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Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House

Large, gruesome, brutal and gluttonous: Donald Trump is the archetypal ogre. So how did he manage to stomp back for a second term?

By Edward Docx

The animated film Shrek opens with the eponymous hero wiping his bottom on a book. Shrek then emerges from the toilet and we follow his swamp-savvy morning routine. He bathes his huge and oddly luminous body in mud. He brushes his teeth with slime. He kills fish for his supper with his flatulence. So far so good.

But Shrek’s life is about to be interrupted. Lord Farquaad, the punctilious local potentate, is rounding up various misfits and banishing them to Shrek’s swamp. The film has Shrek put up “keep out” signs; he dreams of building a wall; and he frightens anyone who comes into his swamp with fierce-but-fake-but-fierce shows of aggression. But it’s no good. Shrek soon feels himself overwhelmed by “squatters” (as he calls them) and is furious.

He duly sets off for Duloc, the city where Farquaad lives and where, by way of contrast, everything is unnaturally immaculate, idealised and perfect. Here he is greeted at the “Information Booth” by animatronic characters singing the Duloc Welcome Song: “Welcome to Duloc, such a perfect town / Here we have some rules, let us lay them down …”

Shrek is an ogre, of course. He does not like rules. He doesn’t like welcome booths that are the opposite of welcoming. Most of all, he doesn’t like fake characters singing annoying songs to him about how they are going to lay down the law.

Ogres are one of the most ancient archetypes in human narrative and they have been with us since we first started telling stories. In Japan, they are known as oni. In tales such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, ogres (or ghuls) are depicted as monstrous beings with a penchant for devouring humans. In The Epic of Gilgamesh there is a character called Humbaba – a giant guardian of the cedar forest. And, of course, there are ogres at the centre of the two foundational epics in western literature: the Cyclops, Polyphemus, in Homer’s Odyssey; and Grendel, who terrorises the mead-hall of Hereot, in Beowulf. As Seamus Heaney’s evocative translation has it: “Grendel was the name of this grim demon / haunting the marches, marauding round the heath / and the desolate fens.” Haunting the swamps in other words. And – yes – coming into town to get even in a bigly way.

And “bigly” is an ogre’s word if ever there was one, conjuring largeness, exaggeration, impact, something overwhelming; but also “bigly” is a dig at language itself and its pretensions to precision. You don’t have to be a writer to see the patterns. The ogres of folklore are always against written law. They are banished, exiled, cannibalistic creatures that inhabit a single realm outside “normal” society – the island (Polyphemus) and the swamp (Grendel). They are large and fearsome. They are gluttonous, violent and selfish. They consume without restraint and hoard wealth. They live for gratification. They are brutish and yet full of a lethal cunning and instinct. They are driven by a need to dominate or destroy anything they perceive as a threat. They lack empathy. They act solely out of self-interest. They are untamed beings of cruelty and desire and appetite. They are grotesques.

They are everywhere present in our stories because, of course, they are part of our struggle to understand ourselves. They represent the recurring preoccupations and apprehensions of the human psyche. They symbolise avidity and voraciousness. They are avatars for all the dangers lurking outside the safety of human society’s agreed norms and rituals.

Not just lurking outside, therefore, but lurking inside … lurking inside the human mind. Most of the time, we repress these traits in order to get along, and yet they persist – as drives and urges, as conscious and subconscious fears. In other words, ogres are not just monsters in tales but archetypal representations of the elemental aspects of our being. Indeed, if we step for a moment across one of the many footbridges between story and psychology, then we can see that ogres represent … the primal; also known as the id.

The id is the inner life we all of us share. The circuit board on which all of our various operating systems run – be they our politics, religions, tribes, nationalities. In the id, we find the collection of feelings and instincts that lie at the very core of the human being. Here lurks desire, lust and greed, avarice. Here seethes anger and aggression. Here is rage, raw, uncontrolled. Here, too, is jealousy. Here is the compulsion for vengeance. Here are the survival instincts: fear and anxiety. Here is euphoria, ecstasy, frustration, anguish. Here is the urge to act without reflection. This is the world of impulse, appetite and desire.

This is also the world of Trump. Trump is the nearest any modern politician comes to pure id. And one way to better understand his inauguration – and the strange folkloric spell of his seduction during the election – is to look through this lens of human story, of human archetype and psychology. Because it is on this deeper level that Trump broadcasts; it is here that he makes his powerful appeal; and it is here that he connects.

Indeed, the description of an ogre above might – without too much modulation – be deftly repurposed as a set of character notes for the future actors who will no doubt play him. The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about “values” – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.

Domination and treasure are two of the ogre’s preoccupations. Devouring is another. The teaser for the second term began thus: “They’re eating the dogs – the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there …” Eating, eating, eating, eating.

