Inside this week's long reads

Support the Guardian Support us   Fund independent journalism Battle of the blobs: scientists feud over the nature of intelligent life, while the BBC fights for funding In this week’s newsletter: the study of slime moulds has ignited a row over the nature of intelligence; and how to pay for public service broadcasting This newsletter is supported by reMarkable

Composite: Guardian Design/Alamy ‘A completely unique opportunity’: the secretive process that will decide the BBC’s future | Barbara Speed Every decade, the BBC’s continued existence must be secured through an elaborate multi-year negotiation with the government. But what does charter renewal actually involve – and will it secure the BBC’s long-term future? Photograph: Henri Koskinen/Alamy ‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence | Samanth Subramanian Scientists are battling over whether these supposedly simple organisms should be considered “intelligent”. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place within it.

Inside this week’s long read This week we published Samanth Subramanian’s article on the extraordinary life of slime moulds. We asked Samanth about immersing himself in this surprisingly contentious subject. What was the genesis of this piece? As with many long reads, it started with a casual chat with my editor David Wolf, who remarked on how weird and surprising slime mould experiments are. We see many of their results in the daily press. But only after I started digging a little and talking to experts did I learn about the fierce debates that these results trigger among scientists – and how fundamental they are to understanding ourselves and other living beings. I know you had childhood ambitions to be a scientist. Did the “fraught, sometimes dirty” battle over whether slime moulds can think make you wish you had stuck with it? I’d wanted to be a physicist, as a kid, and I haven’t yet encountered – or at least written about – similarly fraught and dirty battles in that field. (I wonder if they exist. Readers, get in touch!) But researching this piece did rekindle that old itch, of wanting to be neck-deep in the really fundamental questions about the universe. Even though I imagine that, on a day-to-day basis, being a scientist – like being in any profession, really – involves routine and some drudgery and lots of frustration and plenty of admin, rather than constant immersion in deep thinking. You describe studying the growth and behaviour of a single-cell organism while watching the development of a five-month-old baby. What did you learn? Somehow, the sense of wonder that these scientists communicated to me about slime moulds amplified my already keen sense of wonder about my baby. It kept me alive to the things that seem near-miraculous in his development. Here’s one: we point out babies in prams to him when we go to the park, and say “baby”. Then one day he pointed to a cartoon baby in a cartoon pram in one of his books and said “baby”. How did his brain match real life to a rudimentary sketch? Or: how did he learn “dog” by looking at one breed – and then begin extending that to all the breeds, without being confused about whether they were cats? It’s a constant mystery!

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This week’s audio long reads The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet? Sudan’s outsider: how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war The long shadow of Argentina’s dictatorship: she wasn’t who she thought she was. Neither was her father Listen to the Audio Long Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or in the Guardian app

From the archive Photograph: Imago/Alamy The trial of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right | August 2024 This week, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won its first state election. One man is considered responsible for the party’s metamorphosis from a Eurosceptic, economically liberal movement into a nativist, anti-Islam, climate-denialist party. In 2024, Alex Dziadosz attended his trial for using language that echoed the Nazis. Photograph: Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic | March 2019 This week, prominent Israelis and Jewish community leaders in different countries have welcomed the British government’s announcement of sanctions on Israeli settlements. Conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake, as Peter Beinart explains – as this response to sanctions attests.

What else we’ve been reading This week I started reading Eyal Press’s book Beautiful Souls, which examines why some people resist pressure in order to do the right thing. The first story he tells, about Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander who saved Jewish refugees in the second world war, is a fascinating study of the banality of goodness. David Wolf, editor The relationship between coloniser and dispossessed Indigenous people is addressed in a powerful memoir by JM Coetzee, who writes about the men who worked on his father’s farm in the South African Karoo. A clear-eyed look at the generational legacy of genocide, another brilliant piece from Equator. Clare Longrigg, deputy editor I have been thinking about this interview in the New York Times with the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her husband, Ivara Esege, in which they speak about the shocking death of their 21-month-old son, Nkana, during a trip to Nigeria last year. Yohann Koshy, deputy editor

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