Evening all,

Imogen here with a packed bank holiday weekend edition including Stewart Lee on his mind-boggling run-in with Ofcom, an investigation by Max Colbert into the ICE-enabling surveillance companies with UK contracts, and lots of cultural treats.

I’ve been thinking about kids and parenting a lot this week. Not just because it’s the last hurrah before school starts back and I’ve a mountain of uniform requiring name labels at my house, but because I started The Castle, the latest must-read by the exceptional writer and podcaster Jon Ronson, author of bestsellers including The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats. As Jon puts it in Dorian Lynskey’s fab interview with him for us today, the idea for the book “crashed unannounced” into his life after he received a series of alarming texts from his son Joel. Joel, who was in his early 20s at the time, had been enticed with a couple of friends one night to a huge castle in the forests of New England and was so disturbed by what he found that, for the first time ever, he sent his dad the coordinates of his location and a photograph, just in case. 

As Dorian explains in the interview, “stumbling on to the story of Chris Mark, the chaotic, castle-owning millionaire in Connecticut who is ‘trying to be Hugh Hefner during what is clearly the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner’ allowed Jon to explore the bigger question of why so many middle-aged men are going off the rails in spectacular style”. The book – and the interview – are full of wise, witty insights into the masculinity crisis, partly caused by the disinhibited behaviour the internet has heralded.

“This is very weird”, reads one of Joel’s concerned messages to his dad. And it set me wondering whether this is the weirdest, perhaps most dystopian, time in history to be a child or young person coming of age, when so many of the adults who are supposed to be in charge have taken the guardrails off? On Wednesday, Meta agreed to an $18bn (£13.2bn) settlement, to be paid out over 10 years, in a historic lawsuit brought by 29 US states claiming that its platforms harmed children. Financially, it’s a drop in the ocean – the company was facing an estimated potential damage award of $1.4 trillion. But as part of the deal, Meta has agreed to bring in several significant measures to protect children on Facebook and Instagram in the US. In an excellent column today, regular Nerve contributor and campaigner Adele Walton, who grew up on Meta platforms and tragically lost her sister Aimee to online harms in 2022, asks: is this – finally – the start of a reckoning for the tech industry? 

The links to all this week’s stories follow below – please do forward this email to anyone you think would find them interesting.

“The usually timid broadcasting regulator,” writes Stewart in his weekly column, has “girded its gutter-dangling gonads and upheld a complaint brought against a joke I made in a BBC satire show”. He’s quite pleased, actually, because he had made a mistake, and it was reassuring to see Ofcom acting decisively for once, “like a dying dog that stirs in the presence of a squirrel”. The problem is, the ruling seems to have set a precedent for a right of reply to live comedy. But now that Ofcom has woken up, perhaps it could tackle the mountain of complaints that are piling up about GB News? Read Stewart’s column here.

A new book from Jon Ronson is always an event and The Castle is no exception. Speaking to Dorian Lynskey from his home in New York’s Hudson Valley, their wide-ranging conversation moves from male midlife crises to life in the country and even Jon’s former friend Graham Linehan, who features in one chapter. Read the article here.

Investigative reporter Max Colbert is one of the Nerve’s Palantir experts: it was his research with Charlie Young that revealed the vast suite of contracts the AI company has with UK state agencies. Max has spent the last three months looking into the British activities of the firms providing the dystopian tech that powers ICE’s deportations in the US. Guess what? Many of these firms have state contracts here too: all ready for a future Reform government. As MP Martin Wrigley tells Max: “These are tools, they are sophisticated spanners, and a spanner can be used perfectly for taking apart a motorbike. But when you hit somebody over the head with it, it becomes a lethal weapon.” Read the report here – and please consider upgrading if you read us for free to help fund these time-consuming investigations.

In California this week, Meta agreed to settle a historic lawsuit with 29 states that alleged, essentially, that the company designed features to exploit children. They will pay $18bn over 10 years – a fraction of the $1.4tn liability that had been mooted if they lost the case. And, naturally, they admit no guilt as part of the settlement. Campaigner and Nerve regular Adele Walton  assesses the safeguards the firm and a “squirming” Mark Zuckerberg have had to agree to put in place, and how the lawsuit will “shape the course of Big Tech’s future”. Read her column here.

Best known for the hit novel Sorrow and Bliss, which won the fiction book of the year at the 2022 British Book Awards and has been translated into over 30 languages, New Zealand-born author Meg Mason is now releasing Sophie, Standing There, about a lonely, heartbroken young woman who becomes fixated on a star author. Today Meg shares her recent cultural favourites: from the London restaurant that she adores (“it’s been six months and not a week has gone by that I haven’t thought about the ravioli”) to a hot new book about the real Agatha Christie. Read Meg’s culture tips here.

Neo-soul star Erykah Badu hasn’t put out a full-length release for more than 10 years. But now she’s back, collaborating with ace rapper-producer the Alchemist to produce “a multi-layered epic that unfurls like a hazy all-nighter”, writes our music critic Kate Hutchinson. There’s psychedelia, jazz-rock, R&B, guest stars including Thundercat, Kamasi Washington and Earl Sweatshirt – and, Kate writes, a vibe “like the soundtrack that plays when the last ashes settle on the ground”. Read her review here

The chef, author and food photographer Joe Woodhouse gave up eating meat when he was just 10 years old and promptly learned to cook. Married to the Ukrainian food writer Olia Hercules, Joe has written three vegetable based cookbooks. For the August bank holiday weekend he shares his recipe for Vietnamese-inspired “zingy” summer rolls. Get the details here

Happy long weekend! We’ll see you again next week.

Imogen