Evening all,

It’s Imogen here with today’s weekend edition – and not just any weekend, a shiny bank holiday one. 

I’m very much hoping to send you joyfully off into the long weekend. We’ve got another unmissable column from Stewart Lee; our resident recipe queen Jane has found you a delicious lazy morning brunch dish; and this week’s Recommender, Uncanny’s Danny Robins, shares tips for a “beautifully meditative” book and a “spine-tingling” album. We also have a gripping long read from journalist Paul Holden on being targeted by the Labour party machine. This story has everything – false accusations, corporate espionage, plotting and scheming in the Westminster bubble.

But first we need to talk about online violence against women. It was obviously a central theme in our Nerve x Guilty Feminist Epstein Files-themed collab event in London last night (more on that later). But also there’s a UN Women-published report just out and – as one of its co-authors, Dr Julie Posetti from City St George’s University, puts it in a piece written for the Nerve today – it shows beyond doubt that “in the age of the broligarchs, women in public life are subjected to increasingly sophisticated online violence – from viral acts of ‘nudification’ to AI-assisted synthetic rape designed to humiliate them into silence and steal their agency”.

There are some particularly appalling stats about female journalists, which make the report well-timed ahead of Sunday’s World Press Freedom day. The researchers (who surveyed 641 women journalists and media workers, activists, and human rights defenders from 119 countries) found that reports to police of online violence against women journalists have doubled since 2020, while 25% of women surveyed have been diagnosed with related anxiety and/or depression. 

What’s more, instead of tackling the abuse, the report found that law enforcement was  often passing the responsibility for protection to the survivors, advising women to remove themselves from social media, avoid speaking publicly about controversial issues or even take leave from their careers.

In order to avoid online abuse women must stop being online? Does this remind anyone of the advice that in order to not get sexually abused we must not wear short skirts in public? This silencing, often from deliberate and coordinated online attacks, is working: nearly half of women journalists surveyed reported censoring themselves on social media, and over 20% in their work. 

The theme of technology as a tool of repression against women – and the urgent need for more accountability – also came up a lot in the discussion at our event last night between hosts Deborah Frances-White and comedian Ria Lina and Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr and journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley (author of The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell) as they considered the Epstein files along with the Gisele Pelicot case and CNN’s recent investigation into an online “sleep content” abuse network. 

There was also great music from GeeJay, poetry from Dan Whitlam and plenty of laughs. We’re told this episode of the Guilty Feminist will drop sometime in mid-May– we’ll be sure to post about it on our socials once we have an exact date. Huge thanks to those of you that made it to the live event, and for asking great questions. I for one felt inspired by Lucia’s parting words: “I do think there are reasons to be hopeful. The survivors showed enormous courage and tenacity in getting the Epstein Files Act passed through Congress, they are speaking up louder than ever, we've seen arrests in the UK, and this story hasn't fallen out of the news in the way I've seen so many times over the seven years I've been covering it. We need to match the courage of those survivors by keeping it in the headlines until we see some justice.”

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You may well have read about the “Operation Cannon” scandal – in which apparatchiks at Labour Together, the thinktank behind Keir Starmer’s rise to power, employed corporate spies to build dossiers on journalists, including reporters at the Guardian and the Sunday Times. One name that has been less reported on is Paul Holden, who was writing about a book about Labour Together when he was informed that he was being investigated by GCHQ for a national security breach – something that was completely untrue. What happened next involved lawyers, investigators and months of anxiety and uncertainty, all while his family was awaiting the birth of their second child. As he explains, a group of private investigators had “stretched every sinew” to discredit him. The question of true accountability for what happened has still not been addressed. Read the full deep dive here.

Stewart got lost the other day and found himself on Cable Street – the inspiring place where Jews, Communists and trade unionists faced down Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1930s London. In those days, he writes, the far right were right in front of you, trying to “swarm over physical barricades, where they could be easily seen and beaten back”. But in a technological age, totalitarianism-adjacent companies like Palantir are not so easily confronted, “seeping into our lives silently like an odourless gas”. Maybe in a country now on high alert for hate speech, a spotlight will be shone on the inflammatory ideals and language of the modern far right? We can but hope. Read Stewart’s column here

In an era of online nudification, abuse and humiliation, the world is becoming an increasingly hostile place to be a female journalist – and ahead of World Press Freedom Day on Sunday, the authors of a groundbreaking new study have uncovered exactly how much. Their findings reveal the shocking increase of anxiety and depression connected to online aggression – and the vast numbers of women who have started censoring themselves and their work as a result of abuse. Read their article here.

Just what does the man behind the global phenomenon that is Uncanny, the paranormal podcast that has been spun off into a TV series, books and stage shows, do in his spare time? Read ghost stories for one (though his threshold is quite high now – when he finds one that actually scares him, he's like "Oh my god, yes!"). On the eve of the final two dates of his live show Uncanny: Fear of the Dark at Soho Theatre Walthamstow next week, he shared his current cultural favourites with us: from some "hauntingly brilliant modern folk music", the best thing he's seen at the theatre for ages, and where he buys all the T-shirts he wears on the telly. Read his tips here.

Mass started off as an acclaimed film; now its creator, Fran Kranz, has made it into an  “immensely moving” play, writes our theatre critic, Dorian Lynskey. But because the subject of the piece is an emotional reckoning after a school shooting, it’s not one to be taken lightly. Adeel Akhtar and Lyndsey Marshal, alongside Paul Hilton and Monica Dolan, play two couples who both lost children in the attack: but one family’s child was a victim of the killer and the other’s was the killer himself, now dead by suicide. The cast’s chemistry is outstanding, Dorian writes. Read his review here

For those of you with the time to slow down over the long bank holiday weekend we are sharing this traditional Moroccan breakfast recipe created by the chef Nargisse Benkabbou, which features in her beautiful new book Madaq – Simple & Delicious Recipes Inspired by Moroccan Flavours. She promises that it’s “quick and easy and stress-free”. Get the recipe here.

Thank you for reading and we’ll be back on Tuesday with an important announcement… watch this space. And don’t forget to forward this email to any of your friends and family who you think might like to subscribe – it really helps us if you spread the word.

Imogen