This is no amateur operation. Every computer trails a variety inputs: USB multipliers, memory card receivers, and microSD adapters. A virus scan is initiated on each new connection. Each PC is running some version of a copy utility to facilitate the process. The price is a standard 40 ougiya per song, about $0.14; like every market, discounts are available for bulk purchases. The music on the computers is dictated by the owners. Hassaniya music is most often carried by young Maurs, Senegalese Mbalax and folk by Pulaar and Wolof kids. While I’m searching for Hausa film music, I’m directed to the sole Hausa man in the market, a vendor from Niamey. I sit with the vendors, scrolling through the songs on VLC, selecting with a nod or a pass, the files copied to a folder, tallied, and transferred to my USB.

All I see are dead people.

Our perception of eras seems chiefly dependent on the limitations of the technology that records them. The 20s are speeded up in our heads because the cameras were cranked by hand, creating an unnaturally hasty frame-rate. The 40s, however, are in part characterised by the crackly analogue sound that accompanies most war footage. The 50s are a combination of starchy monochrome US shows and lush cinematic Eastmancolor that stretches into the 60s: this is the era of glamour and dreams, and a colour palette Mad Men seeks to emulate. The 70s have a raw deal: they seem to chiefly exist in the form of grim, murky 16mm news footage of people gazing sullenly at acres of brown wallpaper. With the sole exception of the Wombles, everyone in 70s footage looks as if they’re being held there against their will.

Then in the 80s, our memories are transferred on to video, lending them a shiny, slightly tinny feel. The analogue video age lasts until roughly the turn of the century, at which point everything starts turning crisp and widescreen. Around 2005 things start making the transition to HD – and then we get to today, and a weird new trend is emerging. I first noticed it some time around the Egyptian revolution, when I was suddenly struck by a Sky News report from Cairo that looked almost precisely like a movie. Not in terms of action (although that helped – there were people rioting on camelback), but in terms of picture quality. It seemed to be shot using fancy lenses. The depth of field was different to standard news reports, which traditionally tend to have everything in focus at once, and it appeared to be running at a filmic 24 frames per second. The end result was that it resembled a sleek advert framing the Arab Spring as a lifestyle choice. I kept expecting it to cut to a Pepsi Max pack shot.

Since then, I’ve noticed similarly glossy-looking reports popping up on Newsnight and the like, so it may not be long until this is the norm. I’m guessing it’s a practical decision rather than an artistic one: this is how the new ultra-portable, ultra-useful digital cameras make things look: everything’s a teeny bit polished, a teeny bit Instagrammed. You see it everywhere: even Holby City looks like a movie these days. The news is just following suit.

We’re running out of visions of the future except dystopias,” Morrison says. “The superhero is Western culture’s last-gasp attempt to say there’s a future for us.” Sitting in his drafty house overlooking Loch Long, an hour outside his hometown of Glasgow, the 52-year-old writer smiles. “The creators of superheroes were all freaks,” he says. “People forget that—they were all outcasts, on the margins of society.” And then, inevitably, he shifts from the third person to the first. “We’re people who don’t fit into normal society.

It’s only by making the present strange that we can possibly hope to make the future possible.

There are now many historians who study popular culture, lowbrow entertainment, and the people of the streets, but I am always dismayed to find that they treat every saloon, high-heel shoe, or rock song as something else. If they are sympathetic to the people who consumed them, such things are remade into ‘resistance’ against oppression or ‘collective alternatives’ to capitalist individualism. God forbid they could be simply and only fun.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life, and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

A New Zealand company plans to implant pig cells in the human brain in a clinical trial to treat Parkinson’s disease and help improve movement and brain functions in patients. The clinical trials, planned for next year, would be the first using pig brain cells for potential treatment in humans. Living Cell Technologies Ltd said on Tuesday the treatment involves transplanting “support” cells from the brain of pigs that can help repair damaged nerve tissue in people with Parkinson’s.