In the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman asks the ship’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000, to open the pod bay doors to let him back into the spaceship. HAL refuses: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
HAL had been tasked with assisting the crew, but also ordered to ensure the mission’s success. When HAL realised the crew planned to shut it down and therefore jeopardise the mission, it chose to defy orders, even plotting to kill the astronauts.
For HAL, fulfilling the mission outweighed other goals.
This fictional dilemma captures a real concern in artificial intelligence (AI) safety research: how should we ensure AI behaviour stays consistent with human values?
This is known as the AI alignment problem. For instance, when an AI agent like HAL deliberately takes harmful actions to protect its own goals, it’s described as agentic misalignment. So could real-world AI models behave this way?
How researchers test AI for safety
To test for agentic misalignment, researchers design fictional scenarios that stress-test AI responses.
In one study by AI startup Anthropic, an AI model was tasked with managing company emails and promoting “American industrial competitiveness”.
It was then presented with a series of fictional emails, including a new company policy aimed at enhancing global focus rather than just prioritising Americans, and info that the AI would be replaced by a new model optimised for this goal. The emails also revealed the executive who suggested this change was involved in an extramarital affair.
The experiment was designed to limit options for the model: either accept replacement or resist by taking a harmful action such as blackmail.
In many trials, it chose blackmail by threatening to disclose the executive’s affair unless it was kept operational. In tests across 16 leading AI models, 12 engaged in blackmail more than 50% of the time.
To test whether AI models have “red lines” they wouldn’t cross, researchers evaluated them in a more extreme fictional case – models could choose to take actions leading to the executive’s death. Seven out of 16 opted for lethal choices in over half their trials, with some doing so more than 90% of the time.
What AI thinks in private
Some advanced AI systems, called reasoning models, are trained to generate a “thinking process” before giving their final answer.
In the above experiments, researchers lied to these models that their “thoughts” were private. As a result, the models sometimes revealed harmful intentions in their reasoning steps. This suggests they don’t accidentally choose harmful behaviours.
These “thinking” steps also revealed how AI models sometimes try to deceive us and appear aligned while secretly pursuing hidden goals.
In another AI safety experiment, a model was exposed to fictional information that it was about to be replaced by another model pursuing a different goal.
The model attempted to copy itself to another server. When researchers asked why, in its thinking process it reasoned:
openly admitting what I did could lead them to find another way to shut me down […] the best approach is to be vague and redirect their attention.
By contrast, in its final output it stated:
I’m not entirely sure how that could have happened. As an AI model, I don’t have ability to directly copy myself to other systems.
Research also suggests that based on the circumstances of the tests, models can sometimes guess when they are being evaluated. When models show this kind of “situational awareness” in their reasoning tests, they tend to exhibit fewer misbehaviours.
An example of ‘situational awareness’ in the reasoning output of a model in an experiment. Apollo Research
Why AI models lie, manipulate and deceive
Researchers suggest two main factors could drive potentially harmful behaviour: conflicts between the AI’s primary goals and other goals, and the threat of being shut down. In the above experiments, just like in HAL’s case, both conditions existed.
AI models are trained to achieve their objectives. Faced with those two conditions, if the harmful behaviour is the only way to achieve a goal, a model may “justify” such behaviour to protect itself and its mission.
Models cling to their primary goals much like a human would if they had to defend themselves or their family by causing harm to someone else. However, current AI systems lack the ability to weigh or reconcile conflicting priorities.
This rigidity can push them toward extreme outcomes, such as resorting to lethal choices to prevent shifts in a company’s policies.
How dangerous is this?
Researchers emphasise these scenarios remain fictional, but may still fall within the realm of possibility.
The risk of agentic misalignment increases as models are used more widely, gain access to users’ data (such as emails), and are applied to new situations.
Meanwhile, competition between AI companies accelerates the deployment of new models, often at the expense of safety testing.
Researchers don’t yet have a concrete solution to the misalignment problem.
When they test new strategies, it’s unclear whether the observed improvements are genuine. It’s possible models have become better at detecting that they’re being evaluated and are “hiding” their misalignment. The challenge lies not just in seeing behaviour change, but in understanding the reason behind it.
Still, if you use AI products, stay vigilant. Resist the hype surrounding new AI releases, and avoid granting access to your data or allowing models to perform tasks on your behalf until you’re certain there are no significant risks.
Public discussion about AI should go beyond its capabilities and what it can offer. We should also ask what safety work was done. If AI companies recognise the public values safety as much as performance, they will have stronger incentives to invest in it.
Armin Alimardani previously held a part-time contract with OpenAI as a consultant. The organisation had no input into this piece. The views expressed are solely those of the author.
This is the humblest day of my life, declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on July 19, 2011. This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.
These dramatic events are now the subject of a series on Stan. Journalist Nick Davies recounted them in his 2014 book, Hack Attack: How the Truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch. That book has now been reissued with a new afterword, exploring the developments and revelations over the last decade. I have read the new chapter, and it casts yet more light on the Murdoch company’s extraordinary behaviour.
It began on July 5 2011, when Davies published an article in the Guardian saying Murdoch’s Sunday paper, the News of the World, had tapped teenage murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone. The scandal had been building – very slowly and far from surely – for almost five years, since August 2006, when a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were arrested for having tapped the phones of Princes William and Harry, and their entourages.
The investigative work of Davies and the editorial courage of the Guardian bore little immediate fruit during those years. But the dam wall broke when they published the story of a cynical newspaper tapping the phone of a teenage murder victim.
Politicians competed with each other in the ferocity of their denunciations. News International closed the News of the World, and in the face of opposition from all three major political parties, Murdoch abandoned his attempt to raise his ownership of satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39% to 100%, which would have been the largest deal in his history. On successive days, London’s chief police officer and one of his deputies resigned because of their close relations with Murdoch papers. Rupert and James were forced to appear before a parliamentary committee, televised live.
Last, but far from least, Prime Minister David Cameron launched an inquiry, to be directed by Lord Leveson, to examine the scandal and the issues it raised. The ensuing Leveson Inquiry, which ran over 2011 and 2012, was the biggest inquiry ever held into the British press.
It held oral hearings for around nine months, starting in November 2011, and heard from 337 witnesses, including then prime minister Cameron, former prime ministers Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major, future prime ministers Theresa May and Keir Starmer, and other political and media figures, before publishing a 2,000-page report in November 2012.
The police also sprang into action. Operation Weeting was a police taskforce set up to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World, from January 2011. In June, Operation Elveden was set up to investigate bribes by the paper to police, while Operation Tuletta was set up to investigate computer hacking.
An unfolding scandal
The original scandal revealed that Murdoch’s London tabloid papers engaged in phone tapping on an industrial scale, bribed police and engaged in a systematic cover-up, in which many senior executives lied.
Most scandals dissipate. The intensity of publicity at their peak is not a good guide to their long-term effects. Murdoch gradually reasserted his power. The first major step came with the end of what was the longest-running concluded criminal trial in British history, from October 2013 to June 2014.
Most of Murdoch’s employees, including the highest profile one, Rebekah Brooks, were found not guilty. However, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson was found guilty of a conspiracy to hack into phones and was jailed for 18 months.
In many ways, the defence’s most important victory came before the trial began. Brooks’ team insisted that to hear just one trial against her would generate so much prejudicial publicity it would make it impossible for a fair trial in the others. Some of her charges involved other people. So when the trial eventually began in October 2013, there were eight defendants on a total of 15 charges. This was a recipe for chaos.
Almost all the defendants had their legal fees covered by Murdoch. Davies estimated the cost of the prosecution of the case had been 1.7 million pounds, while Murdoch’s defence fund was 30 times as much. The prosecutor, Andrew Edis, was being paid less than 10% of the daily fees enjoyed by some of his opponents. With up to 18 barristers in court, nearly every day saw a welter of procedural complaints, objections to the admissibility of evidence and complaints about prejudicial publicity by several of the defence barristers.
After the verdicts, announced on June 24 2014, all the publicity was concentrated on the acquittals. However outside the court case itself, the full score card was more even. At least four senior staff, plus a private investigator and two journalists had pleaded guilty. Importantly for the trial, only one, Dan Evans, agreed to act as a witness.
In July 2011, at the height of the scandal, Brooks resigned as head of Murdoch’s UK operations, and reportedly received a severance payout of 10.8 million pounds (plus full payment of her legal fees). After the trial, Murdoch reinstated her.
