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
On the manipulation of human desire and desirability
It is time the left intervened to bring that greatest disrupter, love, to the console, writes FIONA O'CONNOR
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
Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships
By Alfie Bown
Pluto Books £16.99
THERE’S a lot in this book, much of it alarming, some of it alarmist. Alfie Bown’s focus on the love industry’s hook-up with the gaming behemoth begins with a chaste kiss and fast forwards to hardcore data rape.
Yes, the intimate data making up dating sites is empowering, a cause for corporate and superpower mud-wrestles for control.
Of deeper concern is the manipulation of human desire and desirability; libido’s preconscious vulnerability to the stealthy algorithm like a wandering lamb to the salivating wolf.
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SARAH TROTT explores short fictional slices of life in the American midwest from a middle-aged and mostly female perspective
ANDY HEDGECOCK is inspired by accessible insights into the theory, function and psychological impact of our digital tools
LEIGH WILSON applauds the new translation of a novel from 1932 that is a hymn to values inimical to the forces that were growing in Germany in the early 1930s
SIMON PARSONS recommends a musical retelling of the Old Testament story of the sexual awakening of a young childless bride