Sliding out into the morning early on Lammas, the light already autumn-tinged, the water cool and duckweed-frilled for our swim. I stop for brambles on the way home — brambles! At the start of August! — and notice on a walk later on that the way is so lined with ripe plum trees that certain sections of the path are squishy with fallen fruit. This is not how August ought to be. We share a Lammas breakfast and I think of what we sow and what we reap. 

I’ve wondered more than ever this year about why, in our bookclub, the older the book is the more likely we are to all like it. There’s something about modern publishing, particularly the ‘publish everything and see what sells’ model (plus staff cuts and time pressures), that means more books than ever are coming out without sufficient gatekeeping.

Gatekeeping, like most words, doesn’t sway one way or another in objective moral terms. While the majority of people would agree that gatekeeping groups from culture, science, access to healthcare, housing, etc. is a bad idea for all of us, gatekeeping as a quality-sieve also seems to have gone out of the window. Has your TV show got a great single hook? Does your author have a big following online? Will your film get a great response on social media? Great, let’s sign you up! 

And so: we are offered more and more of less and less. Thoughtful books, films, and TV still exist, but they are harder to find. Brainrot culture is given an intellectual gloss by our chattering classes, often in essays far more interesting and insightful than the source, and we can all feel good for not looking down on things that are boring, stupid, or under-cooked. 

I was talking to a housemate the other day about a book we’d both read, and they said that the voice of the narrator was so much less interesting than the voice of the book, and I suddenly knew exactly what they meant. New books now still have so much potential: identity questioning, grief, love, madness, the trivial becoming huge, the huge becoming trivial, dread, rage, joy, bliss. Yet so many of the narrative voices sound exactly the same: slightly removed, slightly self-aware, 2010-levels of blue-tick twitter wit, the ‘correct’ feelings on the big things, and the correct-incorrect feelings on the small things (messy men and women who hate kids, fuck up at their meaningless jobs, can’t cook, but impulse shop and drunk-message and know they spend too long on their phone but hahaha here’s another chapter where they stay up all night on it anyway). On one hand, I’ve read books I’ve loved with those characters (if you didn’t enjoy anything about Bridget Jones’s Diary and High Fidelity in the the 90s, then I probably can’t do anything about that); on the other, these were fresh voices at the time. We hadn’t heard a Bridget or a Rob, at that stage, just as we hadn’t seen a Fleabag or a Bojack in the mid-2010s, and their voices, whether you liked them or not, felt like a person: recognisable, familiar, but individual. 

Another housemate berated me for taking this kind of line — how unfair to compare something published yesterday with an I Capture the Castle (which has survived more than 75 years) or a Talented Mr Ripley (70 years old) or an Excellent Women (72 years). It’s survivor bias to hold up books that were published a lifetime ago to fresh young titles that haven’t yet proved themselves, of course. But I picked up Jonny Sweet’s recent debut novel for my summer holiday, and was struck immediately by the narrator having an actual voice. He didn’t speak exactly like his friends or other characters in the book, and his internal and external voice both reflected who he was and gave us a deeper understanding of him beyond his own. Although a juicy one-line pitch of a concept, the narrative voice made me actively enjoy reading the book, and gave me an opportunity to develop empathy for the pitch-black protagonist, in a way that reading 400 pages of plot-driven bluesky chat just doesn’t. Another recent title, a new novel from an award-winning author that’s out next year, is so odd, so uniquely formatted and conceived, with such an obscure heart to it and such an individual voice, that I want to sing from the rooftops about how brilliant and energising it is to read. In fact, I want to read it again already. 

I realise that I’m craving competence, not correctness. I want to see odd things done bravely and intelligently, whether or not they succeed. I want to enjoy the creations from people of experience and thoughtfulness, whether or not I agree with them; I want the normalisation of reasoned debate to return, to plead with experts that we haven’t actually had enough, that we like knowing that smart people are still producing smart things. 

The evil, evil algorithm fed me this video essay the other day, Why Are Movies About Research So Addictive? , which captures so well the joy of watching capable people do their jobs really, really well. Is there something in the whirling collective anxiety, terror and horror flavouring all public discourse that is the grieving not only for community, but also for competence? Don’t we all miss knowing that if something needs to be done, we can rely on skilled people to do it? That we don’t have to ride an emotional rollercoaster of corruption, fraudsters, scammers or Sludge?

Don’t we want to know that our nurses and doctors are well-rested and able to take care of us? That our teachers aren’t so burnt out that they can still be experts in their fields, able to educate well the generations soon to enter our workplaces and voting booths? That our politicians have had meaningful jobs before they take up political service, and can have the time and freedom to make good decisions for their constituents? That journalists have the support and experience to dig out and publish major news stories? That those building houses and sewage systems and schools and hospitals know what they’re doing, and can do it well and safely? Don’t we all long to live with some sort of trust in the infrastructure of our society? 

Of many of the films Willems mentions in his video, I either watch them fairly regularly or have watched them relatively recently, but I rewatched Shattered Glass for the first time since its release in 2003, and was struck by how much I’d then seen Peter Sarsgaard’s character, Chuck Lane, as the grey-area antagonist of the film, rather than its hero. He’s a heads-down committed journalist, unfazed by Stephen Glass’s wheedling ‘Are you mad at me?’ whenever challenged about a mistake. While the rest of the team in the film just want to be kind to the harmless, pleasing Glass, Lane wants objective facts, understanding better than his whole editorial staff that journalism should not, cannot, be built on vibes, but only on expertise, objectivity, critical thinking, and slow, careful research and analysis. As Sarsgaard says to Chloe Sevigny’s character after Glass’s fabrications have come to light, ‘He handed us fiction after fiction, and we printed them all as fact. Just because we found him… entertaining. It’s indefensible, don’t you know that?’ (In echo, I found the new Superman film to be almost unwatchable, despite the wonderful cast and the great intentions. I don’t need Superman to be the missing final David Lynch film, but don’t we deserve that it makes basic narrative sense? That there is a sense of someone doing good other than just endlessly saying he is? That goodness can be wonderfully interesting to portray? That this bastion of goodness in the face of large- and small-scale badness could be more than merely… entertaining? Or is this just my Barbie battle all over again?)

There’s space for all sorts of culture, high, low, for me, not for me, books for when you’re ill and TV for when you’re cripplingly depressed. Everyone should find something they need when they open a book or sit in front of a screen, and thanks to AI everyone can have the exact flavour of slop they type into the prompt box. Hurray. 

But right now, being entertaining isn’t enough. I want thoughtfulness, I want weirdness, I want individuality. I want culture that makes me question myself, and everything around me. I want experts to make those bits of culture better, and I want to hope that there is the space, and the funding, and the experience, for creators and audiences to get more than they want. In a time of AI, misinformation, authoritarianism, and a Bradbury-esque screen-based attention-grab, I want us to get exactly what we need. 

In other news:

If you still have any gooseberries, make this tart

Marvel at the beauty of the outfits of the cast on this, particularly Claude’s — I want everything in his wardrobe  

Watch Malcolm in the Middle in French (as we spent our rainy days abroad doing) and appreciate how Bryan Cranston’s perfect physical comedy transcends language