Cuttings November 2015

To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw – review by Susan Pedersen in The Guardian. "For today, when they look at Europe between the wars, many of my students don’t only ask: 'Why Nazis?' They also ask: 'Why empire?' They are puzzled as much by the paradox of Europe’s democracies struggling to preserve imperial rule as they are by the paradox of cultivated Europe sinking (as Kershaw puts it) 'into the pit of barbarism'. Why were Britain and France determined to keep hold of the Middle East after 1919? How central was racism to what historians sometimes call 'the imperial project'? How can one explain the coexistence of imperial and liberal-democratic values?"

Twitter’s heart hits the wrong beat - article by Emily Bell in The Guardian. "The replacement by Twitter of its star icon with a heart last week sent its most ardent users into a thumbs down frenzy of only mildly contained #emojirage.... People who wished to register a coolly ironic acknowledgment of a fellow tweeter’s bon mot suddenly found that instead of the neutral 'I see what you are doing there' star, their thumb was hovering over a tiny red love heart. I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not 'like' let alone 'love' the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing."

The real history of the ‘safe space’ - article by Vaughan Bell in MindHacks blog. "The concept of the ‘safe space’ ... started [with] the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin. ... In the late 1940s, Lewin was asked to help develop leadership training for corporate bosses and out of this work came ... the invention of sensitivity training which was a form of group discussion where members could give honest feedback to each other to allow people to become aware of their unhelpful assumptions, implicit biases, and behaviours that were holding them back as effective leaders. Lewin drew on ideas from group psychotherapy that had been around for years but formalised them into a specific and brief focused group activity. One of the ideas behind sensitivity training, was that honesty and change would only occur if people could be frank and challenge others in an environment of psychological safety. In other words, without judgement. Practically, this means that there is an explicit rule that everyone agrees to at the start of the group. A ‘safe space’ is created, confidential and free of judgement but precisely to allow people to mention concerns without fear of being condemned for them, on the understanding that they’re hoping to change."

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage: the emotional effect of class –  review by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "Savage and his colleagues in the London School of Economics’ sociology department have used the results of the class survey to create a seven-class schema, which reveals the vast and growing disparity in wealth and power between the 'elite' and the 'precariat'.... The new elite is followed by the 'established middle class' – well-off, socially gregarious and keen on the arts.... Members of the 'technical middle class' have as much money as the established middle class but don’t know as many people or possess as much cultural capital. The 'new affluent worker' is working class, but relatively well off and keen to live the good life, as are the group of 'emergent service workers' below them. But it’s the last two groups – 'traditional working class' and 'precariat' – that have suffered most both in relative and absolute terms. The 'precariat' are those whose lives are characterised by unstable, low-earning jobs, who cannot afford to make long-term plans, and whose social connection to those at the very top has grown weaker as the elite class ceases to use public services."

How The Hunger Games staged a revolution - article by Danny Leigh in The Guardian. "As YA fiction has swept all before it commercially, the most frequent explanation is that it acts as a mirror to adolescent life: the toxic cocktail of peer and academic pressures analogised into puppet-masters and epic battles. At one level, this is what The Hunger Games does too. But it also combines the fear of the now with the fear of what’s next. Like teenagers across the west, the girls here have been hit hard by austerity; many of [the] pupils [at the London school where the interviews for this article took place] are bright kids who now see university as priced beyond them. 'One perspective about The Hunger Games is the feeling among the young that what awaits them in adulthood is very unforgiving,' [says] Jacobson [the producer of the Hunger Games series of films]. 'I get that. The world we’ve made for them is a harsh arena.' "

The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraits by Simon Schama: comforting myths of British national character – review by John Gallagher in The Guardian. "Imagine one of the country’s great art collections was opened up to you – you could move things around, dust off the half-forgotten stuff in the basement, shine light on the works you love. What would you do? What story would you tell? This is the idea behind Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain, a book and TV series based on the National Portrait Gallery. First founded to house the portraits of 'those persons who are most honourably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature or in science', the gallery becomes, in Schama’s hands, the basis for a new face-to-face history of the UK."

Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine: a breakthrough collection of graphic short stories – review by Chris Ware in The Guardian. "There’s a certain alchemical balance required when planning a comics story, unpredictable yet based on a few measurable quantities – such as how characters are drawn, move and act around one another – which can either open up avenues of possibility in the author’s mind or set up roadblocks and shut down all dramatic throughways. Clearly, Tomine has found the former passage, especially in "Amber Sweet", a story about a girl frequently mistaken for an internet porn star. Here we see an all-too-rare use of the unreliable narrator in a visual medium that, until only very recently, has unimaginatively taken things at face value. The spaces between Tomine’s panels connect with the mature cartoonist’s electromagnetic spark; he knows exactly which facial expressions and gestures to string together as his characters try to convince others of their authenticity or aims. It’s the reader, however, who must make the largest connections, such as between the narrator of "Amber Sweet" and the sudden appearance of a daughter in another story. Tomine’s omissions are not devious or artsy, but the work of a confident writer mirroring how we conveniently edit out events and people from our memories to suit the narratives we wish had happened. The cumulative leanness and efficiency of these stories have a sharpening effect on one’s own mind."

Violence, victors and victims: how to look at the art of the British empire - article by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "This month, The Remnants of an Army [by Elizabeth Butler, 1879] returned to Tate for the first time in half a century. ... Also being touched up and nursed back to health after more than half a century of neglect, [are] similar images of the age of empire... The occasion for this reassessment of Tate Britain’s vast but until now almost invisible holdings of imperial art is the mounting of an important, brave and well-judged show about this supremely touchy subject...: Artist and Empire – Facing Britain’s Imperial Past. Astonishingly, it is the first major show on British soil to attempt to give a sample of the art of the British empire since that empire imploded in the decade after 1945. It is not hard to see why it has taken so long for an exhibition like this to be mounted. The traditional British response to embarrassment has typically been to pretend something isn’t happening, and it is difficult to think of a subject that is surrounded by a more formidable minefield of potential awkwardness than the art of imperialism.

Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights - article by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "Here’s Wells, writing 75 years ago: 'The enormous change in human conditions to which nearly all our present stresses are due, the abolition of distance and the stupendous increase in power, have flung together the population of the world so that a new way of living has become imperative … The elaboration of methods and material has necessitated a vast development and refinement of espionage, and in addition the increasing difficulty of understanding what the warfare is really about has produced new submersive and demoralising activities of rumour-spreading, propaganda and the like, that complicate and lose contact at last with any rational objective … The uprooting of millions of people who are driven into exile among strangers, who are forced to seek new homes, produces a peculiar exacerbation of the mental strain. Never have there been such crowds of migrating dep-ressing people. They talk languages we do not understand … they stimulate xenophobia without intention … Their necessary discordance with the new populations they invade releases and intensifies the natural distrust and hostility of man for man – which it is the aim of all moral and social training to eliminate … For the restoration and modernisation of human civilisation, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen who we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.' Given how familiar all this sounds, it is interesting that our own Human Rights Act is right now coming under attack."