Consider Trump’s campaign visit to McDonald’s to work the frier in Feasterville, Pennsylvania. “Yeah, let’s make some more,” he says, “we got about 10,000 people out there … That’s a big crowd – huh?” (Double Jesus – for those paying attention). “I like it all,” he says, talking of the McDonald’s menu. “I like every ounce of it. Everything.” Then he gets to his political point: “I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phoney story. It was a big part of [Kamala Harris’s] résumé that she worked at McDonald’s – how tough a job it was. She … made the french fries, and she talked about the heat: ‘It was so tough.’” Then he adds with bone-grinding finality: “She’s never worked at McDonald’s.”

Think about what is actually going on here. Sure, the whole thing is staged. Sure, jobs matter. No, he’s not really working a shift. Of course not. Trump knows that you know and that’s why he’s still wearing his suit and tie. He never changes out of costume because he never changed into costume. (From where Trump is standing, from the point of view of the id, the rest of the world is in disguise; the rest of the world is fake.) No, what he’s saying underneath, what he’s transmitting, are messages to do with the primal pleasures of greed and eating … eating those everybody-loves-them-who-cares-if-they-are-bad-for-you fries. Even more than this, he is communicating: this job, working the frier, is sacred in an id kind of a way. And people who complain or lie about it don’t get that – and therefore can’t be trusted on anything else. Trump, on the other hand, Trump gets it. You’re hungry, he acknowledges, even for the bad stuff, especially for the bad stuff. Me too, me too.

“Can I give them extra salt?” he asks. “I love salt.” Yes, he does. And so do you. And then he starts handing it out for free to the drive-through line: “It is all on Trump,” he says, and turns around and asks, “I’m allowed to do that, right?” But the subliminal communication is again more potent than the seemingly casual question. What threatens my generosity in giving you these fries – what threatens our feast here in Feasterville – is the law, Trump is saying. And I tell you something: if the law dares to get in the way of a president feeding his people, then it’s just another fake law in a fake world, like all the other fake laws with which they try to punish and contain me, punish and contain you; the laws from which I will liberate you to eat more, and drive more, and fuck more, and have all the mores you want; it’s going to be huge.

Yes, sex is everpresent, too. As he serves the customers in their cars, Trump continually remarks: “You’re a good-looking guy”, or “what a beautiful woman”. Sex and food. Food and sex. One man says to him: “You made it possible for ordinary people like us to meet you.” And Trump says right back: “You’re not ordinary. I can see. Beautiful wife.” And then he hands the guy his order through the window of his car. He turns back again and says: “I’m having a lot of fun here everybody. Look at all the fake news over there.”

In one sense, that is the whole election – in that moment. All the fake news of human thought over there but right here with Trump … the truth of food and sex.

For our stories to endure, they must be fun as well as scary; every story and therefore every ogre in the storyworld also has to … entertain. And, of course, Trump knows this better than anyone. Indeed, fun is what Trump spends a great deal of time telling us he is having. He uses the word from time to time but his body and his gestures and his general don’t-give-a-shit deportment is also often about conveying fun. Fun is the bad dancing at the rallies. Fun is what he’s having with the fryer. Even the felonies are fun, too, right? If you’re an ogre. Because everyone knows you don’t get the gold without the bending a few rules and – anyway – the law is a pathetic joke to the id. The sex cases the same. Says Trump to the female lawyer grilling him in one of his harassment hearings: “I say this with as much respect as I can, she [his accuser] is not my type … Not my type in any way, shape or form.” And then he adds, addressing the female lawyer herself: “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either, to be honest with you … I hope you’re not insulted. I would not under any circumstances have any interest in you. I’m honest when I say it.”

There’s no respect and he doesn’t care if you’re insulted. When Odysseus appeals for hospitality, invoking the gods, Polyphemus says: “We Cyclops care not a whistle for your thundering Zeus or all the gods in bliss.” Ogre-fun, it turns out, is often threat and menace because most of the time it’s just ogre-anger in a different key.

Transaction is another signifier of the id-world. Consider Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. Think about the trumpeting of deals. Why is the deal so important? Because the deal isn’t about “values” or “morality”, it’s about self-interest. Come on, now: the real world is transactional, Trump grins. That’s the only thing you can really trust. In the id-world, you look not for nobility or fairness in your interlocutor but for weakness – greed, vanity, ambition, jealousy; you eschew the profound in favour of commodity and bargain. When it comes down to it, Trump reminds us, there will have to be a deal. So enough of your phoney “values”.

Indeed, seen from these swampy vantages – greed, sex, power – Trump is not a liar at all, he is a truth-teller. (Truth Social: “follow the truth”). He is honest when he says it. The world is primal, Trump whispers, everything else is made up or posturing and – deep down – you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.

Trump – as ogre, as id – not only understands all of this, he embodies it. This is what so many of the political podcasts and back-peddling pundits missed. Trump is saying, profoundly, “I understand you. I get it.” There’s an id-entity in there that he’s talking to beneath all those other identities we adopt. And it may not be noble or pretty – not at all – but it’s real and it’s ravenous and it’s rapacious and it’s irresistible.

