Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[HVC]

Shorter clip to get the idea of Asian shame punishment

[Sheilbh]

Follow up in the Observer to the Parris column - I think it is interesting because Sodha broadly describes my view here. Also the growing "concerns" from people on the centre left like Streeting and Sturgeon which need to be mitigated (chances are we'll ignore them and then have a massive national scandal/disgrace in 10-20 years).

Also the stats on abuse of the elderly are horrendous:

When the right to die becomes the duty to die, who will step in to save those most at risk?
Sonia Sodha
Sun 7 Apr 2024 08.30 BST

It's rare to get a politician who openly admits they are torn on an issue, but in recent days there have been two striking examples. First, Wes Streeting, Labour's shadow health secretary, admitted that though he voted to legalise assisted dying a few years ago, he feels conflicted. Then Nicola Sturgeon, former Scottish first minister, wrote a piece saying that, with new Scottish legislation on the table, the reservations she expected to subside are becoming stronger.

I wrote last year about my own trajectory in relation to proposals to legalise doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. A decade ago, I would have supported assisted dying out of a respect for personal autonomy and a desire to alleviate suffering. Today, I understand these objectives are not standalone but need to be weighed against the impact on those for whom an abstract liberal notion like autonomy is highly simplistic, and the state-sanctioned wrongful deaths that seem to me impossible to avoid.

The first prompt for my reappraisal has been my evolving understanding of the complexity of relationships. We are not all autonomous islands floating in a sea of humanity; we are highly influenced by each other and by cultural norms. Writing about domestic abuse has opened my eyes to the extent that coercively controlling relationships drive people to do things because others want them to. Of course there will be women who get a terminal diagnosis, whose partners have been emotionally abusive to them for years – telling them their life isn't worth living – who will come under intolerable pressure to opt for assisted dying. How can we ignore that around a third of female suicides are thought to be related to intimate partner abuse? Or that some men who violently kill their sick wives rely on defences such as "mercy killing" and "suicide pacts", sometimes very effectively? Even the fact that men are much more likely than women to leave their partners after a terminal diagnosis feels salient to understanding the gendered implications.

The risk of coercion goes beyond intimate partners in a society riven with ageism and anti-disability prejudice; what happened to older people in care homes during Covid is just one example. More than a fifth of people over 65 have experienced physical, emotional, financial or sexual abuse. There are relatives who will find ways – perhaps quite subtly, even unintentionally – of hinting to people with a terminal diagnosis who need round-the-clock care that they should opt for assisted dying. How would that make you feel? Almost half of people who chose assisted death in Oregon in 2022 cited concern about being a burden.

Then there is the internal pressure that arises from some feeling that they ought to do it to save relatives difficulty and financial consequences: where the right to die becomes the duty to die. That message will be reinforced at a societal level; Times columnist Matthew Parris recently argued in a widely condemned column that assisted dying could help address the cost of an ageing population; that there are those willing to be honest about this should give serious pause for thought. Moreover, palliative care doctors talk about how the wish to die is not stable, and often abates in terminally ill patients in the wake of an initial diagnosis, and can be affected by depression, which is hard to diagnose.

The second factor that's changed my mind is the international evidence that, once you cautiously nudge the door on assisted suicide, it is very difficult to stop it swinging wide open.

The most cited example is Canada, where a limited form of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was legalised in 2016 for people with "grievous and irremediable medical conditions" with assurances about its narrow scope. Today, that definition has been interpreted to include a person with severe sensitivities to chemicals unable to access appropriate housing from the state, and there have been reports of officials promoting assisted dying to people with disabilities applying for government assistance and medical professionals trying to coerce people into it. A parliamentary committee has recommended MAiD should be extended to some sick children and it is set to be expanded to people with chronic mental illness. In the Netherlands, euthanasia is an option for people who are autistic and lonely and is about to be extended to children of all ages. In Oregon, where the law has remained more stable, terminal conditions today include arthritis and anorexia.

Proponents argue adequate safeguards are possible; the latest House of Lords bill proposed certification by two doctors that someone has the capacity to decide to end their own life and has done so without coercion or duress, signed off by a high court family judge. But this dissolves on scrutiny. Medical professionals are not trained in or necessarily any good at detecting coercive control; judges will have limited evidence to make their own call. In the family courts, judges can fail to detect coercive control even when confronted with detailed evidence about intra-familial relationships. Narcissistic abusers can be highly adept at fooling professionals. What level of outside influence is considered too much, how is it measured, and how sure must a judge be, given life and death is at stake, surely rendering the balance of probability evidentiary threshold usually applied in the family courts inappropriate?