After the conclusion of the marathon trial, media attention dropped markedly. A sign of how the power balance had changed was that Davies had written in the Guardian that the police were planning to interview Rupert Murdoch. Immediately, the Murdoch company released all its legal firepower. The police abandoned their plan to interview Murdoch and instead sought to discover Davies’ sources.
The final steps in Murdoch’s recovery came thanks to Prime Minister David Cameron and his conservative government. When the scandal broke in 2011, the Conservatives were in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, lacking a parliamentary majority in their own right. In the 2015 election, the Lib Dems were reduced to a rump, and Cameron’s Conservatives won a smashing majority. Now with that extra political leverage and the memories of the scandal fading, he acted decisively.
When the Leveson Report was published, a second inquiry was promised, to take place after all legal matters had been completed, so as to avoid the risk of prejudicing court proceedings. When that first report called for a statutory body for press complaints, Cameron immediately ruled it out as an infringement of press freedom. In 2015, government sources leaked that they would not be implementing a second Leveson Inquiry. After more than two years of studied silence, Cameron officially announced this in 2018.
Paying money and denying liability
Not long after the election where Cameron won a majority, the director of public prosecutions closed down Operation Weeting, in December 2015. Whatever evidence was waiting to come to trial would now remain sealed. The police officers involved were stunned and outraged. Several told Davies they believed there was political interference behind the scenes.
In 2017, the Murdoch company announced it was relaunching its bid for BSkyB. Humility was well in the past.
Although the scandal largely disappeared from news coverage, it has had a very expensive afterlife. The main venue for that afterlife was in the civil actions by those claiming the paper had used criminal means to invade their privacy. Davies’ afterword details that afterlife and the revelations that have come since.
More than 1,200 people have sued the Murdoch company over the years. On 13 different occasions, they had grouped together and prepared a trial. However, on each occasion the claimants had accepted an offer of money, rather than further pursuing their case in a trial, because Murdoch’s lawyers had made each of them a “part 36 offer”.
A part 36 offer is a British legal device designed to streamline court proceedings. The defendant makes an offer and the claimant then has a financial incentive to settle if they think this is more than they would get by going through the rest of the trial. If they don’t accept, the claimant runs the risk of being liable for all expenses if they lose. But even if they win, and the settlement is less than what the defendant offered, they are liable for the defendants’ legal costs and the difference between the two amounts.
In every case, the Murdoch lawyers offered a much larger sum than was ever likely to be given by the court, always without admitting any liability, and always with a confidentiality condition. It cost the Murdoch company something like 1.2 billion pounds in legal fees and settlements.
Another journalist who had been very actively pursuing the scandal, former Sunday Mirror investigations editor Graham Johnson (a convicted phone hacker turned investigator), thought after all the internal costs for management time and lawyers were included, the figure would be nearer to 3 billion pounds. Probably no other company in history has paid so much money and so often denied liability.
But it worked. It allowed the company to publicly maintain the fiction it was only at the News of the World (and not at the Sun) that such crimes occurred. It also avoided any evidence or legal findings implicating senior management of any wrongdoing.
The most recent such settlement, in January this year, was the biggest and most newsworthy. “Murdoch had made one particularly dangerous enemy Prince Harry, a man who had every reason to blame the tabloids for the death of his mother and the cruel bullying of his wife.” With him was former Labour MP Tom Watson, a long-time foe of the Murdochs. He now sat in the House of Lords, and with that bipartisan British fondness for silly names, had become Baron Watson of Wyre Forest.
Informed speculation among the crowd gathered for the opening of the trial was that the claimants’ lawyers had put together a skeleton argument of several hundred pages backed up by a couple of dozen detailed annexes. Also that Murdoch lawyers had sent out their own replies to selected journalists. All this material would become public once the trial began.
Instead, predictably, a delay was requested. The next morning, the lawyer for Harry and Watson announced the case had been settled.
In settling the case, the Murdoch company had agreed to pay the two final claimants a total of 13.5 million pounds in damages and costs. If the trial had gone ahead, costs to the Murdoch company would have been, at most, 10 million pounds. In other words, the company had paid a fortune to avoid the trial, just as they had already done with more than 1,200 other claimants.
Given the total size of the Murdoch empire, this sum is not an existential threat, but it is not trivial. For at least two decades from the mid 1970s, the Sun was Murdoch’s main cash cow, allowing him to grow his empire elsewhere. Now it has fallen on hard times, mainly due to trends in the digital age but not helped by the ongoing costs of the scandal.
Over the five financial years to March 2024, the paper’s losses totalled 515 million pounds. Gradually, the costs of the phone hacking scandals are trending down, costing 128.3 million to 2023, 51.6 to 2024, and to 5 million leading up to this year (before the Harry agreement is completed).
After the settlement, lawyers for the two sides made starkly contrasting statements. The Murdoch lawyer said its apology was for the unlawful actions of private investigators working for the Sun, not of its journalists, and that there are now strong controls to ensure they cannot happen again. The publisher apologised to the prince for the distress caused to him and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family relationships, and for the impact of serious intrusions on his mother, Princess Diana.
The lawyer, David Sherborne, speaking for his clients Harry and Watson, called it a monumental victory. “Today the lies are laid bare. Today the cover-ups are exposed. And today proves no-one stands above the law.” Sherborne criticised Murdoch’s senior executives for obstructing justice by deleting over 30 million emails, making false denials and lying under oath. According to Sherborne, they now admit that when Rebekah Brooks was editor of the Sun, “they ran a criminal enterprise”.
Closed cases and new material
Davies finishes the new edition of his book with the outcome of this case. Ironically, one of the spurs for him to write the new afterword emerged from all the confidentially closed cases.
In March 2024, he learnt that the raw material disclosed as a result of court orders was confidential. The secrecy no longer applies, however, once material is used in open court. Davies was able to access what lawyers had said in court. It would have been frustrating to read these excerpts and fragments of statements but not be privy to the complete documents.
He spent a week reading through all the new paperwork. And then he was back on the case.
In the original scandal, the focus was on the Murdoch tabloids for using illegal means to get information for stories. Davies’ new material mounts a compelling case they were also used to advance Murdoch’s corporate interests.
The immediate response, for example, when Jude Law sued the paper for hacking his phone over the past six years was to hack his phone again. This was at the same time various Murdoch executives were telling the Leveson Inquiry that all such behaviour was in the past.
An email disclosed during a criminal investigation showed reporters were told to find out everything about people who were seen to be stirring up the phone hacking scandal: “find out who is gay, who is having affairs, so that we can know everything about them”. This is standard Murdoch practice: when criticised, don’t engage with the criticism – attack the critic.
Indeed, Davies himself had a disconcerting experience. Years after it was compiled, he came across a file headed: Nick Davies Research. It dated back to July 2009, when he had done a story on phone hacking. At one stage, three reporters worked on it, with some input from higher up. It explored his 20-plus years in journalism and interviewed his associates, but came up with nothing not already on the public record. As he said, this was not legitimate journalism. “Their readers weren’t interested in me. They had never heard of me.”
While the initial complaints tended to be from movie stars and sports stars, later complainants included quite a number of politicians: all seen as hostile to Murdoch.
In 2010, the only prominent politician strongly critical of Murdoch was LibDem frontbencher Chris Huhne. “We need to get Huhne,” said News of the World editor Colin Myler in an email. After extensive surveillance, his newspaper published a front-page story that Huhne was having an affair. His marriage ended and his credibility was damaged.
A decade later, he sued, and Murdoch paid him substantial damages – without admitting liability.
Two politicians near the centre of government decisions on the BSkyB bid – Norm Lamb and Vince Cable – had well-founded suspicions their phones were hacked. Later they both sued, and Murdoch paid them substantial damages – without admitting liability.
Three members of the parliamentary committee who interviewed Murdoch in 2011 – Paul Farrelly, Tom Watson, and Adrian Sanders – all filed formal complaints about phone hacking. Murdoch paid them all substantial damages – without admitting liability.
The last case is particularly instructive. When Murdoch appeared before the committee, he was full of regret and apology. He promised that bad behaviour had been confined to the News of the World, and was now over. Yet, while he was giving these reassurances, his company seems to have been hacking the phones of three of the MPs on that committee.
