Hello and welcome to our second weekend edition.

This is Sarah Donaldson writing to you from Nerve co-founder Jane Ferguson’s kitchen table (office space coming soon!). This weekend we are bringing you an interview with author and cyber-activist Cory Doctorow, coiner of the deliciously perfect word ‘enshittification’ to describe how all the tech we rely on becomes worse over time. We’ve also got columnist Stewart Lee settling into his regular weekend slot, Booker-nominated novelist Katie Kitamura’s cultural highlights, a review of Tate Modern’s big autumn show and a wonderfully autumnal recipe of the week. 

It’s hard to believe it’s only been 10 days since we published our first edition. News of the Nerve is spreading like wildfire and we are really grateful for all the energising encouragement on our social media channels and via email. Keep it coming! And please keep sending your notes about tech glitches. We are doing our best to get them sorted quickly.

Big news! We’re delighted to confirm our inaugural Nerve members’ event next month - a talk with this week’s interviewee, tech critic Cory Doctorow. He’ll be in conversation with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on Tuesday 18 November at a central London venue. Members will receive notice of priority booking by email in the coming days. And if you can’t make the event in person there will be a live stream. If you are a free subscriber to this newsletter, please consider upgrading to membership to receive access / priority booking details. 

Here’s a bit more about what’s on the Nerve weekend menu:

Tech writer, blogger, science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow coined the word ‘enshittification’ to describe how the online experience pivoted from being utopian to hellish. “Swearing is what made people excited about it.” For this week’s long read, and to mark the publication of Cory’s new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It we sent Zoë Corbyn to his home in Burbank California with instructions that she would find him in the garden in his hammock.

Stewart Lee - ‘achingly politically correct’ according to the Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine - turns his thoughts to the right wing craze for hanging flags on our streets and motorways, not least what to DO with all the flags once he’s torn them down. “Anyone in the market for a flag residue paperweight?” he asks.

New York-based novelist Katie Kitamura is one of the six contenders for this year’s Booker Prize with her deftly radical novel Audition. As this week’s Recommender, she shares her current cultural favourites, including a new collection of Graham Greene stories edited by Yiyun Li, a tense political thriller starring one of her favourite actors and a Jerome Robbins ballet. 

“Ambitious in all of the right places" is how critic Kadish Morris describes Tate Modern's Nigerian Modernism exhibition for the Nerve's Review of the Week. A huge group show featuring work by over 50 artists such as Ben Enwonwu and members of the Zaria Arts Society, spanning the time of indirect British colonial rule to independence in October 1960 and beyond, Kadish finds it thoughtfully curated and full of energy.

For this week’s Dish, Manchester-based chef - and founder of the charity Eat Well MCR - Mary-Ellen McTague gifts us the recipe for her hugely popular Lancashire Hot Pot. Jane admits that she initially baulked at the length of the ingredients list but “actually it is not that complicated - it just needs good preparation.” Ideally the lamb should slow cook for six hours. It’s absolutely delicious and a classic on the menu at McTague’s restaurant, Pip.  

That’s all for this weekend. A quick question before I go. We are finding there’s a real appetite for what we are doing on the Nerve, but getting the message out is our greatest challenge. If you have any friends or family you think would be interested in signing up, please forward this newsletter onto them. And if this has come to you via a friend, welcome and please sign up here if you like what you read!

Huge thanks and see you next week.

Sarah

Co-founder / co-editor, the Nerve

Read more about the ideas behind the Nerve here, and meet the team here.