In the House of Lords debate, there was a marked failure to engage with these detailed concerns. Some claimed there is no evidence of problems abroad, as if coercively influenced wrongful deaths would magically reveal themselves after the fact. One only need look at the fight to reveal the true number of hidden homicides of women by their abusers to understand the naivety in that and, in somewhere like Oregon, the system is simply not set up to catch wrongful deaths. With brutal utilitarian honesty, former supreme court president Lord Neuberger acknowledged there would be abuses, but argued the benefits for those acting autonomously would outweigh them.

We live in a social media-driven world characterised by excessive moral certainty, in which powerful individual stories that invoke strong emotions can dominate the discourse to the detriment of the voiceless. There is a real risk that a law gets passed without any of these devastating concerns being addressed. Assisted dying is not a right-left issue, but it garners more support from MPs on the left, including Keir Starmer, and a Labour government might feel under pressure to introduce big reforms that don't cost money given its self-imposed fiscal constraints. That is why voices like Streeting's and Sturgeon's are so important; we desperately need politicians willing to acknowledge that assisted dying is one of the most complex and fraught ethical questions they will ever be asked to confront.

Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

And not unrelatedly a letter in the Sunday Times on Parris' piece. As I say, I don't think we can pretend this isn't a risk in this country. Also I find this language "a limited return", "reduce the burden" like Parris' "units" with input and output concerning - and why I think even from a secularist perspective insisting on the value, worth and dignity of every single individual is so important:


Edit: And on Tamas' point of no-one really suggesting it we can now add to a Sunday Times column, a King's Counsel at one of the countries leading set of commercial barristers. People are saying it and they're the type of people whose voice usually carries.

[Tamas]

Well I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that the comments below the article are overwhelmingly against its "well I can imagine this abused in some cases so let's not do it" point.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/07/conflicted-legalising-assisted-dying-sonia-sodha#comments

A few top-voted samples:

I have incurable cancer. I would like to have the right to determine when and how I die, having seen a relative experience a last few months of the sort you wouldn't allow a pet to suffer. I get utterly fed up with these sorts of articles.

Agreed, I've seen two parents (mine and in-law) with Alzheimer's, if we treated a dog or cat like this the RSCA would be round.

So, people have to suffer and die in horrible pain and despair because we are afraid to give them agency?

Behind much of the opposition to assisted dying, there lies the unquestioned assumption that there are valid reasons for ending one's life, which the author agrees with (eg, to ease suffering) vs supposedly invalid reasons (eg, not wishing to be a burden) which the author finds would be an inappropriate use of the proposed law.

Suppose I reach a point where I no longer wish to be a burden. Is the author telling me that this is not a valid reason for me to end my own life, over which only I should have autonomy? Who is the author (or anybody else) to tell me what is a good reason and what is a bad reason to end my own life?

Yes there should be safeguards etc, and determination of capacity. But in principle it should not be for the state to decide if my capacitous reasoning for ending my own life is valid.

Etc.

And there was a particularly good point that similar arguments were used to be made against abortion rights: women coerced into aborting their kids.

[Tamas]

Also, Sheilbh, just to make sure so we don't talk past each other: your concern (which I admit isn't 100% unfounded if edgelords like the ones you quoted get in charge) is that if we introduce a rigorous law to allow assisted suicide in very specific cases, that is inevitably going to lead to a future where old people are forced to have themselves killed or at least NHS nurses will run rampant nagging them into suicides?

[Sheilbh]

Also, Sheilbh, just to make sure so we don't talk past each other: your concern (which I admit isn't 100% unfounded if edgelords like the ones you quoted get in charge) is that if we introduce a rigorous law to allow assisted suicide in very specific cases, that is inevitably going to lead to a future where old people are forced to have themselves killed or at least NHS nurses will run rampant nagging them into suicides?

Not really.

As I say I am ambivalent and conflicted about it. I think I'm in the Streeting/Sturgeon boat. And from what I've read I think the system that manages risks best is the Swiss one - but I've not read enough to have a real opinion on that sort of thing.