Indeed, this is one reason why identity politics so often loses to the id-summoning assertions of populism. When times are precipitous and the polity is bitterly contested, human beings tend to back away from “argument” and “ideals” and edge back towards the dependable “truths” of the id. And the story world – where Trump broadcasts loud and clear – is so very powerful here because it darkly enchants; and because it occludes the complex world of actual issues, actual policy, actual debate, actual solutions. You don’t need a ground game when you’ve got an id-game. You don’t need leaflets about policy when you’re the latest main character in an ancient human saga all about wealth and food and sex and anger and fear and power and vengeance.

And it’s interesting to note how our great writers smuggle in sympathy for their ogres’ retaliations. Notice, for example, how Homer describes Odysseus as polytropos meaning “wily” in his opening line. We sense straight away that Odysseus’s intelligence can also be provocative and irritating. Sure, Polyphemus only has a single eye but (like Shrek in his swamp) he was minding his own business before the Greeks turned up and started demanding hospitality. To add insult to injury, Odysseus boasts as he escapes, taunting the cyclops from his ship: “Cyclops, if ever mortal man enquire / how you were put to shame and blinded, / tell him Odysseus, raider of cities, / took your eye…”

But we sometimes forget that Polyphemus has the last laugh because he asks his father, Poseidon, (an id-god if ever there was one), to punish Odysseus: “Hear me, Poseidon, god of the sea blue mane who rocks the earth! … grant that Odysseus … never see his home. / Or if he must, let him come late, having lost all companions, in a stranger’s ship, and find a world of pain … ” The curse is a pivotal moment in the story. Homer – in this moment – is on Polyphemus’s side because of Odysseus’s hubris. And, as we know, it takes Odysseus 10 years (or two election cycles) to get back to Ithaca. And yes, there’s a world of fresh trauma waiting for him when he gets there.

Grendel, meanwhile, is not welcome at the White House correspondents’ dinner either. He is described as an outcast doomed to brooding, isolation and rage. But there’s also a counter-tone of pity in the lines: “It harrowed him / to hear the din of the loud banquet / every day in the hall, the harp being struck / and the clear song of a skilled poet / telling with mastery of man’s beginnings …” What enrages Grendel is that he has been excluded from the kinship, from the rituals of the banquet and the fellowship of music.

In this way, the primal and the rational are in antiphonal relation; one summons the other. The swamp and the city are always part of the same human story. Which brings us to the proper counter to the ogre’s appeal. Because of course the id is not the only truth of human relations. The cyclops has but a single eye. Human beings cannot – and do not wish to – live in the primal world alone. Death is redeemed not through deals but by love.

In psychological terms, the id is no more than a third of the human psyche. There is also the ego (wherein we are rational, controlled) and the superego (the internalised operation of moral standards and ideals). And, sure enough, our stories are also thronged with archetypes of love and reason, with saviours and sages, moral operators and wise rulers. For every Caliban a Prospero. For every Polyphemus a Penelope.

The task of the progressive, therefore, is to avoid appearing like Farquaad. In Duloc, Farquaad preens as he polices the rules. He patrols the borders of language and reaction. He holds up signs to tell the people what to do: “applause”, “laugh”, “aww”. In Duloc, everything must be perfect and pristine. Sure, you might just about put up with this if you are economically secure and Duloc more or less works for you. But the feeling of being reprimanded is the opposite of fun, and this certainly is no way to bring people outside with you. No, the would-be leader must surely be as perceptive and attentive toward the inner lives of their fellow human beings as are the enduring writers. They must seek again to make a real and more universal connection. And they must surely acknowledge appetite and desire and anger and fear – ideally with conviviality – and then offer something much richer: the rest of the human experience.

This manoeuvre – connection first, inspiration second – is what marks out the greatest politicians. Leaving aside secondary considerations such as the right-left or the right-wrong, think what Churchill’s demeanour transmits at its most simple: I get it about the whisky and cigars and the epic dinners – I do, my friends, I do – but still we must fight for “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Or consider John F Kennedy’s persona and body language which (before he says a word) declare in the most charming manner possible: I get it about the glamour and the sex – none more so, none more so – but still we must aspire to go to the moon and “set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people”.

Of course, you have to be a remarkable human being to embody and encompass all of this. But then the leader of a democracy should be an exceptional human being – not in the sense of being merely virtuous, but in the deeper and more resonant sense of being emotionally and psychologically capacious.

In the meantime, welcome to Feasterville.

🔴 Edward Docx is a novelist and screenwriter.

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In the cartoonist Barry Blitt’s portrayal of the Inauguration Day, the new President is sidelined into a dash of yellow hair and a sliver of red tie. “On January 20, 2025, the next leader of the United States—and of the free world—assumes power,” Blitt said. “Also on that day: Donald Trump is sworn in.”