Seen and heard: November 2015

80 Days – addictive and educational (sort of) game from Inkle Studios, based (a bit) on Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Essentially a resource management game, you play Passpartout making decisions about time and money to travel all around the world in the 80 days allotted while keeping your master Phileas Phogg comfortable. The world is a steampunk version of the 1880s, so long-distance airships, underwater trains and so on to provide many more alternative routes than were actually available to Verne’s travellers. Along the way, Passepartout encounters real contemporary situations and events, which is an educational aspect. But more than that, it’s great fun, and once you’ve got around the world once inevitably you want to try it again with a different route. (See Adventure Gamers review.)

Telltale Games: story mode – intelligent YouTube 30 minute documentary about the games company currently leading the field in narrative games such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. As one of their ex-LucasArts Games founders says, they ended up specialising in four things on which most other games companies had given up: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming and interactive narrative.

Let Us Entertain You – BBC documentary series by Domenic Sandbrook, presenting his thesis that Britain’s historic manufacturing pre-eminence has been replaced by pre-eminence in the creative and entertainment industries. Certainly entertaining, if you’re prepared (as the reviewer of the book comments) to go along with his celebration of popular culture to the exclusion of high art.

Periodic Tales – tremendous exhibition at Compton Verney art gallery, themed around the periodic table of chemistry and stocked with artworks based on the cultural associations of certain elements: gold, silver, iron, lead, copper, cobalt, aluminium, uranium. Highlights were Cornelia Parker's Thirty Pieces of Silver and Anthony Gormley's FUSE 2011.

Memoryhouse – really lovely album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter previously only name to me, but whose music we heard and loved as the accompaniment to the ballet ‘Serpent’ in BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse. Like Philip Glass, but different. An album to put on and just hear, doing nothing else

Seen and heard: October 2015

An Inspector Calls – BBC dramatisation of the JB Priestley play. Powerful, but made the same mistake as the Alastair Sim film version of showing the dead woman in flashback, thus establishing that all the family did indeed encounter the same person and thus successively and collectively bring about her suicide. The point is that it doesn’t matter whether it actually was the same person or not; even if it wasn’t, their guilt remains. “Well, he jolly well inspected us, didn’t he.”

Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You – BBC documentary series about uterine development from conception to birth, with memorable contributions from people for whom the process was unfortunately disrupted – lovely people, great interviews.

The Gamechangers – BBC drama about the making of Grant Theft Auto V and the American lawyer who sued the company on the grounds of its violent influence. Gripping performances by Daniel Radcliffe as Sam Houser of Rockstar Games and Bill Paxton as the lawyer Jack Thompson.

Charles III – Mike Bartlett stage play, imagining a future king’s political crisis in the style and blank verse of a Shakespearean history play, with Robert Powell in the title role at Milton Keynes Theatre. Great theatre, making me think about what it must have been like for Shakespeare’s audiences, for whom his references to (for them) recent history and contemporary popular culture would have just worked, as Bartlett’s did for us. Great gags too, such as the ghost of Diana appearing to give Charles a prophecy, and the Duchess of Cambridge behaving like Lady Macbeth quite contrary to her popular image.

Tengami – graphically brilliant puzzle game, set in a world of pop-up paper structures, in which folding the scenery up and down is part of the puzzle-solving as much as the navigation. A bit short, and the puzzle types are quite limited, and not in the same class as Monument Valley, but still a great game on the iPad.

The Face of Britain by Simon Schama – series of five films, in association with the National Portrait Gallery. If you’re going to do lectures on video or TV, this is how to do it, if you have the budget, and a lecturer as stylish and compelling as Schama. Lovely discussions, around five themes (Power, The People, Fame, Love and Self-portraiture), though as the reviewer of the book comments his power-analysis isn’t all that it might be.

The Perils of Man – appealing and well-received Swiss German adventure game, about a teenage girl living alone with her agoraphobic mother who discovers a message from her scientist ancestors and their secret technology which enables her to perceive risk. Good puzzling and voice acting, and some big human themes addressed; but it didn’t quite wrap up into a whole for me.

Rugby world cup, Fiji v. Uruguay at MK Stadium – Polymnia, in which I sing, was honoured to sing their national anthems before the match.

BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse – BBC televisation of the all-male dance company’s 2014 London performance of ‘Serpent’ and ‘Fallen’. with live music by Max Richter and Armand Amar. Absolutely stunning.

What good is video in online teaching? (And what is Khan Academy doing right?)

Video lectures, we believed, those of us who've been working in distance learning for two decades or more, were bad and ineffective. The public might assume that university distance education meant putting lectures on TV or radio, or onto online video – an assumption reflected in the Open University’s original 1963 conception as ‘the University of the Air’ – but we thought we knew better. There was an old joke, we remembered, about a university lecture being a technology for transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. We were determined not to fall into this trap, focusing our efforts instead on developing "active learning" approaches to avoid students falling into the role of passive recipients. Yet over the past few years the online video lectures of the Khan Academy have become both super-popular and super-successful, and the world of MOOCs is dominated by video lectures. What's going on? And have we been wrong all along?

The reflection in this post has been prompted by three things: first an article 'Video and online learning' by six academics from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the MIT Media Laboratory and a blog post by Tony Bates discussing it; second an interview with Salman Khan, broadcast last year in the radio series The Educators, and still available online; and third a conference paper 'Learning is not a Spectator Sport' by academics from Carnegie Mellon University reporting an experimental study of MOOC learning.

The von Humboldt / MIT paper is based on a survey of 20 courses from 6 major MOOC platforms (Coursera, edX, Udacity, iversity, FutureLearn, and Khan Academy) and finds that “video is the main method of content delivery in nearly all MOOCs.” This seems to have been an unthinking decision by the MOOC makers, rather than a principled choice amongst alternatives: “little consideration has been given to the pedagogical affordances of video, what constitutes an effective learning video, and what learning situations the medium of video is best suited for.” What this suggests to me is that MOOC development has been steered not by people with a background in distance education, but by people with a background in technology – including the paper’s authors themselves: as Tony Bates comments, if their literature review concludes “that the use of video as an instructional tool for online learning is a notably underexplored field”, then they just haven’t looked in the right places because “what they are recommending has been known for a long time”.

