Dusty Wentworth

There comes a point in life when travel, age and experience combine to offer a view of humanity that is both humbling and unsettling. You begin to see patterns where once there seemed only chaos, and you start to realise that our greatest achievements and our worst failures are often born from the same part of us. Human genius built both the rocket and the bomb; the difference lies only in intent. Our brilliance and our brutality are twins born of the same restless mind. We like to believe that the great wars and genocides of the twentieth century taught us enough about ourselves to ensure they would never happen again. Yet each generation finds new ways to repeat the same mistake. Hate and intolerance, dressed in new flags and fresh rhetoric, have replaced the mushroom cloud as the weapon of choice. It is as if humanity cannot live without an enemy, and when none can be found, we manufacture one from within. The unnatural habitat we call civilisation Long ago, when animals...

There is a quiet, painful irony in modern writing: the very mark of punctuation once used to capture the rhythm of human thought—the em dash—is now often treated as a tell-tale sign of artificial intelligence. It seems strange that a simple line could lead to an accusation of machine writing, yet in our rush for ‘content’, rhythm and expression are now met with suspicion. I remember when writing was taught with care. We learnt about structure, tone and the weight of a pause. Penmanship mattered. Words were crafted with intention, not mass-produced. Those of us who came before Google, before mobile phones and home computers, grew up with typewriters, pens and paper. We thought electric typewriters were cutting-edge. Writing meant thought and effort, not algorithms and templates—a distinction young writers now struggle to grasp. The em dash was once a writer’s most faithful ally. It carried a change of thought, a shift in emotion, a breath between words. It wasn’t decoration;...