Whenever I talk about smartphones pushing us into a “post-literate age”, says James Marriott on the Radical podcast, I’m always told this is just another moral panic, as with TV back in the 1980s and even novels in the 18th century. What my critics miss is that those moral panics were entirely vindicated. Conservative traditionalists in 18th-century Europe were quite right to worry about more people reading, because the subsequent spread of information helped upend the political system they had long dominated. Same with television. A big study in the Netherlands found that reading levels dramatically declined as TV came into people’s homes in the 1960s and 1970s. When Norway first rolled out cable TV, you could track the corresponding decline in IQ levels “region by region”.

The big risk here isn’t just that future generations won’t get to enjoy Dickens or Austen. It’s that modern democracy was built on a culture of mass literacy, so if we lose reading, “we could lose democracy”. Mass circulation newspapers helped create the modern nation state: they forced everyone to read and speak the same language, rather than local dialects, and enabled people to imagine a community beyond their own neighbourhood. Today, people are going into their own online bubbles, often across nations: British left-wingers adopting the language of American progressives; Nigel Farage aping US conservatives on Christianity. And these imagined international communities are becoming more important to people than their actual real-life communities. The good news is the battle for literacy, and by extension democracy, isn’t yet lost. People have responded to the rise of junk food and sedentary lifestyles by exercising more. They do a hard thing, getting off the sofa and going for a jog, to keep their body in shape. One day, hopefully, we’ll be doing something similar for our brains.

The ceasefire in the Middle East might be fragile, says Daniel Levy in The Guardian, but one aspect of the conflict remains as clear today as it was six weeks ago. “Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does.” The Israeli PM is seizing the opportunity of “geopolitical fluidity” to reach for his end goal: “a Greater Israel”. This is in part an attempt to increase the country’s territory – Israel flattened and reconquered Gaza, seized Syrian land after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, and is now reconstituting a “zone of occupation” in Lebanon. But it’s also about Netanyahu’s desire for Israel to become the “dominant regional power”.

Achieving this requires not only the collapse of Iran but the weakening of the Gulf states by making them dependent on Israel for security and energy export routes. When such countries are hit by Iranian drones, Netanyahu likely sees it as more than just a “regrettable side-effect” and when their access to global markets was choked off by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, he was quick to call for “alternative routes” that would see oil and gas pipes going “right up to Israel”. Just days before the war broke out, he shared with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, his vision of a “hexagon of alliances” around the Middle East including India, Arab nations, African nations and Mediterranean nations, with Israel as the “key nodal point”. A recently published piece by high-ranking IDF figures argued that the Jewish state is set to achieve “superior status as a kind of ‘queen’ of the jungle”. Israel is positioning itself as a force that could be sustained “even if US power draws down”.