
month, but she called her provider and
talked it down to $82.
Not everyone gets to speak to
Casper on her landline. She’s “selec-
tive” about who receives that phone
number, which is separate from her
mobile number.
“There’s no caller ID, so I can’t
screen who’s calling,” she said. “If
I meet a new friend and they’re the
type of person I’d invite back to my
house, they get the landline. When-
ever I hear my phone ringing, I get so
giddy. I love to just sit there and talk
and twirl the little cord.”
ALAINA DEMOPOULOS IS A FEATURES
WRITER FOR GUARDIAN US
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
 35

From the academic

who says humanity
has five years left, to
the workers worried
for their future,
there’s a growing
band of neo-luddite
experts who believe
it’s time to say no to
artificial intelligence.
Even if that means
taking up arms …
By Tom Lamont

ILLUSTRATION BY LISA SHEEHAN

36 Robot wars

Talking head
Nick Hilton pre-
sents a podcast
called The Ned
Ludd Radio Hour
MARK CHILVERS

LIEZER YUDKOWSKY, A 44-YEAR-OLD academic

wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair
and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for
a novice like me – that every single person we know and
love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious
self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not
realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a
bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower
or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred
of a chance that humanity survives.”
It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small
but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and
other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our
spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tend-
ing. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think
the way they do. I want to know how they would render
change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most
pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope.
He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine
Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and
you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s
My work is tech-based. I
theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to
can’t avoid it. I don’t claim
im to
put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current
remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years.
live in the woods. But I am
Could be two years, could be 10.” By “remaining timeline”,
Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought anxious. I feel things fraying
end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think
Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure
in the development of human-made artificial intelligences
– AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon
evolve from their current state of “Ooh, look at that!” smart- how – centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrial-
ness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, ising England resisted advances in the textile industry that
too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being
Don’t imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence – he came
advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to to sympathise with its modern reimagining.
picture “an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times “Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe
faster than us”, in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many three definitions,” says Hilton. “Older people will some-
for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to. times say, ‘Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I’m such
Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about a luddite!’ And what they mean is, they haven’t been able to
this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that keep pace with technological change.” Then there are the
advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are people who actively reject modern devices and appliances,
grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be
the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; called that) as well. “But, in its purer historical sense, the
perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something? term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of
A long way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would
Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to definitely describe myself as one.”
technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly
host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define them-
Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his selves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on
kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, the phone while he runs errands around town. We first
frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. “Write made contact over social media. We set a date via email.
down ‘beautiful’ in your notebook,” encourages Hilton, Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seam-
31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a less transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing
freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024


each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social
fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me,
luddism is about this idea that just because a technology
exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just
because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve
rolled out some advancement. We should be continually
sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in
work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me,
a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically
and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower,
deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something
that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best
interests at heart. Technological development is shaped
by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted
towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the
interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition
of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines
because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.”
HERE A TECHNO-PESSIMIST like Yud-
kowsky would have us address the
biggest-picture threats conceivable
(to the point at which our fingers are
fumbling for the nuclear codes), neo-
luddites tend to focus on ground-level
concerns. Employment, especially,
because this is where technology
enriched by AIs seems to be causing
the most pain. Lorry drivers have their
mileage minutely tracked, their rest hours questioned. Desk
workers may sit in front of cameras that snap pictures at
random intervals, ensuring attendance and attention.
You could call these workplace efficiencies. You could call
them gross affronts. Guess which the luddites would argue.
Labour rights go to the very historical core of this movement.
Hilton called his podcast The Ned Ludd Radio Hour to
honour a man who might have lived about 250 years ago
or might never have lived at all. As Hilton has explained
37
on his show, Ned Ludd is thought to have been a textile
worker living in the English Midlands in the late 1770s.
It’s said he smashed a few weaving machines after being
flogged for his idleness on the job. Something about the
smashing might have resonated with his peers. As Hilton
has explained: “Within a few decades, the veracity of Ludd’s
identity would be lost for ever, but the name would live on.
The luddites became an organised band of frame-breakers
in the 1810s. They fought the Industrial Revolution … and
they lost. They lost big time. In fact, they lost so badly that
the reality of their name became a victim of [obfuscation].”
The history of the luddite rebellion is taught in British
schools – but confusedly, in a way that allowed for at least
some of us, me included, to come away with an idea that
to be a luddite is to be naive or else fearful and monk-ish.
As Hilton walks me through from his kitchen to his lounge,
a room busy with the interconnected equipment he uses
to make his podcasts, he feels the need to apologise. By at
least one definition of the word, “I live a very not-luddite
life,” Hilton says, gesturing helplessly at open laptop, wire-
less earbuds, towering mic. “My work is tech-based. I can’t
avoid it. I don’t claim to be some person living in the woods.
But I am anxious. I feel things fraying.”
T IS THIS PREMONITION of a fraying that has
brought others to a modern version of luddism.
An academic called Jathan Sadowski was one of
the first to knit together anxieties about our quick-
ening tech revolution with the anxieties of those
weavers who took a stand against the infringe-
ments of an earlier machine age. “Luddism is
founded on a politics of refusal, which in reality
▼ Art attack just means having the right and ability to say no
Molly Crabapple to things that directly impact upon your life,”
believes techno- Sadowski says. “This should not be treated as an extreme
logical develop- stance, and yet in a culture that fetishises technology for its
ment is shaped by own sake, saying no to technology is unthinkable.”
money and power At least, that was the case until 2023 – a year in
TIMOTHY O’CONNELL which ChatGPT (developed by a company called OpenAI),
Bard (developed by Google) and other user-friendly
AIs were embraced by the world. At the same time, image
generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney wowed people
with their simulacrum photos and graphic art. “They won’t
be replacing the prime minister with ChatGPT or the gov-
ernor of the Bank of England with Bard,” Hilton has said
on his podcast. “They won’t be swapping out Christopher
Nolan for Dali or Martin Scorsese for Midjourney, but fat
will be cut from the great labour steak.”
In January 2023, a display of AI-generated landscapes,
projected on to the wall of a gallery in Vermont, was van-
dalised with the words “AI IS THEFT”. Creative profession-
als were starting to feel exploited. Masses of uncredited,
unpaid-for human work was being harvested from the
internet and repurposed by clever generative AIs. In spring
2023, Crabapple organised an open letter that called for
restrictions on this “vampirical” practice. There were more
open letters including one that called for a six-month pause
on the development of any new AIs.
There were instances of direct action, some serious,
some tongue-in-cheek or halfway between. In Los Angeles,
opponents of those omnipresent Ring camera doorbells
distributed “Anti Ring” stickers to be gummed over
the lenses of the devices. A group of San Franciscans 
calling themselves Safe Street Rebel started seizing
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
38 Robot wars
traffic cones and placing them on the bonnets of the city’s
self-driving cars, a quick way of confusing the cars’ sensors
and rendering them inoperable. Brian Merchant, a writer
who last year published Blood in the Machine, a history
of luddism, appeared at an event with Safe Street Rebel
in November 2023. In front of cheering Californians, he
staged a “luddite tribunal”, smashing devices the crowd
deemed superfluous.
“There’s a sense that this is now in the realm of the pos-
sible, to actually reject outright parts or uses of a technology
without looking foolish,” Merchant tells me. As we speak,
he is preparing for another tribunal, this time at a bookshop
called Page Against the Machine.
HERE ARE TECHNO SCEPTIC SCEPTICS, of course,
those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremon-
ger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia
bin of history, along with their 19th-century
antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator
Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto
titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism,
describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future
beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking
– “if we want it”, Bastani wrote. Last year, the
Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening
Standard that called pessimism about technology “irra-
tional”. Afolami advised the paper’s readers in bold type:
Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used
his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of
chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an
AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk
described AI as the “most disruptive force in history”, some-
thing that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe
for ill. “You’re not selling this,” joked Sunak at one point.
Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his
luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with
work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think
what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,” Hilton
says. The writer Riley Quinn broadly agrees. Quinn is part of
an Anglo-American collective, Trashfuture, that produces
a popular podcast of the same name. We chat after a record-
ing session one day. They riff and tease each other, taking a
gloomy but wry and funny view of these things. Watch out,
says Quinn at one point, for anyone who presents tech as
“synonymous with being forward-thinking and agile and
efficient. It’s typically code for ‘We’re gonna find a way
around labour regulations’ … I don’t think it’s unthink-
ing backlash or King Canute fighting against the tide [to
point that out].” One of his Trashfuture colleagues, Nate
Bethea, agrees. “Opposition to tech will always be painted
as irrational by people who have a direct financial interest
in continuing things as they are,” he says.
Wisecracking on the brink, the Trashfuture gang have no
time for the brisk dismissal of groups like the neo-luddites,
but neither are they all that keen to start an assault on the
world’s computer farms, delivering the pre-emptive blow
to future AIs that Yudkowsky has called for in print. They
enjoy themselves, the Trashfuture lot, ridiculing his op-ed.
Yudkowsky says he came at the writing in a rush, working to
a tight deadline. He stands by everything he wrote, except
maybe the part about the nukes. “I would pick more careful
phrasing now,” he says, smiling.
Lately I’ve been wrestling with techno-pessimism
myself. At least once a day I throw aside my phone,
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
disgusted with my reliance on it, rebellion that might last
as long as 15 minutes before I go crawling back. My kids,
observing closely, have become accustomed to an idea that
shopping is done by scowling at a screen, that purchases
come by van, and impractically fast. I’m a freelance writer.
Of course I feel the creep of my AI replacement, somewhere
over my shoulder for now, but getting nearer.
We boast at each other online and we seem to have
stopped feeling squeamish about it. We mug for each other
and we pout. I’m convinced we tell each other too much
and capture too much, keeping digital evidence of more
things than the average human psyche can stand to know.
There are not so many secrets between lovers, friends,
colleagues, rivals; some useful middle ground has shrank
away and, with it, a comfortable zone of ignorance. Receipts
of our deeds are time-stamped and archived. Ambiguity
– lovely ambiguity – has got lost somewhere between the
zeros and the ones.
AYBE LUDDISM IS THE ANSWER.
As far as I can make out, talking to all
these people, it isn’t about refusing
advancement, instead it’s an act of
wondering: are we still advancing our
relish of the world? How queasy or
unreal or threatened do we need to
feel before we stop seeing these con-
veniences as convenient? The author
Zadie Smith has joked in the past that
we gave ourselves to tech too cheaply in the first instance,
all for the pleasure, really, of being a moving dot on a use-
ful digital map. Now bosses can track their workers’ every
keystroke. Telemarketing firms put out sales calls with AI-
generated voices that mimic former employees who have
been let go. A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever
survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed
their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.
“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair
Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student.
“That’s Russian-roulette odds.” I meet Stewart, who is 28,
outside the London headquarters of Google’s AI division.
In what I would consider a pretty strange comms effort,
Google has just commissioned some outdoor art to o ease
public fears about the current pace of machine learning.ng. It’s
a confusing display. One of the artworks depicts a vista of
lush green hills, cosy lakeside houses – and, behind all this,
a vast smoking mushroom cloud. “Scientists are using ng AI to
create more stable and efficient [nuclear] fusion reactors
actors,”
an info panel reads. Cool?
It’s the stuff of dread for Stewart. He has taken part in
protests against AI development, at one point unfurling
urling a
banner outside this Google building that called for a pause
on the work going on inside. Not a lot of people joined
him on that protest. Stewart understands. AIs, invisible
nvisible
and decentralised, swarming between datacentres res that
are spread around the world, are hard to conceptualise
ualise as
possible threats, at least when compared with issues ues such
as the climate crisis or animal welfare, the viscerall effects
of which can be seen and felt. “It doesn’t always keep me Legal action
up at night,” Stewart says of the latent danger he perceives.
rceives. Edward Ongweso
“I don’t personally feel anxiety on a day-to-day basis. And Jr calls for leg-
that’s part of the problem. Me, with all of my resources islation to limit
and education – I still struggle to form an emotional the power of AI
connection to this problem.” Last year, he published a TIMOTHY O’CONNELL