My concern is a little less direct than Sodha's but is basically similar. That many advocates treat it purely as an issue of autonomy and an individual's right - which I am broadly supportive of. However the number of people able to be truly self-creating, autonomous individuals are few (and they're all dicks). Most of us are also made up of and shaped by society. So I think there is a risk around not force or nagging, but what Parris called the "unspoken hint". Not least because I think Britain is a society that has quite a lot of unspoken hints shaping our behaviour. In addition I think we revere the NHS in a way that is not healthy give that it is just a universal healthcare system like other countries have. And I don't think, as a society, we have much value or place for the elderly or, for that matter, the disabled. Those factors combined make me think the risk of the "unspoken hint" is pretty strong here - aside from the 20% + of elderly people who are abused.

I also think the point on the slippery slope seems fair from what I've read of other countries' experiences.

And there was a particularly good point that similar arguments were used to be made against abortion rights: women coerced into aborting their kids.

I'd love some details on that because I've never heard it before on abortion.

But, by the by, at the start of every midwife or reproductive health appointment (from what I've heard from women), is the professional asking if they're okay or if their partner is abusive and if they need help. From friends who went to those types of sessions with their partners, the women were called in first to ask those questions separately. Perhaps we do need a bit of that in our treatment of the vulnerable more broadly (including the elderly). A bit like the signs you see in some places (I think particularly date-y plalces) giving a code word that you can use with staff to flag that they need help to get away from their partner.

Well I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that the comments below the article are overwhelmingly against its "well I can imagine this abused in some cases so let's not do it" point.

Yes, let us turn to the comments that reliable gauge of public opinion and sanity But in all seriousness - this is part of why I'm concerned. There will be a free vote, I think it will pass pretty overwhelmingly.

It will be seen as a great progressive move. It'll be a free vote without a party line but holding a free vote will be a way to do "change" that is also free. I suspect concerns or people flagging possible problems kind of hand-waved away.  Then in 10-20 years there'll be a Panorama expose of unlawful deaths etc lots of lessons learned for the predicted and predictable (the standard British scandal).

Until literally the last two weeks everything I'd seen about this was anecdotal experience which you can only sympathise with, but isn't necessarily a great basis for law. Not least because I have anecdotal experience of both elderly relatives who I think would have benefited from this option, but also ones who felt they were a burden, received really bad care because they didn't feel able to stand up for themselves or able to challenge a medical professional.

[The Brain]

If culture affecting behavior means that we cannot allow something then a LOT of stuff will have to go.

[Sheilbh]

I'm not saying it shouldn't or that we can't allow. I'm ambivalent and my concerns around it have grown over time, not diminished - and I think Switzerland is probably the model to look at.

But I think culture is definitely a huge part of the context of all legislating.

This is about when and how you can lawfully kill someone, I think that's quite important. And as I say I don't think we can go in blind and pretend this isn't a risk - again columns and letters in the paper of record. Which means if it's happening (which I think is overwhelmingly likely), then we should think of how to address that. There's no hiding or social plausible deniability if we do end up with the "unspoken hint" ending lives.

[The Brain]

I don't see it as very different from stuff we allow today.

In Sweden it's legal for hospitals to stop life-saving treatment at the request of the patient. The outcome is exactly the same as assisted suicide but messier. I have never heard complaints that people get pressured into ending their treatments (doesn't mean it never happens but it doesn't appear to be a problem of any significant magnitude).

My impression is that people who have terminal/crippling illnesses are less susceptible to pressure than others. What are people gonna do to them? Force them to live in agony without hope of improvement?

We allow abortions, which is certainly about ending life only not legally human, and consequences aren't restricted to the fetus. There are women being put under pressure by partners or parents to have abortions every day. Still we allow them.

[Tamas]

I'm not saying it shouldn't or that we can't allow. I'm ambivalent and my concerns around it have grown over time, not diminished - and I think Switzerland is probably the model to look at.

But I think culture is definitely a huge part of the context of all legislating.

This is about when and how you can lawfully kill someone, I think that's quite important. And as I say I don't think we can go in blind and pretend this isn't a risk - again columns and letters in the paper of record. Which means if it's happening (which I think is overwhelmingly likely), then we should think of how to address that. There's no hiding or social plausible deniability if we do end up with the "unspoken hint" ending lives.