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You cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people that you choose to be around.

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Are we losing the ability to write by hand?

We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience – and a connection to history

Humming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person’s signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.

Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers.

Fans of singer Bob Dylan expressed ire when they discovered that the limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which cost nearly $600 and came with an official certificate “attesting to its having been individually signed by Dylan”, in fact had made unlimited use of an autopen. Dylan took the unusual step of issuing a statement on his Facebook page: “With contractual deadlines looming,” Dylan wrote, “the idea of using an autopen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.” He also acknowledged that: “Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately.”

Our mixed feelings about machine-made signatures make plain our broader relationship to handwriting: it offers a glimpse of individuality. Any time spent doing archival research is a humbling lesson in the challenges and rewards of deciphering the handwritten word. You come to know your long-dead subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged, while another’s pristine pages suggest the diligence of a medieval monk. The calligraphist Bernard Maisner argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is “not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.”

But handwriting is disappearing. A high-school student who took the preliminary SAT used for college admittance in the US confessed to the Wall Street Journal that “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a one-sentence statement that all the work is the student’s own, in cursive, or joined-up handwriting. “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from Grandma.”

The Common Core State Standards for education in the US, which outline the skills students are expected to achieve at each grade level, no longer require students to learn cursive writing. Finland removed cursive writing from its schools in 2016, and Switzerland, among other countries, has also reduced instruction in cursive handwriting. One assessment claimed that more than 33% of students struggle to achieve competency in basic handwriting, meaning the ability to write legibly the letters of the alphabet (in both upper and lower case). “We’re trying to be realistic about skills that kids are going to need,” said one school board member in Greenville, South Carolina. “You can’t do everything. Something’s got to go.” Children who cannot write in cursive also can’t read it.

Schoolchildren are not the only ones who can no longer write or read cursive. Fewer and fewer of us put pen to paper to record our thoughts, correspond with friends, or even to jot down a grocery list. Instead of begging a celebrity for an autograph, we request a selfie. Many people no longer have the skill to do more than scrawl their name in an illegible script, and those who do will see that skill atrophy as they rely more on computers and smartphones. A newspaper in Toronto recorded the lament of a pastry instructor who realised that many of his culinary students couldn’t properly pipe an inscription in icing on a cake – their cursive writing was too shaky and indistinct to begin with.

As a practical skill in the digital world, handwriting seems useless. There is a term in Chinese, tibiwangzi, which means “take pen, forget character”. It describes how more frequent use of computers and smartphones has discouraged the use of traditional Chinese handwriting, including the ability to write traditional characters. Chinese children pick up a pen to write (“take pen”) but experience a kind of “character amnesia” when it comes to putting pen to paper (“forget character”). According to the China Youth Daily Social Survey Center, 4% of Chinese youth are “already living without handwriting”.

What does it mean to live without handwriting? The skill has deteriorated gradually, and many of us don’t notice our own loss until we’re asked to handwrite something and find ourselves bumbling as we put pen to paper. Some people still write in script for special occasions (a condolence letter, an elaborately calligraphed wedding invitation) or dash off a bastardised cursive on the rare occasions when they write a cheque, but apart from teachers, few people insist on a continued place for handwriting in everyday life.

But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.

We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe. We communicate more but with less physical effort, forgetting the vast evolutionary history that fitted us for physical movement and expression as a means of understanding our world.

In 2000, physicians at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles took a remedial handwriting course. “Many of our physicians don’t write legibly,” the chief of the medical staff explained to Science Daily. And unlike many professions, doctors’ bad writing can have serious consequences, including medical errors and even death; a woman in Texas won a $450,000 award after her husband took the wrong prescription medicine and died. The pharmacist had misread the doctor’s poorly handwritten instructions. Even though many medical records are now stored on computers, physicians still spend a lot of their time writing notes on charts or writing prescriptions by hand.

Clarity in handwriting isn’t merely an aid to communication. In some significant way, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, primes the brain for learning to read. Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared students taking class notes by hand or on a laptop computer to test whether the medium mattered for student performance. Earlier studies of laptop use in the classroom had focused on how distracting computer use was for students. Not surprisingly, the answer was very distracting, and not just for the notetaker but for nearby peers as well.

Mueller and Oppenheimer instead studied how laptop use affected the learning process for students who used them. They found that “even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing”. In three different experiments, their research concluded that students who used laptop computers performed worse on conceptual questions in comparison with students who took notes by hand. “Laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning,” they wrote. In other words, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarise as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.

