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December 5, 2025

Why we need weird stories for a warming world

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Trang Dang, Visiting Lecturer in English Literature, Nottingham Trent University

For centuries, nature has been the backdrop to human drama: a stage humanity dominates, exploits, or saves. But what if the planet isn’t just a setting, but a character in its own right – sometimes collaborator, sometimes adversary, sometimes utterly indifferent?

This is the kind of question explored in New Weird fiction, a genre where ecosystems mutate, landscapes rebel and the line between human and nonhuman dissolves. It’s a form of storytelling that asks us to look again at the world we think we know and to question where we fit within it.

The roots of the “weird” go back to the late 19th and early 20th century, to writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and M. R. James. Their unsettling tales explored incomprehensible forces and cosmic horror. The “Old Weird”, as it’s now known by researchers, borrows from horror, fantasy and science fiction, refusing to stay within the boundaries of any one genre. These writers were fascinated by the limits of human understanding and by realities beyond reason.

The New Weird, which emerged in the 1980s, revived this fascination but with a contemporary twist. Its unruly mix of styles and ideas reflects the complexity – and confusion – of living through today’s ecological crisis.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

In the same way that the weird unsettles genre boundaries, it also unsettles the human perspective. Where classic stories centre on human mastery over nature, New Weird fiction turns that hierarchy inside out. It imagines worlds where the human is no longer in control, where the nonhuman acts with agency and where our categories – living or dead, organic or artificial, natural or unnatural – start to blur.

This sense of disorientation isn’t just a stylistic choice. It mirrors the reality of the climate crisis, which has exposed the limits of our ability to understand or predict the world. When wildfires create their own weather systems, or melting permafrost releases ancient viruses, we are reminded that nonhumans don’t follow the rules we’ve set for them. The New Weird invites readers to experience that loss of control not as failure, but as a way to think differently about coexistence.

The ecology of the unknown

One of the most striking examples of New Weird fiction is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Its first award-winning volume, Annihilation (2014), describes “Area X” – a mysterious wilderness that appears on the US coast. Despite years of investigation by a government agency, the Southern Reach, no one can explain what it is or how it works. The more they study it, the stranger – and more powerful – it becomes.

In Area X, fungi glow, animals behave with eerie intelligence and the landscape seems to rewrite itself. It’s as if the ecosystem has decided to evolve on its own terms. Humans who enter the area are transformed in bizarre and often disturbing ways, blurring the boundary between observer and environment.

For VanderMeer, this isn’t just horror for horror’s sake. The story suggests that nonhuman worlds are full of mysteries that exceed our comprehension. In a time when humans are destabilising the climate, Area X becomes a metaphor for the planet itself – reacting, mutating and asserting its presence. Like the climate system, it doesn’t offer neat explanations or resolutions. Readers, like the novel’s characters, are left searching for meaning in the face of overwhelming strangeness.

These unsettling narratives don’t comfort us with solutions. Instead, they ask us to sit with uncertainty – to feel the planet’s vitality and volatility. The lack of closure in stories like Annihilation keeps us questioning long after we finish reading, mirroring the ongoing and unresolved nature of ecological crisis.

Embracing the monstrous

The New Weird also distances itself from the prejudice of earlier writers, such as Lovecraft’s racism and misogyny. Where Lovecraft imagined difference as monstrous and terrifying, New Weird writers often treat the monstrous as something to be understood or even embraced.

In Acceptance, the final book of the Southern Reach trilogy, the Biologist – one of the main characters – comes to terms with her complex relationship to Area X. What others might see as a nightmare, she begins to understand in a new way. For her, the strange quality of the light and the teeming abundance of life in Area X evoke not fear, but ecstasy.

This vision suggests a different kind of relationship with the world, one that acknowledges the messiness, danger and beauty of ecological entanglement. In this way, the New Weird aligns with contemporary ecological thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Timothy Morton, who call for embracing uncertainty and complexity rather than seeking to control or purify the natural world.

Their ideas, like VanderMeer’s fiction, reject the fantasy of a harmonious, stable ecosystem existing for human benefit. Instead, they depict an Earth that is active, unpredictable and deeply interconnected, a place where beauty and horror coexist.

As the planet changes, perhaps our storytelling needs to change, too. The New Weird offers no easy answers, but it helps us practise a different kind of attention: one that accepts uncertainty, honours complexity and feels the pulse of a living, unpredictable Earth.

It reminds us that the world is stranger and more alive than we imagine, and that our old stories of control and mastery no longer serve us.

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Trang Dang 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.

– ref. Why we need weird stories for a warming world – https://theconversation.com/why-we-need-weird-stories-for-a-warming-world-269156

December 5, 2025

A brief history of mulled wine – from health tonic to festive treat

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sara Read, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University

When frost sparkles in the morning and our breath is visible as we venture outside, thoughts turn to winter warming treats like mulled wine – a drink full of ingredients that have become synonymous with Christmas.

Mulled wine is made by adding spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, mace and nutmeg to sweetened red wine, which is then warmed gently. Across Europe and Scandinavia, it can be purchased in many pubs, bars and festive markets – while supermarket shelves groan with bottles of readymade mulled wines for you to heat at home.

There are many different English recipes out there, including some dating back to the 14th century – from a collection of manuscripts that later became known as The Forme of Cury. The beverage made by following this recipe would certainly have packed a punch, as it contains several spices from the ginger family including galangal, in addition to the more familiar ones.

And before wine was known as mulled, drinking wine flavoured with spices has a long history. There is a mention of drinking spiced wine in the biblical poem the Song of Solomon, which states: “I would give you spiced wine to drink.”

It is thought that spice-infused wine was introduced to Britain by the Romans. An older name for it was “hippocras”, although this was mainly taken as a health tonic – made from spice-infused red or white wine and taken hot or cold.

