Category Sách & Tri thức

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How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’?

Big tech treats our attention like a resource to be mercilessly extracted. The fightback begins here

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

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Polyamory, regrets and revenge: changing the story on infidelity

From Lily Allen to Raven Leilani’s Luster, a new generation is re-writing the script around love and cheating, argues the author of The Ten Year Affair

O n the first track of Lily Allen’s breakup album West End Girl, we hear a long phone call that leads to a marriage’s unravelling. Allen listens, confused then hurt, for almost two minutes as a presumed husband on the other end asks to open up the relationship. Fans made the obvious connection to Allen’s own marriage to David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things (who is perhaps equally well known for his tasteful Brooklyn townhouse). The two dabbled in polyamory, goes the tabloid story, only to have Harbour break the rules and hurt Allen in the end.

The album is good – pretty and catchy, with an appealing edge of anger. But public reaction went beyond appreciation for the work. The breakup became the object of gruesome rubbernecking. It was a juicy story about one of the oldest topics: infidelity, betrayal, an affair.

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Chosen Family by Madeleine Gray review – friends, lovers or something in between?

From classmates to co-parents, the changing dynamics of a female friendship are astutely observed in a novel that explores the boundaries between love, lust and companionship

Australian author Madeleine Gray’s award-winning debut novel Green Dot was a smart, funny tale of a doomed office affair. Her new novel, Chosen Family, is a smart, funny tale of a complicated, life-changing relationship between two women.

Nell and Eve meet aged 12 at a girls’ school in Sydney. Gray’s narrative moves smoothly back and forth from the 00s to the present day; as in David Nicholls’s One Day, we learn about our protagonists by meeting them at different moments in their lives, from the pressures of high school to the alcohol-soaked freedoms of university to the frustrations and joys of early parenthood.

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​’How do you really tell the truth about this moment?’: George Saunders on ghosts, mortality and Trump’s America

The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life

Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up the scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to grapple with his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost in from the 1940s, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are in fact here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful”, he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”

Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in so doing, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more …” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting”. He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly – and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy – on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him and he worries that he is not prepared for it.

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Off the Scales by Aimee Donnellan review – inside the Ozempic revolution

A fascinating deep dive into the discovery, use and implications of a revolutionary new treatment

Few aspects of being human have generated more judgment, scorn and condemnation than a person’s size, shape and weight – particularly if you happen to be female. As late as 2022, the Times’s columnist Matthew Parris published a column headlined “Fat shaming is the only way to beat the obesity crisis” in which he attributed Britain’s “losing battle with fat” to society’s failure to goad and stigmatise the overweight into finally, shamefacedly, eating less. The tendency to equate excess weight with poor character (and thinness with grit and self-control) treats obesity as a moral as well as physical failing – less a disease than a lifestyle choice.

One of the great strengths of Reuters journalist Aimee Donnellan’s first book is its insistence on framing the discovery of the new weight-loss drugs within the fraught social and cultural context of beauty norms, body image and health. For those who need them, weekly injections of Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro can be revolutionary. Yet for every person with diabetes or obesity taking the drugs to improve their health, others – neither obese nor diabetic – are obtaining them to get “beach-body” ready, fit into smaller dresses, or attain the slender aesthetic social media demands of them. Small wonder some commentators have likened the injections to “an eating disorder in a pen”.

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I’m a crime writer. Here’s why we make the best Traitors contestants

Barrister turned novelist Harriet Tyce is playing a blinder in the fourth series of the show. As a thriller writer myself, I recognise the traits that make her such a formidable Faithful

This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)

Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.

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Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy – the follow-up to I’m Glad My Mom Died

Family trauma shapes a student’s affair with her teacher in this bleak and funny fiction debut from the American memoirist

When it was published in 2022, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir lit a touchpaper to a nascent cultural conversation. I’m Glad My Mom Died introduced her mother Debra’s narcissistic personality disorder into a world eager to discuss adult child and parent estrangement. McCurdy had also suffered sexual abuse, and claimed her mother had contributed to her developing an eating disorder. The memoir was a bestseller, walking readers through the realities of generational trauma; a step change for the former Disney child star who had been “the funny one” on obnoxious Nickelodeon kids’ shows.

In her debut work of fiction, Half His Age, McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room.

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