The researchers studying how technology transforms the way we write and learn are akin to ecologists who warn of species decline or environmental pollution. We face a future without handwriting. Researchers worry that abandoning the pen for the keyboard will lead to any number of unforeseen negative consequences. “The digitisation of writing entails radical transformations of the very act of writing at a sensorimotor, physical level and the (potentially far-reaching) implications of such transformations are far from properly understood,” notes Anne Mangen, who studies how technology transforms literacy. Writing on a keyboard with the words appearing on the screen is more “abstract and detached”, something she believes has “far-reaching implications, educationally and practically”. Like species decline, skills decline gradually.

It is popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool (handwriting) with a more convenient and efficient alternative (keyboarding). But like the decline of face-to-face interactions, we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

As a physical act, writing requires dexterity in the hands and fingers as well as the forearms. The labour of writing by hand is also part of the pleasure of the experience, argues the novelist Mary Gordon. “I believe that the labour has virtue, because of its very physicality,” she writes. “For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”

Handwriting is also evocative in a way the printed word is not. Literature abounds with plot twists prompted by the appearance of a handwritten letter or signature. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Lady Dedlock recognises the unusual handwriting of her former fiance, whom she thought dead, on a legal document, prompting the events that lead to the revelation of her greatest secret.

Our own handwriting can be a surprisingly effective prompt to memory. When American chef and cookbook author Deborah Madison stumbled upon some old handwritten recipes from the 1970s, she was transported back in time. Jotted down in brown notebooks along with notes and doodles and food stains and lists of suppliers that she used for the restaurant Greens in San Francisco, the recipes were “a record of time spent fitting new thoughts together”, she wrote. “At times it looks careful and deliberate. Other times my hand gets distracted and strays, looks sloppy and tired. But mostly it conveys such a deep sense of discovery that reading through these notebooks, I am reinfected with the obsessive excitement I felt then.” She doesn’t think the same feeling would emerge from a list written on a computer: “There’s much to be said for the mark of the hand.”

The novelist Mohsin Hamid takes notes by hand in notebooks and tries to remove himself from the online world when he is working on a novel, although he writes his novels on a computer. “The technology is shaping me, configuring me” when he uses it, he told the BBC, and he sees danger in embracing machine-like ways of doing things. The human way of doing things imposes limits, depending on our tools. Ten fingers can fly across a keyboard, but the experience of writing with a pen or pencil in one hand requires more patience. The average American can type 40 words a minute but can only write 13 words a minute by hand. As the calligraphist Paul Antonio notes, when he teaches children to write, he is really teaching them to slow down.

As the IT way of looking at the world replaces other ways of knowing, our wilful deskilling of longstanding human activities is not only happening with handwriting. Other embodied skills, also valuable, are at risk of disappearing.

“When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”

Lee Miller, a bootmaker in Austin, Texas, spends up to 40 hours hand-crafting a single pair of boots using tools that are more than 100 years old. Miller notes how the time dedicated to his craft is inseparable from what he creates. “No automated machine can do as fine work as the human hand can,” he argues. His customers, who are willing to wait years for the custom boots he makes, agree.

The significance of the handmade object derives from our knowledge of the time and effort and skill that went into making it; even the most sophisticated machine churning out identically sophisticated objects doesn’t inspire the same feeling. “We are knowing as well as sensing creatures,” the philosopher  Julian Baggini writes. “Knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them.” One need not belong to the elite to enjoy the luxury of owning handmade goods; platforms such as Etsy offer a wide array of handmade goods for every budget.

Some critics argue that our desire for handmade goods is increasing because so much of what we buy is now mass-produced, alienating us from a human connection to the objects we use. This is perhaps one reason that the revelations of horrific working conditions at the Chinese factories that make iPhones prompted outrage. The recognition that these sleek technologies emerged from overworked – even suicidal – human hands changed the way we understood them, at least until the outrage faded and the new version of the iPhone landed in stores.

Our desire for the mark of the human hand hasn’t diminished. Today we satisfy it in a novel way, however. We embrace a vicarious form of craftsmanship comprised of images of well-made things rather than the things themselves. We look at perfectly prepared meals on Instagram, or the efforts of strangers on home remodelling TV shows and do-it-yourself videos on YouTube, which range in quality from highly produced plumbing tutorials to boring, badly lit snippets of people mowing their lawns (which still somehow garner tens of millions of views). This is in keeping with the growth of other vicarious pursuits.

New forms of hands-on making have arisen, forms more in step with our technological age, such as the maker movement, which grew out of a late-20th-century hacker culture that sought to give individuals more power over how their technologies worked. Chris Anderson, who left his position as editor of Wired magazine to join a DIY drone-making company, argues that this new breed of DIY tech tinkerers and 3D printing mavens are responding to a culture that has become too invested in the virtual. “Making something that starts virtual but quickly becomes tactile and usable in the everyday world is satisfying in a way that pure pixels are not,” he wrote, predicting that the growing number of “makerspaces” would usher in a new industrial revolution. Critics such as Evgeny Morozov argue that the movement hasn’t produced a revolution but rather another form of “consumerism and DIY tinkering” sponsored by large corporations and the US military.