A man drinking wine. — An illustration from a medieval manuscript showing ‘ypocras’ being made.
Wikimedia

In The Merchant’s Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), the wealthy, elderly knight January takes “ypocras, clarre, and vernage / Of spices hote, to encrese his corrage” (hypocras, clary, and vernage / of spices hot to increase his courage). January sups these three types of spiced wine to boost his virility on his wedding night for his young bride, May.

Diarist and civil servant Samuel Pepys also mentions taking “half-a-pint of mulled sack” – a sweetened Spanish wine – in an almost medicinal way to comfort himself in the middle of a working morning in March 1668, when things had been going wrong for him.

The name mulled wine comes from the Old English mulse – an archaic name for any drink made of honey mixed with water or wine, derived from the Latin word for honey (mel) and still used in modern Welsh as mêl. From mulse we get “musled”, which was used to describe anything that has been “mingled with honey”.

Before the growth of the global sugar trade, honey was the main way that food and drink was sweetened. Vin chaud, the French equivalent of mulled wine, is traditionally sweetened with honey. England imported spiced wine from Montpellier in large quantities from the 13th century, but only those of social status, like Chaucer’s knight January, would have been able to indulge in those days.

Warm sweet and spiced wine continued to be drunk for health and enjoyment throughout the centuries. But in the 18th century, mulled wine evolved again, as reflected in a recipe in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769) for a warm drink thickened with egg yolks:

Grate half a nutmeg into a pint of wine and sweeten to your taste with loaf sugar. Set it over the fire. When it boils, take it off to cool.

Beat the yolks of four eggs exceeding well, add to them a little cold wine, then mix them carefully with your hot wine a little at a time. Pour this backwards and forwards several times till it looks fine and bright.

Set it on the fire and heat a little at a time till it is quite hot and pretty thick, and pour it backwards and forwards several times.

Send it in chocolate cups and serve it up with dry toast, cut in long narrow pieces.

The result of this method is a frothy, velvety smooth confection, enjoyed with dipping toast or biscuits.

Our ancestors didn’t associate mulled wines with Christmas, so it seems likely that the pairing was popularised by Charles Dicken’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol – like so much of what we now regard as a traditional Christmas.

After Mr Scrooge has seen the error of his miserly ways, he says to Bob Cratchit: “We will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!” Smoking Bishop is a recipe for mulled wine that combines port in the wine and uses dried oranges for an added flavour note. The smoke refers to the steam rising from this hot drink.

So this year, as you cup your hands around the warm mug and inhale the fragrant steam coming off your mulled wine, think of the long history you are a part of.

Sara Read 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.

– ref. A brief history of mulled wine – from health tonic to festive treat – https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-mulled-wine-from-health-tonic-to-festive-treat-271341

December 5, 2025

Your Party: if the name sounds terrible, there’s a good reason for it

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nicholas Dickinson, Lecturer in Politics, University of Exeter

When independent MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched their new political venture in July 2025, they did so under a name that seemed almost deliberately empty: “Your Party”. Initially dismissed as a placeholder, the name is now official, having been narrowly confirmed by members at the party’s inaugural conference in November.

The name won just 37% of the vote against alternatives including “For the Many”, “Popular Alliance” and “Our Party”. The contested nature of this choice, and the peculiar blandness of the winning option, reflects a deeper crisis in how the far left names itself in the contemporary era.

Ten years ago, my research into 20th-century British Marxist groups revealed that these organisations once operated within what I characterise as a coherent naming culture. Terms like “communist”, “workers” and “socialist” were commonly used and carried substantial symbolic weight. Throughout the 20th century, British Leninist groups used these terms not merely as brands but mechanisms to articulate their identity, legitimacy and relationship to the revolutionary tradition.

The patterns were remarkably consistent within each tradition. Orthodox communist groups emerging from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was founded in 1920, showed complete conformity – every single one retained “Communist party” in its name, even decades after splitting from the CPGB.

Anti-revisionist groups, influenced by Maoism, displayed a different pattern. Of the 11 groups I studied, nine used “communist”. More significantly, seven appended “Marxist-Leninist” to their names – an attempt to reconnect some of the smallest and most peripheral groups, often with only a handful of members, back to a grander tradition of messianic leaders.

Most revealing were the Trotskyist groups. Of 13 major organisations, only five used “communist” at any point. Of the remainder, six instead opted for “socialist” in their name and six included the word “revolutionary”. The word “workers” featured in four names. This diversity masked fundamental instability in leftist politics. Most Trotskyist groups changed their names at least twice.

The left’s endless internecine disputes on nomenclature were infamously satirised in Monty Python’s riff on the idea of the Judean People’s Front. It’s hard not to detect some of these dynamics also at play in Your Party’s troubled launch.

Do you want to join The People’s Front of Judea or the Judean People’s Front?

When Lenin rebranded “social democracy” as “communism” in 1917, he was not simply changing a label but investing enormous symbolic capital in a term that would shape leftwing politics for seven decades. The Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920, became the anchor of this naming culture in Britain, with splinter groups and rivals forced to negotiate their position relative to these established terms.

This naming system became increasingly dysfunctional over time. By the 1970s, even terms like “party” had become almost impossible to define coherently within the Leninist tradition. Was a “party” the revolutionary vanguard waiting for its moment in history, or a conventional electoral organisation competing for votes?

When the Socialist Workers Party emerged in 1977 from its predecessor International Socialist, it attempted to embody both definitions simultaneously, presenting itself as both a mass political party and a disciplined Leninist cadre. This contradiction contributed to rapid, often confusing shifts in strategy that alienated members and observers alike.

Whose party?

Your Party emerges from the wreckage of this collapsed naming system. The term “communist” was largely unusable in British politics by 1991. “Marxist-Leninist” had become a punchline even within the far left. “Workers” sounded antiquated in a deindustrialised Britain. Even “socialist” carries decades of baggage. What remained? A name so generic it barely qualified as one at all.

The genius and the problem of the name Your Party are inseparable. The name refuses to make the traditional ideological commitments that far-left names once signalled. It does not claim to be the vanguard party, does not invoke workers or socialism, and does not even claim ownership of itself through terms like “our party” – which, tellingly, came last in the naming vote. Instead, it performs a nominal sleight-of-hand, suggesting both maximal democracy (“it’s yours!”) and minimal commitment.