Doesn't Switzerland have more liberal rules around it than any concrete recommendations I have seen for the UK? Like in the UK it was proposed to limit it to incurable diseases  in their last stages.

From the same article an alleged Swiss doctor's comment:

According to the Swiss penal code from 1942 helping ("Beihilfe") somebody in suicide is exempt from punishment as long as it is not done for selfish reasons. Physicians learn this in medical school and it has been done quietly for generations and without any problems. In my own medical life I did it three times.

Since 30 years there is an increasing tourism for assisted suicide to our country, also from Britain (one of the patients I helped to die was British). It is an utter disgrace that people have to come to our country to get the relief from suffering you would offer to any animal.

[Sheilbh]

In Sweden it's legal for hospitals to stop life-saving treatment at the request of the patient. The outcome is exactly the same as assisted suicide but messier. I have never heard complaints that people get pressured into ending their treatments (doesn't mean it never happens but it doesn't appear to be a problem of any significant magnitude).

That's the position in the UK too. There are occasional court cases between doctors and family members over patients who can't make that request. And I think it is sometimes messy but I think it works. Not least because it's actually very rare.

And I don't think they are the same. I think there's a difference between a passive withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and actively administering a dose of medication that will kill. Just from the start there are circumstances where the former may be in the best interests of the patient - the pain and quality of life on life-sustaining machinery or if they are to all intents already dead, for example. Whereas giving someone a large enough dose to kill them is something that I don't think would ever be in a patient's best interests - but it may reflect their wish and be the right thing to do, or to allow.

Doesn't Switzerland have more liberal rules around it than any concrete recommendations I have seen for the UK? Like in the UK it was proposed to limit it to incurable diseases  in their last stages.

So the Scottish legislation that's been proposed I think is drafted a little more loosely than that. Although, which is often the case, the law is the least important thing about law.

The two things from Switzerland that I quite like, from what I know, is that doctors are only able to prescribe legal drugs within the limits of accepted practice - which the Swiss doctors' association has determined as when someone is "approaching the end of life" (that is stricter than the proposed Scottish law). Also that the final act must be carried out by the individual themselves (also different than Scottish draft) - and I am sympathetic to restricting it to adults only (over 16 in Scotland).

But I think Scottish proposal's right to limit it to residents.

Edit: And I should add the argumnt I've found most persuasive on this is Lord Neuberger's: there will be errors and wrongful deaths, but the benefits for affected individuals outweigh that inevitable risk and cost. I'm not totally persuaded but I think it's honest - again we'd go in with our eyes open.

[Tamas]

Well from what little I know about the Swiss model I'd be content with that so maybe we don't disagree at all. But you should see that concerns raised are largely raised to prevent legislation, not to fine-tune it. It's the same as with other previous progressive legislations:  "but omg society won't be able to handle this" - always proven wrong after much struggle.

[Sheilbh]

Well from what little I know about the Swiss model I'd be content with that so maybe we don't disagree at all. But you should see that concerns raised are largely raised to prevent legislation, not to fine-tune it. It's the same as with other previous progressive legislations:  "but omg society won't be able to handle this" - always proven wrong after much struggle.

I don't agree with that.

There are people and groups who will be oppoed to this in all circumstances - churches, religious groups etc. And that's fine. In Scotland the Catholic Church, Kirk and the Scottish Association of Mosques, all as you'd expect.

When I see Wes Streeting saying he's conflicted or Nicola Sturgeon that she expected to support it but is "veering away" as her concerns grow, or disability rights activists saying they've got real worries about coercion and other problems - I don't think they're bad faith actors.

And on the "progressive" legislation stuff. I'm not sure I agree. A lot of my qualms about this are exactly because of reading stories from other countries - I think particularly Canada and Belgium. I think Streeting and Sturgeon have said much the same.

This will be passed in the same way as other social legislation though. It will be a private member's bill the government makes time for (as is happening in Scotland). It will be voted on as a free vote with no party lines (just like last time it was voted on in 2015) - as with decriminalisation of homosexuality, legalising abortion, gay marriage, abolishing the death penalty (and the votes on bringing it back). Which means it is down to MPs' individual consciences and I think also your own as an individual. I'm a little reluctant to get into a for v anti/progressive v not line drawing on it because I think it's a moral issue that people will, in very good faith, come to very different conclusions on - and that's fine (and, I think, better than having it become political/cultural issue).

