Good evening! 

It’s Ian here, commissioning editor on the Nerve.

We are celebrating our first anniversary this month and by chance this weekend we’re publishing the follow-up piece to our most widely and deeply read article of the past year. The hit article was US journalist and podcaster Virginia Heffernan’s February investigation of how Jeffrey Epstein cultivated connections with Harvard and used them to support the espousal of race science. We headlined it “The Billionaires’ Eugenics Project”. 

One prominent figure in that piece was Steven Pinker, the professor of evolutionary psychology and writer of bestselling popular science books that earned him the coveted moniker of “public intellectual” – which basically seems to mean that he doesn’t let his lack of expertise on a topic prevent him from holding forth on it.

Pinker has just published his 13th book and is in the UK touring it around various theatres. And he’s found another handy opportunity to promote it: the death of Jason Arday. Pinker’s response on X to the Cambridge sociologist’s death wasn’t to mourn him but to complain that he and the “race realist” Nathan Cofnas had been “tarred” with allegations of racism for their attacks on Arday’s work. Heffernan’s piece traces the collapse of Pinker’s intellectual authority: the Epstein relationship he can’t quite repress, the discredited pals he thanks in his acknowledgments, the academic field that fell apart beneath him, and the increasingly odd manosphere company he keeps.

Pinker’s shtick is to give quite pernicious and, frankly, racist ideas an intellectual gloss, all delivered with an air of reasonableness. Meanwhile, in the Oxfordshire village of Piddington, a different kind of respectability is doing similar work. Residents have voted to “leave the UK” over the placement of a detention centre for asylum seekers in an ex-military base nearby. As Stewart Lee notes in his column this week, they have also attracted some undesirables from the far right – the kind of thugs who in normal times might be casing the villagers’ homes rather than lending their support. In both cases, the company they keep tells you something about what their reasonableness is designed to hide. 

Anyway, on to a much happier subject: Nerve events. There are still some tickets available for our event at The Station in Bristol (organised by the city’s independent bookshop Bookhaus) on Wednesday 23 September (6-8pm), where Omar El Akkad, author of the bestselling One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will talk to the Bafta-winning journalist Ramita Navai (of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack).

Tickets for £10 are available here (or £6 for paid-up Nerve members).

And we’re still finalising the lineup for next Sunday’s The Nerve Live (27 September, 10.30-2pm) at the Vision Festival in King’s Cross, London. The programme includes Kiell Smith-Bynoe sharing his cultural highlights in our onstage Recommender Live slot; Cody Dahler and Carole Cadwalladr on the panel “Fighting Hate with Humour”, plus John Sweeney (author, most recently, of The Real Nigel Farage) in conversation with our political columnist Sangita Myska. Get tickets here for just £12. A code for members to add at checkout to access tickets for a bargain £3 is printed below.  Please join us!

Now I’ll hand over to the rest of the team for today’s links:

The Oxfordshire village of Piddington, which this week voted to “secede” from the UK over the arrival of asylum seekers, is about to be invaded by the very worst Britons this country has to offer, writes Stewart: “Daniel ‘Danny Tommo’ Thomas is now planning to blockade the camp with 5,000 men of fighting age, a significantly higher than average percentage of which may have convictions for domestic violence.” It all bodes very poorly for the Piddingtexiteers, who not only have to cope with the Patriot Platform crowd, but brace themselves “for the biometric border checks at Bicester”. Read Stewart’s column here.

There was a time when Steven Pinker – he of the rock’n’roll hairdo and the bestselling books on evolutionary psychology – was the media's favourite scientist. Then came the debunking of his field of study, a flirtation with "race science", admiration from the manosphere and links to Jeffrey Epstein. As Pinker visits the UK to promote his latest book, US journalists and cultural critic Virginia Heffernan traces a very modern fall from grace.

Are you worried about AI? The Nerve’s Cory Doctorow says the artificial intelligence companies are too – but not about human extinction: that’s a distraction. Rather, they are freaking out because they’ve borrowed and spent billions of dollars to build their intelligence machines, and so far, they have little profit to show for it. That’s the real reason they want a moratorium. Read his column here.

It began as a pop-up in a scrappy corner of east London in 2011, formed partly from leftover scaffolding by a broke young theatre director who had posed as a property developer in order to land a disused warehouse to turn into a new space. But it went on to change London’s theatre landscape and help launch the careers of Michaela Coel, Ncuti Gatwa and directors including Alexander Zeldin. Now the radical Yard theatre is back, following a £7m rebuild, with an exhilarating programme: everything from a filthy puppet show to a choreopoem about Black womanhood – and the star power of Ian McKellen. To celebrate its reopening, theatre writer Fergus Morgan spoke to artistic director Jay Miller about how he’s still breaking boundaries after 15 years. Read the interview here.

As a founding member of indie-pop favourites Saint Etienne, Bob Stanley has spent three decades writing about and championing pop culture in all its forms. His acclaimed music books include Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop and his latest, out next week, is The Shadows: The Definitive Story, a biography of the influential rock group. Bob took time out from Saint Etienne’s farewell tour of the UK this month to share his latest cultural discoveries with us, from a reassuringly old-school Yorkshire cafe and a hypnotic new late-night album to a “terrifically bleak” comedy about adult friendship. Read Bob’s choices here.

He is one of the best actors of his generation, nimbly switching from playing Prince Charles (The Crown) to a cocky tennis player (Challengers) to a crumpled grave robber (La Chimera); now Josh O’Connor has taken on his first proper stage role in over a decade. In director Sam Yates’s Golden Boy at the Almeida, he’s “all muscled up as Joe Bonaparte, the conflicted violinist-turned-prizefighter in Clifford Odets’s 1937 assault on the American Dream”, says Nerve theatre critic Dorian Lynskey. It’s a knockout turn – and those of us without tickets can catch it in cinemas in November as part of National Theatre Live. Read Dorian’s review here.

Poppy O’Toole, aka Poppy Cooks, is a cookery star on TV and social media. A frequent guest on popular shows like Saturday Kitchen, she has a whopping 4.5m followers on TikTok. Her new book – her sixth – The Actually Delicious Batch Cookbook, is partly a response to her becoming a new mum. She describes these burgers as being “the lovechild of two takeaway icons” and also “the ultimate university survival hack”. Get the recipe here.

That’s all for this week: thanks for reading! Please do pass on the newsletter to anyone else you think might like it – it really helps us grow.

Have a great weekend.

Ian