This vagueness might appear strategically savvy in an age of widespread distrust of traditional party structures. But the chaotic conference that ratified the name suggests otherwise. The bitter disputes over collective versus individual leadership, the expulsions of members, and Sultana’s boycott of the first day all point to unresolved issues. When 20th-century Trotskyist groups battled over whether to call themselves a “league”, “tendency” or “party”, those were not merely semantic disputes but arguments about organisational structure and democratic accountability, encoded in nomenclature.

Your Party attempts to avoid these arguments by adopting a name that articulates no clear position. But the politics of naming cannot be escaped so easily. What does “Your” signify when members cannot agree on basic questions of leadership or membership rules? Whose party is it, ultimately?

The polling data tells a sobering story. Support for Your Party fell from 18% in July 2025 to just 12% by November, while the Green party, with its clear brand identity, experienced a membership surge. Perhaps voters and activists sense the same problem that plagued late 20th-century Leninist groups – when you cannot articulate what your name signifies, you cannot sustain a coherent political project.

The collapse of Leninist naming culture reflected the exhaustion of a symbolic system where words like communist and workers had been stretched to accommodate too many contradictions. Your Party represents an attempt to build something new without that vocabulary. But in trying to avoid the old mistakes, it may have created a new one – a name so empty that it cannot provide the symbolic foundation a political organisation requires.

Nicholas Dickinson 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.

– ref. Your Party: if the name sounds terrible, there’s a good reason for it – https://theconversation.com/your-party-if-the-name-sounds-terrible-theres-a-good-reason-for-it-271419

December 5, 2025

Jurors aren’t impartial – that’s exactly why they are so important to justice

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Elaine Jackson, PhD Candidate, University of Glasgow; University of the West of Scotland

On the surface, the rationale for the UK government’s proposals to limit the use of jury trials in England and Wales is pragmatic. Over 78,000 crown court cases remain unresolved, creating years-long delays for victims and defendants alike.

But among those of us who research jury behaviour and decision-making, these proposals raise a deeper debate. Some argue that juries are too biased, too unreliable to deliver justice.

Their hope is that if we could replace them with trained legal professionals, we might finally reduce the role that bias plays in the courtroom. But is this even possible?

All observation is “theory-laden”. Scientists, politicians, judges and jurors are not immune to their biases and worldviews influencing their decision-making.

Both judges and juries bring biases to the courtroom. The critical difference is that juries are more diverse than a single judge. Today, 89% of judges are white, 61% are men, and around a third attended private school. Fewer than 10% come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

This class and educational homogeneity matters profoundly. Judges who attended private school and Russell Group universities share not just demographic characteristics but formative experiences. Their relationships with authority, economic security, educational advantage and professional networks are likely to be less diverse than those of a jury.

Different social positions provide access to different knowledge. Someone who attended private school, joined chambers and rose through the judiciary simply hasn’t lived through experiences that would provide insight into many people’s lives.

For example, this might include how economic precarity affects people’s decisions, how working-class communities relate to police authority, or how educational disadvantages affect your ability to navigate bureaucratic systems.

These aren’t biases in the sense of prejudice. They are inevitable limitations of a single perspective.

When judges assess whether behaviour was “reasonable” or a complainant’s response was “credible”, they are making ethical evaluations that mix facts with values. A judge evaluating whether a working-class defendant’s actions were reasonable brings their own class experience to that judgment, whether they recognise it or not.

Twelve randomly selected citizens bring 12 different life experiences. Through deliberation, they must make those experiences visible and justify their interpretation to each other.

If a judge makes a decision on their own, only their own biases will influence the verdict. In a jury, consensus needs to be reached. Different opinions and perspectives will shape the outlooks of others. This makes the verdict more informed by community beliefs, rather than from specific sections of the community.

The human “bias” we worry about in juries is actually the diversity of experience and judgment that may improve group decision-making. Homogeneity masquerades as objectivity. Trials should be decided by the people – and the various human experiences they bring to the courtroom.

A jury drawn from the electoral register might include someone who left school at 16, someone who has experienced unemployment or housing insecurity, someone who’s worked in manual labour, or someone from a community where police relations are fraught. These aren’t just different backgrounds, they are different forms of knowledge about how society works for many people.

This diversity is important for both defendants and victims. Evidence shows that judges may be more likely to convict defendants compared with juries.

Any changes towards judge-only trials may disadvantage future defendants when compared with the current system, where a defendant can choose the option of a jury trial for certain types of offence.

How jury deliberation reduces bias

Our research – part of Elaine Jackson’s PhD – investigated Scottish jury deliberations in rape cases, revealing what kinds of bias jurors bring to them by staging a series of mock trials.

The research shows the influence of rape myths – stereotypes and false assumptions about how rape victims and perpetrators behave – in the courtroom, and how juries can both perpetuate and mitigate their influence.

Across 90 jurors in one mock trial, we identified 180 instances of rape myths. These included victim blaming, demanding impossible proof, framing assault as “heat of the moment”, and using “real rape” stereotypes such as expecting severe injuries and immediate reporting. These myths were pervasive across juror populations, not simply held by a few outliers.

But we also observed that jury deliberation could challenge these assumptions. Both guilty verdicts occurred when a strong foreperson (the jury’s spokesperson) voiced immediate challenges to these myths, or trauma-informed jurors countered these frameworks. For example, when one juror suggested that the accused offering wine to the victim meant sexual invitation, another challenged them, asking: “According to what logic?”

We believe it’s positive that the UK government’s proposals will retain jury trials in cases of rape and murder. In serious crimes, we need diversity of thought and opinion in our decision-making.

This collective scrutiny, 12 different perspectives negotiating with each other, is something an individual judge cannot replicate.