On a beam in the library of 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne’s home near Périgord, France, is carved a liberal paraphrase of a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes: “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.” Montaigne embraced the human body in all its glorious and alarming incarnations (his essays contain gleeful descriptions of his own and others’ bouts of flatulence) and he criticised the hypocrisy of those who deny their corporeality. Our bodies are one of the central ways we understand ourselves, Montaigne believed. They are a reminder of our frailty and a check on the ego. “And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses,” he wrote.

The physical requirements of everyday life in Montaigne’s time were fundamentally different from our own, and far more difficult, prompting greater humility. Such humility is rare in our technological age. The mundane tasks we perform every day with our bodies seem insignificant compared with the powers available to us when midwifed by our new technologies. It’s easier, physically, to send a message to the other side of the world than it is to tie your own shoelace.

But our instruments and tools remain extensions of our bodies in crucial ways. As the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his book Computer Power and Human Reason, we must “internalise aspects of [our tools] in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits”. Our tools become part of us. In a similar way, our bodies help us find our way in the world. “The body is our first and most natural technical object,” the French sociologist Marcel Mauss observed.

Our choice of tools and the way we use them facilitate not only habits of hand but also habits of mind. Our embodied experiences shape not only how we learn to do mundane things, but also how we understand the world around us. In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, one of the characters describes the mores of an earlier generation: his grandmother, who grew up on a farm, “could kill a chicken, and dress it, and eat it afterward, with as little repugnance as her neighbour”. Her generation had a different relationship to the physical world, which was reflected in the way they understood its challenges. “When animals died, the family had to deal with their bodies; when people died, the family’s women laid them out.”

Today, we experience less discomfort and don’t confront our bodies’ failures as often. Our increased comfort may mean that we struggle more with our bodies’ inevitable decline, often using technology to prolong life for as long as possible.

Some of our disappearing habits, such as handwriting and drawing, might not seem important. They are modest skills whose benefits are experienced privately, cannot easily be monetised (unless you are that rare thing, a professional calligrapher), and whose use in daily life no longer makes sense for an increasing number of people.

Yet the quiet disappearance of handwriting from our lives shows how the extinction of certain experiences happens: experiences recede gradually, not through some top-down edict or bottom-up populist campaign. And we rationalise their obsolescence not as a loss but as another mark of progress and improvement. A skill fades, and with it a human experience that spans millennia. Even those experiences leave a trace, like the cave drawings in Altamira and Lascaux, painted about 40,000 years ago and hundreds of miles apart, which both contain images of the same thing: the human hand.

Handwriting’s rapid decline in a world dominated by screens is also a symbol of how thoughtlessly we’ve settled between the old and the new. New technologies don’t have to destroy old ways of doing things. The printing press didn’t destroy handwriting. There is no reason to assume the triumph of the keyboard and touchscreen over pen and paper is inevitable, or that software spells the end of drawing by hand, or that the encroachment of technology in the classroom need force out more traditional embodied forms of learning. We can achieve some form of coexistence, even if it is likely to be an uneasy rather than a peaceful one.

“For our flesh surrounds us with its own desires,” the poet Philip Larkin wrote. It also surrounds us with opportunities – to learn, to understand, to feel in a way that our vicarious, screen-based experiences do not. As our world becomes ever more saturated with images and virtualisations, we shouldn’t let our desire for alluring technologies eclipse the human need to see, touch and make things with our hands.

🔴 This is an edited extract from The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World, published by the Bodley Head

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Κιμαδόπιτα με πράσο, λιλιδιαστή από τη Νάουσα

Λιλίδια στη Νάουσα λένε τα λεπτά φύλλα και τούτη η πίτα φτιάχνεται ακριβώς με τέτοια λεπτά φύλλα, σαν της σφολιάτας. Είναι μια εύκολη τεχνική, αφού αρχικά ανοίγουμε μόλις δύο φύλλα, που τα κόβουμε όμως ακτινωτά σαν πέταλα λουλουδιού και τα βάζουμε το ένα πάνω στο άλλο, ανοίγοντάς τα όλα μαζί στη συνέχεια σε πακέτο, με μπόλικο βούτυρο ανάμεσά τους. Στο ψήσιμο τα φύλλα διαχωρίζονται ελαφρώς σε πολλά λεπτά «λιλίδια», δίνοντας έξοχη υφή τραγανών φύλλων σφολιάτας. Η γέμιση μπορεί να είναι όποια θέλουμε: από κιμά και πράσα, όπως κάνουν στη Νάουσα την πίτα την Κυριακή της Κρεατινής, μέχρι τυριά 😋😋😋

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If You Think Reading Is Boring, You Are Doing It Wrong.

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Everything’s magical when it snows. Winter is not not a season, it’s a celebration ✨⛄

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Tiny details and the aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.

