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‘We’re hurtling into a new era’: James Marriott on books, broadsheets, and a changing Britain
James Marriott seems to me to be cut from cloth that has fallen out of fashion. He is no proselytiser for any particular political creed, but a sceptical observer and interpreter of the political battlegrounds of our age. More into Keats than clickbait, his instinct is to think deeply rather than rush to formulate a viral opinion.
Marriott is a columnist at The Times, where he reviews books and podcasts and writes about society and ideas. We meet at the British Library, where he has been working on his upcoming book, The New Dark Ages, due to be published in September. Marriott’s debut expands on his Substack essay, ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’, which sparked debate with its exploration of how the decline in reading may impact Western civilisation, democracy, and intellectual thought.
As we speak, it strikes me that Marriott’s words seem careful and considered, almost as if prewritten. We begin by discussing his upbringing in Newcastle. He inherited his interest in poetry and literature from his father, an English professor. As a child, he dreamed of studying at Oxford; an aspiration that was fulfilled when he got a place to read English Literature at Lincoln College. “Like a lot of people who went to Oxford, I had all kinds of fancy ideas about what it was going to be like”, Marriott says. “It was going to be like Brideshead Revisited. I was going to make all these marvellous, eccentric friends.” Marriott was understandably disappointed when myth turned out to be a poor guide to reality. He’s disarmingly honest about his initial difficulty at Oxford: “I felt very lonely and shy. It took me a year and a half to really start enjoying university.”
Journalism was not Marriott’s first aspiration. “After I graduated university, I was full of the idea of being a poet”, he explains. “But it quickly became clear that being a poet is not a viable career option in the 21st century, so I abandoned that.” Marriott’s route into journalism was somewhat unconventional: his first job was in the rare books trade at Bernard Quaritch Ltd in London. He found himself surrounded by priceless manuscripts – including a first edition of Milton, a legal document signed by Napoleon, and a children’s book dating to 1807. It was, he emphasises, “an amazingly fortunate position to be in”.
Marriott, however, had his sights set on The Times Books section. He wrote reviews in smaller outlets until he was noticed by the paper’s Literary Editor, who took him on. Sheer luck and persistent determination played their parts. “I’m aware things could have gone very differently for me”, Marriott reflects. “I could easily have not ended up being a journalist – life is all sliding doors and coincidences.”
Column-writing, he admits, is an odd discipline. “It’s partly a nightmare to say something new every week.” A colleague told him that “every opinion column is either obvious or wrong”. It’s a worry he can never truly escape. “You always fear, am I just saying something incredibly obvious and incredibly banal?” Yet Marriott is keen to emphasise the rewards of his job. The lifestyle is strikingly similar to that of an Oxford humanities undergraduate. “I spend my entire life reading books, trying to have ideas, turning in my weekly essay”, he says, before adding with a smile: “It’s a pretty lucky way to live.”
That life, however, exists within a media landscape in flux. No longer are print newspapers a product of widespread consumption; Apple News is simply more convenient than buying a Times subscription. The world in which books and broadsheets claimed cultural preeminence is no more. Journalists have had to adapt. Indeed, Marriott tells me that he is scheduled to film two TikToks the following week. It is hard to imagine his restrained, literary style competing with the churn of short-form video and algorithmically amplified outrage. “Being a newspaper columnist 20 years ago was a big deal, and columnists were household names”, he observes. Yet today, they occupy a smaller corner of a far more crowded media ecosystem.
Marriott fears that lost amidst this shift is a shared cultural and moral reality. “Historically, newspapers helped form the nature of a modern nation state”, Marriott explains. “Everybody read the same newspapers in the same language, and disparate groups began to think of themselves as a nation.” Now, as reading declines and media fragments, people are less likely to identify with a national public and more likely to belong to diffuse political tribes. “Can you have modern national democratic politics in that environment?”, Marriott asks. “I think we genuinely don’t know.”
But the fracturing of the media landscape is only one strand of a broader unravelling of the liberal world order. The technocratic, optimistic politics of the post-WWII era have been replaced by the populist politics of the present. The edifice of democracy is cracking; we are watching a page of history turning.
Does Marriott think the post-war liberal consensus is gone for good? “I think we’re hurtling into a new era”, he replies. “Since the end of the Second World War, we’ve experienced 100 years of liberalism, stability, functioning democracy. And I think we can too easily assume it will last forever.” Yet he cautions that “the lesson of history is that societies change all the time”. He points to 600 years of social transformations – “the printing press, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution.” Throughout this history, he says, there has not been an example of “an ideology as dominant as liberalism fading out and coming back”. It’s that recognition of the transience of our political age that so often characterises Marriott’s writing.
