James Meek

Keith Ridgway’s​ sixth novel, A Shock, doesn’t follow a central character, or even, substantially, a set of characters. It’s peopled by loosely acquainted present-day South Londoners, anxious, precariously employed, bright and lonely. Diverse by age, ethnicity and sexuality, they’re narrower by class: nobody well off enough to own a whole house, and nobody in real,...

It​ wasn’t much of an investigation, and it wasn’t much of an experiment. It was like the kind of measuring you do in primary school and call an experiment: I came back from the deli and put the kettle on. From the jump on the smart meter (already installed when we moved in a couple of years ago) I worked out the kettle was sucking in about three kilowatts of power. It took a...

The equivalent of almost all Scotland’s electricity is now supplied by renewables, and when demand is low and the weather blustery, wind turbines generate two-thirds of the wattage Britain needs. You might accept that Britain has ceded tech sovereignty to overseas multinationals, and say, well, let them at least be competent and effective ones, like Siemens and Vestas. But even as I write this, it has a hollow ring. Suppose I make the distinction between a false populist portrayal of the wind energy revolution as a triumph of national ingenuity and my own understanding of it as a vital endeavour engaging the whole species – one in which the greater ingenuity, foresight and can-do spirit has, this time, been shown by the Danes. The trouble is that these narratives aren’t very far apart. If the Boris Johnson version is neo-aristocratic, boasting of improvements to the landed estate that is Britain, mine is neo-romantic: humanity, and the version of nature we know, may yet be saved! The trouble is that the aristocrat and the romantic have much in common. Each tends to overlook those who do the spade-work, those whose hand holds the welding rod.

When​ his company commander vanished from the front line at the end of 2015, the Ukrainian conscript and novelist Artem Chekh was told he’d deserted and gone over to the enemy. Through the winter Chekh and his comrades were encouraged to believe their captain was a traitor, laughing at them from the line of separatist bunkers opposite their own, lavishly equipped with warm clothes by...

Conspiracists describe epiphanies where they start to see the big picture, the universal meta-conspiracy that explains and links everything. But the picture isn’t big. It’s small. It’s the result of an effort to shrink the answer to every mystery until it can fit whatever doll’s house furniture version of that answer the conspiracist is capable of holding in their head. Maybe it’s better to see conspiracy theories as lots of small things, a box of McNuggets of folksy pseudo-information. The cure for any flaw in a conspiracy theory is to add to it. Conspiracy theories rely on sheer quantity, on feeding a limitless dole of small stimulations to whatever part of the brain hungers for secret knowledge. The appetite is never satisfied, but the plate is always full. The phrase William Cooper uses to describe the conspirators’ silent weapon – ‘it shoots situations, instead of bullets’ – nicely describes conspiracist discourse, including his own.