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Tiny details and the aesthetics aren’t merely a side note, they’re as important as anything else.

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Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump

Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.

As the crowd roared, Musk turned and saluted again, his arm and hand slightly lower.

“My heart goes out to you,” Musk said, striking himself on the chest again. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. Thanks to you. We’re gonna have safe cities, finally safe cities. Secure borders, sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re gonna take ‘Doge’ to Mars.”

That was a reference to the so-called “department of government efficiency”, the federal cost-cutting effort to which Musk was appointed by Trump, and remarks in the inaugural address in which Trump said the US would send astronauts to Mars.

Musk asked his audience to imagine American astronauts planting the flag on another planet, miming such actions and shouting: “Bam! Bam!”

He was speaking in advance of Trump’s appearance at the arena, for inaugural parade events moved indoors due to cold weather and for the signing of executive orders on stage.

Social media users expressed shock at Musk’s gesture. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”

Musk did not immediately comment, though he did repost footage of his remarks that included the second salute and endorsed memes seeking to turn footage of his salutes into jokes.

One X user wrote: “Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing?”

Musk wrote “Yeah exactly” and added a “yawning” emoji.

Nonetheless, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, described Musk delivering “a Roman salute, a fascist salute most commonly associated with Nazi Germany”.

The ADL, meanwhile, says that in Germany between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi salute “was often accompanied by chanting or shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Sieg Heil.’ Since world war two, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have continued to use the salute, making it the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”

In a statement posted to social media later on Monday, the ADL said: “This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.

“It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a high-profile progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York, blasted the ADL: “Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity. People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all.”

Musk responded to that message, saying Ocasio-Cortez “has reached Stage 5 [Trump Derangement Syndrome] – fully unhinged”.

Trump has widely been accused of being a white supremacist and indeed compared to Hitler – not least by JD Vance, now Trump’s vice-president, before the former Marine and author entered Republican politics and changed his tune.

Musk’s engagement with and support for the global far right continues to prove controversial. Last week, he hosted Alice Weidel, leader of Alternative für Deutschland, a far-right German party, for a conversation on X.

Weidel contended that Hitler “wasn’t a conservative, he wasn’t a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite”.

Musk agreed.

On Monday, some prominent far-right social media users celebrated Musk’s gestures onstage in Washington, however he had meant them.

As first reported by Rolling Stone, Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group, wrote on Telegram: “I don’t care if this was a mistake. I’m going to enjoy the tears over it.” Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a far-right social media platform, also wrote: “Incredible things are happening already.”

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Good morning❗ 🎶☕🍩🌞

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When you can't wait to unleash hell all over the world 👀🤔

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I don’t know where my ideas come from. I will admit however, that one key ingredient is caffeine ☕☕☕

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Oliviero Toscani

Photographer and art director who oversaw a series of controversial ad campaigns for the Benetton fashion brand

The art direction and photographs of Oliviero Toscani were provocative not for what they showed – real life, he said, complex and contradictory – but where they were seen. The images, subjects ranging from a bloodied newborn baby to the condemned of death row, would have been unremarkable on the editorial pages of a classic photo-reportage publication such as Life or Paris Match. But they sprang out of the safe spaces reserved for prestige adverts at the front of fashion magazines, or were pasted up on big billboards.

Toscani, who has died aged 82, regarded advertising as the most powerful medium, and claimed an artist’s right, like Michelangelo, to express his ideas in it. Like Michelangelo, he had a patron of papal benevolence, Luciano Benetton, who paid for the spaces where Toscani’s creations were seen. Benetton had co-founded a family firm that evolved into a company making mid-price fashion knit separates, with an international chain of shops. He wanted advertising that promoted an ethos for the brand, and in 1982 recruited Toscani as art director.

Toscani already had a reputation for sheer cheek in fashion photography. In 1971, the Jesus Jeans company – its name a deliberate affront in an Italy where the Catholic church dominated public morality – hired him for a campaign to illustrate slogans that subverted Christian sayings. He superimposed the words “If you love me, follow me” on his close-up pic of his girlfriend’s backside, clad in jeans cut off short to expose chunks of buttock. After the posters went up, carabinieri were sent in to break up the protests.

Toscani’s early work for Benetton was gentler, though. Unusually for the era, the company designed fashion for men, women and children, and its very Italian ideal was a family group all clad in co-ordinated, paintbox-coloured, Benetton. Toscani extended that concept into a “family of man” theme in 1984, assembling young models from the wider range of ethnicities available in the fashion business since the 1970s, and pushed that further by casting amateurs from many countries and cultures. Whole villages, including mafia-haunted Corleone in Sicily, posed in Benetton knits. A Toscani-directed Benetton ad was benign globalisation – equality through clothing, made in Italy, that suited everyone everywhere. No captions, just a small green balloon with the Benetton name, logo, and the words “All the colours in the world”. Later the firm renamed itself United Colors of Benetton.

