AI’s loudest evangelists promise singularity, mass unemployment and post-human transcendence. Charles Pardoe is unconvinced. Drawing on Aristotle, Scruton and the Titan submarine disaster, he dismantles the difference between artifice that improves life and fakery that endangers it. When concentrated cliques of investors profit from hype, who stress-tests the bridge before we all walk across it?

Some words get used too loosely. Narcissism is one of them. In part one of a careful, deeply considered series, Dina-Perla Portnaar moves beyond the casual diagnosis to describe the emotional architecture of families organised around a parent’s needs. Conditional love. Selective empathy. The slow formation of a false self built for survival rather than expression. This is a powerful piece written with restraint, gravity and the authority of lived insight.