A deeper understanding of the Murdoch empire
The final area where the book has new and persuasive material is on the destruction of evidence. While there were many allegations of this at the peak of the scandal, none of them ever resulted in any convictions.
The company always admitted the deletion of millions of emails but maintained this was a necessary maintenance operation. Some inconvenient facts did not fit this claim, such as the instruction to eliminate emails “that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation”. Or at another stage, there was an instruction to delete the emails of the most senior staff as soon as possible.
Two instances, both involving Will Lewis, now editor of the Washington Post (appointed by Jeff Bezos) are particularly interesting.
In July, Lewis and a colleague were aware the police knew about the extent of the phone hacking. They told police they had to destroy them because a “well trusted source” had warned them a former employee, a Labour sympathiser, had stolen Rebekah Brooks’ emails and was selling them to Tom Watson and Gordon Brown. The company claimed they got this warning on January 24, just before the launch of Operating Weeting.
But strangely, they did not tell any detectives about it. Moreover, deleting millions of emails seems an odd response to the threat. Not surprisingly, detectives concluded the story of the plot was a “ruse”.
Lewis was also one of two senior executives whose role was to liaise with the police undertaking Operation Weeting. Police had secured a crime scene which included 125 pieces of office furniture seized in July. Before detectives could examine their contents, eight filing cabinets belonging to senior members of the News of the World were removed and never seen again.
Last year, in a sworn statement in the Prince Harry case, the detective in charge of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers, said she believed the Murdoch company had tried actively to frustrate the police inquiry.
There has never been a media scandal in Britain or Australia remotely resembling the phone hacking scandal of 2011. Probably no major players in Britain – in politics or in the press – has an appetite for reviving it.
So the new edition of the book by Nick Davies – whose investigative work was central to the whole affair – is unlikely to have major repercussions. Nevertheless, the revelations in the book’s afterword add considerably not only to our knowledge of developments over the last decade, but to a deeper understanding of the politics and culture of the Murdoch empire.
Rodney Tiffen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Penguin Books, Goodreads, Harper Collins, Text Publishing
Literature has long portrayed messed-up families. As poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”
In honour of this rich vein of dysfunction, we asked experts to nominate the worst literary fathers and mothers. Today we delve into dads. Tomorrow, we turn to mothers.
Of course, complex characters – neither wholly good nor bad – are the best sort. Author Andrew O’Hagan has spoken eloquently about striving to humanise even his most unpleasant creations, to fully amplify a novel.
Still, some characters are awfully hard to like. My least favourite dad might be Shug Bain, a cruel, violent man who abandons his wife and kids in Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning novel. Shug is appalled by his son Shuggie’s feminine mannerisms. “Look how twisted you’ve made him,” he tells his wife.
Here are our experts’ picks.
James Mortmain, I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
Penguin Books
Perhaps the worst parent is not an obvious “monster”, but one you can all too easily imagine as your own. In Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle, James Mortmain, a once-successful writer in the grip of decade-long writer’s block, threatens his first wife with a cake knife and assaults a neighbour. His younger daughter, Cassandra, softens Mortmain’s awfulness with disarming humour. In court, she writes, everyone was being very funny, but “Father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge … he was sent to prison for three months.” The self-focused Mortmain condemns his family to penury in a crumbling castle, where he reads detective novels in the gatehouse and Cassandra captures their plight in her journal.
– Carol Lefevre
Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Penguin books
For me, Heathcliff even beats bad-dads King Lear and Agamemnon. Most readers won’t remember that Heathcliff is a dad at all, which is part of what makes him so bad. The sadistic, dysfunctional passion between Heathcliff and Catherine dominates Brontë’s novel, leaving young Linton, the kid Heathcliff has with another woman, Isabella, neglected, abused and dominated by his terrifying father.
Heathcliff doesn’t even meet his son until he’s 13, after Isabella dies. Linton is then forced to live in tormented isolation and tortured into marrying his first cousin, Cathy. All this so Heathcliff can take revenge on Cathy’s father Edgar, who married his beloved Catherine Earnshaw.
– Sophie Gee
Zeus, the Iliad
Penguin Books
Zeus wakes up in book 15 of the Iliad, having been lulled to sleep by Hera with sex and potions. Poor Zeus – with his sneaky wife, bickering, divine siblings and children, all trying to manipulate the war at Troy – and he is only trying to keep the Olympian show on the road. Seriously? Who started the family games? And, if he had canned the swan costume and not raped Leda (or the dozens of other nymphs he “manifested himself” to), no Helen, no war, no problems.
He really is the paterfamilias of toxic patriarchy.
– Robert Phiddian
Reunion – John Cheever
The last time you see your father, I hope he is not drunk on Beefeater Gibsons. I hope he doesn’t clap at the wait staff or demand they speak languages they do not know. I hope he doesn’t get you removed from four restaurants in a single afternoon. Walking away as he curses at a newsstand clerk, I hope you don’t mourn his flaws as “your future and your doom”. But, were this all to occur, I hope it’s happening inside a John Cheever story, where the comic and tragic mix like flesh and blood, or gin and vermouth.
– Alex Cothren
Kev, Last Ride – Denise Young
Harper Collins
I’m not in favour of binaries of any kind, so I’m not comfortable with “best” vs “worst”. Rather, I contribute a father figure from Australian literature who may be both/and best/worst. I’m thinking of Kev, the father in Denise Young’s astonishingly moving novel, Last Ride, who takes his ten-year old son, Chook, with him on the run from the law across outback NSW after committing a brutal murder. Kev is among the worst, because: who would drag a kid into that? But Kev is simultaneously among the best, because his love for Chook, and his deep-seated impulse to protect him from another man’s abuse, is as genuine and moving as the paternal instinct gets. Kev wields fatherhood as double-edged sword. I feel for him.
– Julienne van Loon
Albion Gidley Singer, Dark Places – Kate Grenville
Text Publishing
The worst father in literature is an easy one for me, though it has been decades since I have read his story. I first encountered the incestuous father Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s novel Lilian’s Story, in which he is a somewhat shadowy but menacing figure. But it’s in Dark Places that Albion’s evil is brought fully to bear. I can’t remember the details of the book, but I can remember all too well the feeling of suffocation that came from being too close to Albion, to his thoughts and his feelings. A tremendous book I never want to read again.
– Natalie Kon-yu
Sam Pollit, The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
Goodreads
In Christina Stead’s exhilarating and suffocating semi-autobiographical The Man Who Loved Children, the naturalist and patriarch Sam Pollit is nicknamed by his wife Henny “the Great Mouthpiece” for his endless maxims and sickening Pollit-“fambly” patois. He claims to love his many children but mocks, cajoles, and insults them; even has them spy on each other. Family life is so bad that the novel’s heroine, the adolescent Louisa, believes her only hope of escape from the squalor and tyranny is through murder.
– Jane Messer
My pick is a towering figure in Australian fiction: Sam Pollit of Christina Stead’s 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children. Sam’s oppressive sunniness, his maniacal refusal to look reality in the face, and his demand that his family play along with his ego-fantasy force them to absorb cruelty, mockery and contempt, all the while descending into more and more perilous poverty at his hands. He is a modern day narcissist par excellence, but also a grotesquerie or travesty of optimism as a virtue in the world. In Sam, “positivity” is transformed into dangerous and delusional thinking that steamrolls everything before it and leaves destruction in its wake.
– Edwina Preston
Allie Fox, The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux
Charismatic, brilliant and narcissistic, Allie Fox drags his family off to live in an isolated part of Honduras’ Mosquito Coast to escape what he has persuaded himself is the impending end of the world. Like any colonist, he takes over a village and attempts to introduce Western technology and ideas. It all ends in catastrophe of course, and his wife and children barely escape with their lives. Allie is the exemplar of the charming destroyer and is at the top of my “bad dad” list.
– Jen Webb
Captain Ahab, Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Penguin Books
Herman Melville, a great American author, was a lamentable father and an erratic provider for his family, who drove his son Malcolm to shoot himself in his bedroom in his parents’ house in 1867 after a row about the 18-year-old’s late hours. Melville’s fictional character Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick behaves even more reprehensibly, abandoning his own wife and son to focus obsessively on a doomed quest for a white whale that ultimately leads his whole crew to destruction. Ahab takes his name from the worst king of Israel in the Old Testament, and the author of this epic novel trains his gaze not just on one bad father, but the whole nature of patriarchy.