[Josquius]

Well from what little I know about the Swiss model I'd be content with that so maybe we don't disagree at all. But you should see that concerns raised are largely raised to prevent legislation, not to fine-tune it. It's the same as with other previous progressive legislations:  "but omg society won't be able to handle this" - always proven wrong after much struggle.

You definitely do often get some general opponents of whatever issue throwing up problems to be fixed as excuses to stop things happening altogether. But this doesn't render any noting of these problems as instantly invalid.

[Sheilbh]

Totally separately - nice gestures for 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale.

French troops at Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard, which is the first time non-Commonwealth troops have participated. Similarly British troops at the Elysee to guard the French head of state, which is the first time non-French troops have been in that role at the Elysee. Nice message from Macron too.

Feels like it's something worth marking and possibly deepening as, for all their flaws, still the two main European defence powers while Russia is invading another European country (at least until Germany or Poland's spending has an impact).

[Sheilbh]

Incredible Anglo-American cultural exchange here (also generally great article):

Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.'s Premier Quiz Show?
Brandon Blackwell, a 30-year-old from Queens, helped turn London's Imperial College into a "University Challenge" powerhouse.


Brandon Blackwell was 22 years old when he decided to turn quizzing into a full-time job.Credit...Elias Williams for The New York Times
By David Segal
    April 7, 2024

Brandon Blackwell sits in his apartment in the Jamaica section of Queens, training with a collection of 30,000 homemade flash cards the way weight lifters train with barbells. Each card contains an obscure fact about the world. Which country is home to Lake Assal, the largest salt reserve on earth? (Djibouti).  Which metal is smelted using the Hall-Héroult process? (Aluminum).

It is the fall of 2016 and the 22-year-old is struggling to reach the highest echelons in the little-known world of competitive quizzing. He's earned about $400,000 by appearing on "Jeopardy!" Teen Tournament, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and a handful of other shows. But he fares poorly when up against top quizzers in online contests and does not exactly dazzle at the Quiz Olympiad held in Athens that year.

Mr. Blackwell wants to get better. Much, much better. He'd also like to turn quizzing into a full-time job, although how exactly that will happen is unclear. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he has no choice.

He has to move to London.

"Eight of the top 20 quizzers on the planet lived there," he said during a recent interview. "It's the epicenter and competing in the city was the only way I was going to improve quickly."

To land a British visa, Mr. Blackwell — who already had a degree in computer science from New York University — needed to enroll in a British university. And if he was moving across the Atlantic, he figured he might as well finagle his way onto one of the country's televised quiz shows. When he searched "university" and "quiz" on Google, up it popped: "University Challenge."


Mr. Blackwell, top row, competing in "University Challenge" for Imperial College, a science and engineering school in London.Credit...BBC

The BBC show is a cultural institution, now in its 53rd season. Each year, four-person teams from colleges around the United Kingdom compete in what is essentially a tournament of brainiacs, with episodes that air on Monday nights. Questions tend to the wildly esoteric. Recent topics have included the chemistry of pine trees and the films of Youssef Chahine.

Mr. Blackwell applied to just one place, Imperial College, a science and engineering school with about 20,000 students, located in the South Kensington section of London. It was hardly an obvious choice. Imperial had not won "University Challenge" since 2001. But he knew that when players buzz in to answer questions, the show's unseen narrator shouts the name of the school, followed by the name of the player.

"So he would have to yell 'Imperial Brandon!'" he explained. "I'm a 'Star Wars' fan. I loved that."

In September 2016, he began executing the plan: Get admitted to Imperial. Move to London. Make the school's "University Challenge" team. Win the championship. Go pro.

Nothing about this seemingly long shot scheme would be left to chance. Mr. Blackwell would study "Challenge" like a puzzle that could be solved, dreaming up what he privately called BISQUE, the Brandon Imperial System for Quiz Efficiency. And he would apply this system with an approach that is quintessentially American and decidedly out of favor among Britain's academic elites.

He would work at it, shamelessly.