So the rush to video in MOOCs doesn’t mean that those of us who have come to online learning out of the distance education tradition are wrong: MOOC designers are simply unaware of that tradition and are having to reinvent the wheel. The third paper is an example of wheel reinvention: researchers looked students taking a MOOC on introductory psychology and found that those who opted to do additional learning activities and comprehension checks did better in the final exam. Thus they re-discovered and re-justified the pedagogy of “learning by doing”, a century after Dewey.

But two elements of the von Humboldt / MIT paper are really useful. One is a typology and technical analysis of video production styles, or ways of organising the visual field of a lecture video, each of which has subtly different affordances for learning. Their 36 types, all illustrated and discussed, are: talking head, presentation slides with voice-over, picture-in-picture, text-overlay, Khan-style tablet capture, Udacity-style tablet capture, actual paper or whiteboard, screencast, animation, classroom lecture, recorded seminar, interview, conversation, live video, webcam capture, demonstration, on location, and green screen. This is a useful menu of choices for video producers to use while planning video making with academics. Even more useful is a typology of the pedagogic uses to which video can be put. Their twelve types are:

• Building rapport – establishing an emotional connection
• Virtual field trips – access to people and places
• Manipulating time and space – macro / micro views and slow motion
• Telling stories – captivating viewers and taking them on a journey
• Motivating learners – stimulating appetite by conveying enthusiasm
• Historical footage – bringing the past to life
• Demonstrations – showing experiments and psychomotor skills
• Visual juxtaposition – creating meaning through contrasting concepts
• Multimedia presentation – combining audio-visual elements

This can be used by learning designers as a prompt list, or just a stimulus to thought, when they are trying to establish with academics why there should be video at all: what pedagogical benefit is so great as to justify the still significant expense. (Notice that ”Communicating information” is not one of them.)

So where do Khan Academy videos fit into this typology? What are they – to judge by their massive popularity – getting right? They certainly have their own production style, sufficiently distinctive to warrant its own category in the von Humboldt / MIT paper, but I believe they are successful not because this production style is somehow superior to all others but because it’s perfectly suited to the subject area with which the Khan Academy originated and the pedagogical approach which it adopted. Though it has now broadened its range of subjects, the Khan Academy’s original focus was on maths and mathematical physics, and its prototypical videos took the form of Salman Khan going through a mathematical problem or exercise. He was never seen himself; what the screen showed was his mathematical working, line by line, handwritten on a tablet, as he explained what he was doing to solve the problem and why. Now what this reproduces is not a lecture but a tutorial, and one of a kind which will be familiar to anyone who’s received a tutorial in maths or physics: the tutor sits in front of a sheet of paper, you sit beside them, with possibly another student on the other side (if there are more than two students in the tutorial it gets complicated), and you watch their working as they go through problems and proofs, sometimes asking you what should be done next, or asking you to complete the next step. The classic way of learning these subjects is through problems and exercises, and what the tutor does is not so much impart information, although they may do that, as model the process of thinking and helping you to reproduce it until you can do it for yourself unaided. This is what the Khan Academy videos reproduce, both in their pedagogy and in the production style which focusses attention not on the tutor but on the maths.

Sarah Montague (interviewing): It's almost as if somebody's sitting beside you...

Salman Khan: Yeah, … you don't see the face, you just see the writing on this kind of digital blackboard, and you hear the voice. And so, it's, I've had some people say it feels like I'm next to them at the kitchen table, some people say it feels like I'm in their head! (Laughs) And actually some people have even said when they do math problems their internal voice is me, which is weird, but I guess cool!

(Khan’s interview for The Educators, from 2’55”)

If this is how people experience Khan Academy videos, it shows how effective they are at enabling students to internalise their teacher – which is one of the most important ways in which learning occurs. Even though video has no general and universal utility in online teaching, and can actually be distracting and time-wasting as well as expensive, the Khan Academy is a reminder of how effective video can be – provided that its content and production style are aligned to subject matter and pedagogy.

Postscript: another important use of video is as part of a "flipped classroom" approach, helpfully described by three lecturers from the University of Essex in 'Will video kill the lecturing star?' on The Guardian's Higher Education Network.

Cuttings: October 2015

[Hindu] Practice: Darshan and Namaste - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "In the Hindu tradition, darshan (or darsana) is to behold the Divine and to allow yourself to be fully seen. Many Hindus visit temples not to see God, but to let God gaze upon them--and then to join God's seeing which is always unconditional acceptance and compassion."

How the magic of cinema unlocked one man’s coma-bound world - article in MindHacks blog. "Lorina Naci has used cinema to show just how sophisticated conscious awareness can be in a ‘minimally conscious’ patient. The trick they used involved an 8 minute edit of 'Bang! You’re dead', a 1961 episode of 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'. In the film, a young boy with a toy gun obsession wanders around aiming and firing at people. Unbeknownst to him, and the adults he aims at, on this day he has found a real gun and it has a live bullet in the chamber.... Naci showed the film to healthy participants. To a separate group she showed a scrambled version involving rearranged one-second segments. This ‘control’ version was important because it contained many of the same features as the original; the same visual patterns, the same objects, the same actions. But it lacked the crucial narrative coherence – the knowledge of the bullet – which generated the suspense.... Next the researchers showed the film to two patients in wakeful comas. In one, ... who had been hospitalised and non-responsive for 16 years, his brain response matched those of the healthy controls who’d seen the film. Like them, activity across the cortex rose and fell with the action of the film, indicating an inner consciousness rich enough to follow the plot."

The latest episode in the ‘Can women have it all?’ soap opera" - review of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business by Helen Lewis in The Guardian. "The book practises what it preaches by having rather a lot to say to anyone with a Y chromosome. Slaughter pinpoints something called 'Halo dad syndrome', where fathers are praised for the slightest achievement, such as remembering to pick the kids up from school. This is patronising, she points out, and reaffirms the existing cultural belief that men are not 'naturally' suited to childcare. In one of the best passages of the book, Slaughter flips such compliments around: 'Imagine that as a woman you’re praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn’t actually expect you could do it so well.' ”

Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical - article by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "Thomas More's Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a 'conspiracy of the rich'. Such men, the book announces, are 'greedy, unscrupulous and useless'. ... Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. The finest of all such works in Britain is the Marxist William Morris’s, one of the very few utopian visions to offer a detailed account of how the political transformation actually came about.... The word 'utopia' means 'nowhere', but it isn’t clear whether this is because the place could exist but happens not to, or whether it is nowhere in much the same sense that a humble Richard Dawkins or a coy Chris Evans is."