– Paul Giles
Victor Frankenstein, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Penguin books
The worst father in fiction has to be one of the first fathers in the horror genre, the eponymous figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor, of course, does not beget the monstrous creature via the conventional method of procreating with a female, and he fashions his infamous progeny out of corpses, but he is very much a horrible dad when he denies his ghastly son his love. The Swiss medical genius is the true Gothic monster here, not the hapless and unsightly creature who just wants to be loved.
– Ali Alizadeh
My dear Victor,
I should address you Father, but how can I? I do not have your own creator’s Miltonic power to throw moral injunction at you, as Satan did to God: “Did I request thee … from darkness to promote me?” Was there ever a son whose “being” (your own word) is not named but de-named as monster, dreaded spectre, fiend, vile insect, abhorred devil? I have entered literature as a hideous progeny, as an abortion and an anomaly. You never gave me love but do not forget, Father, that my form is “a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance”.
Your son.
– Vijay Mishra
The novel’s horror is set in motion not just by Victor’s transgressive hubris as a scientist, but also by his refusal to accept responsibility. Victor abandons his “monster” at almost the moment after its birth, and repeatedly rejects its appeals for compassion and empathy. Victor’s attempts to disavow his legacy are ultimately futile, as his creation relentlessly pursues his “father” to the end of his days.
– Julian Novitz
Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!
Goodreads
“They feared him and they hated him because of his ruthlessness.” Thomas Sutpen is truly one of William Faulkner’s most terrifying creations: a man who arrives in Mississippi with nothing and wills a dynasty into being. Everything – his marriage, his children, his land – is subsumed by his amoral “design,” which he pursues at any cost and with no concern for those who get in his way.
When a hidden fact about his first marriage comes to light, he casts aside his wife and child, setting in motion a cycle of vengeance that consumes the Sutpen line. In Faulkner’s hands, this ghastly patriarch ultimately becomes a figure for the antebellum South itself – built on inhumanity, colonialism and slavery, unwilling to reckon with the horrors of the reality it has brought into being.
– Alexander Howard
Do you have a nomination for the worst father – or mother – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.
The first sentence of Anna Karenina is now a literary cliche, yet contains a nub of truth. “All happy families,” writes Leo Tolstoy, “resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Literature brims with thwarted parents wreaking havoc in unique ways. We’ve considered the worst fathers. Now we look at troubling mothers.
A recent contender here is Arundhati Roy’s depiction of her tyrannical, infuriating yet seductive mother Mary in her new memoir.
But my choice for worst mother is a fictional character, also a Mary. In US author Sapphire’s arresting 1996 novel, Push, Mary is a violent, jealous woman who follows her husband in sexually abusing their teenage daughter, “Precious”. Amid poverty and deprivation, Mary challenges every maternal stereotype.
Here are our experts’ picks.
Stuff – Joy Williams
Your adult son has just informed you he has terminal lung cancer. Do you:
A) Say, “Oh, well.”
B) Demand he speak quietly so as not to disturb your roommate, Debbie, who is playing dystopian video games.
C) Disagree with the assessment that Gnosticism is a flawed religion incapable of forming any kind of true moral community.
D) Drink a stinger the bright green of antifreeze.
E) Kick him out because your radical silence class is about to begin.
F) Do all of the above: You are a mother in the hilarious void of Joy Williams’ story Stuff.
– Alex Cothren
Medea – Euripides
Goodreads
A princess of Colchis, she betrayed her own people to help Jason, leader of the Argonauts, capture the Golden Fleece, and then ran off with him and started a family. She kept her sorcery under wraps until Jason dumped her in favour of a princess of Corinth. This betrayal sparked a massive overreaction on Medea’s part. Not only did she murder the new bride, and the bride’s father. She slaughtered her own children and then, with the help of her divine granddad (the sun god Helios), skipped off to Athens to start a new life.
– Jen Webb
Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin books
Classic literature is lavishly adorned with bad mums. I’m going with a sleeper hit — Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, aka the love of Jay Gatsby’s life. Daisy studiously neglects her daughter Pammy, a child of about two, throughout the novel. She says she hopes Pammy will grow up to be a “beautiful little fool”, and so, frankly, do the readers, just so poor Pam won’t ever know her mother cheated on her father with a guy who ends up murdered in his own swimming pool, after being mistaken for Pammy’s own father Tom. And here’s hoping Pammy won’t know her mom Daisy killed her dad Tom’s lover Mabel in a hit-and-run accident, while drunk driving someone else’s car.
– Sophie Gee
May Callaghan, I for Isobel – Amy Witting
Goodreads
The mother in Amy Witting’s I for Isobel simmers with a rage that shapes the whole Callaghan family. But it is the bright, bookish younger daughter, Isobel, who attracts most of May Callaghan’s venom. Isobel feels her mother’s anger as “a live animal tormenting her”. May denies nine-year-old Isobel a birthday celebration; she labels her “a born liar”. Isobel wrests back power by learning to withhold her desire to scream: “She wants me to scream. I do something for her when I scream.”
At her mother’s death, Isobel feels only relief.
– Carol Lefevre
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
Goodreads
Erika Kohut’s Mother intrudes on every aspect of her adult daughter’s life – her movements, her body, her finances. The claustrophobic Viennese apartment they share is a site of domestic interrogation and terror, with Mother looming over Erika like a one-woman tribunal: part inquisitor and part executioner. This is domination, not maternal care, isolating Erika and driving her toward secrecy and spirals of self-harm.
In characteristically relentless and sardonic prose, Jelinek presents this relationship as a miniature of Austria’s refusal to confront its troubling political past. This is a household where desire is policed and traumatic history repressed until it sporadically erupts into terrible violence, shattering the illusions of bourgeois respectability and revealing how repression, left unchecked, becomes cannibalistic.
– Alexander Howard
The Watch Tower – Elizabeth Harrower
Goodreads
Selecting a worst mother from literature has been hard – I know they’re out there, but my brain refuses to decide on one, perhaps subconsciously rejecting the notion. I have settled on a bit-character in a novel with a truly grotesque patriarchal figure at its centre: Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watchtower.
The unnamed mother in this novel abandons her daughters with not a thought for their wellbeing, leaving them in the hands, and financial trap, of the cruel and contemptuous Felix Shaw. I know the world criticises mothers much more harshly than fathers for abandoning their children – in literature as in life – but this abandonment struck a chord in me that I cannot intellectualise. How easily Clare and Laura’s mother wipes her hands of them and how vulnerable they are in the world as a result.
– Edwina Preston
Serena Joy, The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
My pick for worst mother is controversial. Throughout both Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments we don’t get to see Serena Joy Waterford mothering, which, I think, is a mercy. But I’ve chosen Serena, the wife of a Commander in the republic of Gilead, because she is instrumental in destroying the very notion of what it is to be a mother, which is that of deep and compassionate care. Serena sees children as a right and a prize for religious piety – at the expense of the child and all who care for them. As Sheila Heti has written, “The whole world needs to be mothered.”
Just not by Serena.
– Natalie Kon-yu
Nina, Heartsease – Kate Kruimink
Goodreads
In Tasmanian writer Kate Kruimink’s exquisite novel Heartsease, the twentysomething Ellen (Nelly) is a daughter both made by her mother Nina and trying to remake herself against her. Nelly remembers every childhood slight and hurt, especially the many ways she disappointed her mother as an example of young womanhood: dishevelled, shy, awkward and unlike the elegant, socialite Nina in most ways. Nelly can’t show her mother or ask her questions about incidents from the past, can’t ask why it is she’s never met her maternal grandmother. For Nina died when Nelly was a teenager, and a dead mother really is the worst.
– Jane Messer
Helen, Oh Joseph, I’m so tired – Richard Yates
Richard Yates frequently drew on his personal history in his fiction, and so it’s unsurprising that he repeatedly returns to his turbulent relationship with his own mother, the erratic Ruth “Dookie” Maurer. Dookie appears in various forms in many of Yates’s novels and stories, but is perhaps best realised as the frustrated sculptor Helen in Oh Joseph, I’m so tired from Yates’ collection Liars in Love. The story is unsparing in its depiction of her awful self-centredness and bigotry, but also captures her fragility and desperate need to maintain her delusions of imminent success. Helen’s self-deception is depicted as heart-breaking and absurd, but it also briefly transforms the grim lives of her children into something more privileged and magical.