A Want-to-Win Team

Mr. Blackwell would spend more than a year on a self-taught crash course in British history, most of it gleaned from Wikipedia. He watched in excess of 100 hours of "University Challenge" on YouTube. He went through his entire set of flash cards eight times. It was the same grind-it-out ethic he'd used for years prepping for shows and competitions.

"When I started flash carding 10 years ago, I was like a pariah," he said over dinner at an Indonesian restaurant one night in the Elmhurst section of Queens. "People were like, 'Oh he learns lists. He flash cards.' I'm like, I'm a Black kid from the 'hood. Nobody I know listens to the Beatles. Nobody I know watches 'Friends.'"


"When I started flash carding 10 years ago, I was like a pariah," Mr. Blackwell said.Credit...Elias Williams for The New York Times

Mr. Blackwell speaks in long, discursive paragraphs at roughly the 1.5x setting on an audiobook app. A warm and intense 30-year-old, he was raised by a mother who is a middle-school teacher and a father who is an insurance adjuster. He attended an elementary school for gifted children on Long Island, then became, by his account, a middling student at the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city's most selective public schools. At 5-foot-6, he was shorter than most of his peers and "got picked last for stuff," as he put it.

One day while at home watching "Jeopardy!" Teen Tournament, he told his parents that the questions were easy. They pushed him to apply for a spot on the show. He did and won $10,000.

In his second year at N.Y.U., he landed on a short-lived show called "The Million Second Quiz." He lost in the season finale to a guy who snagged $2.6 million.

Suddenly, quizzing looked like a potentially lucrative career. A year earlier, when he appeared on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," he'd netted $43,100, more than enough to cover a medical procedure for his grandmother, because he'd learned the word for a fear of bridges just 12 hours before taping (gephyrophobia). He had printed out a list of phobias from the internet, after deciding that knowing words with Latin and Greek roots was essential to "Millionaire" success.

The lesson: With enough sweat, anyone could excel at quizzing.

A self-described ascetic, Mr. Blackwell has lived a no-frills life off his quiz show profits since his college days, and aside from freelance quiz-related writing gigs, has never had another job. The funds bankrolled his move to London and tuition at Imperial, where he studied for a master's in computer science. By the time of the college's tryouts for "University Challenge," in October 2017, he was training 80 hours a week. To his unhappy surprise, the students in charge of the process didn't seem interested in assembling the best team.

"They'd only told their friends about the tryouts," he said. "Plus, they'd pick people who scored the highest on the test, rather than looking for specialists in different areas."


He picked Imperial College because he'd be addressed as "Imperial Brandon" on "University Challenge." "I'm a 'Star Wars' fan. I loved that."Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

It was like recruiting a football team and only hiring quarterbacks. He made the squad, but when he met with his new teammates, none seemed especially hellbent on winning. Or maybe they simply couldn't match Mr. Blackwell's startling intensity.

"I asked them, is this a Tinder-pic team" — in other words, a group that just wanted a photo from the set of "University Challenge" to enhance a dating profile — "or a we-want-to-win team?"

Tinder pic, apparently.

Mr. Blackwell quit Imperial, at least temporarily. "University Challenge" allows students to appear on the show just once and he didn't want to waste his sole shot with a group that he considered doomed. (As it happened, that team wasn't picked by the BBC to compete.) After putting his belongings in storage, he headed back to Queens, though not before telling the student union that the people running the "Challenge" tryouts were a disaster.

"I got an email back that said, 'It's just a game,'" he said.

When Mr. Blackwell returned to London in 2018, the selection system was not exactly overhauled, but his complaint seemed to persuade the school to publicize tryouts more widely. He made the team again, this time with three people — Richard Brooks, Caleb Rich and Conor McMeel — who didn't balk when Mr. Blackwell suggested that they immediately spend a couple hours in the library plotting how to train. They had three months to prepare for the opening round.

"There was definitely an extra layer of enthusiasm there," said Mr. McMeel, who now works at a trading firm in London. "I was a little worried that I'd roped myself into some version of a hyper-serious sports movie."

During the meeting, the four figured out their strengths — Nobel Prizes, the periodic table, British castles — and wrote down their blind spots — sports and biology. Those topics were divvied up and assigned to different players.

