MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
The genius concealed in the non-human realm
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a strangely reassuring book, grounded in exploring our alienation and the creative possibilities inherent in embracing cognitive diversity
Recognising alternative intelligences in the expansive taxonomy of life
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
James Bridle
Allen Lane, £20
IT IS impossible not to be enthused by James Bridle’s epic vision of a future in which digital technology is repurposed to reconcile a blinkered, supremacist human intelligence with the “more-than-human” aptitudes of animals and plants.
Every page written by this original thinker bubbles like primordial soup with optimism about the possibilities were our benighted species to look beyond its navel for solutions to the many problems it has visited upon the natural world.
Ways of Being is Bridle’s manifesto for an “ecology of technology” that recognises alternative intelligences in the expansive taxonomy of life with which humans can collaborate in a bold experiment in mutual benefit to create a truly just world.
More from this author
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends an exhibition on the profound and sometimes revelatory interactions between Islamic and Western art
Six years on from the Bangladeshi factory collapse, survivors help British activists launch a radical new brand that redefines ‘ethical fashion,’ writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