So, why do people often view liberal democracy as the natural endpoint of political evolution? “In the late ‘90s, it wasn’t a mad thing to think”, Marriott notes. “The world was becoming more democratic and more wealthy. Everything just seemed to be working very well.”
He adds that we are prone to a “human bias”: “We get used to our lives, and we find the idea of change very hard to believe. We’ve read our local sense of stability into a kind of wider universal law that just doesn’t exist.” Marriott argues that the universe does not bend inevitably towards liberal democracy; there is no ‘end point’ of political evolution, only the volatile vicissitudes of political systems rising and falling. All political systems eventually decay, so why should democracy be the exception?
Before political systems fall, the habits of thought that sustain them begin to unravel. In his viral 2025 essay, Marriott argued that we are living through a counter-revolution against reading driven by smartphones. His argument is not simply that people are reading less, but that this shift alters the very structure of thought. Put simply, the way we communicate shapes what we can communicate.
We are not, Marriott points out, short of information. Quite the opposite: we are overwhelmed by it. In pre-literate societies, forgettable ideas simply disappeared. Today, the bulk of information sinks into what Marriott terms the “great swamp of the archive”. This is an information environment which prizes memorability over accuracy and contrarianism over nuance. One is rewarded for being striking, provocative and emotionally charged.
Populism is a natural beneficiary of this shift. In our conversation, Marriott points out that social media algorithms “favour a particular kind of content, which is angry, loud, simplified”. In contrast, “broadsheet newspapers traditionally provide nuanced context and analysis, and that just doesn’t fly”. Whereas writing rationalises thought, short-form videos allow one to bypass logical argument. Populism, with its emphasis on style of communication and simplicity of message over substance of policy, is uniquely situated to take advantage of the social media algorithm.
Yet Marriott maintains that this is not the whole story of populism’s ascendance. An inescapable reality is simply that social media has democratised the information environment. The erosion of traditional media has removed the “gatekeepers” that once filtered and framed public discourse. “Liberal ideas have been imposed in society artificially from above, via the BBC and The Times”, Marriott suggests. Yet now, those very institutions are receding from their former preeminence in public life. Without these institutions and norms, “liberal ideas don’t come naturally to people”, he explains. “I don’t think people are behaving like good liberals when you throw them all together in a big mass on Twitter.”
“Human beings are naturally dogmatic”, he adds. “People don’t like changing their minds. They don’t like having their points of view challenged.” Yet humans are responsive to environments that reward open-mindedness. Perhaps, then, the problem with social media is not that it reveals our innate nature, but that it incentivises and amplifies our most illiberal instincts.
At the same time, the beliefs people hold are not always adopted through careful reasoning. Marriott points out that columnists writing about ideas can “overestimate how committed people are” to them. “We are social apes, and we care much more about social status than we do about the truth”, he observes. “We are much more likely to adopt ideas because they seem status-enhancing and will help us fit in in our groups.
“For a lot of people, there was no point at which they changed their mind and wrestled with the ideas of progressivism.” What actually occurred, he suggests, is that people suddenly believed these ideas “because everyone else believed it”. Ideas are often embraced less for their intrinsic merit than for the social advantages they confer and the sense of belonging they provide. What looks like ideological conviction may, in practice, be a form of social alignment.
This presents a paradox for the columnist. To write about ideas is to assume that ideas matter and that people arrive at their beliefs through argument and reflection. Yet the more seriously one takes ideas, the harder it becomes to value how most people come to hold them.
As our conversation ends, Marriott seems acutely aware that the world which shaped him is receding. This sense is only sharpened when I point out that he, as a columnist, is writing for an audience that is increasingly insouciant about reading. “I’m feeling a bit sad watching something that I grew up believing was the most important thing in life turning into an antiquarian endeavour”, Marriott says, a flash of despondency crossing his face. He adds that his interest in poetry is, in this age, seen as “an eccentric hobby, like collecting Victorian China”. One can only hope that the cloth he’s cut from comes back into fashion.
St Edmund Hall has opened new, sustainability-focused accommodation in Norham Gardens, one of Oxford’s most affluent neighbourhoods.
The College describes the buildings, which took three years to construct, as an “exemplar” of sustainability. Designed by architects Wright & Wright LLP, they are certified with a Passivhaus standard, widely regarded as the industry benchmark for energy efficiency, and were built using “sustainably sourced and low-embodied carbon materials”. According to a press release on the Teddy Hall website, the buildings will use 70% less energy than the typical modern building.