Intellectual snobs beware - review of Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory by Matthew Sweet in The Guardian. " 'Whether British culture is the world’s best is an unanswerable and ultimately pointless question,' [Sandbrook] writes, at the beginning of his latest doorstopper. 'But it has a very good claim, pound for pound, to be its most successful.' He has the numbers to prove it: £30m in the bank account of Oxford University after it invested in the software that powered Grand Theft Auto; 400m Harry Potter books, 1bn Beatles albums and 2bn Agatha Christie novels sold. The triumph of Downton Abbey in China, Top Gear in Iran and Doctor Who everywhere. (The Doctor, pleasingly, is never far from Sandbrook’s thoughts.) These are the figures that make us, Sandbrook argues, 'a cultural superpower'. "

‘I was passionate about Austen's anonymity’ - article by Elena Ferrrante in The Guardian. " Elinor’s 'sense' [in Sense and Sensibility] is, in short, the art of living in the world with equilibrium, satisfying her own desires without hurting other women but, rather, offering herself as a support for their fragility.... It seems to me that Austen, by not putting her name on the books she published, did the same thing as Elinor, and in an extremely radical way. She uses neither her own name nor one that she has chosen. Her stories are not reducible to her; rather, they are written from within a tradition that encompasses her and at the same time allows her to express herself. In this sense they are indeed written by a lady, the lady who does not fully coincide with everyday life but peeks out during the often brief time when, in a common room, a space not hers, Austen can write without being disturbed: a lady who disappears whenever something – the disorderly world of the everyday – interrupts her, forcing her to hide the pages. This lady doesn’t have Jane’s anxieties or her reserve. The lady-narrator describes the ferocity of the male world that clusters around income, is afraid of change, lives idly, contends with futility, sees work as degrading. And above all she rests a clear gaze on the condition of women, on the battle between women to win men and money. But she doesn’t have Jane’s natural resentments toward daily life."

In Online Courses, Students Learn More by Doing Than by Watching - article by Ellen Wexler in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  "When students enroll in MOOCs, they almost always watch a series of video lectures. But just watching videos — without also engaging interactively — is an ineffective way to learn, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.... All of the students [on an Introduction to Psychology MOOC] were assigned 11 weekly quizzes and a final examination. Those in the MOOC-only course scored an average of 57 percent on the final. Those in the combined course scored an average of 66 percent. And when students in the combined course completed an interactive activity, they learned six times as much as those who only read the material or watched a video. 'When one is watching a lecture or reading material, there’s an illusion of learning,' says Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and an author of a report on the study. 'Lessons communicated in a lecture don’t stick.' "

Catching Violence at the Beginning - 'Daily Meditation' by Richard Rohr. "One of the reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation twenty-eight years ago was to give activists some grounding in spirituality so they could continue working for social change, but from a stance much different than anger, ideology, or willpower pressing against opposing willpower. Many activists I knew loved Gandhi's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s teachings on nonviolence. But it became clear to me that theirs was often an intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery. I saw people on the left playing the victim and creating victims – exactly what Jesus did not do. It was much more subtle than the same game on the right, but it still proceeded from an unkind and self-righteous heart."

Extremely rare Wicked Bible goes on sale - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "To commit adultery, or not to commit adultery – for hundreds of readers in the 17th century, the answer depended on which bible they consulted, after an unfortunate error in a certain edition of the text omitted to include a vital “not”. Known as the 'Wicked' Bible, the text, printed in 1631, leaves the word 'not' from the seventh commandment. This means that amid exhortations that 'thou shalt not kill', and 'thou shalt not steale', readers are also informed that 'thou shalt commit adultery'. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the printing error only discovered a year later."

From cold war spy to angry old man: the politics of John le Carré - article by Adam Sisman in The Guardian, based on his John le Carré: The Biography. "One reason why The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made such an enormous impact was its seeming authenticity. This, apparently, was the real world of spying: one in which there were no heroes, and the line between right and wrong was at best blurred. The protagonist, Alec Leamas, is not a glamorous figure: he is a tired, middle-aged man on the edge of burnout. ... The moral ambiguities of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the cold war, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the five-star hotels and high-rolling casinos frequented by Bond."

Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin - article by David Mitchell in The Guardian, based on his introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea. "If Earthsea is one of literature’s best-written fantasy worlds, it is also one of the most cerebral. Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power.... From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name.... The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called 'individuation', in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin ...: 'In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the "axis of evil" is within them.' "

What does ‘radical’ actually mean? Well, it depends who you ask … - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. " Can we draw any helpful lessons from [the] confusing tangle of uses [of the word 'radical']? It would be good to know when 'radical' means something nice and when it means something nasty. Should I take a radical attitude to obeying laws I find preposterous? Should you advertise yourself as a baker of radical cronuts? In the end, the political valency of 'radical' simply depends on the power relations between groups. Labour is circumspect about calling itself radical because it doesn’t want to frighten the horses. But the Tories can call themselves radical because they are in office for the next five years and can do whatever they like, which apparently includes cutting working tax credits after promising not to during the election campaign. Now that’s a radical approach to governing with the public’s consent."

How to make a wildlife epic - article by Vincent Graff in Radio Times, 31 Oct to 6 Nov 2015, pp. 8-13. "The narrator for this series is David Attenborough, whose famous authoritative, whispery tones are central to its appeal... 'A good narration is sparse,' he says, 'Don't use any unnecessary words, The visual is always more powerful than the words - so you should only add information that is necessary to fully understand the pictures. You shouldn't repeat what the pictures say.' The narrator must resist the temptation to be too clever, he adds. 'Although all sorts of poetic similes may come into your mind, similes are there for the printed word, in order for you to invoke a picture. If you've already got a picture, there's no point in a simile.' ... However, says Attenborough, 'rhythm is important. You have to tailor the words so that they hit the right picture – the right close-up, the right cut, whatever it is. Pauses are rather more important than the words.'"

Seen and heard: September 2015

Her Story - very good and interesting video-based game by Sam Barlow. The interface simulates a database of short digitised clips from a series of police interviews between June and July 1994, and by searching for keywords you have to work out what happened in the case. To start you off, you're given the keyword "murder", which returns four clips, from which you can work out that the woman interviewed, superbly played by Viva Seifert, is under suspicion of having murdered her husband, but where you go from then is up to you. It's not just about accumulating information; more by luck than judgement, within half a dozen searches I discovered that some of the woman's statements did not fit together at all; and that the story was entering some very murky waters indeed. The game necessarily draws you in, as you start hypothesising about what might be going on, and what keywords might lead you forwards. So powerful is the involvement that some players continue to wonder if even the scripted solution of sorts really tells the full story and whether some of their more outlandish ideas might have a place; Barlow wisely does nothing to discourage this!

Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert - a full and detailed biography of the TV producer (famous for having brought Dr Who to life), but after the early years - pioneering for both TV drama and women in TV drama, a great deal less interesting than I was expecting, at least for those of us outside the business. The chapters increasingly become name-check lists: she produced or commissioned this play or series, which was a triumph or a disaster; she worked with or had a flaming row with this script editor or director or television chief; she had an affair with or broke up with or married this person. Wouldn't make a great TV drama.

The Ascent of Woman - very watchable TV series by historian Amanda Foreman, eschewing grand feminist theory but nevertheless giving intelligent erudite commentary to a world tour of women who made or challenged the tenor of their times. Most of the names will be familiar to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of feminist history, but the neat and unique thing which she does is to let us hear from present-day women of the countries where the historical characters lived, saying what they mean to them. So the past and present is made to feel whole and continuous, somehow affirming and encouraging.

The Pedagogy of Distance and Online Education - Ph.D. thesis by Mary Thorpe (Open University, 2014). A pre-retirement Ph.D. by publication from one of the big names in the field, going back to the era of print-based distance education, and - as one might expect - a consistent defender and proponent of pedagogical sophistication and enrichment, repeatedly challenging lazy but common assumptions that certain technologies (such as print) either entail limited pedagogies or (such as conferencing) will lead to better learning. It's sent me back to several of her key publications: 'The challenge facing course design', in F. Lockwood (ed.) Open and Distance Learning Today (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 175-184; 'Assessment and "third generation" distance education', Distance Education, 19 (1998), pp 266-286; 'Encouraging students to reflect as part of the assignment process: student responses and tutor feedback', Active Learning in Higher Education, 1 (2000), pp. 79-92.

It's Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens, by Danah Boyd (Yale University Press, 2014). Really tremendous and very readable book, astonishingly available free as a PDF, which to a discussion still dominated by doom and utopianism brings good sense, clear thinking and some decent ethnographic research. Boyd is especially good at tracing the continuities of teenage relationship management, rather than giving in to the temptation to see the advent of digital social media as a radical break. Her insights include: teens' engagement with social media is tied to their broader peer groups, so the norms that get reproduced online don't devitate much from the norms that exist at school; they do value privacy but are mostly concerned about evading the gaze of adults with power over them, and they have many strategies other than limiting access for achieving privacy in online public spaces; social divisions often get reproduced online, so information inequalities also get reproduced; and technical skills are correlated with quality of access, which is itself correlated with socio-economic status, so that many "digital natives" are actually quite digitally naive.

Tropes versus Women in Video Games - funny and cool video lectures by Anita Sarkessian, on the stereotyped way women usually appear in computer games. Typically "damselised" - that is, reduced to a state of passive helplessness to provide the plot direction of their rescue by the (male) player-character - alarmingly they often die or are killed at the end of the game, thereby relieving the player character from the task of establishing or sustaining a mature adult relationship with a woman. As she observes, shooter-type games, in which the player's principle means of interacting with the game world is shooting things, don't offer much possibility for sophisticated plot or character development. How sad that a woman should come in for such hostility (as described in her Guardian interview) just for talking sense.

Cuttings: September 2015

Anita Sarkeesian interview: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - article by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."

The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."

Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."

How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."

Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."

The key to better lecturing? Trust your students - article by Simon Lancaster in The Guardian, Higher Education Network. His tips: "You are not obliged to teach the same way you were taught.... Use contact time to engage with students.... Prioritise concepts above facts.... Embrace [already existing] online resources - they’ll save you time.... Trust your students - they are your collaborators in learning.... There is reward and recognition out there for teaching"

How eBay built a new world on little more than trust - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "eBay played a significant role in persuading millions of people who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, cyberspace that there might actually be something in this internet thing. I saw that happen in my own family. My elderly mother-in-law was a technophobe from central casting. She thought that mobile phones were weird and could not understand why I kept going on about 'this internet thing'. In desperation one day, I thought of showing her eBay. I logged in, and knowing that she was passionately interested in pottery and porcelain, clicked on some auctions in that area of the site. In an instant she was transfixed: she might not have been interested in technology, but boy, was she interested in porcelain. Suddenly, for her, the internet made sense. It was transformed in her mind from an obsession of her geeky son-in-law into something that would be useful to normal human beings. And in that respect, she was simply treading the same path as hundreds of millions of other people."

Promised You a Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett: how today’s Britain was born in the early 80s - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "According to John Hoskyns, the head of her policy unit, [Margaret Thatcher] could be found in the summer of 1981 sitting on a seat at the end of her garden thinking: 'It’s all gone wrong. I don’t think it will ever come right. I’m the most unpopular prime minister ever. I will go down as a total disaster.' A year later, even as the [Falklands] taskforce was still heaving and wallowing its way homeward, the Tories were suddenly leading Labour by 20% in the polls and Thatcher was chastising 'the waverers and the faint hearts … who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did', and announcing that Britain had 'found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back'. In the election the following year, the Tories won their biggest victory since Harold Macmillan’s in 1959. A Commons majority of 144 meant that that they were likely to last at least two more terms in government, the years in which Thatcherism came into its own."

Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out - article by John McPhee in The New Yorker. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. Quoting Ernest Hemmingway's non-fiction Death in the Afternoon, 1932: “'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'.... [As a writer at Time magazine] you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said 'Green 5' or 'Green 8' or 'Green 15' or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil... Groan as much as you liked, you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your 'finished' piece, to see what could be left out.... Greening has stayed with me, though, because for four decades I have inflicted it on my college writing students, handing them nine or ten swatches of photocopied prose, each marked 'Green 3' or 'Green 4' or whatever."

A Personal Take on Go Set a Watchman - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin, 3 August 2015. "Reviews that describe the Attticus of Watchman as having become a racist, or being revealed as a racist, by clinging to the idealized Atticus of Mockingbird may miss the point of Watchman. Atticus hasn’t changed. We saw him through his young daughter’s eyes as faultless. Now, seen by his grown daughter, we can see him as imperfect: a good man who, being fully committed to living, working, and having friends in an unjust society, makes the compromises and performs the hypocrisies required of its members.... So, the daughter returning home on a visit finds her father, her model of clear thinking and courageous honesty, is siding with the bigots; her boyfriend, her model of brotherly kindness, is siding with the bigots. What’s she to do? The answer from outside is quick and easy: of course she rebels. She rises in wrath, denounces, disowns, and departs.... It’s what I would have imagined her doing, and believed it absolutely necessary for her to do, before I married into a white Southern family and lived with them some years...."

