When he was the television critic of this newspaper, Alan Coren published a collection of his columns under the title Golfing for Cats, with a giant swastika on the cover. His work mentioned none of the three. Coren knew such words sold books, so set out to mock the tricks of a wordsmith’s trade. At the time, this was a joke about human editors gaming human instincts.
Today the same logic governs how most people encounter the world — except the decisions are no longer made by editors but by machines, dominating the news agenda at a scale Coren could not have imagined.
