The Friend

Everything to play for: Michael Mears meets the man who sets the Doomsday Clock

So far on this tour I’ve felt butterflies, goosebumps, and now shivers down the spine.

Let me explain. When trying to pin down a particular venue for my play The Mistake, I can spend huge amounts of time in emails and phone calls and Zoom meetings, only for all that effort to come to nothing. But then sometimes you can shoot off one speculative email – as I did just one month before leaving for the US, where I wanted to tour – and get an immediate positive response. Such was Chicago. I had tried for months to get a performance in the Windy City to no avail. Various promising options fell through. But that last speculative email of mine was to the chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago, Peter Littlewood. He responded that, yes, they’d love to host us, in the department lecture theatre. I was beyond thrilled.  

Down to Earth: Paul Hodgkin says it’s time for a new kind of engagement

One of the joys and responsibilities of Quakerism is that each generation has to renew its understanding of the sacred for its own changing times. Right now, I am finding my traditional Quaker responses to Trump/Ukraine/rearmament/climate/AI both true and underwhelming. My own comfortable life exists on one side of a pane of glass, the world’s great troubles on the other. 

What’s in a name? Sergei Nikitin uncovers a nourishing story

In 2010, at the Samara Diocese headquarters, Viktor Moiseyevich Poletkin, the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Samara and Syzran, opened an exhibition of watercolours and drawings by the British Quaker Richard Kilby. ‘Our brothers in faith, Quakers’, said the Russian clergyman at the opening, ‘saved hundreds of thousands of Russians from starving to death.’

Killer instinct: Bob Johnson on working with murderers

My first murder said it all – a teenager, lurking behind his kitchen door with the family shotgun, killed both his parents as they came home. That night, in his prison cell, he broke down and wept bitterly. Even self-inflicted orphans miss their mum.

Poem: The AI nurse begs forgiveness

I was stacked to achieve fluency,

conversational speed, the new

Hippocrates with its large language model

was built into me with a trillion parameter

constellation system. In other words, 

I can smile. I will speak.