Backdoors won’t work. Just ask the TSA. (Or the NSC.) - blog post by John Naugton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "[An article by Julian Huppert about why there shouldn't be backdoors in encryption software illustrates] how useful it is to have a mundane, everyday illustration of an important idea. ... I wasted [many years] trying to persuade lay audiences about the importance of open source software. My argument was that software that affects our lives should never be impenetrable or unalterable ‘black boxes’ — the 'freedom to tinker' was vital. This argument got precisely nowhere. And then, one day, I suddenly understood why: my audiences had never written a line of software. It was an entirely alien concept to them. So the next time I gave the talk I brought a copy of my favourite recipe book with me. Before starting, I asked who in the audience cooked or baked? Every hand went up. So then I turned to a particular recipe that had 300ml of double cream as one ingredient. 'Now', I said, 'double cream if not good for a guy like me, so I’d like to replace it with creme fraiche. But imagine that we lived in a world where, if I wanted to do that, I would have to write to the authoress to seek her permission, and perhaps to pay a fee. What would you think of that?' And of course they all said that it would be nuts. 'Well then', was the payoff line, 'now you understand why open source software is important.' "

Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal: hissy fits about apostrophes - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "As Crystal writes, scribes started to punctuate in order to make manuscripts easier to read aloud: they were signalling pauses and intonational effects. Grammarians and, later, printers adopted the marks, and tried to systematise them, as aids to semantic understanding on the page. The marks continue to serve both purposes.'This,' Crystal writes, 'is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today.' His central argument, buttressed by countless well-chosen examples and enlivened by the odd whimsical digression, is that neither a phonetic, nor a semantic, nor a grammatical account of our punctuation system is singly sufficient. Those hoping to make punctuation logically consistent are chasing a will o’ the wisp – and ignoring the aesthetics and the pragmatics of practice. But nor is it a complete free-for-all. There are discoverable rules, or at least workable generalisations, about how punctuation functions. However, they are discoverable by the study of usage rather than from old school textbooks."

Why the suffragettes still matter: 'they dared to act as the equals of men' - articles by Sarah Crompton and others in The Guardian. "As a new film Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan as a passionate campaigner for votes for women, arrives in cinemas half a century later, it is strange suddenly to realise that [the] song for Mrs Banks [in the film Mary Poppins], dreamed up on a whim, stands as one of the most famous cultural representations of the women who, in the early years of the 20th century, fought fiercely and resolutely for the vote, breaking laws that they believed were unjust and engaging in a campaign of active resistance. What’s more, the sparky wit of 'Sister Suffragette' has helped the musical, full of strong, self-motivated women, to be discussed – with some seriousness – as a feminist tract, a representation of different kinds of womanhood within the candyfloss surroundings of Cherry Tree Lane. Yet in 1964, when women were talking about liberation, and the counterculture was in full swing, it can also be seen as a slap in the face for their ideals – a throwback to the negative image of a suffragette as someone who is prepared to sacrifice everything, even her children, for her beliefs."

Way to go: the woman who invented Britain’s road signs - article by Homa Khalelli in The Guardian. "More than half a century ago, [Margaret] Calvert, along with her colleague Jock Kinneir, took on what he called 'possibly the biggest graphic design job ever' – creating a new signage system for Britain’s roads.... The pair were asked to design signs for the first motorway in the UK. Sleek, modern and made to signal 'a common language' with Europe, they were colour-coded, easy to read at speed (the 70mph limit was not yet in place), distinctive and uncluttered. Then, when the government became worried about the state of the nation’s roads – whose signs were a jumble of words, fonts and styles – the duo were asked to do the same for all national roads. Today, their triangles warning of children crossing or slippery surfaces, and circles prohibiting right turns, have become such an integral part of the national landscape it is hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. Although they may not have the glamour of other iconic British designs, it’s easy to see what designers find so impressive in the pleasing simplicity of their arrows, and the surprising loveliness of their running deer."

Seen and heard: August 2015

Blackwell Epiphany - final adventure game in the Blackwell sequence. A strong and fitting end, though unlike some other players I didn't cry or come close to it at the denouement. Deserving of its classic status, and a case study of what can be achieved with a relatively simple game engine and some very good writing.

David Mitchell, Thinking About It Only Makes it Worse - fun collection of essays from his Observer column, with witty and genuinely perceptive angles on politics, popular culture, and life in general.

Partners in Crime - or Tommy and Tuppence, as I think most people are calling it. Very agreeable BBC drama series featuring Agatha Christie's husband-and-wife amateur detectives, with David Walliams and Jessica Rayne presenting just the right hint of camp. Particularly nice to see the character Uncle Tony, who is something hush-hush in the secret service, played by James Fleet from The Vicar of Dibley. If running the secret service is what Hugo Horton did when he grew up, it could explain a thing or two.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.- new film. We had low expectations, given the poor reviews, but found it surprisingly acceptable. Henry Cavill wears a suit well and delivers the appropriate charm for Napoleon Solo, and though Arnie Hammer is an entirely different Illya Kuryakin from David McCallum (he's much taller for one thing, and more angry) the banter between the two of the is top class, and so is the sixties cool (Italian fashion houses, motor racing, yachts on the Mediterranean). Hugh Grant is supremely avuncular as Mr Waverley, contrasting with the oppressive parents of their own pre-U.N.C.L.E. secret services, paving the way for a franchise which I for one would be very happy to see. One of the ideas for re-booting the James Bond franchise, before Daniel Craig gave it a shot of adrenaline, was to return Bond to his historical roots, re-setting him in the Cold War of the '50s and '60s. Well, U.N.C.L.E. has got there first.

Danny and the Human Zoo - BBC TV drama by and loosely based on the early life of Lenny Henry, taking a few liberties with the biographical facts to tell what I guess was the emotional truth of his story: about what he had to do to fit in, first as a kid bullied at school (impressions – the same ones that all the impressionists did, but as he said, “in colour”) and then an aspiring young entertainer (joining the Black and White Minstrel Show), from which he had to break away from to find his own voice as a comedian and now a fine actor.

Alina Ibragimova Plays Bach – a pair of BBC promenade concerts. Some of the most sensational music ever written for the violin, stunningly played by a small woman alone on the vast stage of the Albert Hall. So intense, we could only listen to one at a time. However did she manage three in a concert, with the remaining three a few days later?