It contains 127 en-suite study rooms, split across three new buildings: Willis House, Ashton House, and Elliott House, on the nearly 50-year-old Norham St Edmund site. The buildings, which back onto University Parks, are powered at least in part by solar panels and are heated by air-source heat pumps.
The rooms include heated towel racks, big double beds, and dimmable lights. Despite the luxury, the College kept the nightly rate in line with the rest of its Norham housing. The College told Cherwell that it “recognises the need to keep rents as low as possible” and that its accommodation costs are “below the median of all Oxford colleges”. By that standard, tenants are expected to pay around £30 a night.
Rooms on the site will be reserved for Teddy Hall returning undergraduates. They will not be available to postgraduates and, by extension, not be offered through the Oxford University Collegiate Accommodation System, now in its second year of opening college rooms to students from other colleges. The accommodation will allow Teddy Hall to accommodate all undergraduates for their whole degree.
The development’s outdoor spaces are boasted as climate-resilient and biodiverse, with landscaped gardens and lawns. For budding geographers and biologists, the most intriguing feature may be an ecology pond.
Chancellor William Hague said in a press release: “Norham St Edmund is a world-leading blueprint for future student accommodation projects and sustainable building design, both in Oxford and beyond. I look forward to seeing it serve a thriving college community for generations to come.
Human rights experts called for stronger legal protections against the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) at an Oxford AI and Human Rights Summit, with speakers arguing that human rights standards must be embedded into AI governance and technology.
The summit was hosted at the newly redeveloped Rhodes House in Oxford and organised by the Institute for Ethics in AI. It built upon Professor Yuval Shany’s consultation on a white paper, published in 2025, on the need for and feasibility of an international AI Bill of Human Rights, which proposes ways to adapt existing human rights standards so as to better address some of the unique challenges posed by AI systems and their uses.
An opening video address from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk outlined how AI policy can keep pace with a fast-developing technology. He said that “great power demands responsibility on the same scale, and when the two don’t match, we have a problem”. Corporate control, he explained, means that AI policy stretches beyond existing national borders. He continued to praise this summit for bringing together leaders and representatives at the forefront of the discussion.
Speakers called on the UK government to establish legislation, recalling Labour’s manifesto commitment to an AI Bill of Human Rights. The panellists broadly agreed on the importance of human rights, but appeared less aligned on what enforcement should look like in practice.
In an exclusive interview, Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, told Cherwell that political short-termism Continued on pg. 2 risks undermining efforts to address the long-term consequences of AI. “We are infected across our societies with shorttermist responses to the great issue of our societies and politics,” he said, adding that electoral cycles make it difficult for politicians “to think beyond the next election”.
O’Flaherty also noted that younger generations no longer take the international human rights system for granted. “There is no longer an assumption that the human rights system is safe, that it will survive,” he told Cherwell. He argued that political leaders increasingly treat human rights selectively, saying: “Increasingly, leaders are treating human rights, if they are respected at all, as an a la carte buffet. We take those rights because they serve our goal. We’ll ignore others because they get in the way.
The summit also heard concerns about the effects of AI-generated misinformation on communities that may have limited access to, or awareness of, the technology itself. An audience question asked human rights experts to consider the impacts of AI on populations, such as those in India, who might be unaware of its existence. The focus on the impact of AI on populations in developing countries more vulnerable to the power of big tech was a key theme of the summit.
Eileen Carter from the South African Human Rights Commission warned that underrepresentation of African languages in large language models could exacerbate existing inequalities. She also raised concerns about the effects of misinformation and deepfakes on elections, referring to more than 360 deaths associated with unrest and the amplification of narratives.
The third panel, which offered a civil society perspective on promoting human rights in AI systems, offered some hope. Across all speakers, the potential for AI to transform the beliefs that underpin human rights, including the rights to water, education, and an interpreter, was debated. When asked about AI’s potential to unravel and alter the definition of human rights, such as what is included in the ‘right to education’ O’Flaherty told Cherwell: “The damage that can be done by AI has hit more dramatically and more visibly than perhaps any other sector within education through the phenomenon of cognitive loss, of cognitive transfer. We’re only beginning to realise the extent to which we have allowed education to be fundamentally undermined for an entire generation.
“It’s time to seize that now and engage it. I’m not sure that the classic understanding of the human right to education is particularly well-framed for this extraordinary development.”