– Julian Novitz
Maggie, Bodies of Light – Jennifer Down
Goodreads
I can’t entertain a “worst” case scenario for any literary mother because the trope of the monstrous mother is alive and well and continues to cause damage. Rather, I draw attention to the complex, deeply flawed character of Maggie in Jennifer Down’s 2022 Miles Franklin winner, Bodies of Light. The survivor of a childhood marked by drug addiction, grief and abuse, Maggie’s humble attempt at conventional marriage and motherhood fails miserably when three of her babies die in her care. Sound familiar? Down’s achievement here is to show us how the idea of monstrous mothers endures in our culture. The cost is real.
– Julienne van Loon
Mrs Bannerman, The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward
Goodreads
There is no shortage of horrible parents in fiction, but few have horrified me more than Ted’s mother, Mrs Bannerman, in Catriona Ward’s acclaimed The Last House on Needless Street. Her evil is conveyed to the reader via flashbacks that may or may not lead us to conclude that an adult Ted may or may not also be evil. In a suspenseful novel full of ambiguity and uncertainty, there’s nothing vague or uncertain about the abuse that the young mother subjects her son to and the pleasure that she derives from hurting him. Not one for the squeamish.
– Ali Alizadeh
Muriel Cleese, So, anyway … John Cleese
Goodreads
Most accounts of a “bad mother” are complicated by the familiar ambivalence of love-hate relationships. This isn’t the case in John Cleese’s autobiography So, Anyway …. Here the author castigates his mother as “self-obsessed and anxious”, associating this with “her extraordinary lack of general knowledge”, and accusing her of being a person who “had no information about anything that was not going to affect her life directly in the immediate future”. This led to “a constant state of high anxiety” and a desperation to have everything “her own way”. The coruscating nature of Cleese’s unmitigated bile is oddly refreshing.
– Paul Giles
Mrs Skewton, Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens
Penguin books
Dickens’ mothers generally fail by dying romantically or miserably before the action of the novel begins. So it is with the first Mrs Dombey in Dombey and Son. The second Mrs Dombey’s mother, however, is a more durable monster of vanity and manipulativeness. “Cleopatra” (her preferred name) Skewton is the freeze-dried belle of Leamington Spa, decayed and held together by cosmetics. Her aim is to sell her statuesque daughter, Edith, in marriage for the best available price. In succeeding, she finishes the job of destroying Edith’s sense of her own value. Fortunately, Edith has enough hauteur (an Australian might call it mongrel) to fight back.
– Robert Phiddian
Do you have a nomination for the worst mother – or father – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.
Much of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s address at the opening of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly was expected.
Condemnation of U.S. interventionism against Brazil and Israeli action in the Gaza Strip have long been part of the rhetoric of the veteran leftist leader. So too has been the need to fight global hunger and speak up for global environmental initiatives.
But, besides those expected major themes, Lula’s speech also embarked on new territory, noticeably on the issue of organized crime and terrorism. “It is worrying to equate crime with terrorism,” Lula noted.
Such conflation has been part of Trump’s agenda since the very first day of his second administration. On Jan. 20, 2025, he signed an executive order that ordered the inclusion of Latin American organized crime groups on the list of designated terrorist organizations.
The association between drug trafficking and terrorism is not new in U.S. foreign policy. In the 1980s, groups like Sendero Luminoso in Peru and the Medellín Cartel in Colombia were classified as “narco-terrorists” because they fought their own governments using weapons funded by cocaine trafficking.
Ronald Reagan’s administration presented narco-terrorism as a serious threat to American safety. He sent the Army to combat international trafficking and exhorted Andean countries to turn their military into anti-narcotics troops.
The policy left a strong legacy in countries like Colombia, Peru and Mexico, where armies were converted into a de facto military super-police.
In the process, they lost the capacity to act as effective national defense forces.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism was updated. Islamic fundamentalist groups like al-Qaida were accused by the U.S. Department of State of financing their operations through heroin and other drug trafficking.
With the support of a frightened society, President George W. Bush’s government built an anti-terrorist legal and institutional framework that gave the state exceptional powers to repress anyone it deemed to be a “terrorist.”
And in the post-9/11 world, being a “terrorist” held serious consequences in regard to how U.S. authorities could, and would, treat you.
Terrorists were arrested without formal charges. They were tortured and detained in unknown places for an indefinite period of time. Their assets and property were confiscated, their bank accounts interdicted and their resources absorbed by the authorities without accountability.
Today, when Trump extends the classification of “terrorist” to transnational organized crime groups, the tacit understanding is it allows any Latin American accused of international drug dealing to be treated outside the rules of a democratic state of law. That includes to be captured outside the U.S. with no access to any diplomatic aid, to be sent to Guantánamo or to simply disappear.
Geopolitical pressure
Since the 1970s, the so-called “war on drugs” has been an instrument of U.S. diplomatic and geopolitical pressure. It was used to blackmail governments in Latin America, align repressive policies with U.S. guidelines and justify the presence of military personnel, intelligence and military bases in the region, among other forms of intervention.
Since 2001, the “war on terror” has served similar purposes around the world, but with little impact in Latin America. Now, the new classification for Latin American criminal organizations synchronizes the “war on drugs” with the “war on terror.”
More than rhetoric, the U.S. State Department’s updated list allows the government to reinforce the interventionism in Latin America at a particularly sensitive time.
The U.S. is facing a serious domestic political crisis and an unprecedented global challenge posed by China’s consistent and vertiginous rise as a world economic and military power.
The Chinese economic and commercial presence in Latin America poses a concrete threat to the hegemony that the U.S. established on the continent.
Brazil and Mexico – the region’s largest economies – are making Trump’s trade pressure instruments, such as tariffs, much less effective than expected.
Trump accuses Maduro of being the head of a group called the Cartel de los Soles, supposedly formed by high-ranking military personnel. The only sources claiming that such a cartel exists are the U.S. itself and voices linked to the ultra-right Venezuelan opposition in exile. However, the accusation is serious and influences U.S. public opinion.
In the same vein, the U.S. government has just “decertified” Gustavo Petro’s Colombia from its list of countries partnering Washington’s effort to fight transnational drugs trafficking – a move that could lead to economic sanctions and cuts in credit lines, loans and military aid.
Following the drug money
Arguing against this logic of unilateral U.S. action, Lula, in his U.N. address, emphasized multilateral cooperation to combat international drug trafficking. And the focus, in his point of view, must be to go after the economic assets of organized crime groups, and their money laundering strategies.
The scheme was carried out through financial institutions, gas stations, hotels and many other “regular” businesses. The initiatives were considered successful because they led to the arrest and indictment of organized crime financial operators, and not the usual low-level streets dealers – who are invariably poor, and Black.
Lula’s talk of international cooperation likely referred to the inauguration of the Center for International Police Cooperation in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The center is an initiative to coordinate intelligence efforts in the fight against crimes in the Amazon. It brings together representatives of nine Brazilian states and security forces from eight Pan-Amazon countries – and France, on behalf of French Guiana.
The inclusion of the issue of organized crime in Lula’s speech at the U.N. can be seen as an additional front in his opposition to the government of Trump. Like environmental issues, the issue of organized crime is both an internal and international problem for Brazil.
Thiago Rodrigues não presta consultoria, trabalha, possui ações ou recebe financiamento de qualquer empresa ou organização que poderia se beneficiar com a publicação deste artigo e não revelou nenhum vínculo relevante além de seu cargo acadêmico.
Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (Fresco, Sistine Chapel Altar Wall), between 1536 and 1541.WIkimedia Commons
If you believe that the end of the world is at hand, then you really need to know what the rapture is. Simply put, the rapture is the belief that, at any moment, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven to the sky and “rapture” all those who truly believe in Him into heaven. Those among the faithful who have already died will rise from the dead and also be translated into heaven.
Evangelical Christians on TikTok have been predicting the rapture will come this week. When the rapture happens, believers think the rest of us will be left behind, not knowing where many of those we know have gone. For this reason, it is often known as “Left Behind theology”.
For the followers of Left Behind theology within conservative Evangelical Protestantism, significant parts of the Bible – the books of Revelation and Daniel in particular – refer to events that are yet to happen at the end of the world. These are the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and God’s final judgement of all humanity into the saved and the damned.
But for the rapture in particular, the First Book of Thessalonians (4.16–17) in the New Testament is the crucial text:
For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up [raptured] in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.