Opposition to tech is painted
as irrational by people who
have a financial interest in
keeping things as they are
blogpost that pondered next steps, listing “occupation
of AI offices”, “performative vandalism of AI offices” and
even “sabotage of AI computing infrastructure” as possible
forms of resistance.
NGWESO, IN NEW YORK, moots the idea of
computational sabotage, too. He doesn’t
think this will be easy, nor likely, unless
employees inside the datacentres that
feed and sustain AIs begin to feel that their
own jobs or freedoms are under threat.
“For instance, if people became con-
cerned about algorithms being deployed
to justify lay-offs, or if they became con-
cerned about algorithmic surveillance,”
Ongweso speculates. However, as the Trashfuture gang
are quick to point out, even if some of these centres are
sabotaged, the information they store is fluid, multiple,
surely backed-up elsewhere. “These things have become
so abstract,” says Quinn, “their physical manifestations
are so far from so many people.”
39
Are we doomed? Or is there hope? Will this genera-
tion of protesters be remembered in 200 years’ time for
their interventions – or will there simply be no one to do
the remembering by then? The new luddites I speak to
come at these questions with varying degrees of optimism
or catastrophising.
Crabapple, the artist who took a stand against image gen-
erators, believes it should be possible for all of us to reckon
more frankly with the dirty underbelly of clean-seeming
tech. Take this nice idea of the digital cloud, she says. We
chat about the cloud as though it’s neutral, immutable,
something benign. After all, it’s a cloud. “But there’s no
fucking cloud,” says Crabapple, “there’s other people’s
computers. There are vast datacentres that are sucking up
water and electricity and rare-earth metals, literally boil-
ing up the planet … For me, what luddite success would
look like would be a societal shift where we ask ourselves,
‘Why are we burning our planet? Making our lives shittier?
Getting rid of every last bit of our autonomy and privacy
just to make a few guys rich?’ Then maybe started doing
something about this legislatively.”
Ongweso would start with legislation too. He’d be happy
with something on a small, achievable, symbolic scale,
something that prepared the way for more expansive laws
in future. “Moves to pre-empt and limit the ability of AI to
troll the internet and take copyrighted work, to train its
model on already generated work by writers and artists
– that feels possible right now, and something that could
be a stairway to a series of victories.”
What would the others have us do? Stewart, the soldier
turned grad student, wants a moratorium on the develop-
ment of AIs until we understand them better – until those
Russian-roulette-like odds improve. Yudkowsky would
have us freeze everything today, this instant. “You could
say that nobody’s allowed to train something more power-
ful than GPT-4,” he suggests. “Humanity could decide not
to die and it would not be that hard.”
Quinn, milder, a middle-grounder, pitches the notion
that we stop making ourselves so giddy and grateful about
every new piece of hardware and software that’s dreamed
up. “There is constantly a demand for deference,” he says,
“a demand that you say the world is lovely because you can
type buttons on your iPhone and get a Starbucks coffee.
You’re made to feel you’re not allowed to criticise, and you
must say thank you, or else the brilliant geniuses who cre-
ate these things might not create any more. And won’t you
be sorry then.” Sadowski concurs. “Technology is far too
important to be thought of as just a grab-bag of neat gadgets,
and it’s far too powerful to be left in the hands of billionaire
executives and venture capitalists,” he says. “Luddites want
technology – the future – to work for all of us.”
Hilton, who is about to record another episode of his
luddite radio hour, says: “Classical luddism was a failure.
But it has obviously endured, because it continues to exert
this pull. The smashed loom is an image that has stuck itself
within history. Maybe it’s remembered as a symbolic gesture.
Maybe it’s remembered as a gesture in anger. But it is remem-
bered.” What might be the defining gesture of this era? Let-
ters, legislation, vandalised Ring cameras, airstrikes? “The
historical luddites tried to make the system scream,” says
Ongweso. “That catalysed later change. It’s part of the new
luddite project to try to figure out how to do the same.” •
TOM LAMONT IS A REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
TO THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
Pet food is a $150bn industry, with
vast resources spent on working out
how best to nourish and delight our
beloved charges. But how do we know
if we’re getting it right? By Vivian Ho
LORENCE MEOWMALADE came to me on a chilly
winter’s night last year. A one-year-old orange
tabby with a little pink nose, she arrived at
my door in London after travelling for three
days in a van with 30 dogs across continental
Europe. She brought with her an EU pet pass-
port, a soiled pink blanket and a penchant for
snuggling into any available lap.
Growing up, I had a dog (a husky), a goldfish
that jumped out of its bowl and a clutch of
gerbils that refused to stop procreating – but those had all been fam-
ily pets. The arrival of Florence, or Lady Meowmalade as she shall be
addressed by her lessers, marked the first time in my life that I had a
small creature entirely dependent upon me for her wellbeing. And
like so many pet owners before me, her wellbeing became my fixation.
During her time on the streets of Vaslui in Romania, Florence’s
teeth had come loose. By the time she reached me, she had none. Her
foster mother, who cared for Florence in Romania until she left for
London, assured me that she still had a healthy appetite and could
sustain herself on kibble – dry, compound food – albeit the kind made
for kittens. And she seemed to like it. She came to us at least a kilo
overweight, her pouch swaying whenever she trotted into the room.
But I couldn’t stop worrying about her little pink gums, which she
flashed at us when she chirped or squeaked for our attention. If I had
no teeth, I wondered, would I enjoy gumming down hard baked pellets
for every meal? Or would I prefer that soft wet mix that, in pet food
commercials, you see spooned alluringly on to pristine white plates?
Most pets once got by on little more than table scraps, and whatever
extra they could hunt or scavenge. Today, things are different. The love
humans have for their pets, combined with capitalism’s eagerness to
exploit our every desire and anxiety, means pets can now eat better
than their owners do. As a pet owner, the sheer level of consumer
choice can be overwhelming. Terms like “complete” and “nutrition-
ally balanced” shout out at you from brightly coloured packaging in
the pet food aisle of the supermarket. In adverts, hearty looking dogs
sprint in slow motion toward kibble cascading into bowls. On social
media, targeted posts barrage me with warnings about meat meal
and ash content while pushing the latest curated pet food delivery
service. Our pets are more than just animals to us – and the $150bn
global pet food industry has risen up to cash in on that.

ONE OF THE WORLD CENTRES for pet food innovation is located on

the site of an old horse farm, deep in the rolling green fields of the
Midlands. The Waltham Petcare Science Institute in Melton Mowbray
is the science arm of Mars Petcare, a leading company in the pet food
industry. The research that takes place there determines the future

Super
products of dozens of pet food brands: Iams, Cesar, Whiskas, Sheba,
James Wellbeloved, Pedigree, Eukanuba and more.
About a third of the staff at Waltham work in its research labs. The
other two-thirds are dedicated to feeding, training, exercising and
maintaining the living spaces of the real stars of the show: the 200
dogs and 200 cats that live at Waltham and test the products devel-

bowls
oped there. The 200 dogs belong to four different breeds, chosen to
represent different canine sizes: labradors for big dogs, beagles for
medium, and norfolk terriers and petit basset griffon vendéens for
small dogs. Almost all the cats on site are domestic shorthairs, but
the odd longhair can also be found.
When I arrived at Waltham one overcast day last sum- 
mer, I found cats lounging in their outdoor catios, gazing out

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024

 41

OXANA OLEYNICHENKO/ALAMY

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

42 Super bowls
over swathes of manicured lawn, or shimmying up scratch trees.
Labradors of every hue chased balls in play areas and walked on leads
with their handlers. The animals live in state-of-the-art facilities.
The dogs have heated squares for sleeping and bunk two to a room to
prevent loneliness; the cats have specially designed climbing nests
that look like spiral staircases. All the animals can access the outdoors
from their living quarters.
The dogs are well-trained in the arts of sitting still, lying flat and
“chin to hand” – placing their snouts on to a waiting hand – all of which
aid the various check-ups and observations they undergo. Some
observations require the dogs to be absolutely still, which is no small
feat. “Have you ever tried to get a labrador to stop wagging its tail?”
Lesley Deacon, Waltham’s behaviour and training lead, asked drily.
Amid all the training, playing and tail-wagging, these cats and
dogs are hard at work. Each day, they eat two meals, and from there,
teams of behaviourists, statisticians and nutritionists study how they
respond. Each bowl is protected with a cat flap activated by a specific
animal’s microchip, so each dog or cat can access its own food, but
not food meant for another animal. The bowls are equipped with
electronic balances so researchers can track things like how fast the
animals ate their food, or if they paused during eating. Like profes-
sional athletes, these dogs and cats wear monitors that track their
vitals. All of them have had their DNA sequenced, and their quarters
are under video surveillance, with staff closely monitoring them for
any variations in behaviour or appetite.
All the animals are slated for adoption once they begin to show
signs that they’re done with product testing. Most pets end up going
home with the staff and scientists who have grown attached to them.
To prepare them for the outside world, the dogs play fetch and go
on walks at on-site parks designed with a series of different tex-
tures – wood chips, brick, pebbles – so they won’t get spooked when
they encounter them off campus. When Scott McGrane, one of the
research managers at Waltham, took home a cat named Joey 10 years
ago, he found that Joey “was a bit perplexed” by the television. The
cats’ socialisation rooms now contain TVs – and on the day I visited
Waltham, the cats were watching Wimbledon.
This all may seem a bit much for animals known to eat their own
faeces. But there are good business reasons for this astonishing atten-
tion to detail. The bowl of kibble or wet mix placed in front of pets
each day is the end result of months, if not years, of research and
experimentation into pet nutrition, food chemistry and veterinary
science. And it is this process that companies believe will give them
the edge in the increasingly lucrative world of pet food.
HEN WALTHAM OPENED ITS FIRST
nutritional facility in the UK in 1960, the commercial pet food industry
was about 100 years old. Before the mid-19th century, household pets
survived mostly on table scraps, while working animals received
heartier fare. (For the fluffy white toy dogs who acted as status symbols
for the rich, the 16th-century French court employed a boulanger
des petits chiens blancs – a baker whose job was specifically baking
bread for these pooches.)
Then came James Spratt. An American electrician and lightning-rod
salesman in England, he was horrified to see malnourished dogs at the
docks surviving on the sailors’ leftover hardtack – the dense, tasteless
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
biscuits taken on long sea voyages specifically for their durability. In
the early 1860s, he launched the patented Spratt’s Meat Fibrine Dog
Cakes – a mixture of wheat meal, vegetables, beetroot and beef blood
– thus inventing the commercial pet food industry. Spratt advertised
his meat fibrin cakes as the food of show dogs – animals with sleek
coats, in peak health and form. The association was already there:
your dog will be the best because of what it eats.
Following Spratt’s success, others began their own ventures into
pet food, which they marketed to the growing middle class. In 1922,
Ken-L Ration introduced canned dog food in the US, largely made of
horse meat. Canned pet food became the norm until the rationing
of tin during the second world war forced the industry to look for
alternatives. The result was dry pet food, which had a longer shelf life
and could be left out in bowls overnight. In 1956, Purina reformulated
its core brand Dog Chow as a dry kibble, the first of its kind. Kibble
has dominated the industry ever since.
Waltham opened at a time when veterinarians in the UK were
seeing a lot of dogs and cats with vitamin D deficiencies and rickets.
The centre has always focused on nutrition, and its scientists made
discoveries that have shaped the composition of pet food through-
out the world. It’s possible you’ve spotted chicory root or chicory
extract on the ingredient list of some pet food. That came about after
Waltham researchers demonstrated, in 1997, the prebiotic digestion
benefits of the nutrient-dense fibre. All cat food now includes taurine,
an amino acid critical for heart function, vision and digestion that
cats cannot produce naturally – and it was at Waltham, in the 1980s,
that researchers determined the levels required in dry and wet food.
This research extends beyond mere nutrition. In the 1990s, Mars
scientists developed the first nutritional supplement to make dog farts
KSENIYA OVCHINNIKOVA/GETTY; IMAGEBROKER/ALAMY; GIC/STOCKSY UNITED
less odorous. And today, a major part of the research at Waltham is
about how to make healthy food actually taste good to pets. “If they
won’t eat it, they won’t get the nutrients they need,” Darren Logan,
vice-president of research at the Mars Advanced Research Institute
and Global Food Safety Centre, told me. He equated the process to
adding soy sauce to plain noodles – the soy sauce doesn’t add much
nutritional value, but it entices you to finish your meal.
In 2005, Waltham scientists, in conjunction with the Monell
Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia, discovered that cats do not
have taste receptors for sugar. They tend to go for umami and kokumi
– a taste of fullness and richness that flavour scientists purport to be
the sixth taste after sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. “Cats, as it
turns out, have a very similar palate to what Asian cuisine is based
around,” said Logan.
The enthusiasm of the Waltham cats and dogs as they eat a given
product provides crucial data, but taste research goes far beyond this.
Taste receptors are encoded in DNA, which means that scientists can
use a particular animal’s DNA sequence to see which flavours it will
respond to. As with humans, dogs and cats’ palates vary. Building
individual taste profiles offer answers when some pets don’t respond
well to certain foods: if only one or two cats out of a panel of 40 seem
to dislike what they’re tasting, researchers can look at their taste
profiles and determine which flavour in the product is causing the
cat’s aversion. The goal isn’t to develop a food that will please every
cat, but one that will appeal to most.
For pets as well as for humans, elements other than taste contribute
to the enjoyment of a meal: texture, consistency, appearance, tem-
perature and aroma. Laboratory scientist Freya Grondinger’s main
role at Waltham is to smell. Most of her sniffing is done in front of a
gas chromatograph that isolates the individual scents coming from
the pet food in order to build an aroma profile. The day I visited, she
handed me a small container and asked me to describe the smell.
“I would describe it … as dog food,” I said tentatively – it smelled of
dry kibble. She laughed. “Potato,” she said. “Starch.”
Grondinger’s job is to note which smell is the strongest in each pet
food recipe. She can’t say for sure how a cat or dog will perceive any
given smell, but researchers believe that the relative strength of each
part of the aroma is similar between people and pets. The notes that
smell strongest to Grondinger are typically the ones that are further
researched for their appeal to cats and dogs.
The research done in the labs at Waltham then goes to the recipe
formulators at the innovation centres, who produce a new “flavour
formulation”. This formulation then goes back to Waltham for testing
on the dogs and cats. If the pets respond positively, the company’s
corporate teams assess the feasibility of producing that formulation on
a large scale, and figure out which of Mars’ numerous brands should
produce it. These brands are located throughout the world, and dif-
ferent regions have different preferences. “Some countries like dry
food, some like wet food. And Japanese markets are very different
from North American and South American markets,” Logan said.
The formulations also have to change according to what is and isn’t
available at any given moment. “We work in a world that has lots of
In the 1990s, Mars
scientists developed
the first nutritional
supplement to make
dog farts less odorous
supply challenges,” Logan said. “You have to make sure that you can
make adjustments based upon the local sourcing of your ingredients.”
All this means that it can take years for a recipe to go from passing
testing at Waltham to being stocked on supermarket shelves.
ROTEIN IS AT THE HEART of the pet food industry. Cats
are obligate carnivores, meaning that they must have meat, and
though dogs have evolved into omnivore scavengers, they also require
protein-rich diets. But for the products that dominate the industry, no
animal is slaughtered solely for pet food. “We’ve always been, as an
industry, a kind of reuse and recycling mechanism to deal with excess
in the human food chain,” said Michael Bellingham, chief executive
of the industry association UK Pet Food. “If you look at an animal
that you’re going to eat, you’re not going to use all of it … our industry
uses those materials in a constructive way.” Cooked and processed
organ meat and bones, all of which retains nutritional value for the
pet, are the main components of pet food and appear on ingredient
lists as “animal by-products”.
But there are those who say our pets deserve better than our left-
overs. These are the raw food evangelists: owners and pet companies
who argue that we should go back to feeding dogs and cats what they
ate in the wild – chiefly a mix of raw meat and bone. Raw food fans
denounce kibble as junk food and equate it to eating McDonald’s every
day. “Imagine getting optimal nutrition from one bag of food your
entire life,” wrote Dr Karen Shaw Becker and Rodney Habib in their
book, The Forever Dog: Surprising New Science to Help Your Canine
Companion Live Younger, Healthier & Longer. “Sound impossible?
It is.” This perspective is becoming increasingly popular. In the UK,
the raw pet food sector has grown by about 20% in the past year, and
is now worth about £200m ($250m), around 5% of the UK sector.
The concept began gaining popularity in the 1990s when an Aus-
tralian veterinarian, Ian Billinghurst, introduced it as the Barf diet
– “biologically appropriate raw food” or “bones and raw food”. Pro-
ponents of raw feeding tend to be critical of the modern pet food
industry, and the power of its major companies. In addition to pro-
ducing food, companies such as Mars fund a number of veterinary
schools and clinics, which, raw food advocates claim, push the
companies’ products on trainee vets and pet owners, regard- 
less of pet health. (“When any of our veterinary professionals
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
44 Super bowls
provide nutrition advice, they have the freedom to recommend the
best product for that pet, regardless of brand,” said a spokesperson for
Linnaeus, a veterinary group that’s part of Mars Veterinary Health.)
Many owners claim that switching their pets to raw food has given
them more energy, made their coats shinier and resulted in non-messy
bowel movements. But scientists at places like Nestlé Purina maintain
that “there is no evidence that [raw meat diets] provide any specific
health benefits”. Instead, these companies have warned against the
dangers of raw feeding and possibly exposing your pet to salmonella
or E coli. In turn, raw-feeding companies and owners point at the
number of recalls of processed pet foods.
Jonathan Self, who has been feeding his various dogs raw food for
17 years, launched Honey’s Real Dog Food in 2009. A former livestock
farmer who went vegetarian after struggling to slaughter his pigs, Self
understands that though he may not need meat to survive, his dogs do.
I made a trip to Honey’s a few months after my Waltham visit. Situated
on the site of an old fish processing plant west of London, the company
has no team of highly studied cats and dogs – just whichever of the
staff ’s dogs decided to accompany their owners into work that day.
Before the pandemic and remote work, six or seven dogs could be
found trotting about Honey’s offices above the processing room on
an average day. When I visited, however, it was just Blue, a one-year-
old border collie belonging to the general manager. In the processing
room, heaps of raw lamb ribs sat in vats, tingeing the refrigerator-
chilled air with the rich, metallic scent of blood. The processing typi-
cally takes about five hours; lamb takes longer than that because the
bones are harder. Three staff members were overseeing the processing
of almost three tonnes of food. The meat went into the mincer, bone
and all, along with carrots, parsnips and a leafy green. From there,
the meat, bone and vegetable blend went into the mixer, then into the
casing machine that shaped the mixture into a sausage-like package.
The package is frozen before being shipped to customers.
Honey’s pork comes from the “organic pig farmer down the road”,
and its goat meat from “the gourmet goat farm in Norfolk”, Self said.
The average Honey’s customer spends £70-£80 a month on pet food
– in comparison with the £43 a month spent by the average British
household. Honey’s is by no means the priciest raw food option: if
It’s hard to not project
my experiences on to my
cat. I don’t enjoy eating
the same thing every
day. Why would she?
The Guardian y 23 February 2024
uardian Weekly
your pet is large and you choose one of the more expensive brands,
you could find yourself spending in excess of £300 a month. That sum
doesn’t include the treats and supplements that some owners add
to their pets’ raw food bowls: on social media, you can see pet food
influencers garnishing their offerings with quail eggs, freeze-dried
organ meat, green-lipped mussels and smelt.
Self admits that Honey’s clientele includes a royal and some well-
known actors, but the company also serves pensioners and manual
workers who don’t have high incomes. “They’re often feeding their
dogs better than they’re feeding themselves, in my opinion,” Self said.
OON AFTER HER ARRIVAL, I brought Florence
Meowmalade to a vet, who voiced concerns about the impact kibble
would have on her gums. A different vet told us not to worry: if she
enjoyed kibble, we should continue giving it to her. But by then I had
become the sort of neurotic owner who regularly Googled phrases like
“is my cat depressed” or “cat ears cold is cat sick”. It didn’t help that
whenever I told raw-feeding advocates I fed my cat kibble, they would
respond with some variation of “Oh, you mustn’t blame yourself”.
I began searching for an affordable wet food Florence would like.
I started Florence on Whiskas, which she seemed to like – she fin-
ished her morning and evening bowls that first day. The next day, she
took about two bites and walked away. “I think she doesn’t like the
fish flavour,” I told my husband. I gave her only the chicken flavour;
she started sticking her paw into the bowl and flicking bits on to the
floor. “Maybe it’s the brand,” I said, and changed her to a more expen-
sive mix, which she left in the bowl until it hardened and congealed.
I had discussed with Self whether I could try Florence on Honey’s,
but we realised that without teeth, she wouldn’t be able to get through
the bits of bone. I remembered the pet influencers whose reels I had
watched on Instagram, but I was unable to afford the delicacies they
served up. I settled on a small pouch of powdered bone broth and
soaked Florence’s kibble in it. But it was no good: the broth-soaked
kibble sat there uneaten, attracting flies.
It was hard for me to not project my own experiences on to my
cat. I try not to eat overly processed food, nor do I enjoy eating the
same thing every day. Why would she? Yet here was my weird little
toothless cat who just seems to love kibble.
Frustrated, I recalled the meal I made Florence on the day she
arrived: boiled chicken breast, hand-torn into tiny, digestible pieces.
She had licked the bowl clean. With that meal, I had been telling her
I could take care of her. I could make her happy. Remembering that
chicken, and the satisfaction I felt watching Florence eat it, I began
to understand my mother’s compulsion to serve me plate after plate
of hand-wrapped dumplings even when I’m close to bursting.
A person can let you know directly what food they like, and why;
not so a cat. Florence cannot tell me that she prefers to graze rather
than eat big meals – something I only realised somewhere between
the second and third wet food brands we tried. Nor can she tell me
that she actually enjoys the feel of the kibble on her gums – a theory
I’ve been running with for the past few months. So we’ve gone back
to kibble, though in the morning I give her a bowl of hand-shredded
LINDA NYLIND
boiled chicken as well. She’d be happy with just kibble. Even so, every
morning I carefully shred another chicken breast – just in case •
VIVIAN HO IS A JOURNALIST BASED IN LONDON
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