While judges may consult colleagues, at trial stage they ultimately decide alone – without a formal deliberation requiring them to defend their interpretations to others who have equal decision-making authority. A diverse jury has this built-in corrective mechanism, which is why it must remain a part of the UK’s legal system.

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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Jurors aren’t impartial – that’s exactly why they are so important to justice – https://theconversation.com/jurors-arent-impartial-thats-exactly-why-they-are-so-important-to-justice-271322

December 5, 2025

Reform’s £9m gift and the rise of the political mega-donor

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam Power, Lecturer in Politics, University of Bristol

When the latest figures on donations to political parties were released, it was revealed that businessman Christopher Harborne had donated £9 million to Reform. Harborne, who lives in Thailand, made his fortune on aviation and cryptocurrency. Reform leader Nigel Farage insists he wants nothing in return for the money and that the two speak once a month or every six weeks.

Harborne’s is the biggest one-off donation by a living individual in British history. But he’s far from alone in giving massive amounts to parties. Financier Stuart Wheeler gave £5 million to the Conservatives in 2001 which is actually £9.5 million in today’s money. Frank Hester donated £15 million to the Tories just before the 2024 election but broke it up a little bit so nobody seems to care or remember.

Harborne’s gift amounts to a quite significant boost to Reform’s coffers. For context, Reform received £1.3 million in the reporting period directly prior to this one, and just £70,000 in the same period a year ago (donations figures that aggregate to over £11,180 are released quarterly).

But as I have shown elsewhere, political donations are cyclical and the receipt of them tends to ratchet up in advance of elections. Next May – with elections in Scotland, Wales and a seemingly bruising set of locals set for Labour – is seen to be a time where Reform can lay a marker as the “true” opposition party. So it’s less surprising to see such big figures this far out of a general election.

Who is Christopher Harborne?

The fact that Harborne has donated to the Conservatives in the past, as well as to Boris Johnson’s private office when he was prime minister, has been taken by some as indicative of a donor exodus from the Tories to Farage’s outfit. But that’s premature, we’ve seen some small movement to Reform in the figures since the 2024 election, and several stories about Reform-curious Tory donors but no real sea change in this respect.

The research is also fairly settled that donors tend to give money to parties for three reasons: they agree with them (they are ideological), they like the access it provides (they are intimates) or they want something in return (they are investors).

There is a long history of donors as pragmatic investors, thinking long and hard about how their money can be best spent to achieve their aims and effectively spreading their bets (though that is much more common in systems of proportional representation).

As one donor said during the 2024 election, when it became increasingly apparent Rishi Sunak was failing to bring in significant amounts of money: “Any self-respecting businessperson conducts due diligence before an investment decision. Time will tell whether smart money will back Mr Sunak”. Reader, it didn’t.

So, while donors do tend to be ideologues in the UK, there is some precedent for them changing lanes. The aforementioned Wheeler ended up as Ukip treasurer, for example. And given that British politics is increasingly characterised by fragmentation, it would be little surprise if donors started following the voters in shopping around.

Rise of the mega donor

What this donation also speaks to, though, is an increasingly worrying trend in British politics, which is the rise of the mega-donor. The very rich have always made up the vast majority of the donor class but there are signs this has become supercharged in recent years.

As investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan points out, 75% of all donations to Reform and its predecessor the Brexit Party since 2019 have come from three men: Harborne, deputy leader Richard Tice and businessman Jeremy Hosking.

Hester’s donations to the Conservatives in the run up to the 2024 election, meanwhile, equated to about 63% of the party’s entire spend on the campaign.

When almost exactly a year ago Elon Musk mooted a £70 million donation to Reform, which never materialised, it felt like a canary in the coalmine. That, if something wasn’t done, the UK was moving towards an increasingly Americanised system of glorified oligarchy.

In the US, remember, it’s no longer even a case of the 1% having all the power. Across the pond, the top 0.01% of donors accounted for 50% of all funds raised in 2024.

There is currently no upper limit on political donations. Parties have debated bringing one in for 25 years but can never agree to actually doing so – despite the fact the public (including Reform voters) backs the idea.

This is because any significant cap set at, say, £10,000 a year (as suggested by the Committee on Standards in Public Life and Transparency International) or £100,000 (which is think-tank the IPPR’s preference) would mean injecting more state funding into the system. Which the public hates just about as much (if not more) than the idea of mega-donors.

This leaves everyone in a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” system of inertia and paralysis. It’s the kind of frustrating state of affairs which causes me to write book chapters with titles like “What do you do when the voters are wrong?” (which is reason #51 that I could never be an MP) and a similarly frustrated political scientist to remark: “parties need money: but not mine, not from my taxes, and not from interest groups”.

My solution, when faced with this, is that doing something is better than nothing. It’s why I think there’s utility in what I call a “democracy backstop” cap of £1 million.

It would do little to allay public fears that the very rich have outsize influence on politics, but I’m not sure there’s a limit low enough that can, and I do (literally) have a PhD’s worth of research to back me up on that. It would, though, put the brakes on just a little bit.

Let’s not forget that Labour has said it will introduce an elections bill in this parliament. That means it is not quite too late, but the time to act is very much now.

Sam Power has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

– ref. Reform’s £9m gift and the rise of the political mega-donor – https://theconversation.com/reforms-9m-gift-and-the-rise-of-the-political-mega-donor-271428

December 5, 2025

Low-tax or high-welfare? The UK must decide what type of country it wants to be

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Adam, Professor of Development Economics, University of Oxford

Perceptions of a high-tax UK are wide of the mark. Steve Travelguide/Shutterstock

Headlines about tax in the UK being at an all-time high abounded after the autumn budget. The current overall tax take, at 35% of GDP, is indeed a historic high for the country. And the measures announced in the budget will take it to 38% by the end of the parliament.

Yet, contrary to what some might have you believe, it is only high by British standards.

If the UK wants a decent welfare system in the coming years, it’s time to start doing things differently. But this can’t just mean raising taxes to meet the growing demands of an ageing society.

The structure of the UK’s tax system must be fixed before politicians even think about further rises, since its complexity and distortions hold back investment, productivity and long-term growth.