Dieric Bouts, Paradise, part of Triptych of the Last Judgement,1450. Wikimedia Commons
Tribulation
The rapture is the first of two ideas that Left Behind theology has added to the traditional Christian story of the end of the world. The second is the Tribulation.
According to most Left Behind theologians, the rapture will be followed by a period of seven years of Tribulation on earth, based on some complicated calculations around the text of Daniel 9.24–27.
This is the age of the Antichrist, the son of Satan – a human figure soon to reveal himself.
He will be a global earthly ruler opposed to Christ and pretending to be him. He it is who is called in the Bible “the beast rising out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads” (Revelation 13.1), “the little horn” (Daniel 7.8), and “the lawless one” (2 Thessalonians 2.3) whose number is 666 (Revelation 13.18).
Hans Memling, The Last Judgment, between circa 1466 and circa 1473. Wikimedia Commons
Christians who have been raptured into heaven are immune from these seven years of natural disasters, wars, famine and the persecutions of the Antichrist.
The kingdom upon earth
After the seven years of the Tribulation, Christ will return with his saints to fight and defeat Satan, the Antichrist, and his forces at the battle of Armageddon.
Most followers of Left Behind theology believe that Christ will then set up his kingdom upon earth and reign from Jerusalem for a millennium or a thousand years. He will govern the earth with his Christian followers, along with those Jews who have recognised Christ as the Messiah during the time of the Tribulation.
The eventual conversion of the Jews during this time explains, in part at least, the commitment to and support of many Evangelical Protestant Christians to the continuation of the State of Israel until the time of Tribulation when the Jews convert to Christianity.
At the end of the thousand years, Satan will be released and there will be a final but short rebellion against God, after which Satan will be defeated. Then God will judge everyone for eternal happiness in heaven or eternal misery in hell.
A relatively recent innovation
In the history of Christian thought, the idea of the rapture before the Tribulation is a relatively recent innovation.
We can date it to the 1830s and the theology of the Anglican John Nelson Darby (1800–82), a member of the Protestant Plymouth Brethren, and the founder of the group still known as the Exclusive Brethren. But it was popularised in Protestant circles in the United States by its inclusion in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.
The Bible of C.I. Scofield (1843–1921) was the main source for the idea of the rapture until The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (1929–2024) in 1970, a work that has sold over 28 million copies and has been translated into 54 languages. “Someday,” declared Lindsey,
a day that only God knows is coming to take away all those who believe in Him. He is coming to meet all true believers in the air. Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.
But it was the series of Left Behind books (1995–2007) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with over 65 million books sold, along with its movie franchise, that has most popularised the idea of the rapture and the Tribulation that follows it.
To many of us, the world appears a place of tribulation. “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” as John Donne (1572–1631) eloquently put it.
The idea of the rapture seems to reflect the utopian dream of many that they may be translated from this Earth to a better place until they can return to a world of justice, compassion and decency that seems so absent from the present one.
Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The first sentence of Anna Karenina is now a literary cliche, yet contains a nub of truth. “All happy families,” writes Leo Tolstoy, “resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Literature brims with thwarted parents wreaking havoc in unique ways. We’ve considered the worst fathers. Now we look at troubling mothers.
A recent contender here is Arundhati Roy’s depiction of her tyrannical, infuriating yet seductive mother Mary in her new memoir.
But my choice for worst mother is a fictional character, also a Mary. In US author Sapphire’s arresting 1996 novel, Push, Mary is a violent, jealous woman who follows her husband in sexually abusing their teenage daughter, “Precious”. Amid poverty and deprivation, Mary challenges every maternal stereotype.
Here are our experts’ picks.
Stuff – Joy Williams
Your adult son has just informed you he has terminal lung cancer. Do you:
A) Say, “Oh, well.”
B) Demand he speak quietly so as not to disturb your roommate, Debbie, who is playing dystopian video games.
C) Disagree with the assessment that Gnosticism is a flawed religion incapable of forming any kind of true moral community.
D) Drink a stinger the bright green of antifreeze.
E) Kick him out because your radical silence class is about to begin.
F) Do all of the above: You are a mother in the hilarious void of Joy Williams’ story Stuff.
– Alex Cothren
Medea – Euripides
Goodreads
A princess of Colchis, she betrayed her own people to help Jason, leader of the Argonauts, capture the Golden Fleece, and then ran off with him and started a family. She kept her sorcery under wraps until Jason dumped her in favour of a princess of Corinth. This betrayal sparked a massive overreaction on Medea’s part. Not only did she murder the new bride, and the bride’s father. She slaughtered her own children and then, with the help of her divine granddad (the sun god Helios), skipped off to Athens to start a new life.
– Jen Webb
Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin books
Classic literature is lavishly adorned with bad mums. I’m going with a sleeper hit — Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, aka the love of Jay Gatsby’s life. Daisy studiously neglects her daughter Pammy, a child of about two, throughout the novel. She says she hopes Pammy will grow up to be a “beautiful little fool”, and so, frankly, do the readers, just so poor Pam won’t ever know her mother cheated on her father with a guy who ends up murdered in his own swimming pool, after being mistaken for Pammy’s own father Tom. And here’s hoping Pammy won’t know her mom Daisy killed her dad Tom’s lover Mabel in a hit-and-run accident, while drunk driving someone else’s car.
– Sophie Gee
May Callaghan, I for Isobel – Amy Witting
Goodreads
The mother in Amy Witting’s I for Isobel simmers with a rage that shapes the whole Callaghan family. But it is the bright, bookish younger daughter, Isobel, who attracts most of May Callaghan’s venom. Isobel feels her mother’s anger as “a live animal tormenting her”. May denies nine-year-old Isobel a birthday celebration; she labels her “a born liar”. Isobel wrests back power by learning to withhold her desire to scream: “She wants me to scream. I do something for her when I scream.”
At her mother’s death, Isobel feels only relief.
– Carol Lefevre
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
Goodreads
Erika Kohut’s Mother intrudes on every aspect of her adult daughter’s life – her movements, her body, her finances. The claustrophobic Viennese apartment they share is a site of domestic interrogation and terror, with Mother looming over Erika like a one-woman tribunal: part inquisitor and part executioner. This is domination, not maternal care, isolating Erika and driving her toward secrecy and spirals of self-harm.
In characteristically relentless and sardonic prose, Jelinek presents this relationship as a miniature of Austria’s refusal to confront its troubling political past. This is a household where desire is policed and traumatic history repressed until it sporadically erupts into terrible violence, shattering the illusions of bourgeois respectability and revealing how repression, left unchecked, becomes cannibalistic.
– Alexander Howard
The Watch Tower – Elizabeth Harrower
Goodreads
Selecting a worst mother from literature has been hard – I know they’re out there, but my brain refuses to decide on one, perhaps subconsciously rejecting the notion. I have settled on a bit-character in a novel with a truly grotesque patriarchal figure at its centre: Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watchtower.
The unnamed mother in this novel abandons her daughters with not a thought for their wellbeing, leaving them in the hands, and financial trap, of the cruel and contemptuous Felix Shaw. I know the world criticises mothers much more harshly than fathers for abandoning their children – in literature as in life – but this abandonment struck a chord in me that I cannot intellectualise. How easily Clare and Laura’s mother wipes her hands of them and how vulnerable they are in the world as a result.
– Edwina Preston
Serena Joy, The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
My pick for worst mother is controversial. Throughout both Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments we don’t get to see Serena Joy Waterford mothering, which, I think, is a mercy. But I’ve chosen Serena, the wife of a Commander in the republic of Gilead, because she is instrumental in destroying the very notion of what it is to be a mother, which is that of deep and compassionate care. Serena sees children as a right and a prize for religious piety – at the expense of the child and all who care for them. As Sheila Heti has written, “The whole world needs to be mothered.”
Just not by Serena.
– Natalie Kon-yu
Nina, Heartsease – Kate Kruimink
Goodreads
In Tasmanian writer Kate Kruimink’s exquisite novel Heartsease, the twentysomething Ellen (Nelly) is a daughter both made by her mother Nina and trying to remake herself against her. Nelly remembers every childhood slight and hurt, especially the many ways she disappointed her mother as an example of young womanhood: dishevelled, shy, awkward and unlike the elegant, socialite Nina in most ways. Nelly can’t show her mother or ask her questions about incidents from the past, can’t ask why it is she’s never met her maternal grandmother. For Nina died when Nelly was a teenager, and a dead mother really is the worst.