PAUL TAYLOR
EU panics
over farmer
protests
Page 48 

UNITED KINGDOM
The Starmer paradox: saying
nothing won’t work in No 10
John Harris
JOEL GOODMAN †
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
46 Opinion
n the assumption the Conservative
party suffers a rout and Labour at
last takes power, one place will be
seen as the battleground where
the Tory malaise finally became
terminal: Wellingborough.
Last Thursday also saw a
byelection in the Bristol suburb of
Kingswood, where the Tories’ vote share came down by
about 20 percentage points, and Labour easily triumphed.
But in the Northamptonshire town, the figure was a
jaw-dropping 38 percentage points: the worst slump the
Conservatives have ever suffered in such a contest. The
local campaign was defined by the sleazy fall of the Tory
MP Peter Bone, and the surreally stupid decision to make
his girlfriend the prospective Conservative replacement,
both of which spoke of a party in awful decay; nationally,
the sense of a government gripped by infighting
completed the picture. Were the local swing from Tory
to Labour to be replicated nationally, political pundits
gasped, the Tories would be left with only four seats.
I went to Wellingborough just over a fortnight ago,
and what really hit me was the sheer volume of symbolic
local stories about the state of the country. The town,
population 54,000, is just under an hour by train from
London. Its history of offering a new start to people from
the capital goes back to rehousing schemes in the 1960s
and 70s, but the latest blow-ins are people who have
bought a new generation of flats and houses, marketed
to those priced out of metropolitan living. Many have
recently suffered the worst effects of rocketing mortgage
rates; plenty of local people, meanwhile, complain that
these new homes are impossibly expensive.
The forlorn town centre is peppered with vacant
shops, and dominated by a huge Edwardian building that
used to be the post office: it now lies empty. In 2018, the
financial collapse of Northamptonshire county council
heralded the current wave of municipal bankruptcies,
and marked more cuts and social damage: people in the
know say that Wellingborough’s problems with knife
crime and the county lines drug trade have been made
worse by the closure of youth centres. Signs of what has
gone wrong are everywhere: outside some buildings
defibrillators sit next to “bleed boxes” containing first
aid kits for people who have been stabbed.
In 2005, Wellingborough switched from Labour to
the Conservatives. Eleven years later, 62% of voters
in the wider local area voted to leave the EU. In 2019,
Bone’s majority climbed to 18,500. But what has
Wellingborough got to show for it?
Were the local swing
from Tory to Labour to
be replicated nationally,
the Tories would be left
with only four seats
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
The day I was there, a van with the logo of the far-
right Britain First – which got 477 votes – was doing laps,
and blasting out that party’s mantra: “Stop the boats …
Deport illegal immigrants … Reject career politicians.”
As I walked around, I met Debbie and Sarah, a mother
and daughter who moved to Northamptonshire from
east London about 12 years ago. Sarah told me she had
four kids: she and her mum then spent five minutes
bemoaning the lack of things for children to do, rising
crime, a slow decline of community spirit, and the
dearth of opportunity. Sarah’s 16-year-old daughter, she
said, had worked hard at school and was trying to get a
childcare apprenticeship, but had been unsuccessful.
What, I wondered, did they make of the contest
between the Tories and Labour, and the two parties’
leaders? “Sunak ain’t got a hope in hell,” said Debbie.
“He comes from money. He doesn’t know our side of the
story, cos he’s never lived it.”
And Starmer? She grimaced. “Maybe,” she said, very
slowly. “He says a lot, but I don’t know if he can do the
walk. Is it for real? Hopefully, he can pull things back.”
The conclusion Starmer apparently draws from all this,
hardened by Labour’s traditional fear of the rightwing
press, is that now is not the time for any high-flown
rhetoric or ambitious plans. “Voters hate all of us,”
one Wellingborough Labour activist recently told the
Guardian: in that kind of political atmosphere, the key to
winning is to neurotically “bomb-proof” any promises,
stick within Jeremy Hunt’s specious fiscal rules and keep
people’s attention on the government’s failings.
But that takes us to a familiar question that last week’s
Labour successes render even more glaring: what will
happen if – when – the party takes power? As well as
Wellingborough and Kingswood, the past couple of
weeks have seen two other big Labour stories, which
can be combined into a worrying look ahead. The final,
woeful binning of the so-called green prosperity plan
represented the demise of what was once the anchor
of Starmer’s entire pitch for government. Labour’s
Rochdale byelection candidate shambles, meanwhile,
further undermine the leader’s enduring selling point:
simple competence. Voters are a lot less interested in
these stories than political journalists, but if the mixture
of policy flimsiness and shambling management persists
into government, it will clearly spell trouble.
The British electorate can be
John Harris fascinatingly mercurial: despite their
is a Guardian weary disconnection from politics,
columnist voters are also capable of responding
to events. It is only four years, let us
not forget, since Boris Johnson was in his pomp, and the
Tories landed a Commons majority of 80.
This highlights what we might think of as the Starmer
paradox. Even if Labour’s belief that it can only win
by staying quiet is correct, arriving in government will
demand something different: starting to fix the country’s
problems, lifting people’s mood and giving them reasons
to believe. The byelection results, the Labour leader
says, “show people want change”. But what exactly is
it, and when will it come? Wellingborough, like so many
other places, will soon demand an answer •

