Laura Dodsworth is the co-author of the Sunday Times bestseller 'Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it’
‘Excuse me please, would you mind moving your bag so I can sit down?’ I asked. He took a slug from his can of lager, looked me in the eye and said no. Picture the scene: the London Underground, steaming hot, a crowded carriage, a long day spent in heels, and a spot of sciatica.
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Laura Dodsworth is a photographer, artist and author. In her most recent book Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist it, Laura draws on the Nudge Unit, behavioural psychology and fact checking services to analyse the range of ways in which our minds are manipulated. On the podcast, Laura talks
In my local countryside lanes and wooded walks, no one is bagging the excrement deposited by the deer, foxes, rabbits or birds. There are luxuriant piles of horse manure in the fields. Cow dung is positively welcomed on the common by boho surburbanites for its contribution to biodiversity. Pet cats deposit their poop not just
Algorithms dictate what we do – and don’t – see online. On Twitter and Facebook, they determine what posts do well and which ones get buried. Yet how they actually work is shrouded in secrecy. Elon Musk, who agreed a £34.5 billion takeover bid with Twitter’s board last month, has voiced his concern about algorithms: ‘I’m worried about
What’s the one idea that can’t be debated at a festival of ideas? The answer, it turns out, is the Covid Pass. If we don’t want a ‘medical papers, please’ checkpoint society, then we have to refuse to comply where we can I was delighted to be asked to give a book talk and join
‘We all have to be responsible for the fact that our health touches upon those who we sit next to and who we share air with. And this is a public health truism that is self-evident,’ said health minister Lord Bethell, answering a question about mandating vaccine passports in nightclubs in the House of Lords. Yet
I was bemused when I first saw the photograph of spaced-out chairs and vaccination booths in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Was this an art installation designed to probe the relationship between personhood and state? Were we supposed to question the transformational power of medicine, in a live enactment of biomedical transubstantiation in the