Then the real work began. The team gathered once a week for practice games, typically an online episode of "University Challenge," which they watched with an electronic buzzer system borrowed from the school's quiz society. In the "University Challenge" format, there are "starter" questions worth 10 points, which either team can buzz in and answer. The winner of those points then gets three bonus questions on a niche topic — events that lasted 44 days, monarchs nicknamed "the conqueror" — worth five points apiece, which only that team can answer.

Teams are given about 15 seconds for a quiet huddle about those bonus questions. Mr. Blackwell proposed a rule to his teammates about how to confer during matches: The person with the most expertise was not allowed to speak first. That way, the nonexperts would get a chance to offer an idea, which they might otherwise have kept to themselves.

In February 2019, the team traveled to a studio in Manchester where episodes are filmed. The show was then hosted by Jeremy Paxman, a veteran broadcaster and journalist known for amusingly withering comments about errant guesses.


Jeremy Paxman, the former host of "University Challenge," joked that Mr. Blackwell had found a question much too easy.Credit...BBC

In the opening round, Imperial crushed Brasenose College, Oxford by a score of 255 to 70. Mr. Blackwell stood out immediately. He fist bumped teammates. He wore a pin that read, "I'm not here to make friends," which he describes as only semi-ironic. When he got a question right, he pursed his lips and looked skyward, as if he'd spotted a noxious bird. It was actually an expression of relief that Mr. Paxman mistook for arrogance.

"You look as though you find the question insultingly easy!" he quipped with a smile after Mr. Blackwell nailed one about the number of planets in the solar system known in 1820. (Six, excluding Earth.)

"No, no, no, it's not like that," Mr. Blackwell replied, waving an arm and grinning deferentially.

"You want a more difficult one!" Mr. Paxman said.

Social media in Britain lit up with commentary about this wildly expressive American. He was fidgety and eager, a living retort to the Oxbridge ethos of "effortless superiority," which casts overt striving as a bit gauche. While much of the online feedback was supportive, some was racist and plenty of it was critical. "Brandon Blackwell responds after drawing flak for showing emotion on the BBC show," read an article in The Guardian.

Passing the Charisma Check

The British love quizzes. More than 20,000 of the country's pubs hold a quiz night once a week, a fervor that led to cultural exports like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

"University Challenge" is the most durable of Britain's trivia institutions. Started in 1962 on a different network, the show is actually an Anglicized rendering of the "College Bowl," which began as an NBC radio program in 1953 and became a Sunday night staple of American television.

Rights to the "College Bowl" are owned and managed by Richard Reid, the son of the man who created the show. He runs the College Bowl Company, which operates from a third floor office in the Wild Hills section of Los Angeles. Mr. Reid licenses the format of "University Challenge" to ITV Studio, which produces it for the BBC.

"It's safe to say that it's been extraordinarily profitable," he said, declining specifics. "Gets renewed every two years like clockwork."

"Challenge" regularly attracts an audience of three million. Viewers don't come to match wits so much as marvel that anyone can answer the questions. Others tune in for the quiet reassurance that a new generation of super nerds will soon tackle the world's problems.

Every year, hundreds of schools apply for a spot on the show. Just 28 make the cut, and only after an in-person interview, known by players as the charisma check. Some teams go into it with a plan.

"I was the dark Russian, saying eerie things in an exotic accent," said Nikita Trojanskis, a 26-year-old Latvian who played this season for Balliol College, Oxford. "And we decided our British guy would speak in elegant, enchanting sentences that didn't really make sense, with long pauses, so you didn't know if he was done speaking."

Typically, 20 to 30 percent of the teams hail from either Oxford or Cambridge. This isn't necessarily a matter of intellectual wattage. Those universities are made up of about 30 colleges apiece and they apply separately to the show.


Frank Coffield, a retired professor of education at the University College London, has been a critic of the stranglehold that Oxford and Cambridge have on "University Challenge."Credit...Jo Ritchie for The New York Times

That enrages Frank Coffield, a retired professor of education at the University College London. Yes, Oxbridge colleges are financially independent, but students sit for exams and are marked by the university as a whole, he points out.

"This is exactly how British society runs," Professor Coffield said in a phone interview. "One rule for the rich and powerful, another rule for the rest of us."

A more benign theory is that the viewing audience loves watching the overdog smarty pants tussle with everyone else. A preoccupation with the countless gradations of class is the subtext of just about every interaction in Britain, so why should "Challenge" be any different? Or perhaps there's fear that if the two most selective universities in the country field just one team each, those teams will be unbeatable.