I N EQUA L I T Y
A well-placed profanity
is the perfect riposte to
the gender swear gap
Claire Cohen
he first time I attempted to use a
naughty word at school, aged seven,
has become family folklore. I was
aching to try out a grownup term
that I’d heard an older girl utter in
the playground, so when my friend
was standing at the classroom sink,
washing her poster paint-covered
brushes, I took my chance.
“Hey, move your bom,” I loudly declared, my cheeks
turning bright red as I realised the whole thing had come
out wrong. I scuttled away as fast as I could, shocked by
the power a single word could hold – and how shaming it
could feel if not deployed just right.
I have swearing on my mind thanks to Olivia Colman,
who is promoting her new film Wicked Little Letters –
the true story of a 1920s scandal involving very sweary
poison pen letters, which were suspected to have been
written by a woman.
Colman pointed out that there’s still a gendered
double standard when it comes to obscenities. “If a
woman swears, people act shocked. Fuck off ! Women
▲ Kim Sears in are human – funny, filthy, loving, caring – just like men,”
her ‘parental she told the Radio Times.
advisory’ T-shirt Too bloody right. Take a 2001 study by Louisiana State
at the Australian University, which concluded that people find swearing
Open final in 2015 more offensive when it comes from women rather than
SCOTT BARBOUR /GETTY;
men, who also swear more. Of course, there would be a
GUARDIAN DESIGN sodding gender swear gap, wouldn’t there?
47
To understand how far we are from equal opportunity
swearing, you only need look at the reaction towards
women in the public eye. A personal favourite was
Kim Sears’ “outburst” during husband Andy Murray’s
Australian Open semi-final in 2015, when she seemed
to mouth “Fucking have it you Czech flash fuck” in the
direction of his opponent’s team.
Granted the reference to nationality was unnecessary,
but it was hard not to admire her sheer alliterative
fluency. Her response to accusations of “unladylike”
conduct (now there’s a really offensive word) was to
wear a “Parental advisory, explicit content” T-shirt at the
final. Game, set and match, Kim.
If we do approve of a woman swearing, it tends to be
fetishised – held up as evidence that she’s “salt of the
earth” (I’m thinking Kathy Burke’s inimitable “About
fackin’ time” as she picked up a comedy award in 2002).
My own education began with Bridget Jones’s sweary
journalist friend Shazzer, who quite reasonably asks,
“Has he ever actually stuck his fucking tongue down
your fucking throat?” of Mark Darcy. It was Bridget
herself who, as far as I know, coined the phrase
“emotional fuckwit” for a certain type of man and
for which I’m for ever grateful.
These days, we’ve certainly become more
permissive. There’s even sweary swag: I’m the proud
owner of a Karen Cheung porcelain ring – painted with
“Fuck this shit” – which always
Claire Cohen sells out instantly to her fans; for
is a journalist them, a delicate piece of jewellery
and author featuring an expletive feels like an
act of rebellion. It sticks two fingers
up at the notion of polite femininity, and you can’t
put a price on that.
Do I think it’s big and clever to swear? Sometimes.
But I always think that a well-placed profanity is the
perfect way to reject outdated ideas about female
delicacy and polite society. Plus, it can be deliciously
creative. Colman has said her favourite line in the
script was: “Fuck you in the nose holes.” Favourites
of mine include: buggeration, knobber, clusterfuck,
arse biscuits and “fuckpigs”, which was also used by
Dominic Cummings to describe the cabinet.
I can’t deny that my own potty mouth might have
something to do with the industry in which I work.
Would I be so sweary had I spent the past two decades
in a corporate environment, or the public sector,
and not under some male editors in journalism for
whom calling someone a “cunt” counted as people
management? That word might have been used with
derogatory intent and some women find it horribly
misogynistic, I know. But I relish saying it: that it
immediately forces you to confront any preconceptions
you might have about women swearing is, for me,
where its power lies.
Of course, the conundrum in all of this is that I
want people to stay a bit offended when I swear and,
inevitably, the more you do it, the less impactful it
becomes. But the least we can do is remain equally
offended by foul-mouthed men and women.
Anything else is just rude •
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion

EU ROPE A N strategy, intended to make the EU carbon-neutral by

UNION Brussels is panicking
over farmer protests:
welcome to ‘greenlash’
Paul Taylor
rsula von der Leyen surrendered
to angry farmers this month faster
than you could shake a pitchfork
or dump a tractor-load of manure
outside the European parliament.
The European Commission
president, who announced her
candidacy for a second term
heading the EU executive this week, told lawmakers
that the commission was withdrawing a bill to halve
the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and would hold
more consultations instead.
The proposed measure was a key plank in the
commission’s European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork
2050, make agriculture more environmentally friendly
and preserve biodiversity.
Von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn was not just an
attempt to defuse a spreading continent-wide rural
revolt over rising fuel costs, burdensome environmental
regulations, retailers’ price squeezes and cheap imports.
It was also a sign of growing panic among the EU’s
mainstream parties over the seemingly inexorable rise of
far-right nationalists ahead of the June elections.
Von der Leyen, a former German defence minister,
is vying to lead the centre-right European People’s
party’s campaign for the elections even though she is
not herself seeking a European parliament seat. Her
coronation at a party congress on 6-7 March as the
EPP’s Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidate) to run the
commission from 2024 to 2029 is a formality, since there
is no other contender. But she has had to water down
her green policies to placate a party spooked by the
“greenlash” against net zero legislation.
EU leaders tried to take another contentious issue
off the table by agreeing in December on a long-stalled
migration pact. But populists such as the Hungarian
prime minister, Viktor Orbán, continue to rail against
being forced to choose between admitting unwanted
migrants and paying for other countries to take them

Illustration Eleanor Shakespeare

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024

 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

in under the new system. I have seen unpublished

opinion polling conducted for the European parliament
in January that showed Eurosceptic, sovereigntist or
Alexei Navalny’s murder:
populist parties have taken the lead in eight of the 27 EU
members, and are in second place in four more.
This is getting scary, and events such as the farmers’
Putin must be shown that
furore are playing into the hands of populists such as
France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel and
Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who thrive on
he can’t kill with impunity

A
grassroots grumbling against the metropolitan elites. lexei Navalny, with impunity. Is he wrong?
persecuted, tortured Is he winning? These are the
Farmers have traditionally voted for mainstream and murdered by questions western democracies
conservative and Christian Democratic parties, while Vladimir Putin, must ask themselves.
the socialists and social democrats had their bastions was – to borrow the title of Their condemnations of
in industrial urban areas. Remember former president the Russian poet Mikhail Navalny’s killing were swift
Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist farmers’ friend, jovially Lermontov’s most celebrated and fierce. Biden called
slapping the hindquarters of cows in his southwestern work – “a hero of our time”. Putin a killer, Canada’s
Corrèze constituency. Nowadays, those voters are more His courageous fight against Justin Trudeau said he was
likely to vote for Le Pen’s National Rally, polls suggest. the venality and brutality a monster. But words are no
In the Netherlands, farmer discontent over curbs on of Russia’s regime, and his substitute for a plan to reverse
nitrogen emissions led to the sudden rise of the Farmer- championing of democratic what is beginning to look like
Citizen Movement, a party that came from nowhere choice and human rights, a losing trend on Ukraine’s
to win the most votes in regional elections last March. placed him at the forefront battlefields, and to push back
Many of those protest voters have since switched to of today’s global struggle the authoritarian tide that
Wilders’ Freedom party, which topped the poll in a between liberalism and Putin symbolises. Nato should
general election in November. authoritarianism. be doing more to halt Russian
Ironically, the party that seems likely to suffer most Navalny’s death last week aggression. If it had acted
from the farmers’ fury is the Greens, who are not even in prison provoked shock, earlier, less cautiously, Ukraine
part of the coalition of mainstream centre-right, centre- anger and revulsion around would be in a better place.
liberal and centre-left parties that the world. Why did Putin Biden must provide Kyiv
Paul Taylor dominate the commission and the choose this exact moment to with longer-range missiles,
is a senior fellow parliament. Polling suggests the act? Navalny had been at his capable of hitting targets
of the Friends ecologists will lose up to one-third mercy since his arrest in 2021. deep inside Russia. Nato ships
of Europe of their 72 seats in the 720-member Putin’s move may be related to should help secure Black Sea
thinktank legislature due to the “greenlash”. next month’s stage-managed ports and grain export routes.
On the other hand, the far right presidential “election”. It’s And delivering the stalled US
still has plenty of potential upside, according to a possible, too, that Putin aid package is crucial.
political consultant working on the campaign. Incidents believes he is on a roll in his The consequences arising
involving migrants may be exploited to inflame public confrontation with the west, from Navalny’s murder should
opinion in the run-up to the June poll. Both Russia and principally over the war in include action to confiscate
Belarus have sought to use refugees at the EU’s eastern Ukraine. Kyiv’s forces are billions in Russian state funds
borders to create scares, most recently in Finland. The pinned down along the eastern and assets frozen since the
threat of terrorism could also drive voters towards frontlines and face a more full-scale Ukraine invasion.
parties promising harsher law-and-order and migration plentifully armed foe. This money, plus the interest
policies. The meagre consolation for von der Leyen is The failure of European accrued, should be used for
that the rightwing populists cannot agree to sit in a single countries to meet their own reconstruction. The allies
group in the European parliament because of personal, targets for ammunition and should also clamp down harder
ideological or national rivalries. artillery shell production is on businesses and countries
So Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party sits in the undermining the resistance of that circumvent sanctions
rightwing sovereigntist European Conservatives and Kyiv’s troops. Putin, doubtless and break off diplomatic
Reformists group along with Jarosław Kaczyński’s Polish encouraged by this, will also be relations with Moscow.
Law and Justice party, the Finns party and the Sweden monitoring American political It’s time to get real with
Democrats, while Italian deputy prime minister Matteo weakness. Joe Biden has failed Russia. Like it or not, the west
Salvini’s League is allied in the hard-right Identity and to deliver a new military aid is in an existential battle it must
Democracy group with Le Pen’s National Rally, Weidel’s package for Ukraine. Donald win. After Navalny, it’s time
Alternative für Deutschland and Wilders’ Freedom party. Trump’s attacks on Nato are to drop any lingering illusion
Unless the far right makes more spectacular gains a great boon to Russia. that Putin’s Russia is a normal
than the surge already predicted, it will remain divided These factors may have country, that it may be reasoned
and marginalised in EU governance by the coalition persuaded Putin that this was with. Russia has gone rogue. It
of pro-European mainstream parties. But as von der an opportune moment to rid is a killer regime. It is a menace
Leyen’s U-turn on pesticides shows, it may already be himself of Navalny. He seems to its own people and the entire
winning some of the policy arguments in Europe • to think he can do what he likes democratic world • Observer

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE People deserve more than
TO US Labour’s timid offering
At a seminal moment in
our history, it seems that
the Labour party’s offer is
Letters for going to be: “Vote for us;
publication
we won’t do very much”
weekly.letters@
(Labour’s green U-turn
theguardian.com
— reflects readiness for
Please include a May election, Spotlight,
full postal address 16 February). This is either
and a reference deplorable timidity or
to the article. dissimulation aimed at
We may edit letters. electoral advantage. It
Submission and epitomises the dire effect
publication of all of the first-past-the-post
letters is subject
voting system. We will
to our terms and
be offered a shopping
conditions, see:
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
list, but with no prospect
LET TERS-TERMS of better, more effective
government; a long list
Editorial of promises but with no
Editor: convincing means of
Graham Snowdon delivering them.
Guardian Weekly, We have betrayed one
Kings Place, generation and are on the
90 York Way, cusp of betraying future
London N1 9GU, generations. We need and
UK
deserve more than this.
Neil Blackshaw
To contact the
editor directly: Alnwick, England, UK
editorial.feedback
@theguardian.com • Having alienated
Jewish, Muslim and
Corrections environmental support
Our policy is to in one week, Keir Starmer
correct significant may be casting around for
errors as soon as replacements. How about
possible. Please socialists? Just a thought.
write to guardian.
Peter Griffith
readers@
Droitwich, England, UK
theguardian.com
or the readers’
editor, Kings Place, • Oh dear – Green party
90 York Way, here I come!
London N1 9GU, Dr Tim Paine
UK Bristol, England, UK
• With Keir Starmer’s
ditching of the £28bn
($35bn) green pledge,
I am left wondering, as I
look back from my seat
in the Emirates Stadium
towards his, whether a
belief in Arsenal [football
club] is the only thing left
that we have in common.
Ian Wilson
Thames Ditton, England, UK
Prohibition’s to blame for
the power of drug cartels
I buy Roberto Saviano’s
description of the evil
of drug cartels, but not
his attribution of blame
(People who crave cocaine
rarely consider who
really pays for it, Opinion,
16 February).
It is not the drug
that created the gangs;
prohibition did it.
The gangs would hate
legalisation just as much
as their customers giving
it up, but neither of these
events would kill them
now; they’ve become
too diverse.
Prohibition gave them
their big leg up and now
they are too big to defeat.
Well done prohibitionists;
give yourselves a pat
on the back.
S W Davey
Canberra, Australia
Upside down and back to
front is apt for us farmers
Your 9 February cover
asks: “What’s eating
Europe’s farmers?”
The illustration is of a
front-end loader on a
farm tractor with the
bucket drawn upside
down, and backwards.
Which is exactly what
eats most farmers about
the policies imposed on
us by urban planners.
Those policies are upside
down in the sense they
empower a tiny handful
of big business oligopolies
in food processing and
retailing to use their
market power to gouge
money from farmers
and captive consumers.
And backwards in the
sense those same policies
take any market power
farmers once enjoyed
through cooperatives
and marketing boards
away from them in the
name of a “free-trade”
that has never existed in
agriculture.
Add in a few wrong-
headed ideas about
agricultural emissions that
ignore how comparatively
small they are compared
to the emissions from
the tar sands and other
industries, and you have
a good sense of what’s
eating farmers, including
this Alberta grain farmer.
Ken Larsen
Benalto, Alberta, Canada
Retirement needs a
more nuanced solution
It seems unsustainable
to always have this cliff-
edge of retirement as the
only way to deal with
increasing life expectancy
(State pension age will
soon need to rise to 71,
UK report, 9 February).
At what point is it no
longer reasonable to ask
somebody to work full-
time? What we need is
a right to work reduced
hours, particularly as you
approach retirement age.
Why not have a system
that allows people to
demand the reasonable
change to their contracts
when they reach, say,
60 or even 55? It could
be called the “partial
retirement age”, and it
means that your employer
must accommodate your
reasonable request to
work reduced hours.
Nick Watson
Swanmore, England, UK
• At least you have
medical coverage in the
UK. This American is
still working at 75, as a
caregiver for a disabled
adult, and doesn’t expect
to be able to quit any
time soon, primarily for
the sake of the excellent
union-funded health
insurance.
Alison Loris
Bremerton, Washington, US
My wish to see Trump
say goodbye to the circus
Delighted to see Nellie
the Elephant between
Trump’s knees on
the front cover of the
2 February issue. “Off
she (he?) went / with a
trumpety-trump, trump,
trump, trump”... / And
“she (he?) was never
seen again ...”
Ralph Bosman
Toyono, Osaka, Japan