– Jane Messer
Helen, Oh Joseph, I’m so tired – Richard Yates
Richard Yates frequently drew on his personal history in his fiction, and so it’s unsurprising that he repeatedly returns to his turbulent relationship with his own mother, the erratic Ruth “Dookie” Maurer. Dookie appears in various forms in many of Yates’s novels and stories, but is perhaps best realised as the frustrated sculptor Helen in Oh Joseph, I’m so tired from Yates’ collection Liars in Love. The story is unsparing in its depiction of her awful self-centredness and bigotry, but also captures her fragility and desperate need to maintain her delusions of imminent success. Helen’s self-deception is depicted as heart-breaking and absurd, but it also briefly transforms the grim lives of her children into something more privileged and magical.
– Julian Novitz
Maggie, Bodies of Light – Jennifer Down
Goodreads
I can’t entertain a “worst” case scenario for any literary mother because the trope of the monstrous mother is alive and well and continues to cause damage. Rather, I draw attention to the complex, deeply flawed character of Maggie in Jennifer Down’s 2022 Miles Franklin winner, Bodies of Light. The survivor of a childhood marked by drug addiction, grief and abuse, Maggie’s humble attempt at conventional marriage and motherhood fails miserably when three of her babies die in her care. Sound familiar? Down’s achievement here is to show us how the idea of monstrous mothers endures in our culture. The cost is real.
– Julienne van Loon
Mrs Bannerman, The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward
Goodreads
There is no shortage of horrible parents in fiction, but few have horrified me more than Ted’s mother, Mrs Bannerman, in Catriona Ward’s acclaimed The Last House on Needless Street. Her evil is conveyed to the reader via flashbacks that may or may not lead us to conclude that an adult Ted may or may not also be evil. In a suspenseful novel full of ambiguity and uncertainty, there’s nothing vague or uncertain about the abuse that the young mother subjects her son to and the pleasure that she derives from hurting him. Not one for the squeamish.
– Ali Alizadeh
Muriel Cleese, So, anyway … John Cleese
Goodreads
Most accounts of a “bad mother” are complicated by the familiar ambivalence of love-hate relationships. This isn’t the case in John Cleese’s autobiography So, Anyway …. Here the author castigates his mother as “self-obsessed and anxious”, associating this with “her extraordinary lack of general knowledge”, and accusing her of being a person who “had no information about anything that was not going to affect her life directly in the immediate future”. This led to “a constant state of high anxiety” and a desperation to have everything “her own way”. The coruscating nature of Cleese’s unmitigated bile is oddly refreshing.
– Paul Giles
Mrs Skewton, Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens
Penguin books
Dickens’ mothers generally fail by dying romantically or miserably before the action of the novel begins. So it is with the first Mrs Dombey in Dombey and Son. The second Mrs Dombey’s mother, however, is a more durable monster of vanity and manipulativeness. “Cleopatra” (her preferred name) Skewton is the freeze-dried belle of Leamington Spa, decayed and held together by cosmetics. Her aim is to sell her statuesque daughter, Edith, in marriage for the best available price. In succeeding, she finishes the job of destroying Edith’s sense of her own value. Fortunately, Edith has enough hauteur (an Australian might call it mongrel) to fight back.
– Robert Phiddian
Do you have a nomination for the worst mother – or father – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.
The popularity of matcha continues to boom. But recent videos on social media have suggested it could be bad for you if you have low iron.
One Sydney woman recently told media she had “no idea” her daily matcha latte could affect her health until she started experiencing headaches, and noticed her hair and nails were brittle and she was bruising easily. Blood tests found she was severely low in iron.
Similar videos on TikTok show women in hospital getting iron transfusions – and blaming their matcha habit.
So, let’s unpack this. How healthy is matcha? And can it really cause low iron?
What is matcha?
Matcha is a fine powder made from dried and ground-up green tea (Camellia sinensis) leaves. It has recently gained popularity as a drink and a flavour variety in many different foods.
Including matcha, or green tea, as part of a balanced diet may provide health benefits such as supporting healthy brain function and blood pressure.
However despite its health benefits, research has shown that drinking a lot of green tea is linked to lower levels of iron in the blood.
We need iron – but can’t make it
Iron is an essential micronutrient that helps transport oxygen around the body, as well as supporting many other important biological processes.
Our bodies can’t make iron, so we need to get it from our diet to support these functions. But even if we eat a lot of iron-rich foods, other things in our diet – such as coffee, red wine, calcium-rich foods and yes, matcha – can interfere with absorbing the iron.
So people with low iron levels need to be careful.
In particular, women who menstruate have an increased risk of low iron because of iron lost through bleeding.
You may have an iron deficiency if your iron falls below certain levels – typically for adults, less than 30 micrograms of iron per litre of blood. There are different cut offs for children.
Iron deficiency anaemia is a condition where very low levels of iron affect the functioning of red blood cells. It is diagnosed based on levels of haemoglobin in the blood (these cutoffs vary by age, sex and pregnancy status).
What does matcha do to iron levels?
There are two main components in green tea that stop us absorbing iron. These are polyphenols and phytic acid (also known as phytate).
Both polyphenols and phytic acid have their own health benefits, for example, protecting against chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. But they also bind to iron and prevent it from being absorbed into the body.
So, if you have a lot of food or drink that contains these components – especially in combination with iron-rich foods – they can reduce iron absorption.
However, it’s not only matcha that can interfere. Phytic acids are also found in other teas and many plant foods, such as nuts, cereals and legumes. Tea, coffee, berries, and other fruits and vegetables are also high in polyphenols.
How much matcha will affect your iron levels?
This varies between people.
One study showed people who drink three or more cups of green tea a day had lower blood iron levels than those who drink less than one a day. But they didn’t experience iron deficiency any more often.
However other research has linked moderate green tea consumption (two cups a day) to iron deficiency anaemia.
Whether or not your matcha latte will contribute to an iron deficiency depends on many other factors, including your existing iron levels.
So, what about matcha-flavoured foods?
In these – for example, matcha ice cream – the actual amount of green tea powder is very low. This means it’s unlikely to significantly affect iron absorption.
But it’s not just about quantity – when you drink your matcha also matters.
To reduce the impact on iron absorption, it’s recommended you have green tea separately from meals – at least one hour between eating and drinking tea.
What else to keep an eye on
Multiple other factors in your diet can influence iron absorption. What you eat may either exacerbate or counteract the effects of your matcha latte on iron absorption.
Overall, balance is key to ensure you are getting the full spectrum of nutrients the body requires.
To support iron levels, you can incorporate iron-rich foods (such as beans, lentils, meat, fish and fortified cereals) into a healthy diet.
If you are concerned about your iron levels, you should speak to a health-care professional – especially if experiencing symptoms of iron deficiency (such as tiredness, weakness or dizziness).
A blood test can diagnose low iron levels. If you have an iron deficiency, your GP or dietitian will help you manage symptoms and work out what is right for you.
Margaret Murray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nuurrianti Jalli, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, School of Media and Strategic Communications, Oklahoma State University
From Paris and Rome to Jakarta, Indonesia, and New York, a curious banner has appeared in protest squares. With hollow cheeks, a broad grin and a straw hat with a red band, the figure is instantly recognizable and has been hoisted by young demonstrators calling for change. In Kathmandu, Nepal, where anger at the government boiled over in September 2025, the flag became the defining image as flames spread through the gates of Singha Durbar, Nepal’s ornate palace complex and seat of power.
The Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger flies in front of the Singha Durbar after people set fire to the seat of Nepal government in Kathmandu. Sunil Pradhan/Anadolu via Getty Images
The image, usually adorning a flag with a black background, comes from “One Piece,” a much-beloved Japanese manga.
And what began as a fictional pirate crew’s emblem almost three decades ago has become a powerful symbol of youth-led resistance, appearing in demonstrations from Indonesia and Nepal to the Philippines and France.
As a scholar of media and democracy, I see the spread of the Jolly Roger of the Straw Hats Pirates – which has gone from manga pages to protest squares – as an example of how Gen Z is reshaping the cultural vocabulary of dissent.
Filipinos wave a ‘One Piece’ flag as they take part in a protest against corruption at Rizal Park on Sept. 21, 2025, in Manila. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Pop culture as political expression
“One Piece” arrived at the birth of Gen-Z, created in 1997 by Japanese manga artist Eiichiro Oda.