In 2023, the tax take as a percentage of GDP was 35.3%, slightly above the overall average for the 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This placed the UK 18th on the list and almost two percentage points lower than the average of other European members.

But even the new figure of 38% does not take the UK anywhere near the top. It matches Germany, but remains significantly lower than the tax take in France, Italy, Belgium and the Nordic countries, where the tax share exceeds 40% of GDP.

The UK has a deep productivity problem. Real wage growth has collapsed from being third best among OECD countries before 2008 to 16th afterwards. Without a recovery, the country will not be able to maintain levels of public provision, let alone reboot the health and public support systems.

The welfare system certainly needs a reboot, as our latest research shows. In health, the NHS is grappling with some of the longest waiting lists on record as well as delivering comparatively poor results. At the same time, thousands of people are stuck in hospital due to the lack of affordable social care.

Social housing is increasingly out of reach for those who need it: the gains of the right to buy policy of the 1980s have been confined to those who bought their council houses, while the costs of that mass sell-off are borne by the state and today’s poor in the form of housing shortages and high rents.

Perhaps most damning of all, child poverty has risen steadily since 2010 and is now among the highest in the OECD.

grandmother reading to a little boy sitting on her knee. — Pressures on health and social care spending will only grow in future.
PeopleImages/Shutterstock

The pressures on the system will only grow. The ageing population is dramatically increasing pension costs and the demand for social care. Advances in healthcare, while holding out the prospect of longer and higher-quality lives, are also extending the years that people can live with chronic conditions. This is particularly true among lower-income groups who often lack the means to maintain their health.

The health and social care sector is one where the real cost of delivery is rising, so the UK will need to increase the resources flowing into it just to stand still.

The pension triple lock is continuing to exacerbate the pressure on public finances. Meanwhile, precarious and low-paid employment means millions of people still rely on in-work benefits. And the post-COVID surge in health and disability-related personal independence payments (Pip) shows no signs of abating.

What kind of country does the UK want to be?

We see two feasible paths forward to fix the distortions in the tax system while ensuring that those who need the welfare state don’t fall through the widening cracks. But here’s the rub. Both would be extremely difficult politically.

First, the UK could accept that a universal welfare state is not affordable, and radically reshape and target it. The question is whether the public would tolerate deeper means-testing, for instance, which might represent a genuine reshaping of the welfare state.

The founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, understood that his system required not only technical solutions but a compelling narrative about social solidarity where all citizens bought into its core principles.

Second, the country could engage in a genuinely open debate on the cost of and willingness to pay for welfare services. It could then fix the tax system to fund comprehensive welfare provision, moving toward European-style social insurance systems.

The UK spends just over 11% of GDP on welfare, placing it near the OECD average and well below Nordic countries and France. The fact that overall tax take of 35% rising to 38% is a historic high makes any conversation about taxation hard – perhaps impossible.

But UK outcomes compared to those of its neighbours who spend more should be food for thought. The answer cannot be in stealth taxes.

The budget mainly just walked a path of continuation from a long period of piecemeal reforms that may not achieve what they are intended to. It raised revenue primarily through fiscal drag (the freezing of tax thresholds so that rising pay pushes more people into higher brackets).

It did remove the regressive limit on universal credit or tax credits for larger families, but in the main it continues to follow a path of least political resistance. This is likely to result in the gradual emergence of a two-tier system where those who can afford it increasingly opt for private healthcare, private housing and private education.

Given how much resistance the government is facing even now, perhaps the path of least resistance is the only option available. But perhaps a braver conversation is possible – one that spells out the human tragedy of under-investing in welfare and the economic problems of continuing with the current UK tax structure.

What won’t work is pretending these choices don’t exist. The UK has neither the benefits of low taxes nor the welfare outcomes of its higher-tax neighbours. It’s time to redesign the tax and welfare system for the century we’re in.

– ref. Low-tax or high-welfare? The UK must decide what type of country it wants to be – https://theconversation.com/low-tax-or-high-welfare-the-uk-must-decide-what-type-of-country-it-wants-to-be-271231

December 5, 2025

Why Vladimir Putin’s in no hurry for peace

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This newsletter was first published in The Conversation UK’s World Affairs Briefing email. Sign up to receive weekly analysis of the latest developments in international relations, direct to your inbox.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, believes that Russia’s strategy is to outlast Ukraine and its allies in a war of attrition. Rubio told Fox News host Sean Hannity this week that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had made it clear that he is determined to achieve his war aims even though it may “cost more and take longer” than Russia wants it to.

Rubio’s words appear to be borne out by the most recent negotiations in the Kremlin this week. Rubio wasn’t there this time. Instead the US president sent special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law). As Alexandros Koutsoukis of the University of Lancaster notes, replacing diplomats with dealmakers has been a feature of the way the US has approached this peace process.

A detailed account of their meeting with the Russian president and his aides has yet to be published, but the takeaway from that meeting was that Putin was not in the mood for compromise. While acknowledging the talks had been “useful, constructive and meaningful”, Putin’s aide, Yuri Ushakov, concluded that: “We are no closer to resolving the crisis in Ukraine.”

But it’s well worth noting a comment of Putin’s, delivered shortly before the meeting, which may shed some valuable light on what appears to be Russia’s long game, something becoming clearer as the conflict gets closer to its fourth anniversary. Putin accused Kyiv’s European allies of trying to scupper a peace deal with “absolutely unacceptable” demands. Ushakov meanwhile commented that “some American proposals appear more or less acceptable”.

This, writes Intigam Mamedov – an expert in conflict and security at Leiden University – appears to be a direct reference to the draft deal developed jointly between Russia and the US over a few days in Miami in late November. That 28-point proposal was viewed by Ukraine and its European allies as a non-starter, hanging as it did on Kyiv giving up the whole of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, including territory that Russia has not been able to take by force. It also called for Ukraine to give up all hope of ever joining Nato and accept a limit on the size of its armed forces.