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

VISUAL ARTS
Ukrainians
and their secret
thoughts
Page 55 

Martin Scorsese
on movies,
morality – and
his rebirth on
TikTok

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Screen

I
INTERVIEW HAVE BEEN TALKING TO MARTIN SCORSESE for two
By Steve Rose minutes and apparently the interview is already
over. We’re discussing his most recent movie, Kill-
ers of the Flower Moon, which has been nominated
for 10 Oscars, including a record 10th best director
nomination for Scorsese. But he has been promot-
ing the film since last April, he says. “For the most part, the
reaction to the film is beyond encouraging. It’s very, very
appreciated. However, I think I want to get back to making
something as soon as possible. Like now. Right now. Today.”
Then he makes to get up from his chair and walk off.
“Yes, right now. I’m going to leave right now.”
Er …
He sits back down and laughs heartily. “Nothing personal,
nothing personal,” he says, as I barely suppress my relief.
“No, it’s just that they say, ‘Well, you need to take a rest.’
Really? Time is an issue. Existence, non-existence, is an
issue. So, alors, as they say.”
At an age when most film-makers would be retired or
winding down (he turned 81 last November), Scorsese still
has much to do – and the energy to do it. He almost seems
to be ageing backwards. He continues to turn out ambi-
tious – and epically long – movies: Killers of the Flower
Moon is nearly three-and-a-half hours; its predecessor, The
Irishman, was even longer. And he’s still desperately busy
with other stuff: making documentaries and TV shows,
producing other people’s movies and, as pretty much the
last survivor of New Hollywood’s 1970s golden age, gener-
ally carrying the torch for the cause of cinema.
And on top of all this, against all expectations, Scorsese
has found the time to become a social media star. “Appar-
ently, I’ve been forced to engage with the TikToks,” he
says, amusedly. This is thanks to his 24-year-old daughter,
Francesca, who has been co-opting her obliging dad into
her posts. Here’s Scorsese trying to guess the purpose of
certain items, from an eyelash curler to a menstrual cup
(“A flagon?”); here he is being tested on gen-Z slang (he
gets a few wrong but, basically, he slays); here he is screen-
testing a prospective new muse to replace Robert De Niro
and Leonardo DiCaprio – who turns out to be the family dog,
Oscar. The father-daughter duo’s dynamic is so endearing,
they were hired to make a Super Bowl ad for the website
company Squarespace.
Francis Ford Coppola recently described Scorsese as
“the world’s greatest living film-maker”, and now he’s ▲ In focus ▼ High flier
making 30-second sketches for the socials. “It’s kind of Scorsese on the Leonardo DiCaprio
fun, actually,” he says. “There’s something about suddenly set of Killers of in The Wolf of
breaking through all this artifice of being properly inter- the Flower Moon Wall Street, 2013
viewed or being presented in certain events, and suddenly APPLE ALLSTAR/PARAMOUNT
there we are at home with the dogs all over the floor, in
pyjamas and people laughing.”
He’s in a relaxed mood – smartly attired as always in a
tailored shirt and blazer, but informal and chatty. He’s stop-
ping by in London on a European tour that also includes
a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, and, in a few
days’ time, an appearance at the Berlin film festival.
Making a three-and-a-half-hour movie isn’t that hard,
Scorsese suggests – he’s done it plenty of times before, after
all. Killers of the Flower Moon – based on the true story of
how white outsiders systematically murdered members
of the Native American Osage tribe after they struck oil on
their land in the 1920s – was six years in the making and took
PREVIOUS PAGE:
VICTORIA WILL/
almost 100 days to shoot. It wasn’t easy, he acknowledges,
INVISION/AP shooting in sweltering Oklahoma, with Covid restrictions

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024


in place and with period sets, cars, costumes, horses and
scores of extras to marshal. But he’s not complaining. “By
the time you get on set, you tend to eliminate from your
mind all the pitfalls, the uncomfortable nature of shooting,
the aches and the pains as you get older, how many naps
you need to take – you forget all that and you think you’re
going to go on and do it very quickly, or at least, efficiently
… and it doesn’t happen,” he laughs again. “And so you slog
through it.” He prefers shooting in the cold, he says. “If it’s
colder, you shoot faster.”
Killers was still something of a risk for Scorsese, though.
Not economically – it was backed by Apple, after all – but
politically, in that it excavates a shameful, unambiguously
racist episode of American history (the story also takes in
the white-supremacist 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which
happened just 100km away), at a time when many rightwing
culture warriors are fighting to keep such histories buried.
“Well that’s why it should be made,” he says simply.
“I didn’t do that intentionally: ‘Now we’re going to expose
the corruption and the baseness of untethered capitalism,
53
which we know to be terrible.’ I tried that with The Wolf of
Wall Street [his 2013 rise-and-fall of a 1990s stockbroker],
but as a kind of angry shout about it, with humour. And
then what happened is that Trump was elected.”
Movies don’t often influence real life straightforwardly,
Scorsese seems to be implying – yet many of his seem to
have seeped into the culture in deeper ways. Not least
because of his areas of interest: men, male power, male
relationships and, in particular, men’s capacity for violence.
He says he is unfamiliar with the concept of the “Scorsese
bro” – the type of male film fan who admires his macho,
violent “drugs and guns” movies at the expense of his other
works. Many of them – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging
Bull, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street
and especially Goodfellas – are regarded as masterpieces,
but, I suggest to him, often these movies take the point
of view of the (overwhelmingly male) perpetrators of the
violence, rather than the victims. Killers of the Flower Moon
is no exception, it must be said. These men usually get their
comeuppance, but thanks to Scorsese’s frenetic, snappy,
visceral film-making style, their lifestyles often look kind
of cool. As Scorsese puts it himself: “Sin is fun.”
“That’s pretty much all I’ve been interested in, I think,”
he admits, “in terms of the perpetrators.” He looks to the Wise guys
side and pauses for a long time. “It’s a very complicated With Robert De
issue because it goes back to my childhood,” he finally says. Niro on the set of
He’s thinking about his postwar upbringing in Little Italy, Goodfellas, 1990
the area of lower New York City where his Sicilian grand- WARNER BROS/KOBAL/
parents settled, along with hundreds of other Italian immi- SHUTTERSTOCK
grants. The guns and gangsters
were not movie fiction there:
they were part of everyday life,
Am I the kind as were the poverty, violence,
of person who Catholicism – notions of moral-
ity, of sin and guilt. He studied
makes moral to become a priest, before being
judgments opened up to the world of mov-
ies, literature and music. His
on how other hard-up parents were “trying to Back seat
people live? No. toe the line, morally”, he says, Scorsese
“just to be able to survive with appeared with
I lived that way some kind of dignity in a world Robert De Niro in
which was really corrupted on Taxi Driver, 1976
many different levels”. As for SILVER SCREEN /GETTY
the perpetrators, he says he’s fascinated by what makes
people criminals. “Can we become perpetrators?”
H
E HINTS THAT HE HAS made mistakes in
his own life: “Am I a person who comes in
and makes moral judgments on how other
people live? No. I lived that way.” But my
attempts to lead him down this autobio-
graphical road are deflected. Scorsese has
been married five times. He left his first wife, Laraine Marie
Brennan, in 1971, not long after she had given birth to their
daughter, Catherine – by all accounts he chose career over
family. There were three short marriages – to Julia Cameron,
Isabella Rossellini and Barbara De Fina – and relationships
with actors including Liza Minnelli and Ileana Douglas. He
has been married to his current wife, Helen Morris, since
1999. Scorsese also went through a period of cocaine addic-
tion, which resulted in hospitalisation. He would rather
talk about such events through the prism of his films: 
“I can’t make things like that if I don’t feel those things.”
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Screen
As for the Scorsese bros, “there is always going to be a
group who will only see the brutality of the film, and what
they think is thoughtless violence,” he says. With mov-
ies like Goodfellas, “the point I was trying to make was,
let’s understand the attraction and the enjoyment of evil.
And so you may say, ‘Now you’re having it both ways.’” He
smiles. “Possibly.”
These issues are still pertinent today. Taxi Driver,
especially, seemed to home in on a kind of lonely, alien-
ated, disempowered, resentful male identity that has only
grown since. De Niro’s character was the prototype “incel”,
or potential mass shooter, or domestic terrorist. Taxi Driver
also foresaw the media’s role in muddying the moral waters
around such characters, as did The King of Comedy, with
De Niro as a failed standup who resorts to kidnapping. Like
any good auteur, Scorsese was following his instincts, rather
than those of the industry, he suggests. “We just gravitated
towards these characters and these stories.”
The violence spilled off the screen in the case of Taxi
Driver: John Hinckley Jr – driven by his obsession with
Jodie Foster, who starred in the movie, and emulating De
Niro’s antihero – attempted to assassinate the US presi-
dent, Ronald Reagan, in 1981. It’s an episode Scorsese has
grappled with ever since. “Did I like what happened? No.
Did we feel that we were right in making that film? Yes. Is
violence ultimately the deciding factor in what makes a
man a man? I don’t think so.”
There are outlets for male rage other than violence,
Scorsese suggests. Rock’n’roll, for example. He has made
many music films over his career, from his classic 1978
concert movie The Last Waltz to documentaries about Bob
Dylan, the Rolling Stones, George Harrison, the history of
the blues, even Michael Jackson’s extended Bad video.
Perhaps film-making is another outlet. Steven Spielberg
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
reportedly remarked how Scorsese let De Niro’s character in
Mean Streets “go over the top and lose control so that Marty
can remain in control. I think [De Niro] is just wonderful
as a sort of extension of what Marty might have been if he
hadn’t been a film-maker,” Spielberg said.
S
CORSESE HAS ALSO EXPLORED other themes in
works: spirituality, for example, in Kundun, The
Last Temptation of Christ and Silence (his next
movie will be A Life of Jesus, set in the modern
day and adapted from a story by Shūsaku Endō,
who also wrote Silence – and it will be short,
Scorsese has promised). He has made comedies, such as
After Hours or his family-friendly Parisian adventure Hugo.
And when Scorsese has put women to the fore, the results
have usually been positive – from Pretend It’s a City, his
recent Netflix series on the quintessential New Yorker Fran
Lebowitz, right back to 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any
More, for which Ellen Burstyn won the best actress Oscar
as a single mother yearning to become a singer. Burstyn
hand-picked Scorsese to direct it on the strength of Mean
Streets. I read Scorsese a quote from an interview where she
talked about meeting him for the first time. Burstyn said to
him: “This film is about a woman, and there was only one
female role in your picture [Mean Streets], and I couldn’t
tell from that if you know anything about women. Do you?”
Scorsese replied: “No, but I’d like to learn.”
“I still like to learn!” he says. “I’m learning. I really am.”
He has many female colleagues, he points out, including
Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked with him for nearly
60 years, and won three Oscars for editing his films. He has
produced films by female film-makers including Joanna
Hogg and Josephine Decker. And for the past 30 years, he
has mainly read fiction by women, he says.
Which brings us to one of Funny turn
Scorsese’s least typical but, for The King of
my money, most accomplished
It’s a very pictures: The Age of Innocence,
Comedy, 1982,
with Jerry Lewis
different thing, released in 1990 and based on and Robert
the novel by Edith Wharton. It is
having children set among the ultra-rich families
De Niro
20TH CENTURY FOX/
at a late age. of late 19th-century New York KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
and rendered with a sumptu-
It teaches you ous, sweeping grandeur. There
a great deal are no guns or drugs but this
society is every bit as violent
about love beneath the surface. Daniel Day-
Lewis’s suave social climber is
ultimately outsmarted by his
two lovers, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. In other Guilty pleasure
words, it’s a movie about men failing to understand women. The Age of
Scorsese’s family life is now full of women. As well as Innocence, 1993,
Francesca, he has two older daughters (aged 58 and 47), with Michelle
and two young granddaughters. “It’s a very different Pfeiffer and
thing, having children at a late age. It teaches you a lot,” Daniel Day-Lewis
he says. He’s not just talking about TikTok. “It teaches you ALLSTAR/COLUMBIA
a great deal about love.”
Ultimately it doesn’t matter about gender differences,
he says. “I try to find who we are as a human being, as an
organism, what our hearts are made of. That’s what I think
I’m looking for. Let me put it this way: I’m still curious.”
STEVE ROSE IS AN ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR
FOR THE GUARDIAN
Killers of the Flower Moon is available on Apple TV+
 Culture
Visual arts
Fears ‘I
hope my ex has been killed by a rocket,”
says one message. “I feel ashamed that
I miss my cats more than my own dad,”
writes somebody else. “I want to kill my
father for his Soviet beliefs,” confesses a third.
and “I can’t wank,” confides one person. Another:
“I wank every day.” And someone else: “I want
to have amazing sex before the nuclear strike,
but in two months, I haven’t had the emotional
desires
resources to even open Tinder.”
These intimate confessions are displayed on a
wall of the Jam Factory, an elegant arts centre in
the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. They are from
a collection of anonymous wartime “secrets”
artist Bohdana Zaiats collated using an online
At a powerful exhibition Google form, and posted on Instagram. Each pro-
vides a fleeting insight into the private, unsayable
in Lviv, Ukrainians reveal thoughts of Ukrainians reeling from the war.
their most secret thoughts It is one of the most fragile and vulnerable
– while others play conflict moments in the Jam Factory’s opening exhibi-
tion, titled Our Years, Our Words, Our Losses,
karaoke with the sounds Our Searches, Our Us. The show – curated by Kat-
of tanks, sirens and bombs eryna Iakovlenko, Natalia Matsenko and Borys
Filonenko – zooms in on such raw emotion, bring-
ing together works that express the tender quid-
By Charlotte Higgins LVIV dities of inner lives in ways that journalism or
Photographs by Alessio Mamo documentary cannot. But it also zooms out – on
to a historical panorama stretching back as far
▲ Past revisited ▼ Out of place as the 19th century.
The Defence of ‘This land was You start with Crimea. The ticket you are
Sevastopol by always desired’ handed at the front desk is itself an artwork,
Oleksandr Hny- … exhibition titled I Have No Other Homeland But You. It
lytskyi and Oleg curator Kateryna was created by exiled Crimean Tatar designer
Holosiy (1991-92) Iakovlenko Sevilya Nariman-qizi, who “had never been pre-
sent in Ukrainian galleries, or had any connec-
tion with the art world”, says Iakovlenko – part
of a history of exclusion that is now magnified
for those Crimean Tatars, frequently labelled as
Islamic extremists by the Russian authorities,
who remain on the illegally occupied peninsula.
Once inside the show, you are greeted by a
panoramic work from 1991-92, made as Ukraine
55
became independent from the Soviet Union.
Titled The Defence of Sevastopol, it is a suite
of five paintings by Oleksandr Hnylytskyi and
Oleg Holosiy. Its form and imagery allude to an
earlier commemorative panorama of the 1854-55
Crimean war made by painter Franz Roubaud in
1904. Casting back to the 19th-century war is a
pointed choice, given today’s traumatic situa-
tion. “This land was always desired,” says Iakov-
lenko of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014. “It
was always a red line in politics.”
The newer work abandons the historicist
detail of Roubaud’s panorama, instead offering
an uncannily blurred landscape that could be
as readily set in the 1940s as the 1850s. But it
turns out that some artists unknowingly paint the
future when they paint the past. The Defence of
Sevastopol could also be a painting of the annexa-
tion of 2014. Or of the Ukrainian battlefields of
2024. Such is art’s ability to collapse time.
What do we remember, what is the point of
remembering, what is better forgotten? Katya
Buchatska, whose work will feature in the
Ukraine pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale,
considers how the land itself holds loss in a video
work from 2023, This World Is Recording. As the
camera pans over fields scarred with shell holes,
one thinks of other voids, empty spaces caused
by the war – lives cut short, artistic work that will
never be made, homes occupied or destroyed.
Such voids in survivors’ lives, paradoxically, do
not feel like empty spaces, but are made of a grief
that fills the body to choking.
Buchatska considers the role of memorials.
Remembering events, she notes, is not always an
effective safeguard against such things happen-
ing again. Buchatska’s work ends with the propo-
sition that a garden might one day be planted over
those wounded fields, rather than a traditional
memorial – “so that we have something to lose”.
If the land holds the memory of trauma, 
so do stomachs and mouths. Open Group is
23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly
56 Culture
Visual arts
a collective of Ukrainian artists. For their work
Repeat After Me, they spent time in Lviv record-
ing sounds of war vocalised by refugees who had
fled the frontline.
The film begins with Svitlana, from the
Luhansk region, imitating the sound of a Ka-52
Alligator – a Russian attack helicopter. After
offering a long, descending “tr-tr-tr”, Svitlana
invites the audience to “repeat after me”: the
work is in the form of karaoke. Antonina is next,
with the gut-clenching wail of the air raid siren.
Iryna imitates a T-80 tank, while Boris, from
Mariupol, mimics the sound of aerial bombing,
a thin keening followed by resonating thunks.
“Repeat after me, so you’ll remember,” he says,
for these memories are historically important
and too much for one person to contain.
Everything in this exhibition pulses with a
sense of the power and limits of memory – some
remembrances frantically preserved, others
hovering just out of reach, perhaps for ever lost.
There is one tiny, pragmatically made image in
the exhibition that was not intended, at first, to
be regarded as an artwork – not least because
the artist, at the time he made it, was focused
on humanitarian volunteering. On one of the
gallery walls is a mobile phone. On its screen is
a photo of a wooden fence bisected by a double
gate. It was taken by Yaroslav Futymskyi while he
was helping with reconstruction in the northern
region of Chernihiv, after its deoccupation.
On the gate is written “DETY”, the Russian
for “children”. Such signs were painted as an
appeal for mercy. The letters
▼ In the picture are divided, two on each side
Sasha Maslov’s of the gate, which invites a
portrait of different reading. In Ukrain-
Ukrainian musi- ian, “DE TY” – two words –
cian and soldier means: “Where are you?” It
John Object could almost serve as an alter-
native title for the exhibition,
invested as it is in excavating a sense of place in
time and history – and in finding a way to recover,
somehow, those things that have gone.
CHARLOTTE HIGGINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
CHIEF CULTURE WRITER
Our Years, Our Words, Our Losses,
Our Searches, Our Us is at the Jam Factory,
Lviv, Ukraine, until 10 March
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
Reviews
FILM
The Taste of Things
Dir. Tran Anh Hung
★★★★☆
At first glance, French-Vietnamese
director Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste
of Things looks like just another
period drama. But in its elegantly
restrained way, Tran’s film, set in the
kitchen, grounds and dining room
of the chateau of famed gourmet
Dodin (Benoît Magimel) in 1880s
France, is radical and risk-taking.
Take its exquisite opening
sequence, starting with a wordless
nod from Dodin’s celebrated cook,
Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), as
the gardener hands her a celeriac
root. About 35 minutes, much of it
dialogue-free, is dedicated to the
preparation and consumption of
a feast in a fluidly choreographed
dance of camera and characters.
You are struck by the audacious
daring of easing us into a film.
This opening allows us to explore
Dodin and Eugénie’s relationship.
There is something unconventional
about the film’s depiction of their
love. It’s not just that they are an
older couple. Cinema tends to
be fascinated by the high-stakes
drama of new love or its final
moments. Far fewer explore love
that has endured and deepened
over decades. Wendy Ide
On release in the UK and US
Podcast of the week One Handshake Away
Before American film-maker Peter Bogdanovich died, he was
working on an interview podcast. Now, thanks to his ex-wife,
Louise Stratten, it sees the light of day. The guest list is impressive,
with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro and Greta
Gerwig talking about other moviemaking greats. Hannah Verdier
MUSIC
Tangk
Idles, Partisan
★★★★☆
The pitch for Idles’ fifth album is
very straightforward. “This is our
album of beauty and power,” wrote
frontman Joe Talbot on social media
at the end of 2023. “All love songs.”
Indeed, it’s so straightforward, you
question the value of announcing
it at all: writing love songs is hardly
an unprecedented move in rock
and pop history.
But context is everything, and
this is Idles we’re talking about:
authors of I’m Scum, Rottweiler,
White Privilege and Never Fight
a Man With a Perm, who rose to
fame on the back of debut album
Brutalism, a 41-minute long howl of
grief, confusion and fury.
And yet, here we are: songs
unironically titled Gratitude and
Grace, unironic paeans to the joys
of parenthood, new romance,
freudenfreude – taking delight in
other people’s success – and strong
fraternal relationships, the latter
compared to the sound of “Hall &
Oates … playing in my heart”.
Tangk feels like a surprising
album, which says something about
the way one’s expectations have
been narrowed in a music world
increasingly dominated by stay-in-
your-lane playlists and algorithms
programmed to second-guess your
tastes by serving you up more
of the same. Or perhaps it says
something about underestimating
Idles themselves; making muscular,
aggressive music about “impotent
male rage”, as Talbot put it, is a
tough balancing act, liable to tip
over, open to misinterpretation.
Not everything on Tangk works,
but the vast majority of it does,
with a message of positivity:
reason enough to break out the
freudenfreude. Alexis Petridis
 Culture 57
Books
Maurice and Maralyn may be based on real
events, but it has the feel of fiction – all the better
to convey the thoughts, fears and coping strate-
gies of the pair as they fight for survival. Elmhirst
finds rich source material in Maralyn’s diaries,
written on the raft, which contain, among other
things, the food items she daydreamed about.
The couple spent a total of 117 days adrift,
during which they endured sunburn, dysentery,
dehydration and near-starvation. While they
were able to pack food from the boat before it
sank, these rations soon ran low, leading Maralyn
to fashion a fishing rod using safety pins and a
length of cord. They subsisted on raw sea turtle,
small sharks, the occasional seabird and rainwa-
ter captured in containers that quickly became
smothered in algae.
The bare facts of the couple’s survival are, by
themselves, astonishing, though this isn’t just a
story of physical endurance. Underscoring it is a
spiritual drama in which the couple’s partnership
is put to the test. “For what else is a marriage,
really, if not being stuck on a small raft with some-