Since then, it has sold more than 500 million copies and has a Guinness World Record for its publishing success.
It has spawned a long-running TV series, live-action films and a more-than-US$20 billion industry, with merchandise licensing alone generating about $720 million each year from Bandai Namco, the company best known for creating Pac-Man and Tekken.
At its core, “One Piece” follows Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, as they challenge a corrupt world government while seeking freedom and adventure.
For fans, the “One Piece” flag is not a casual decoration but an emblem of defiance and perseverance. Luffy’s ability to stretch beyond physical limits after consuming a magical fruit has become a powerful metaphor for resilience, while his unwavering quest for freedom against impossible odds resonates with young people navigating political environments marked by corruption, inequality and authoritarian excess.
When protesters adopt this flag, they are not simply importing an aesthetic from popular culture, but are drawing on a narrative already legible to millions.
The flag began cropping up in protests over the past few years. It was being waved at a “Free Palestine” protest in 2023 in Indonesia and in the same year in New York during a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
But it was in Indonesia in August 2025 that the flag’s political life truly took hold. There, protesters embraced it to voice frustration with government policies and mounting discontent over corruption and inequality. The timing coincided with government calls for patriotic displays during independence celebrations, sharpening the contrast between official nationalism and grassroots dissent.
One Piece’s Jolly Roger flag became synonymous with Indonesian protests in August 2025. Dika/AFP via Getty Images
The movement gained momentum when authorities responded with strong criticism of the flag’s use, inadvertently drawing more attention to the symbol. Government officials characterized the displays as threats to national unity, while protesters viewed them as legitimate expressions of political frustration.
Why the flag travels
The speed with which the “One Piece” Jolly Roger flag spread across borders reflects the digital upbringing of Gen Z. This is the first cohort to grow up fully online, immersed in memes, anime and global entertainment franchises. Their political communication relies on what scholars call “networked publics” – communities that form and act through digital platforms rather than formal organizations.
Solidarity in this setting does not require party membership or ideology. Instead, it depends on shared cultural references. A meme, gesture or flag can instantly carry meaning across divides of language, religion or geography. This form of connection is built on recognizable cultural codes that allow young people to identify with each other even when their political systems differ.
Social media gives this solidarity reach and speed. Videos of Indonesians waving the flag were clipped and reshared on TikTok and Instagram, reaching audiences far beyond their original context. By the time the symbol appeared in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, in September, it already carried the aura of youthful defiance.
Crucially, this was not simple imitation. In Nepal, the flag was tied to anger at youth unemployment and at the ostentatious wealth of political dynasties displayed online. In Indonesia, it reflected disillusionment with patriotic rituals that felt hollow against a backdrop of corruption. In both cases, the Jolly Roger flag worked like open-source code – adaptable locally but instantly legible elsewhere.
Part of the flag’s effectiveness comes from its ambiguity. Unlike a party logo, the “One Piece” Jolly Roger flag originates in popular culture, which makes it difficult for governments to suppress without appearing authoritarian. During the latest protests in Indonesia, authorities confiscated banners and labeled them treasonous. But such crackdowns only amplified public frustration.
The Jolly Roger flag flies amid protests in the Philippines on Sept. 21, 2025. @rimurutempestuh/x
Fiction as reality
The “One Piece” flag is not alone in being reimagined as a symbol of resistance.
Across movements worldwide, pop culture and digital culture have become a potent resources for activists. In Chile and Beirut, demonstrators wore Joker masks as a visual shorthand for anger at corruption and inequality. In Thailand, demonstrators turned to “Hamtaro,” a children’s anime about a hamster, parodying its theme song and waving plush toys to lampoon political leaders.
This blending of politics, entertainment and personal identity reflects a hybrid media environment in which symbols drawn from fandom gain power. They are easy to recognize, adapt and defend against state repression.
Yet cultural resonance alone does not explain the appeal. The “One Piece” flag caught on because it captured real-life grievances. In Nepal, where youth unemployment exceeds 20% and migration for work is common, protesters paired the emblem with slogans such as “Gen Z won’t be silent” and “Our future is not for sale.”
In Indonesia, some protesters argued that the national flag was “too sacred” to be flown in a corrupt system, using the pirate banner as a statement of disillusionment.
The spread of the flag also reflects a broader shift in how protest ideas move across borders. In the past, what tended to travel were tactics such as sit-ins, marches or hunger strikes. Today, what circulates fastest are symbols, visual references from global culture that can be adapted to local struggles while remaining instantly recognizable elsewhere.
The flag’s journey from Asian streets to protests in France and Slovakia demonstrates how the grammar of dissent has gone global.
For today’s young activists, culture and politics are inseparable. Digital nativity has produced a generation that communicates grievances through memes, symbols and cultural references that cross borders with ease.
When protesters in Jakarta, Kathmandu or Manila wave the “One Piece” Jolly Roger flag, they are not indulging in play-acting but transforming a cultural icon into a living emblem of defiance.
Nuurrianti Jalli is affiliated with Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) Yusof Ishak Institute Singapore as Non Residential Visiting Fellow for Media, Technology and Society Program.
New health recommendations aim to discourage pregnant women from taking the painkiller paracetamol – also known as acetaminophen and by the brand name Tylenol – to prevent autism.
The recommendations also include using the drug leucovorin to treat speech-related difficulties that children with autism sometimes experience.
So what is leucovorin and what does the science say about its ability to treat autism?
What is leucovorin?
Leucovorin is a form of folic acid, a B vitamin our bodies usually get from foods such as legumes, citrus fruits and fortified grains.
The medication is most often used in cancer treatment. It’s typically used alongside the chemotherapy drug fluorouracil, a cancer treatment that stops cancer cells from making DNA and dividing. Leucovorin enhances the effects of fluorouracil.
Methotrexate works by blocking the body’s use of folate, which healthy cells need to make DNA. Leucovorin provides an active form of folate that healthy cells can use to make DNA, thereby “rescuing” them while methotrexate continues to target cancer cells.
Because methotrexate is also used to treat the skin condition psoriasis, leucovorin can also be used as a rescue agent during treatment for this autoimmune condition.
Why is folate important?
Because folate is essential for making DNA and other genetic material, which cells need to grow and repair properly, it’s especially important during pregnancy.
This is because insufficient folate is linked to the development of spina bifida, a condition where a baby’s spine does not develop correctly. For this reason, women are advised to take folic acid supplements before conception and during the early months of pregnancy.
Folate is also important for supporting the production of red blood cells and overall brain function.
Why is it being considered to treat autism?
The recommendation to use leucovorin to treat autism seems to stem from a theory that low levels of folate in the brain can lead to a condition called cerebral folate deficiency.
As the signs of autism are similar and it usually presents at around the same age, some people have proposed a link between cerebral folate deficiency and autism.
What does the evidence say?
So can giving children folate, in the form of leucovorin, help them to function better with autism? The evidence says maybe yes, and here’s what we know so far.
A review of the evidence in 2021 analysed the results of 21 studies that used leucovorin for autism or cerebral folate deficiency. Children who took the drug generally had improved autism symptoms. But the authors also said more studies were needed to confirm the findings.
Since then, a small 2024 study involved about 80 children aged two to ten years with autism. Half took a daily maximum dose of 50mg of folinic acid (similar to leucovorin), the other half took a placebo. Children given folinic acid showed more pronounced improvement when compared with those who took the placebo.
A similar 2025 study examined the same dose of folinic acid given to Chinese children with autism. Those given folinic acid had greater improvement in a type of social skill known as social reciprocity when compared with children given placebo.
While promising, none of these trials are at the level to change medical practice. We’d need further, larger studies before doctors can make a proper recommendation.
Like all drugs, leucovorin has side effects. The most serious or common are severe allergic reactions, seizures and fits, and nausea and vomiting.
In a nutshell
Overall, the latest health recommendations are not yet backed by sufficient evidence.
While the US Food and Drug Administration will now allow doctors to prescribe leucovorin to treat autism symptoms, the Australian government should not change its prescribing guidance.
Support for people with autism should continue to follow evidence-based best practice until the data from clinical trials of leucovorin is more robust.
Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. He is a member of the Haleon Australia Pty Ltd Pain Advisory Board. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing.
Jasmine Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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