Mamedov sees a longer-term project here. Whatever Putin hopes to gain from the war in Ukraine itself, the more protracted and bloody the war in Ukraine becomes, the bigger a wedge it drives between the US and Europe. Hence all the talk of US proposals being constructive and Europe’s being unacceptable.

The conflict is also exposing deep divisions within Europe over the plan to raise €90 billion (£78 billion) to help Ukraine sustain its resistance, either by leveraging frozen Russian assets or by borrowing on the international markets. Belgium is very unhappy about the former plan, as the bulk of Russia’s frozen assets are held there potentially exposing it to liability if the loan is not repaid.

Meanwhile Hungary and Slovakia oppose funding Ukrainian defence and are also planning a legal challenge to an EU plan to halt imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) by the end of 2026 and shut off pipeline supplies by the end of the following year.

Whatever the outcome of talks, writes Roman Birke, it’s appearing increasingly likely that Ukraine will be forced to give up territory in return for peace. This is a denial of core principles of international law and the United Nations charter, which forbids “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

Birke, an expert in modern European history at Dublin City University, believes rewarding Russian aggression with territory will “confirm that, in the 21st century, European borders can be redrawn by military force once more”. Birke recalls the work of Hugo Grotius, a Dutch lawyer born in 1583, who was one of the most influential thinkers of his time on the laws of warfare.

Grotius put forward the idea that only just wars where a state is defending itself against aggression or to enforce its legitimate property rights, should be legal. But eventually, disillusioned, by the violent world around him, he concluded that all states making war would simply claim theirs was a just war (a little like Putin is doing now in Ukraine) and that this risked other countries feeling obliged to back the side they believed was right. In that way, wars can quickly spread, be concluded.

Birke is concerned that rewarding Russia for its aggression by handing over bits of Ukraine would return the world to a Grotian state, in which less powerful states can be attacked with impunity. Might would become right, in other words.

We recently marked the 30th anniversary of the signing, in an air force base in Ohio, of a treaty to bring an end to the appalling conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The Dayton accords was signed on November 21 1995 and again, in a public ceremony in Paris on December 14, by the presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, bringing to an end three years of bloodshed and ethnic cleansing.

Two rows of men in suits clapping, including Bill Clinton and John Major — The Dayton accords, signed in December 1995, ended three years of bitter conflict in the Balkans.

International security experts Stefan Wolff of the University of Birmingham and Argyro Kartsonaki of the University of Hamburg see some useful parallels between the peace process in the Balkans and the attempts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The first, and arguably most vital, factor at play there was US leadership in Nato, which intervened with bombing missions to force Serbia to the table. There were robust security guarantees put in place and the treaty was a detailed (if imperfect) plan which aimed to ensure hostilities would not resume.

Thirty years on peace has largely held, although it remains tentative and the increasing confidence of Serbian separatists could still cause Bosnia and Herzegovina to disintegrate into its constituent parts, which possible horrific consequences.

But, as Wolff and Kartsonaki conclude, for all Dayton’s imperfections, “even an imperfect agreement may be preferable to an unending, and likely unwinnable, war”.

Death in the Caribbean

To Washington, where the focus is on the sequence of events leading up to the first of the US attacks on so-called Venezuelan drug boats in the Caribbean. It was recently alleged in the Washington Post that the US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, had given an order that there were to be no survivors of the attack on September 2, which killed 11 people – nine in the initial strike on the boat and, we’re told, the remaining two, reportedly as they clung on to the boat radioing for assistance.

The full details of the incident have yet to emerge and, as Hegseth himself has claimed, there is always a lot of confusion in “the fog of war”. That said, the secretary of war has been quick to pass responsibility for the second strike on to the ranking military officer present in the situation room, Admiral Frank M. (Mitch) Bradley.

But in a political climate in which high-ranking former US officers such as Mark Kelly, a former US navy officer and astronaut who is now a Democrat senator, could face prosecution for urging members of the US military not to obey orders that are clearly illegal, this episode is a potential flashpoint.

But in the end this incident should not obscure an arguably more important issue with the US strikes on these Venezuelan boats: international law forbids extrajudicial killing. Andrew Bell and Thomas Gift explain the issues at stake.

Sign up to receive our weekly World Affairs Briefing newsletter from The Conversation UK. Every Thursday we’ll bring you expert analysis of the big stories in international relations.

– ref. Why Vladimir Putin’s in no hurry for peace – https://theconversation.com/why-vladimir-putins-in-no-hurry-for-peace-271350

December 5, 2025

How the ‘hypnagogic state’ of drowsiness could enhance your creativity

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University

The Beatles’ song Yesterday was written in what psychologists refer to as the “hypnagogic state”. This is the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, when we drowsily linger in a semi-conscious state, experiencing vivid mental images and sounds.

Waking up one morning in early 1965, Paul McCartney became aware of a long complex melody playing inside his head. He jumped straight out of bed, sat down at his piano and picked out the melody on the keys. He quickly found the chords to go with the melody and created some holding phrases (as songwriters call them, before they write proper lyrics) to fit the melody.

Finding it difficult to believe that such a beautiful melody could emerge
spontaneously, McCartney suspected that he was subconsciously plagiarising another composition. As he recalled: “For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before … I thought if no one claimed after a few weeks, then I could have it.” But it turned out to be original.

Many great discoveries and inventions have emerged from the hypnagogic state. The physicist Niels Bohr effectively won the Noble prize while semi-conscious. Drifting off to sleep, he dreamt he saw the nucleus of the atom, with the electrons spinning around it, just like the solar system with the sun and planets – and in this way he “discovered” the structure of the atom.

The sweet spot

Research has shown that the hypnagogic state is a creative “sweet spot.” For example, in a 2021 study, participants in a hypnagogic state were three times more likely to discover the “hidden rule” that could solve a mathematical problem.

Psychologists associate creativity with qualities such as openness to experience and cognitive flexibility. Others have suggested that creativity arises from co-ordination between the cognitive control network of the brain (which deals with planning and problem solving) and the default mode network (which is associated with daydreaming and mind-wandering).