W
BIOGR APHY hen Maurice and Maralyn Bailey one and trying to survive?” Elmhirst asks. While
decided to build a boat and sail to the author is not given to empty theorising, she
the other side of the world, it was does a convincing job of filling in the psychologi-
not on a whim. The couple from cal gaps in Maurice and Maralyn’s story.
All at sea Derby had long hankered for adventures that When they met, Maurice was a shy, anxious
would lift them out of their dreary suburban man whose unhappy childhood led to estrange-
A couple brought existence. Over six years, they diligently studied ment from his family. He and Maralyn met via
boat designs, routes, timetables and supplies. a mutual acquaintance named Mike. Mike and
together by a love of They gave up their jobs, sold their bungalow and Maralyn would go to car rallies once a month
adventure embark the bulk of their belongings, and oversaw the but, when he couldn’t make it one week, he
building of a boat they called “Auralyn”, a com- asked Maurice to go in his place. Maurice was
on an ocean voyage – posite of their first names. Auralyn would have 29 and Maralyn, then 21, turned out to be the yin
and get far more than no radio transmitter as Maurice was keen “to pre- to his yang: talkative, adventurous, at her hap-
serve their freedom from outside interference”. piest outdoors. Meanwhile, for Maralyn, Mau-
they had bargained for By the time they set off for New Zealand in rice represented freedom. She was still living
the summer of 1972, Maurice and Maralyn were with her parents, bored and craving a life free of
By Fiona Sturges confident sailors who had considered every even- housework and children: “Here was a man …who
tuality. But even they couldn’t have anticipated already appeared to be living it. He flew planes.”
a 12-metre sperm whale, injured and in distress, After their rescue their recovery took months
smashing into their boat 400km north of Ecuador as their bodies acclimatised to food and move-
and ripping a hole the size of a briefcase beneath ment. Maralyn said their survival had depended
the waterline. Their attempts to pump water out on working as a team. “Where one faltered, the
proved hopeless, as did their efforts to plug the other bolstered their flagging spirits,” she told the
hole. Realising what needed to be done, they radio presenter John Peel. But Maurice confessed
spent 10 wordless minutes gathering essentials, it was he who flagged and Maralyn who bolstered.
then climbed into a tiny motorless dinghy, with The saddest part of the book is the end when Mau-
an attached inflatable raft, and watched their rice is a widower (Maralyn died of cancer in 2002,
beloved Auralyn sink into the inky depths. while Maurice lived until 2018). Without her, he
In Maurice and Maralyn, Sophie is again at sea in his loneliness.
Elmhirst documents the before, dur- The tale of the Baileys is clearly a
ing and after of the Baileys’ ordeal, gift for an author but all credit to Elm-
which began in March 1973 and ended hirst for marshalling these elements
with their rescue four months later. into an electrifying narrative full of
Elmhirst had stumbled on their story atmosphere and humanity and with
while stuck in her own confined space the lightest dusting of romance. Mau-
▲ All aboard with her family during the Covid lock- B O O K O F rice and Maralyn is about a shipwreck,
Maurice and down of 2020. Her book opens with a THE WEEK yes, but it’s also a tender portrait of
Maralyn Bailey ferocious jolt and the sound of splin- Maurice and two unconventional souls blithely
recreate their tering wood as whale meets boat. A Maralyn defying the conventions of their era
ordeal in 1974 few pages later, we are marooned with By Sophie Elmhirst and making a break for freedom.
LES LEE/GETTY the couple on the raft. FIONA STURGES IS AN ARTS WRITER

