Hello all,

It’s Sarah here, writing this newsletter from a train en route to the Laugharne Weekend festival in Wales, where the Nerve is media partner. We’ve got a great range of stories for your weekend reading today, including Stewart Lee on Trump’s hallucinatory St Patrick's Day speech, a thought-provoking long read on how the mainstream enabled anti-’woke’ extremism, singer Arlo Parks’s cultural favourites and a five star review of a “distinctly relevant” revival of Russian playwright Maxim Gorky’s once-banned satire Summerfolk.

First, we have the latest instalment by Carole Cadwalladr and tech editor/reporter Ian Tucker in our ongoing investigation into evil enemies of humanity data surveillance company Palantir. Having brought you news of the £670m-worth of UK state contracts with the US corporation, founder Peter Thiel’s transatlantic network, and the concerns of two whistleblowers inside the MOD that Palantir is a threat to national security, this week we joined a team of news titles across Europe including Spain's El Pais and Der Standard in Austria to report on big European financial organisations’ investments in the company.

The investigation - headed up by Dutch outlet Follow the Money - revealed that UK institutions - including some of our biggest pension providers - have over £5bn invested in the US tech corporation. I know, I just said the word pension, but stay with me! The firms include two of the UK's largest workplace pension providers - Legal & General (which has a whopping £1.9bn in Palantir shares) and Aviva (£255m). As Clive Lewis MP pointed out to us, up to one in three UK pension holders may now be unwittingly “financing Palantir’s expansion”. Are you? 

A note too on a piece we are publishing today by politics nerd (and our theatre critic) Dorian Lynskey on the story of the term ‘woke’. Trump’s recent wheeling out of his favourite insult - calling AI firm Anthropic a “radical left, woke company” in the row over AI missile target selection, got us thinking about the years in which the word “woke” was so often a mainstream term of abuse for young people and sensible progressives. How did so many sane people get swept up in “anti-woke” hysteria? We asked Dorian to delve into the history of this very 21st century term. It’s a fascinating read…

The Nerve team will be spending the next couple of days at the independent Laugharne festival where our co-founder Carole and columnist Stewart Lee are on the bill alongside the likes of Eliza Carthy, Armando Iannucci, author Zakia Sewell and Gwenno. We are delighted to be the media partner and are looking forward to meeting many Nerve members, and will post a few updates on Bluesky and Instagram. We’ll also be recording a couple of the talks - more on that next week.

Finally - if you haven’t yet, do check out our filmed interview with former senior Nato commander General Sir Richard Shirreff from Tuesday on the total disaster that is Trump’s “strategy” in Iran. He was absolutely fascinating.

Oh - and a quick favour, please could you click on the ad for Protonmail at the end of this email, for which we will get a small amount of £ towards our funding. We can genuinely recommend this email provider - unlike the other big brands, they do not scrape your data for advertising.

Links to this week’s stories follow, and an update on a couple of forthcoming Nerve events.

On Tuesday, Trump celebrated St Patrick’s Day with a speech in which he claimed that the BBC - who he is suing - used AI in their coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “Whatever happened to the old tradition of just putting on a green wig and jumping around to Jump Around until you are sick?” writes Stewart in this week’s column. All the media covered the speech - except, strangely, the Daily Telegraph, the paper that stirred the Trump/BBC row up in the first place. Read his unmissable column here (including his poem ‘Terrible Words by Donald J Trump, age 79’).

“It is strange, now, to recall that ‘woke’ used to have positive connotations,” writes political podcast host, Dorian Lynskey, in a brilliantly-written essay tracing this most 21st century of concepts. ”The rapid mutation of woke spawned new linguistic monstrosities like ‘wokerati’, ‘wokery’ and ‘wokeism’, which recast the progressive worldview as a sinister, monolithic ideology.” Sane conservatives and even centrists jumped on the anti-woke bandwagon - and on occasion hair-trigger “wokeness” went too far – but now, says Dorian, “it seems absurd to lambast “snowflake” students when Trump is strong-arming universities; Critical Race Theory when he openly promotes white nationalism; or Black Lives Matter when ICE is murdering people in the street.” Read the piece here.

"A singular voice who uses lyrics of remarkable beauty" was how the judges described London-born singer-songwriter Arlo Parks when her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, scooped the Mercury prize in 2021, when she was just 21 years old. Now Arlo is back with her third album, Ambiguous Desire, influenced by club nights and hedonism, and has taken time out to talk to us about her recent cultural discoveries: from a beautiful surrealist film and a "fearless" album, to her favourite restaurant for indulging her pickle obsession. Read the piece here.

Up to one in three people with workplace pensions may be unwitting investors in the controversial tech surveillance company, Palantir. A Nerve investigation with Dutch reporters at Follow the Money reveals UK financial services companies hold more than £5bn in Palantir shares, including some of our biggest pension providers. Read Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker’s report here.

Boasting a beautiful set, a brilliant cast and a script that's been modernised with "Succession-style zip" the National's new production of Russian writer Maxim Gorky's 1905 play Summerfolk is wildly enjoyable, says Nerve theatre critic Dorian Lynskey. "A kind of furious sequel to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the play picks apart unhappy people in an unhappy nation, distracting themselves with sex, gossip, drinking and fishing rather than facing reality." Sound relatable?! It also features stars including Motherland's Paul Ready, Doon Mackichan, Alex Lawther and more. Read Dorian on why it's a great night out here.

Ben Benton, chef and co-host of Go-To Food podcast, is the author of All You Can Eat, a tour of the best and most innovative foods and meals in contemporary Britain, published this week. To fellow cook, Meera Sodha: “Ben is the rarest of beasts, in that he both cooks and writes beautifully; his book on what British food is now is a dream come true.” His deliciously spiced fish pie for the Nerve is inspired by trips to Riley’s fish shack in Tynemouth and Leeds Road Fisheries in Bradford. Get the recipe here.

We are thrilled to be partnering with the How to Academy to host a conversation (Friday 22 May at Conway Hall in central London) with the American journalist Karen Hao and Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr. Karen was given access to Open AI and had a ring-side during its meteoric rise. Her book Empire of AI: Sam Altman, ChatGBT, and the Global Resistance - Inside the reckless race for total domination was published last year. Book tickets here (Nerve members get 15% discount and we will send the code later). Last Friday we mentioned our upcoming collaboration with the Guilty Feminist on Thursday 30 April at the Leicester Square theatre. We will release details of guests soon - we had our first planning meeting this week. In the meantime tickets are on sale now - again, we will send 20% discount code to members later.

Thank you for reading and see you again next week.

Sarah

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