However, in my view, one of the most important theories of creativity is one of the oldest, put forward by the early British psychologist Frederic Myers in 1881. According to Myers, ideas and insights come as a sudden “uprush” from a subliminal mind.

As Myers saw it, our conscious mind is just a small segment of our overall mind, including not only what Sigmund Freud called the unconscious, but also wider and higher levels of consciousness. Ideas may gestate unconsciously for a long time before they emerge into conscious awareness.

Woman making a square with her fingers — Creativity often comes from beyond consciousness.
oneinchpunch/Shutterstock

This is why it often feels as if ideas come from beyond the mind, as if they are gifted to us. They can come from beyond our conscious mind.

The importance of relaxation

The hypnagogic state is so creative because, as we hover between sleep and wakefulness, the conscious mind is barely active. For a brief period, our mental boundaries are permeable, and there is a chance creative insights and ideas will flow through from the subliminal mind.

In a more general sense, this is why creativity is often associated with relaxation and idleness. When we relax, our conscious minds are usually less active. Often, when we are busy, our minds are full of chattering thoughts, so there is no space for creative insights to flow through.

This is also why meditation is strongly associated with creativity. Research shows that meditation promotes general creative qualities such as openness to experience and cognitive flexibility.

But perhaps even more importantly, meditation quietens and softens the conscious mind, so that we’re more liable to receive inspiration from beyond it. As I point out in my book The Leap, this is why there is a strong connection between spiritual awakening and creativity.

Nurturing the hypnogogic state

Research has found that around 80% of people have experienced the hypnagogic state, and that around a quarter of the population experience it regularly. It is slightly more common in women than men.

It is most likely to occur at the onset of sleep, but can also occur on waking up, or during the day if we become drowsy and zone out of normal consciousness.

Can we use the hypnagogic state to enhance our creativity? It’s certainly possible to linger in the hypnagogic state, as you probably know from Sunday morning lie-ins.

However, one of the difficulties is capturing the ideas that arise. In our drowsiness, we may not feel the impulse to record of our ideas. It’s tempting to tell ourselves before falling back to sleep, “This is such a good idea that it will definitely stick in my mind.” But when we wake up some time later, the idea is gone forever.

However, through mental training, there is no reason why we can’t build up a habit of recording our hypnagogic ideas. The best practice is to keep a pen and paper right on a bedside table. Or for a more contemporary variant, keep your phone beside the bed, with the recording app open.

In fact, this is a practice that Paul McCartney has always followed. He even trained himself to write in the dark for this purpose.

We can also use a technique of “conscious napping” to generate ideas. Whenever the great inventor Thomas Edison was stuck for a solution or new idea, he would allow himself to drift into unconsciousness, while holding a metal ball. As he fell asleep, the ball would clatter to the ground and wake him, when he would often find that a new insight had emerged.

More generally, we should use idleness as a way of cultivating creativity. Don’t think of napping or relaxing as a waste of time. Far from being unproductive, they may lead to the most inspired ideas and insights of our lives.

Steve Taylor 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.

– ref. How the ‘hypnagogic state’ of drowsiness could enhance your creativity – https://theconversation.com/how-the-hypnagogic-state-of-drowsiness-could-enhance-your-creativity-269724

December 5, 2025

Is the dominance of the US dollar unravelling under Trump?

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Fabian Pape, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

The dominant global financial position of the US and its currency, the dollar, is wobbling under the second Trump administration. AURA88 / Shutterstock

The US has long sat at the centre of the global financial system, with the US dollar serving as the backbone of the world economy. Private investors rely on the dollar as a store of value in times of uncertainty.

Governments and central banks hold dollars to manage the value of their own currencies and as a form of insurance against economic shocks. Key commodities such as oil are also priced in dollars.

This dominant position, which has given the US enormous privileges including the capacity to borrow money cheaply and the ability to use the global financial system as a tool of statecraft, is often explained through the size and stability of US markets and the strength of its institutions. But beneath these economic fundamentals lies something more intangible: trust.

Countries and private financial institutions hold dollars, trade in dollars and borrow in dollars because they trust the US to maintain an open, rules-based international order. They also trust the US to honour contracts, protect property rights and manage the world’s financial plumbing responsibly by acting as an international lender of last resort during periods of crisis.

The dollar system has long had its critics. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, which occurred between 2007 and 2009, emerging economies faced severe spillovers from US monetary policy and growing exposure to dollar-denominated debt. They also witnessed the increasing use of financial sanctions as a tool of US foreign policy.

China, Russia, India and other countries outside the west began constructing alternative financial infrastructures – new payment systems, currency swap lines and efforts to internationalise their own currencies. What began as a gradual search for some form of protection from US financial power quietly created cracks at the margins of the dollar-based system.

However, nothing has been as disorienting to the global role of the dollar as the second Trump administration’s overt attacks on the liberal international economic order. The imposition of sweeping trade tariffs, as well as efforts to undermine international and domestic institutions, represent a fundamental break with the promise of responsible American financial leadership.

Previous predictions of the dollar’s decline have proved premature. But as we argue in a recently published paper, the erosion of trust in the US as the steward of the liberal international order should be taken seriously. What we are seeing is not the immediate collapse of US financial power, but the beginning of a slow transition towards a fragmented, multipolar – and less predictable – global monetary system.

Rupture of trust

Three developments stand out. First, Washington’s commitment to the liberal economic order under the leadership of Donald Trump is being widely questioned. Rather than acting as the guarantor of open markets, Trump has reframed global trade as a transactional system where countries must “buy down” US tariffs. This means other countries must essentially now buy American Treasuries and other securities in exchange for access to the US market.

Second, surging US debt is increasing doubts about US fiscal stability. The Trump administration’s major tax cuts and spending plans are projected to create persistent deficits of around 6% of GDP, and US government debt has ballooned to record levels. This has prompted foreign central banks to reduce their dollar holdings.