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

58 Culture
Books

H
FICTION elen Oyeyemi’s latest novel is a story the old town. Alone in her room, she picks up
about stories; a tale that unpicks and the “Prague book” her 14-year-old son bought
exposes the threads that tie tales her for the trip: Paradoxical Undressing.
together. It’s set in Prague, with the It’s at this point that the concept of “facts”
A wild ride city functioning as backdrop, cipher and, even, begins to come unstuck. The first time Hero reads
at times, narrator; the main characters slip, slide Paradoxical Undressing, the opening chapter
Set in, and about, and transmute, and the bit-part players reap- tells a whimsical tale: a young woman working
pear in different roles and get-ups, like actors in a secondhand bookshop finds scraps of paper
Prague in various in a travelling theatre. Time in this city warps tucked into its crumbling walls. When pieced
eras, this baffling and and winds backwards, contributing to the sense together, they contain yet another Prague story:
of the novel, and Prague itself, as a switchback the adventures of a nobleman at the court of
beguiling novel warps ride: a “non-stop paternoster lift” that carries Rudolf II. Hero is engrossed, until the moment
and winds stories its passengers in circles, rather than launching when Paradoxical Undressing appears suddenly
them along straight lines. The themes to address itself directly to her, with an
within stories are love, history, identity, and – most abrupt, “Where are you?”. She puts the
fundamentally of all – the essential book down and the next time she picks
By Sarah Crown subjectivity of the act of reading; the it up, chapter one tells a different story.
notion that, when we open a book, Now, we’re plunged into the watch-
we’ll each discover something dif- ful, umbral world of Matouš Brzobo-
▼ Tales of a city ferent inside. Which, to be frank, hatý, a “(rightly) reviled High Court
Prague is depicted makes for an interestingly high-stakes Parasol Against judge”, busily dispensing communist-
as a ‘non-stop reviewing experience. the Axe era justice in 1957 Prague without a
paternoster lift’ This is, of course, business as usual By Helen Oyeyemi flicker of disquiet until the moment he
GARY YIM /GETTY
for Oyeyemi, to whom formal experi- realises his son has become “a kind of
mentation and narrative instability are meat and sentient Party placard”. This new tale is equally
drink. Let’s start, then, with what appear to be absorbing – right up until Paradoxical Undress-
the facts. Parasol Against the Axe is the story ing again interrupts itself to ask Hero (and us?),
of a parched summer weekend in which two “Where are you? (Do you know?)”.
women, Hero Tojosoa and Dorothea Gilmartin, From here, Oyeyemi’s novel takes on a life
converge on Prague for a hen weekend. Hero of its own, playing fast and loose with both
and Thea were once as thick as thieves; these its characters’, and its readers’, expectations.
days they’re not speaking, and their motives Hero, talking to others in the hen party, finds
for attending the bride-to-be Sofie’s celebra- she’s not the only one to have read Paradoxical
tion are wildly different. The weekend begins Undressing; both of the brides’ mothers have
with a whistlestop tour of the city’s untouristy read it, too, but where one remembers a “callous”
sights (“the bright-bannered hypermarkets … the story about a cold war misinformation agent, the
angel-cake concrete of the prefabricated tower other recalls the tale of a feud between “two of
blocks”), after which Hero is deposited at a bed the greatest 1960s pop singers in this country”.
and breakfast buried in the twisting streets of Meanwhile, Thea is given a copy of the book by

V
BUSINESS ladimir Lenin once defined communism The question is whether climate mitigation
as “Soviet power plus electrification of targets can be met by efforts to “green” the largest
the whole country”. His words may source of carbon dioxide emissions: electricity.
strike a chord with today’s green rebels Christophers is pessimistic because the transi-
Power play who see clean energy as a force for transforma- tion is lubricated by capitalism. His scepticism is
tive change. Yet these revolutionaries have yet to not new. Many on the left say it is in capitalism’s
A clear-eyed look see their revolution. While renewable energy is nature to be destructive of the environment.
booming, it’s not growing fast enough to prevent However, the author has a more sophisticated
at the economics climate breakdown. argument. While low-cost and abundant solar
of energy, and why The reasons for this, and what can be done, and wind energy is within our grasp, the mistake
are explored by Brett Christophers, a professor is to presume that because renewable power has
capitalism can’t solve of economic geography at Uppsala University in become relatively cheap, it will get built. Capi-
the climate crisis Sweden. Christophers has made his talists invest because profits are high
name through a series of books that and stable. In a world awash with the
attempt to expose capitalism’s grubby proceeds from fossil fuel extraction,
By Randeep Ramesh secrets. His aim is to make readers Christophers thinks renewables and
understand that they have been lulled their volatile, wafer-thin margins
into a false sense of security by a doc- don’t stand a chance.
trine that promises salvation. In the Christophers bombards the reader
same way, The Price Is Wrong rejects The Price Is Wrong with facts and figures. In 300 pages, he
the orthodox reasoning that techno- By Brett details how privatisation and competi-
logical innovation and market wiz- Christophers tion have failed to produce the desired
ardry will be enough to save the Earth. economic and environmental results.

The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024

 59

a woman dressed as a cartoon mole. When she BOOKS OF THE MONTH

reads it, the story it contains follows a young Jew- The best recent crime and thrillers
ish woman making a living in 1943 entertaining
German officers in the guise of a “taxi dancer”.
These stories-within-the-story perform a By Laura Wilson case of drug smuggler
range of functions, and raise a whole host of ques- Bruce Hopkins, recently
tions. On the one hand, they create a “Prague returned from the Costa
book”, along the lines of Ivo Andrić’s astonishing del Sol, whose naked body
novelisation of 400 years of Yugoslav history has been found in the boot
in The Bridge on the Drina. On the other, they of a stolen car submerged
speak to the unreliability not of narrators but of in a reservoir. Pacy and
narratives: the notion that novels are inconstant expertly engineered,
zones in which definitive answers, meanings and this is a superior police
even events are hard to come by. Not only does with no idea why she’s procedural with a
Paradoxical Undressing show a different face to there or who she is. It wonderful sense of place
each new reader, it begins, over time, to break out Happiness Falls becomes clear she’s a and time; perfect period
of its confines: plotlines and characters escape By Angie Kim junior barrister who, in detail range from the “care
from its pages, infiltrating, echoing and inflecting Set in a Virginia suburb the absence of her QC, is in the community” policy
the contemporary action. And while the name during the lockdown defending a man accused of deinstitutionalisation,
of the book’s author – Merlin Mwenda – does not of summer 2020, Kim’s of a terrorist offence. to mis-sold endowment
change, his biography appears to shift about as second novel is narrated Someone is sending mortgages. Highly
much as the stories themselves. Eventually, he by 20-year-old Mia, who threatening messages recommended.
makes a guest appearance in the flesh, as an ice- is quarantining at home to her hotel room. Lila
cream seller, dispensing cones and wisdom in with her twin brother is unsure of what is
equal measure. John, their Korean mother real and things become
“Pick 10 people, tell each of ’em the same Hannah and American curiouser and curiouser
thing … then go back and ask … what you told father Adam, who looks in this courtroom drama/
’em,” says Merlin, towards the end of the book. after their nonverbal dystopia mashup, as
“It’s guaranteed you’ll hear 10 things you never brother Eugene. Eugene she tries to solve the
fuckin’ said. Hardly anybody talks about what has autism and Angelman dual mysteries of what
it is they’ve heard or read; we only say what we syndrome, a rare genetic happened on the day a
were thinking about while someone was trying condition affecting the bomb killed 27 people at
to talk to us” – if Oyeyemi’s brilliant, baffling, nervous system. When a Home Office building, Butter
beguiling novel has a central message, it’s this, he returns from a hike and of her own identity. By Asako Yuzuki,
or it was for me, at any rate. Who knows what with Adam, alone and Shepherd, a lawyer, translated by Polly Barton
you’ll find within its pages – but the voyage of distressed, he is unable to walks the line between Loosely based on the true
discovery will be wild. explain what happened. pleasantly intriguing and story of the “Konkatsu”
SARAH CROWN IS DIRECTOR OF LITERATURE The official investigation annoyingly baffling with (marriage-hunting) serial
AT THE ARTS COUNCIL appears to go nowhere, aplomb and stays on the killer and fraudster Kanae
and, as the family try to right side for an inventive Kijima, this ambitious
come to terms with the and exciting read. and unsettling Japanese
In 1985, fossil fuel-fired power plants generated situation, Mia studies bestseller follows
64% of electricity globally; in 2022, it was 61%. It the notes her father left thirtysomething journalist
is state subsidies that prop up green industries. behind, documenting his Rika Machida as she
It was political economist Karl Polanyi who research into the nature becomes increasingly
introduced the distinction between real and of happiness. Could his obsessed with Manako
“fictitious” commodities. Electricity, says Chris- disappearance be an Kajii, a convicted killer
tophers, is an example of the latter, a resource experiment; did he simply she visits in prison. Kajii
fundamentally unsuited to being priced up and want a new life without has used her cooking
traded. Such an insight might have helped the burdens – or is there a and nurturing skills to
high priests of green finance realise that the elab- more drastic explanation? lure lonely middle-aged
orate market structures being erected to produce Bittersweet, sensitive The Winter Visitor men to their deaths.
a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and moving, this is a By James Henry Although some of the
sit on unsound foundations. compelling exploration Henry’s DI Lowry trilogy social commentary is
Only the state, concludes Christophers, has of love, neurodiversity was set in Essex in 1983; heavy-handed, this is
“both the financial wherewithal and the logistical and heuristics, within a his latest novel featuring a thought-provoking
and administrative capacity” to deliver the tril- literary mystery. one of its characters, and surprisingly
lions of dollars in annual investment in solar and the now promoted DS feelgood take on
wind that could keep the planet from burning The Trials of Lila Dalton Daniel Kenton, finds us friendship, transgressive
up. The message is that active involvement in By LJ Shepherd at Colchester CID in the pleasures, and society’s
shaping the future is crucial, and such a task is This debut novel has a bitterly cold February of impossibly contradictory
too important to be left to markets. fever-dream quality, as the 1991. With his new partner, expectations of women.
RANDEEP RAMESH IS CHIEF LEADER WRITER eponymous narrator finds the unkempt DS Brazier, LAURA WILSON IS A
FOR THE GUARDIAN herself in a courtroom Kenton investigates the CRIME WRITER

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
I live with a
younger man
who denies our
sexual history
I met “Jon” (not his real name) eight
years ago when I was 59 and he was
22. He cruised me on a gay pickup
site. Upon meeting it was obvious
that I had something that he craved
(and I’m not speaking physical/
sexual), and of course, as an older
man, I wasn’t going to turn down the
affections of a younger, hot man! He
moved in with me three months after
meeting. We had some great sex
for several years, always initiated
by him. The relationship was never
romantic, but it became very much
about caring for each other.
Fast forward eight years, we are
still living together but have not
had sex, cuddling nor even quick
touching below the belt (his rules)
for several years. He now hooks up/
dates men his age, which I agree
is better for him, while obviously
I miss the sex/cuddling. He is now
much more like a son. And he says
he is more likely to care for me in
my old age than he will for his own
(divorced) parents. (No need to go
into it, but this relates back to what
he craved in me when we met.)
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
He hates it when I refer to
anything sexual we used to do.
There was a particular time frame
around when we last had sex,
which I remember because of the
circumstances. But when I talk
about it he absolutely denies it and
says there’s something wrong with
me because that never happened.
Do you think it’s a problem
that not only is he extremely
uncomfortable with me making a
statement once in a while about
anything to do with our sexual
history, but that he is also blocking
out the last few times we had sex?
I
t’s one thing to be forgetful
about details. Some people
aren’t as forensic as others, but
to be so certain he’s right and
attest that you are misremembering
and there must be something wrong
with you – with no curiosity that
he might have forgotten – is fairly
arrogant and controlling.
I went to a COSRT-accredited
(College of Sexual and Relationship
Therapists) psychotherapist, Silva
Neves, who said: “Someone erasing
your history is a problem, yes,
because it’s denying an important
part of your communal experiences.
Your partner feeling uncomfortable
talking about sex is one thing, but
him actively erasing part of your
past is wounding.”
I think you’re right to feel
unhappy about Jon doing this.
There seems to be a certain amount
of denial going on. It appears your
relationship has radically changed,
and Neves and I wondered how
comfortable you really were about
this. Aside from Jon denying (part
of) your past, are you happy with
the way things are? Because it
seems unequivocal that Jon doesn’t,
and that the sexual side of your
relationship is over. Neves wondered
if Jon was avoiding the subject of sex
because he thinks talking about it
will lead to you wanting it?
“If you’re satisfied with the setup
but you’re ‘only’ bothered that the
end of the (sexual) relationship is
denied, then it might be a good idea
to validate that the relationship is
now in a completely different place.
Jon may need some reassurance that
there will be no invitation for sex,”
suggested Neves.
I know it won’t be easy to initiate a
conversation, but we both felt it was
important. Only then can you really
take stock of what’s going on and,
from there, work out what you want.
It sounds like there are elements
of you both caring for each other,
and Neves wondered if your
current setup would work as a
loving nonsexual base from which
you could have “a wider network
If you would of relationships, some of which
like advice could be sexual”. This seems to be
on a family what Jon is doing.
matter, email The cuddling may come back
ask.annalisa@ once boundaries are in place and Jon
theguardian. knows it won’t lead to anything. But
com. See without a conversation about where
theguardian. you’re both at there is no emotional
com/letters- intimacy, and when you add that to
terms for terms no physical intimacy it’s hard to see
and conditions how this is tenable long term.
 KITCHEN AIDE 611
6
By Anna Berrill

