Evening all! 

Jane here, introducing this weekend’s edition, while multitasking madly. 

This weekend, we’re celebrating the Nerve’s first birthday with The Nerve Live – a festival stint that brings our journalism to the stage. New Nerve T-shirts are being packed ready to be sold, our anniversary “zine” is at the printers. We even have our life-size cardboard cut-out of Nigel Farage packed and ready to go... what could possibly go wrong?

But first, our weekend newsletter, featuring Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, talking with journalist and documentary-maker Ramita Navai. Also, we have an interview with a true original, the US artist and musician Laurie Anderson, and more.

Today, two of our writers tackle the rapidly deteriorating discourse around immigration in the UK – and indeed globally. Regular Nerve contributor and author Natasha Walter has interviewed Piddington resident Rachel Marsh. Rachel spoke emotionally on Newsnight about confronting the xenophobia of her neighbours after they voted to “secede” from the UK in protest at the proposed housing of male asylum seekers in a local repurposed army barracks. 

Natasha reports: “The reaction she [Rachel] has encountered has been vicious and horrifying. And while the media spotlight has now moved on from Piddington, it would be wrong to think that anything has been resolved.” Although Rachel has received much support, both online and in real life, she worries that “how I’ve been treated by far-right activists will prevent a lot of good people from speaking out”. 

Meanwhile, our brilliant resident satirist Stewart Lee takes a sideways look at where we are heading, and the collapse of compassion in post-Brexit Britain. He wonders whether it’s time to live like the Romans and stage grand public spectacles to satisfy public appetites? “Perhaps the RNLI should offer ordinary British people the opportunity to be taken out to sea to watch the migrants drown, while RNLI heroes poke the desperate with billhooks?”

Just to say that we have a few remaining tickets for The Nerve Live. They’re £12 and just £3 for members. Regular readers of the newsletter can possibly recite the line-up by heart, but in brief it is John Sweeney talking to Sangita Myska; the Recommender featuring actor/comedian Kiell Smith-Bynoe talking comedy and sharing his culture tips; and a panel discussion on “Fighting Hate With Humour” with comedy “newsfluencer” Cody Dahler, the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr and – just announced! – the Guilty Feminist herself, Deborah Frances-White, fresh from her own event at the Vision Festival this evening. 

And now for the links to this week’s stories from the Nerve team. Oh – and please click on our ad from Proton Mail at the bottom; we get some pennies for every one.

Egypt-born, US-based, the journalist and author Omar El Akkad has written one of those books that shifts the discourse. 2025's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This focused not on the monstrous scale of the violence in Gaza, but instead on the hypocrisy and double standards of western governments – and the wilful ignorance of the average western liberal who chooses to “just look away”. Omar is currently in the UK for the publication of One Day… in paperback and the Nerve hosted a live talk with him this week in Bristol, chaired by documentary-maker Ramita Navai. This edited transcript of their fascinating conversation covers everything from the failures of journalism to the Ed Sheeran debacle; read it here.

“Apparently, the phrase ‘let them drown’,” writes Stewart – after witnessing footage of a young girl chant those words – “merely represents what politicians are calling ordinary people’s ‘legitimate concerns’.” If compassion for migrants has really collapsed to that extent, perhaps it’s time to lean into the spirit of the moment, he suggests, and organise the drownings as a public spectacle? Of course, there is one other way to resurrect British decency, which would be “an organised effort to stop malign foreign influence stirring up trouble”  – but it might be too late for that. Read his furious column here. (And don’t forget that you can buy Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, in our bookshop. Copies have been selling like hot cakes!).

The media narrative around the village of Piddington “declaring independence” over immigration has been a lighthearted one. But that wasn’t the experience of villager Rachel Marsh after she courageously voiced anti-racist views in a BBC interview. As she tells Natasha Walter, she has since been doxxed, abused and threatened with death. With far-right campaigners having gathered in Oxfordshire from around the country, the atmosphere has become increasingly poisonous, but, Rachel says: “I can’t let this kind of rhetoric dominate the whole conversation. There has to be a way of talking about this issue without denying people’s humanity.” Read the interview here.

Composer, performance artist, avant-garde pop star… at 79, the unique Laurie Anderson is still as busy as ever, and breaking new ground as she prepares to play her first ever show in Wales at the Cardiff Music City Festival. But she found time to talk to Jude Rogers in a wide-ranging conversation covering Trump’s fixation with the Kennedy Center (and threats to the arts generally), young women being inspirational, and “cutting yourself some slack” when being self-critical. And how about life lessons? “I don't mind making blunders. I learned a lot through blunders!” Read the Q&A here.

It’s been a decade since Korean director Na Hong-Jin released his word-of-mouth hit supernatural thriller The Wailing, and since then Korean cinema has gone truly mainstream – including Bong Joon-ho’s social satire Parasite becoming the first non-English-language film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Now Na Hong-Jin is back with Hope, a high-energy, bonkers-sounding creature feature that was a hit at Cannes and is reported to be the most expensive Korean film of all time. Does Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones think it’s going to be a monster hit? Read her review to find out.

The actor, writer and director Clint Dyer currently has his production of Tracey Scott Wilson’s newsroom thriller The Story running at the National Theatre. He shares his current cultural highlights, which include watching his friend Goldie’s artistic journey; the album that chimes with his memory of being a young Black man growing up in London; and “two equally brilliant plays with very different budgets”. Read the full list here.

As a middle-class, London-dwelling cooking enthusiast with no garden, I groan when my vegetable box contains celery and sometimes – sorry! – end up chucking it out when it goes floppy. No more. In his new book Kitchening, Jeremy Lee, the erudite chef behind Soho’s Quo Vadis, guides us through the seasons with dishes such as baked asparagus and braised shin of beef. Here he shares instructions to make a delicious-sounding risotto – something I will definitely try this weekend. Get the recipe here.

Thanks for reading; see you on Tuesday,

Jane

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