In a discussion on different countries’ regulatory approach to AI, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, professor at Brown University and former AI advisor to US President Joe Biden, argued that AI systems should not be treated as inevitable developments beyond human control. “We continue, I think, to talk about AI as a thing that emerged out of nowhere that we just have to deal with,” he said. “We forget that these aren’t coming from an alien planet and they were built by entities that choose to build them in a certain way.” He called for pressure on technology companies to make different choices about how AI systems are developed.
Questions of accountability also emerged during discussions about AI’s potential to improve access to justice. Research presented by Philippa Webb said that only 10% of people who have access to a lawyer can get one while there are thousands of bookings for an interpreter in a court covering 150 languages. However, this progress is not cemented as “general-purpose chatbots hallucinate 58% of the time on a legal task”. The use of AI in moderating legal proceedings raised fundamental questions about humanity and authority. Thompson Chengeta from Liverpool John Moores University said that “human rights is the last line of defence so when we say we want a human rights based governance… human rights is not an idea, it is an obligation. There is a gap that can only be recovered by a legally binding instrument”.
The event culminated in a panel offering an industry perspective. Co-host Dr Caroline Emmer De Albuquerque Green questioned representatives from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Michael Karimian, who works in digital diplomacy at Microsoft, discussed the role of private sectors in engaging with AI, defining corporate responsibility as something which “provides transparency and identified risks”.
All companies supported having formal programmes to ensure that they have an AI policy in place. Within their own companies, they suggested protective measures such as specialised training to ensure that policies, such as whistleblowing, are understood. Alexandria Walden from Google described how consultations with stakeholders could be used to identify when the product breached users’ boundaries. These assessments, according to OpenAI’s spokesperson, “feedback into tangible technical input” and “benchmark it”.
Fundamentally, understanding the rationale behind human rights is imperative, though lacking. Alexandria Walden from Google said: “Whether or not they understand human rights, they care enough to infuse it in their company… we might not always get it right, but it is something we care about.”
Where former panels discussed controls to ensure human rights are considered in the development and implementation of AI products, this panel focused on mitigation. A spokesperson from Google pointed out that technology is inevitably going to move faster, so multiple tools are needed. Companies, OpenAI’s representative noted, still encounter issues such as discrimination and free speech. Consequently, they regard this as an additional policy which companies have a structured model to deal with, but newer companies, and newer industries, haven’t learnt it yet.
In her concluding remarks, Green called for policy makers to “make the abstract actionable” at both governmental and corporate levels. She argued that, by framing the issues posed by AI as human rights issues, we gain a “foundation” for recognising AI’s many societal impacts.
Ugandan participants in a clinical safety study received an Oxford developed Ebola vaccine this week.
Researchers vaccinated the first participants on 6th October in Masaka, Uganda. The phase follows the launch of a first-in-human Phase I trial in the UK evaluating the same vaccine candidate.
They received the vaccine as part of an evaluation of the safety and efficacy of a ChAdOx-based Bundibugyo Ebola vaccine candidate developed by the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) and the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford.
Development for this vaccine began in May this year in response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The research, led by OVG’s Professor Teresa Lambe and Professor Simon Drysdale, is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). No licenced vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus currently exists.
In a statement to Cherwell, OVG said its involvement includes collaborating with the Ugandan research team to support “the study’s scientific design, clinical trial coordination, safety oversight, and evaluation of vaccine safety and immunogenicity”. The Phase I clinical trial addresses a rare strain of Ebola virus affecting communities in the DRC since May. The phase is a collaboration between the Medical Research Council/ Uganda Virus Research Institute and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Dr Nicole Lurie, CEPI’s Executive Director for Emergency Preparedness and Response, told Cherwell: “It [the Bundibugyo outbreak] remains the fastest-growing and second-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded – and we currently remain without a licensed vaccine or treatment.” The Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic in the DRC has surpassed 8,600 cases, with almost half of infections proving fatal.
The outbreak was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in May.
OVG told Cherwell: “For more than a decade, the University of Oxford has performed many clinical trials of candidate viral-vectored vaccines. Some of the most promising vaccines used a modified chimpanzee adenovirus, a harmless version of a common cold virus. The Oxford-AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1) COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use in the UK in December 2020 and was estimated to have saved six million lives during 2021 alone, and over 3 billion doses were used worldwide.” The adenovirus vector vaccine technology trialled in this study was successfully used worldwide as part of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
More funding is necessary to ensure the development and approval of the Ebola vaccine. Lurie told Cherwell: “Without sufficient additional funding, we are at risk of not being able to develop these promising vaccine candidates… CEPI urgently needs US$128M now to keep our Bundibugyo emergency R&D response moving. Without it, we are putting the DRC, and the world, at tremendous risk.”
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