T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By Cynthia Shanmugalingam

№ 255
Aubergine,
tamarind, chickpea
and coconut curry
Prep 15 min This dish graces the homes of
Cook 1 hr Sri Lankan Tamil folks the world
over. It is traditionally made with
Serves 4 deep-fried slices of aubergine, but
I think it’s just as good with roasted
Boil together or saute vegetables –
• GLUTEN FREE

ones. With sweetness from coconut

the secret to perfect one-pot pastas
I make a tomato, kale and lemon
one-pot pasta on repeat, but what
other one-pot pastas should I try?
Linda, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
“One-pot pastas have a particular
brilliance to them,” says Anna
Jones, who is behind your recipe
and whose latest book, Easy Wins,
is published next month. This
method, where you put the sauce
ingredients, the pasta and the
cooking water all in one vessel, can
be taken in numerous directions.
To achieve carb comfort, there
are two schools of thought. The
first, says Mateo Zielonka, author of
The Pasta Man, is “to mix chopped
vegetables – broccoli, onion,
tomatoes, herbs – pasta and water in
a pan and bring to a boil”. The other
would be to “cook onions, garlic and
other vegetables in olive oil, add the
pasta and water, and simmer until
the liquid is absorbed”. Success
hinges on equal amounts of pasta to
water. “You can then play around
with flavours,” Jones says, adding
citrus zest, spices, harissa or miso.
Grated squash tossed in at the
end of cooking is a good shout: “It
softens and creates a silky sauce,”
Jones says. Zielonka, meanwhile,
would cook onions and garlic in oil
until just golden, then add sliced
mushrooms. “If you have white
wine, add a splash and reduce. Next
add rigatoni or casarecce, mix and
cover with water.” A parmesan rind
wouldn’t go amiss. Simmer until the
IMAGE SOURCE/GETTY
pasta is al dente, then fold through
chopped parsley or spinach, plus
taleggio or cream.
Rosie Birkett, of the A Lot on Her
Plate Substack, is into a “sort of
hybrid between a sauce/soup and
pasta; you end up with something
slurpy, warming and delicious”.
This translates into a minestrone of
sorts. She starts with “a version of
soffritto – diced celery, onion, carrot
– softened in olive oil and butter for
a few minutes with salt and pepper,
maybe some chilli and spices”. In
goes chopped garlic, then finely
chopped chard stalks, a tin or jar of
beans or chickpeas, chicken stock
and leafy greens. “Snap spaghetti
in half, then cook it in the stock
until al dente. Take the pot off the
heat, cover and let it settle for a
couple of minutes, then add lemon
juice and chopped herbs.” Top with
pangrattato or grated parmesan
and drizzle with oil.
Rob Chambers, executive chef
at Luca in London, heads back to
his childhood with pasta e fagioli.
“It’s a classic that my nonna used
to make. In a large pot, combine
cooked cannellini beans with finely
chopped soffritto, a parmesan rind
and chopped pancetta, guanciale
or ham hock.” Chuck in “short and
small” pasta and chicken stock, cook
until al dente, then eat drizzled with
oil, parsley and celery leaf.
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
Got a culinary dilemma?
Email feast@theguardian.com
milk, acidity from tamarind, the
creaminess of chickpeas and the
silky taste of aubergines, this might
be the ultimate aubergine curry.
Ingredients
2 medium Method
aubergines Heat the oven to 220C (200C fan)/
(about 450-500g), cut gas 7. In a large bowl, mix the
into 2cm-thick rounds
aubergine slices with a half-teaspoon
Salt
2 tbsp coconut oil
of salt and a generous tablespoon
or vegetable oil of oil, then toss to coat. Arrange the
1 large red onion, slices on a lined baking tray, so they
peeled and sliced are flat next to each other, then bake
4 garlic cloves, for 30–45 minutes, until golden.
peeled and sliced Remove and leave to cool.
4cm piece root Meanwhile, make the curry
ginger, peeled and powder. Turn down the oven to 180C
finely chopped
(160C fan)/gas 4. Put all the spice
15 fresh curry leaves
2 tbsp jaffna curry
seeds on a large baking tray, toast
powder (see below) in the oven for five minutes, then
100g tamarind tip into a bowl. Turn up the oven to
block, soaked in warm 200C (180C fan)/gas 6, then toast the
water, or 2½ tbsp curry leaves and kashmiri chilli on
tamarind paste the same tray, until the chilli turns
2 tsp fenugreek seeds dark and they both smell fragrant.
2 fresh tomatoes, Tip into the same bowl, cool, then
roughly chopped
blitz until fine. Tip into a clean jar,
1 x 400g tin
chickpeas, drained
and store in a cool, dark place – this
100ml tinned makes far more than you need here,
coconut milk but it keeps for a couple of months.
Plain yoghurt, Fry the onion in the remaining
to serve tablespoon of oil on a medium heat
Plain white rice, until soft. Add the curry leaves and
to serve after 30 seconds, add the garlic and
ginger, and cook, stirring for a couple
Jaffna curry powder
of minutes. Add the tamarind,
150g coriander seeds
75g cumin seeds
fenugreek, tomatoes, chickpeas,
75g black 120ml water and two tablespoons of
peppercorns curry powder, cover, simmer, and
75g fennel seeds cook for five to six minutes.
20g fresh curry Add the roast aubergine, then
leaves gent
gently y stir in the coconut milk and
350g dried kashmiri cook for a finfinal two to three minutes,
chillies adding a bit morem water if the sauce
1¼ tsp ground
iis too thick. Serve over plain white
turmeric
rrice
ice with a sspoonful of yoghurt.

23 Febru
February 2024 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Which sci-fi character’s
hairstyle was inspired by
Mexican revolutionary
Clara de la Rocha?
2 What indignity did
Sandy Island, New
Caledonia, suffer in 2012?
3 Carmen Callil founded
which publishing house?
4 Which athlete ate 1,000
chicken nuggets at the
2008 Olympics?
5 ADX Florence in Colorado
is the last of what in the US?
6 The Kirkwood gaps are
interruptions in what?
7 Which BBC programme
for deaf people has run
since 1981?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
ILLUTATION
a) joke on wrong occasion
b) mud bathing
c) flooding
d) badmouthing
2 Cryptic
A South American heritage?
It’s really hot! (12).
CHESS
Leonard Barden
“Freestyle chess” is
a new name for the
variant where the back
rank pieces are placed
randomly, so as to make
the game more a test of
skill and imagination
than memory of book
openings. It used to be
called Fischer Random
after its inventor, then
Chess 960 or Chess
9LX after the number
of possible starting
positions.
Elite grandmasters
like it, and last week a
$200,000 event took place
at the Weissenhaus resort
on Germany’s Baltic Sea
The Guardian Weekly 23 February 2024
8 Which two Labour party
leaders died in office?
What links:
9 Rankin; Stillz;
Weegee; Yevonde;
Yosigo?
10 Bann; Tay; Thames;
Tywi?
11 1st (unaffiliated);
2nd (Federalist);
3rd (Democratic-
Republican)?
12 APA; Chicago; MHRA;
MLA?
13 Afar; Amhara; Oromia;
Somali; Tigray?
14 Big Wednesday; Blue
Crush; Blue Juice; Point
Break?
15 Entertainment;
Football; History; Money;
Politics?
3 Words Without End
Which 3-letter string may
be appended to each of the
following beginnings, in
each case making a word?
b—; d—; g—; j—; l—; m—;
r— ; tr—.
4 Mind Body
Identify the words that
differ in the letters shown:
****T*** (focus your mind)
****C*** (keep taking the
tablets)
© CMM2024
coast. Half of the eight
competitors, including
the world No 1, Magnus
Carlsen, and the world
champion, Ding Liren,
were over-30s, while the
other four were under-21s.
The rapid section,
to decide the classical
3907 Levon Aronian v Vincent
Keymer, freestyle chess,
Weissenhaus 2024. White to
move and win.
CINEM A CONNECT
Killian Fox
Name the films and the writer
who connects them.
3 -UST. 4 MEDITATE, MEDICATE.
Maslanka 1 b). 2 INCANDESCENT.
on plays by William Shakespeare.
The Tragedy of Macbeth are all based
Cinema Connect Titus, Ran, and
15 The Rest Is … podcasts.
14 Films that feature surfing.
systems. 13 Regions of Ethiopia.
Jefferson). 12 Academic referencing
States (Washington, Adams and
first three presidents of the United
Wales. 11 Political affiliations of the
Northern Ireland; Scotland; England;
10 Longest rivers entirely within:
Smith. 9 Mononymous photographers.
7 See Hear. 8 Hugh Gaitskell and John
“supermax” prison. 6 Asteroid belt.
3 Virago Press. 4 Usain Bolt. 5 Federal
2 Sandy Island was proved not to exist.
Quiz 1 Princess Leia (Star Wars).
Answers
knockout pairings, was
a disaster for Ding, who
was struggling with
health issues and lost
seven games in a row.
Levon Aronian beat
him in 18 moves with a
queen sacrifice.
Carlsen lost his first
knockout game to Alireza
Firouzja before recovering
to win 3-1, while Ding’s
dire form continued.
The sponsor, Jan
Buettner, said the event
would return to Germany
in February 2025, when
there could also be a
Freestyle Tour, in the US,
India and South Africa.
4 Qxb8 wins.
If Rxd6 2 Rxe8+ Kxe8 3 Qxg8+ and
cxd6 2 Bb6+ Kc8 3 Rc4+ and mates.
3907 1 Rxd6+! and Black resigned. If
Notes and Queries
The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
COU N T RY DI A RY
AY D O N C A S T L E
Northumberland, England, UK
H
igh above the jostling
treetops, a buzzard gains
lift with the wind. It’s
another buffeting day in
a winter of many gales. I’m glad to
have left the fields for the shelter
of this wood. The footpath that
led up from Corbridge follows its
namesake, the Cor Burn, a twisting
stream that gathers water from the
north side of the Tyne valley.
This path must have been here
for centuries. Sunk between root-
encrusted banks, it’s a hollow way,
dappled brown with oak leaves.
A simple bridge crosses the burn
where sound is patterned by shallow
waterfalls over flat slabs of rock.
As we climb, it’s clear why this
was a defensive site. The blocky
outline of masonry glimpsed
through skyline trees is Aydon
Castle. Pillaged and burnt during
the cross-border wars, changing
hands several times, it was used as
a farmhouse from the 17th century
to the 1960s. Despite all this, it’s
a largely unaltered 13th-century
fortified manor house, homely in the
embrace of its high curtain walls.
Spring shows earlier here than
in my upland home of Allendale.
Wild garlic is spearing up through
the leaf litter. Lesser celandine’s
heart-shaped leaves gleam along the
banks, arched over by unruly sprays
of bramble. Rippling hart’s-tongue
ferns cascade down; in this moist
soil there’s golden saxifrage, the new
buds showing among fleshy foliage.
It’s the snowdrops I’ve come to
see, tumbling down the scarp, filling
the wood between castle and burn.
Single snowdrops, my favourites –
pure elegant droplets. They spread
beneath hazel, ash, sycamore and
beech, thrust up through moss, twigs
and ferns. Milk-white, lichen green,
the snowdrops bob in the wind, their
movements contrasting with the
sturdy castle walls. Susie White
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Quick crossword
No 16,777
8 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

10 11 8 9

12 13 14 15 10 11

All solutions published next week

16 17 18 19 20 12 13 14

15 16

21 22 23 17 18 19 20

24 25 21 22

26 27 23 24

The Weekly cryptic By Paul Across 7 Opulence (6)

1 The ___, Franz Kafka novel 9 Female head of the family (9)
No 29,304 published 1926 (6) 13 Resembling a rodent (7)
4 Starry (6) 14 Pleasing sound (7)
8 Chicken or egg? (5) 15 (Old-fashioned) telephone (6)
Across 6 See 25 Across
9 Computer folder holding 16 Humble (6)
1 See 25 7 Tom dashed here? (5,4)
correspondence (7) 18 Hearing-related (5)
6 Large group out to lunch, starter 13 More Italian mafiosi initially surrounding
10 Sincere (7) 20 Long-term prisoner (5)
unavailable (4) airport, dangerous element? (9)
11 Pronounce – complete (5)
8/10/11 A rude Etonian struggling to maintain 14 Names European Community provided
12 Crime of Oedipus and Orestes (9)
working relations, promptly dismissed filed by operatives (9)
17 Slightest (5)
(2,3,3,3,3,3,5) 17 Alcoholic drink, beverage inspiring old Solution No 16,771
19 Sink back again (7)
9 On ship heading for Africa, in the writer briefly (7) P U S H MO N A S T I C
21 A bit hot (7)
doldrums reportedly? (6) 18 Case of Agincourt in place identified as L T N C W U
22 Stopped moving (5)
10 See 8 scene of action (7) A R U M F R E E W I L L
23 Help for those in need (6) Y D R U T G L
11 See 8 20 Flag featuring leader in Rome on me,
24 Stick of wax used for drawing (6) B O I L E R S U I T
12 Cook passed quarterdeck? (6) old warship (7)
22/19 Consort, German essentially? (5,6) A O L H C A A
15 Comparative amount fed to horse all
Down L A U R E L W A R MU P
the time (8) 23 Ogre: call to have one evicted (5) L S N G C M O
16 Allotment 21 gone to seed (8) 1 Flavour of tiramisu (6) S T E A M I R O N S
19 See 22 Down 2 Rider’s foothold (7) G F L M D N T
21 Letter about surrender, as near as 3 Serving spoon (5) U N O P E N E D P I C A
dammit? (3,5) 5 Incentives (7) S U S T T S
22 Abscess: one in five say, drained (6) 6 Prove to be false (5) T H R A S H E D D E W Y
24 No frills on trip west of small Italian port (6)
Solution No 29,298
25/1A/6D What can’t be said of a palindrome,
for sure (5,3,2,3,4,5,2)
Sudoku
26 Book horrifying production company, B E N I N C O M E C O M E Medium
extremes trimmed back (4) E O I O A O O Fill in the grid so
27 American author in German vessel on A L C O C K A N D B R O W N that every row,
water (9) C T H L E K E C every column
H O U S E M E N U S E D T O and every 3x3
E R S C S box contains the
Down
D U N C E S C A P R E S I T numbers 1 to 9.
1 6.75 + 0.6 recurring for silky fabric (5)
W A N E E E A T
2 Spice added to reference book was Last week’s solution
H A L L E D I P S W I T C H
passionately expressive? (7)
A R P U E
3 Coe rival, yet often fastest, always
showing heart? (5) L E T S G O R E E M E R G E
4 Sparkling hospital department, highly E I I B R I A A
thought of (7) B L I S T E R P L A S T E R
5 Piece of kit, coat on seen with a D E A O O E T
‘70s jumper (5,4) H E A D H U N T W I D T H

23 February 2024 The Guardian Weekly