Third, the Trump administration is openly attacking and undermining US government agencies and the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. Trump has repeatedly threatened to replace the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, and dismiss other central bank officials since returning to the White House in January.

Central bank independence is considered a hallmark of credible monetary governance and undermining it raises doubts about whether the US remains a reliable anchor for the global financial system. According to Reuters, European officials are now openly questioning whether the Fed will continue to supply dollars to overseas central banks at times of financial strife.

Taken together, these actions are striking at the core foundation of dollar dominance: the assumption that the US will behave predictably, responsibly and with institutional restraint.

Despite the turbulence, no single currency is ready to replace the dollar. China’s renminbi still lacks open capital markets and strong legal protections, while the euro lacks a unified fiscal authority. New digital currency platforms remain experimental or speculative.

Still, the world is moving towards a more fragmented monetary landscape. Countries are diversifying their reserves into gold and other non-dollar assets. At the same time, regional payment systems are proliferating and dollar-denominated lending to emerging economies is declining.

Commodities are also priced increasingly in currencies other than the dollar. And no longer are only countries like China retreating from the dollar system, even US allies in Europe are encouraging banks to reduce their reliance on dollar funding.

The global economy is entering a financial interregnum – a period in which the old order is fading but the new one is not yet born. The dollar’s dominance will not vanish overnight as too many institutions and networks still rely on it. But its uncontested supremacy is coming to an end.

A fragmented financial system will reduce US leverage, while also making the global economy more complex and, possibly, more crisis-prone. The dollar is not dead. But the world is slowly preparing for life beyond dollar hegemony, and the second Trump administration may be the catalyst that turns long-running dissatisfaction into systemic change.

Fabian Pape receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2024-367).

Johannes Petry receives funding from German Research Foundation (446618653)

Tobias Pforr received funding from the European Research Council (grant agreement No 884910).

– ref. Is the dominance of the US dollar unravelling under Trump? – https://theconversation.com/is-the-dominance-of-the-us-dollar-unravelling-under-trump-270600

December 5, 2025

Train Dreams on Netflix is a beautiful film – but it misses the magic of the original novella

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dominic Davies, Reader in English, City St George’s, University of London

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams was first published in 2002 as a short story in the Paris Review. When it was reissued as a standalone novella almost a decade later, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer prize. While the book did not win that year, somewhat strangely neither did anything else – for the first time in 35 years, the panel refused, without explanation, to choose a winner.

I have always liked this story because it brings to life the eerie and unsettling world of the American frontier. Train Dreams is a novella where each event and detail seems significant, fused into a larger tapestry of meaning.

And yet, by the end of the book, the reader struggles to explain exactly what has happened. The effect is one of deep disturbance – somewhere between alienation, curiosity and longing. I imagine it bewitching the Pulitzer panel, stunning them into indecision.

The new movie, adapted and directed by Clint Bentley and now streaming on Netflix, is a beautiful meditation on themes of grief and loss, and a frank account of an important phase in the history of environmental crisis. Whether you’re a fan of Johnson’s writing or have never read him before, you should take the time to watch it.

However, while the film is mostly loyal to Johnson’s plot, it doesn’t take the novella’s risk of refusing explanation or resolution. As such, it loses the spirit of unsettling indirection that comprises the magic of the original.

The trailer for Train Dreams.

Set in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainier (played in the film by Joel Edgerton), an orphan-turned-logger who scratches a living together by cutting down trees and building railroads for the emerging US superpower. During one bridge-building job, he is involved in an incident in which an indentured Chinese labourer is wrongly accused of stealing, then punished by mob justice. Grainier’s guilt over his minor involvement in this episode haunts him for the rest of his life.

When a forest fire destroys his isolated log cabin, and his wife and only daughter disappear in the melee, Grainier feels the disaster must be some kind of retribution for his earlier misdeed. As I explore in one of the few academic papers written about Train Dreams, the novella also intimates a structural link between the ecological devastation wrought by industrial civilisation and the accelerating instability of our planetary home.

The film adaptation takes up these themes and makes them impossible to miss. In a world where deaths from forest fires are an annual occurrence, its scenes of smoke-ridden skies and charred landscapes are entirely believable – a matter of routine rather than spectacle. This underlying moral message of climate grief is communicated through exquisite landscape scenes, with felled trees falling through canopies and fire-breathing trains roaring over waterways.

But the film also pulls back from the most unforgiving elements of the novella’s critique. In the adaptation, the one Indigenous character, Kootenai Bob, lives peacefully in the local village. In Johnson’s original, he is swindled, bullied and attacked by white settlers, before being symbolically killed by an oncoming train.

The novella refuses the reader the comfort of decoupling contemporary climate disasters from the long histories of settler colonialism and racial violence that made the American frontier. These issues are still present in the movie, but they are smoothed over into something more palatable for mainstream audiences.

This is not, however, the movie’s greatest betrayal. A strange event haunts the ending of both novella and film, which I can say without spoiling either has to do with Grainier’s missing daughter. The brilliance of Johnson’s original work is that the utter bizarreness of this incident defies any single interpretation, problematising rather than explaining the rest of the story.

The movie maintains some of this ambiguity but ultimately reduces the scene to a dream sequence. It seems neither the boards of Netflix nor the Pulitzer prize could quite stomach the true weirdness of Train Dreams.

Johnson’s title intentionally evokes the righteous promise of the American dream and then disturbs it, blurring the promise of the frontier into an ethereal mirage of hope and sorrow.

The Netflix adaptation drives into these themes and does many of them justice. But whether you have watched the film and enjoyed it or not, I would urge you to pick up a copy of this short book and let it unsettle you. It will take you weeks to shake off the uncanny howling of wolves that rings in your ears after reading.

Dominic Davies 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.

– ref. Train Dreams on Netflix is a beautiful film – but it misses the magic of the original novella – https://theconversation.com/train-dreams-on-netflix-is-a-beautiful-film-but-it-misses-the-magic-of-the-original-novella-271339