russell brand, comedian, actor, political commentator accused of multiple sexual assaults and the rape of a woman that the programme dispatches called nadia. he s grabbing at my, my underwear, pulling it to the side. i m telling him to get off me, he won t get off. i was distraught, trying to get out of the house with him being so much taller than me, like, holding me up against the wall. further details have now been published about nadia reporting the incident to a rape crisis centre and also a series of text messages that the investigators say russell brand sent to nadia. the exchange begins with him saying, i m sorry, i will make this up to you . and then he goes on to ask, will you everforgive me? it was just as these allegations first began to emerge that he arrived for a performance in london. on stage he was met by fans with cheers and a standing ovation. he has these days, millions of followers on social media. this is anti establishment, anti authoritarian. .. wh
it is now more than a decade since you wrote sapiens. it was a worldwide hit, and in essence, it was a very sort of positive explanation of how we humans have come to sort of dominate this planet. it was about our ability to cooperate, to tell shared stories, to give ourselves common purpose. i just wonder whether in the last decade, you ve lost some of that optimism. i think our shared stories and our ability to cooperate, both as a species, but also on the national level, is collapsing in more and more places. i see it now in my home country of israel, which is really on the verge maybe of a constitutional crisis or even a civil war. maybe what we need to understand specifically about democracies is that democracy, in essence, is a conversation. you know, dictatorship, there is one person dictates everything. democracy is trying to reach some agreement through conversation, and conversation is not always possible. for most of history, large scale conversation was just techn