In an email to The New York Times, a BBC spokesman wrote, "All education institutions that design and deliver teaching towards university level qualifications are welcome to apply to University Challenge independently."

To the show's credit, the pool of players on "Challenge" has been getting more diverse every year. Three decades ago, teams were reliably four white guys. Now there are far more women and far more players from around the world. Schools from Oxford and Cambridge still represent 20 percent or more of the teams every year. Which makes the amiable new host, Amol Rajan, a perfect reflection of the show's current demographics. He was born in India and attended Cambridge.


Mr. Blackwell left Britain in 2019. But while Imperial Brandon is no longer competing for the school, he looms large over its quizzing tactics.Credit...BBC

Imperial and Mr. Blackwell rampaged through the tournament in 2020, posting some of the most lopsided results in the show's history. By the time the final aired in April, against Corpus Christi, Cambridge, Covid lockdowns had elevated the show's profile and Mr. Blackwell had achieved the status of national character. The Daily Mail tagged him "The Scowler." On YouTube, someone made a compilation of the show's announcer shouting "Imperial Brandon!" over and over.

He played the final in a sweatshirt with the "We Are Happy To Serve You" logo found on coffee cups in New York City's Greek diners. Ten minutes into the game, Imperial was winning 100 to negative 5. The squad seized the lead by correctly answering this brain-glazer: "The Kirkwood gaps are regions of low population on graphs showing the distribution of what objects plotted against their semi-major orbital axis?" (Asteroids.)

The final score was 275 to 105.

"The triumph burnishes Blackwell's credentials as one of the sharpest quizzers in the English-speaking world," said a story in The Times of London, under the headline "Brandon Blackwell's Imperial Rout Rivals."

The attention made him squirm a bit, because it ignored his teammates. "They were all monsters," he said over dinner. "They absolutely would have won without me."

Mr. Blackwell left England in November 2019. (Episodes of "Challenge" are taped months in advance.) But while Imperial Brandon is no longer competing for the school, he looms large over its quizzing tactics. In the years since, his methods have been adopted and tweaked at Imperial. If Imperial prevails on Monday against University College London, it will have won in three of the last five years and become the winningest school in the show's history.


Suraiya Haddad, the current captain of Imperial's team, called Mr. Blackwell "the father of this dynasty."Credit...Robert Ormerod for The New York Times

Suraiya Haddad, the team's captain, called Mr. Blackwell "the father of this dynasty."

"He came in and said, 'You guys need to play more strategically,'" she said.

Ads for tryouts are now ubiquitous. Instead of choosing the four top scorers, players with deep knowledge of a few topics are sought, with care to prevent overlap.

"It's better to have three specialists and one generalist than four generalists," said Fatima Sheriff, who was on Imperial's winning team in 2022. "I wasn't the highest scorer on the test, but I was strong on film, literature and anatomy."

In November, Mr. Blackwell flew to Spain for a quiz competition and tacked on a visit to London for a special meal. He'd invited all the players on recent "Challenge" teams at Imperial to have dinner, his treat, at an upscale restaurant in the city's Mayfair section. He wanted to acknowledge everyone's success and, as importantly, build camaraderie.

After remarks by Mr. Blackwell, the assembled presented him with a gift: a coffee mug with the words "Imperial Dad."


Mr. Blackwell has fulfilled his ambition to turn quizzing into a full-time profession.Credit...BBC

In the years since his victory, Mr. Blackwell has fulfilled his improbable ambition to turn quizzing into a full-time profession. He now appears on both the U.S. and Australian version of "The Chase," nationally syndicated shows in which a group of mortals play for cash, which they keep unless a somewhat villainous character called the Chaser outplays them. Mr. Blackwell is the only on-staff Chaser on both shows, a dapper and deadpan figure called "The Lightning Bolt" by producers. He regularly swipes more than $100,000 from contestants, and he does it without mercy.

"It's not all that different than being on 'University Challenge,'" he said. "The idea is the same — make someone else go home unhappy."

David Segal is a business reporter for The Times, based in New York. More about David Segal

I missed the rise of Imperial Brandon. Last University Challenge competitors I remember noticing were Bobby Seagull and Eric Monkman