But the advertising still showed the products, never satisfying to Toscani. His education had been in tougher photographs. He was born in Milan, to Dolores (nee Cantoni) and her husband Fedele Toscani, a Corriere della Sera photojournalist of the hardest school, his most famous image the hanging corpses of Mussolini and his mistress. Toscani acted as his father’s lab assistant and messenger, and recalled how his schoolteacher once read a newspaper with a picture on the front page he had personally delivered to the paper’s offices the previous day; the boy thought, “he knows everything one day later than me”.

The confidence that training gave Toscani led him to an art and design college in Zurich, Switzerland, then into art direction, and fashion photography, which in Italy in the 60s was a relatively new field. When it took off, its imagery came from different sources – high art and low realism – and went in different directions, especially social and political protest, than such work elsewhere. Toscani contributed pictures to Vogue Italia of the late 60s and 70s, which was like no other Vogue – it considered political provocation molto elegante.

The Benetton company in the 80s was so successful that the clothes almost sold themselves. Toscani thought they no longer needed to appear in the ads – “Selling jumpers is the company’s problem, not mine” – and that the expensive page, wall and television screen space they occupied could be better employed to show life itself, with an occasional inflammatory joke, such as actors cast as a nun and a priest kissing.

From 1990, Luciano Benetton gave Toscani licence to fill those spaces how he wanted, retaining only the Benetton label in a corner, as sponsor. Toscani stared directly and hard at the sex and death often present, but only allusively, in advertising: he featured an abstract of coloured condoms, an interracial lesbian couple with their adopted baby, a graveyard of the Gulf war, a pieta of the death of the Aids victim David Kirby. The pictures were meant to surprise. They shocked, and divided opinion, which made for major publicity.

In 1991 Luciano Benetton also sponsored Toscani, along with the graphic designer Tibor Kalman, to launch a quarterly magazine, COLORS, published until 2014 in six languages and 20 countries, and full of challenging subjects and images. Its creators’ belief in the beauty to be found in everyday global reality had a strong effect on a last generation of magazines. In 1995, Benetton also sponsored Fabrica, a Toscani-headed creative education centre in the Benetton home town, Treviso.

Toscani seemed to have mellowed out of extreme outrage – in a 1998 catalogue called Enemies, the geopolitical content was merely Israelis and Palestinians photographed agreeably together, wearing Benetton. But in 2000 he produced a 96-page booklet, distributed in an issue of Tina Brown’s glossy Talk magazine, with his own portraits of death row inmates in US jails, plus interviews. There was a discreet direction to Benetton’s website on its last page.

The resulting furore caused the Benetton firm, already changing direction as it lost out to international fast-fashion enterprises, to dismiss Toscani. He did not return until Luciano Benetton, intent on revitalising the brand, invited him back in 2017. The family enterprise had meanwhile widely diversified, and controlled a company managing and maintaining Italy’s toll roads, including the Moranti Bridge, in Genoa, which collapsed in 2018, killing 43. During a live radio conversation about the Fabrica centre, Toscani was questioned over the tragedy, and answered: “But what difference does it make if a bridge falls down?” He later apologised, but this ended his Benetton career.

Toscani’s third wife, Kirsti Moseng, and their children, Rocco, Lola, and Ali, survive him. Two earlier marriages ended in divorce. With his first wife, Brigitte, he had a son, Alexandre; from his second marriage, to Agneta Holst, he had two daughters, Sabina and Olivia.

🔔 Oliviero Toscani, art director and photographer, born 28 February 1942; died 13 January 2025

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Not a single one in my life so far 😞🤔

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Winter forms our character and brings out our best❗

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Bibury is a village and civil parish in Gloucestershire, England. It is on the River Coln, a Thames tributary that rises in the Cotswolds. The village centre is 6+1⁄2 miles (10.5 kilometres) northeast of Cirencester. Arlington Row is a nationally notable architectural conservation area depicted on the inside cover of some British passports. It is a major destination for tourists visiting the traditional rural villages, tea houses and many historic buildings of the Cotswold District; it is one of six places in the country featured in Mini-Europe, Brussels.

The picturesque Arlington Row cottages were built in 1380 as a monastic wool store. This was converted into a row of cottages for weavers in the 17th century. The cloth produced there was sent to Arlington Mill. Arlington Row is a popular visitor attraction, probably one of the most photographed Cotswold scenes, and was preserved by the Royal College of Arts. It has been used as a film and television location, most notably for the film Stardust - claims that Bridget Jones's Diary was also filmed at Arlington Row seem incorrect. In 2017 the BBC reported that an "ugly" car parked by an elderly motorist had been vandalised, possibly by visitors who had repeatedly complained that it spoilt photographs.

The world's first horse racing club, The Bibury Club, was formed in 1681 and held race meetings on Macaroni Downs above the village until the early 20th century.

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