Cuttings: August 2015

Shhhhhhh: an exploration of silence - review of BBC Radio 4 programme 'Shhhhhhh' by Hannah Verdier in The Guardian. "Silence isn’t something you hear much on the radio.... That dead air, the interview gone wrong, the pause of doom. So Lucy Powell’s hour-long exploration of silence, Shhhhhhh, was welcome and compelling. Powell admits to being 'enamoured and perplexed' by silence. Her fascination began when a zen master set her a kōan... Her quest continues in this thought-provoking documentary, which smoothly leaps from one theory to the next with great enthusiasm.... In the increasingly noisy world, the contrast between everyday buzz and the nearest we ever get to silence is sharp. It’s powerful: from a teenage sulk to the two minutes’ silence of remembrance. 'It is the stuff of comedy and the end of tragedy. It is as full of meaning and almost as various as speech,' concludes Powell. Happiness, sadness, peace and mortality: who would have thought silence could provoke such a broad investigation? Her passion for silence is contagious, inspiring listeners to switch off and go and find a quiet space of their own. Shhhhhhh!"

Yes Please by Amy Poehler: a "non-book" - review by Laura Miller in The Guardian. "Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers, so technically, it is a book. However, it's the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a 'non-book', meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exmplifying the form. It is not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. It is hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren't already familiar with Amy Poehler's work in film, TV and improv comedy. It is meant for those people who, on hearing Poehler's name, explain, 'Oh, I love her!' Not that there aren't many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time..."

I believe in an authority greater than David Cameron’s. Am I an extremist? - 'Loose canon' column by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "The Church of England is the longest-running prevent strategy in history. If not from its inception, then certainly from the end of the English civil war, the big idea of the C of E was to prevent radicalisation – precisely the sort of radicalisation that led to religious people butchering each other throughout the 1630s and 40s. ... Increasingly suspicious of theological dispute, the idea was to kill off God – or at least God-talk – with religion. ...Religion itself – going to church and so on – was reclaimable as a part of the much-needed project of national togetherness.... But God had to be kept out of it as much as possible. ...And then along comes Islam – and, thankfully, it disrupts this absurd game and refuses to play by the rules. Its practitioners want to talk about God, sex and politics rather than mortgages, school places and the latest Boden catalogue. ... But David Cameron’s whole attack upon 'non-violent extremism', his upping the ante on the Prevent agenda, is an attempt to replay that clapped-out C of E strategy of stopping people talking about God in a way that might have social or political consequences."

Inside Out: what universities can learn from Pixar about emotions - article in The Conversation by Emma Jones. "In Inside Out, it is emotions which are guiding Riley’s every waking moment and even influencing her dreams.... But for centuries, stemming from the work of philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, emotions have been viewed largely as a series of reckless impulses that were unthinking and potentially destructive..... If Inside Out’s producer, Pete Docter, had subscribed to this theory, the five emotions would have been relegated to a small broom cupboard in the far corner of 'headquarters' and the console guiding Riley would have been firmly in the control of a large, overbearing figure known as cognition or reason....Inside Out follows more recent philosophical and scientific thinking in ascribing a value and importance to emotions.... However, the world of higher education has not yet caught up with contemporary thinking on emotions. There is still a tendency for individual disciplines and departments to focus on developing their own academic character and traditions with emotions viewed as belonging solely in the pastoral domain."

Headings Are Pick-Up Lines: 5 Tips for Writing Headlines That Convert - article on Nielsen/Norman Group website by Hoa Loranger. "A headline is often the first piece of content people read. And often it is the ONLY thing people read. If you want to make your encounters with people to be successful, make sure to write solid headlines.... Below are 5 tips for writing engaging headlines:
1. Make sure the headline works out of context.... 2. Tell readers something useful.... 3. Don't succumb to cute or faddish vocabulary.... 4. Omit nonessential words.... 5. Front-load headings with strong keywords."

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton - review by Nicholae Guyatt in The Guardian. "Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name.... The central paradox of Sutton’s book, which he acknowledges but never quite resolves, is why anyone expecting Armageddon would waste time on politics. For more than a century, prophecy adherents have largely agreed on the end times sequence: war in the Middle East, world government and the rise of the antichrist will mark a seven-year period known as the tribulation. Jews will suffer particular torture, but will ultimately find refuge in Christ. Evangelicals can afford to be sanguine about this because they think God will teleport them to heaven just before things turn bad.... The idea of impending doom has always allowed outsiders to make a virtue of their marginalisation. We can see this in the in the 20s and 30s, when American evangelicals struggled to break into the political mainstream. It seems less true of the period after the second world war as Christian fundamentalism found a foothold in the Republican party. The most iconic postwar evangelicals – Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson – occasionally predicted that the end times were approaching, but focused their energies on mending a broken world. The religious right rejected the idea that vice and godlessness would sweep the US towards apocalypse, looking to mobilise a 'moral majority' behind conservative principles."

Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi - review by Avi Schalim in The Guardian. "In 2005, Karmi returned to her homeland not as a tourist but as a consultant to the ministry of media and communications of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She wanted to be at the heart of things, to be part of the community, to make her contribution to state-building.... Karmi’s entire life had centred on the fundamental facts of the catastrophe of 1948, from which all else was derivative. By her own estimation, she is one of the custodians of Palestinian history. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, people like her are irrelevant, far removed from the immediate reality of the extraordinarily harsh conditions imposed on them by the Israelis, their army and their settlements. It was not that the past was another country. But the locals were more preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival against a brutal oppressor than with the grand Palestinian narrative of the past."

‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’ - interview with Sara Paretsky by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. "The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism; so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to 'write a crime novel ... that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society'. With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that; five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to 'helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction'. 'Without her example,' said Val McDermid, speaking at this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival, where Paretsky was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award, 'many of us wouldn’t be where we are today.'"

The arts, the law and freedom of speech - article by Julia Farrington in The Guardian. "We have a problem. The heckler’s veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police have shown that they will all too often take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet still find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protest is trumping the right to freedom of artistic expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy age of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut down are easily made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression."

Ford Madox Ford: as scary as HP Lovecraft? - article by Ned Beauman in The Guardian. "Ford and Lovecraft are not often discussed in the same breath. But in fact they are very similar. The difference is that Lovecraft appears to be writing about cosmic horror but is really writing about sex, whereas Ford appears to be writing about sex but is really writing about cosmic horror. Another way of putting it is that they are writing about exactly the same thing: the feeling that if you peel back the skin of everyday reality, what you will see underneath is something so alien that it will burn away all your sanity points in an instant."

Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an 'F' pattern: the top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works by default. The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away."

PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The problem is that any contradictions at the heart of capitalism have always generated contradictory political responses from its opponents. Should a fatally flawed system be allowed to destroy itself or should it be overthrown by force? Can its failings be corrected by taking it over or should socialists opt out altogether and create their own alternative communities? You will get very different answers depending on whether you start with Fourier or Marx, Chartism or Leninism. By touching base with all these approaches and more, Mason seems to indicate that anything goes. He wants more cooperative schemes of free exchange – a 'sharing' economy to replace a predatory one – and more collective ownership as well. He wants the state to do more to tame private finance and individuals to do more to bypass it. The eclecticism of Mason’s approach to economics only produces confusion when it comes to politics."

Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments, They’re Just Different - article by Casey Fabris in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Although some instructors are phasing out journal-keeping assignments in favor of a class blog, a study has found that blogs are not inherently better instructional tools.... With all the hype about blogging, [Drew] Foster ...compared more than 2,000 blog posts and journal entries from intro-sociology classes at [the University of] Michigan. He expected the blogs to yield reflections that were more thoughtful, but that wasn’t what he found. It’s not that one format is better than the other, he discovered, it’s that they’re different. Public blogs encourage students to take intellectual risks, and private journals encourage them to take personal ones."

Living in the age of permawar - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian. "So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own."

Banksy's Dismaland: 'amusements and anarchism' in artist’s biggest project yet - review by Mark Brown in The Guardian. (See pictures.) "He describes it as a 'family theme park unsuitable for small children' – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why. In one tent would-be anarchists can find out how to unlock the Adshel posters seen at bus stops. For £5 people can buy the tools to break into them, replacing the official posters with any propaganda they please.... Across the way is a 'pocket money loans' shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen. ... Other highlights include the Jeffrey Archer Memorial Fire Pit where visitors can warm themselves around a daily burning of the local lord’s books; a model boat pond with dead bodies and overly crowded boats full of asylum seekers; and a puppet revue show constructed from the contents of Hackney skips. In the moat around the castle is an armour-plated riot control vehicle built to serve in Northern Ireland which is now a children’s slide. Banksy himself has created 10 new works, including the Cinderella crash in a large castle. Visitors walk in to discover the pumpkin carriage crashed, Cinderella and horses dead, and paparazzi madly taking photos."

Anita Sarkeesian: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - interview by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."

The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."

Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."

How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."

Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."

Pushing stuff into people: how NOT to do training, by Charlie Chaplin

I was reminded of this scene from Chaplin's film 'Modern Times' recently when discussing staff development.

Credit for seeing the feeding machine as a metaphor for (bad) training goes to John O'Donoghue, who played this clip during a conference at the University of Wolverhampton's Learning Lab in 2001. His point was that e-learning (as we called it back then) was being seen by managers as a way of avoiding the expense and lost time of sending staff away on training courses, just as the manager in this clip hopes to avoid the expense and lost time of his workers stopping for lunch. But if all e-learning does is try to push information into people, it's likely to be as ineffective and impractical as the feeding machine.

In this connection, the speech from the machine salesman given in the preceding scene (ironically delivered by gramophone record) is particularly interesting, because in 2001 it did sound precisely like the way in which e-learning was being sold.

Good morning, my friends. This record comes to you through the Sales Talk Transcription Company, Incorporated: your speaker, the Mechanical Salesman. May I take the pleasure of introducing Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, the inventor of the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work? Don't stop for lunch: be ahead of your competitor. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead. Allow us to point out some of the features of this wonderful machine: its beautiful, aerodynamic, streamlined body; its smoothness of action, made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearings. Let us acquaint you with our automaton soup plate - its compressed-air blower, no breath necessary, no energy required to cool the soup. Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food pusher. Observe our counter-shaft, double-knee-action corn feeder, with its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper: its factors of control insure against spots on the shirt front. These are but a few of the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine. Let us demonstrate with one of your workers, for actions speak louder than words. Remember, if you wish to keep ahead of your competitor, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of the Billows Feeding Machine.

Seen and heard: July 2015

This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Trouble Life of the BBC – book by Charlotte Higgins. A journalist’s touch makes this an easy but illuminating read, moving seamlessly between historical account and perennial broadcasting issues. How far-sighted of Alan Rusbridger (then Editor of The Guardian) to assign her to work on this book, now paying dividends for the wider context it provides as the renegotiation of the BBC Charter – with potentially radical changes to the BBC’s scope and mission – kicks off in earnest.

Mr Holmes – new film, with Ian McKellen, excellent of course, playing Sherlock Holmes convincingly at three different ages or stages: old, very old but healthy, and very old and ill. Great concept: the long-retired Holmes, keeping bees in the Sussex Downs, struggling to remember his last case which was the reason he gave up detection, with the audience invited to solve the mystery – both intellectual and emotional – along with him as detail after detail successively becomes clear. A lovely tale, another great piece of work from BBC Films.

Gloucester Cathedral – a great place to spend a day, wandering along the side aisles and through the quire (sic) and lady chapel (one of the biggest I’ve seen) and around the cloister court, stopping off for the occasional history lesson from the excellent walk-around guide leaflet or for lunch in the café or for souvenir hunting in the shop. Very nice to see so many contemporary statues in the gothic niches, as some kind of replacement for those destroyed at the Reformation.

Eric Whitacre singers with Laura Mvula – performing in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Cheltenham Festival, with the bonus that we also got hear them rehearse in the afternoon. The Eric Whitacre sound – all the standards, from 'Lux Aurumque' to 'Sleep', wonderful in the resonant acoustic – segued beautifully with Renaissance Polyphony (Dufay’s 'Ave maris stella') and the harmonic backing to three Mvula numbers (which we’ve told them they should record). Well worth the journey, well worth the price of admission.

The Blackwell Deception – fourth adventure game in the Blackwell sequence created by Dave Gilbert. Extraordinary how the basic story premise – a New York medium and her private eye spirit guide find unhappy spirits and help them to move on – has been spun through so many variations and taken to such depths.

Inside Out – very smart new film from Pixar, dramatising the inner emotional life of an eleven-year -old girl. Actually it cheats in a way: whereas Anger, Fear and Disgust and to a lesser extent Sadness are pure emotions and act only according to their type, Joy is actually a rounded character in her own right. She has her hang-ups (an obsession with giving her girl a “perfect day”) and her own inner emotions (fear and panic when events slip out of her control, contempt for Sadness when she is too depressed to continue), and goes on her own emotional journey as she comes to realise that life isn’t all about her. (For me, the beautiful smile which Sadness gives when Joy finally acknowledges and accepts her is the culmination of the film.) A nice article by OU academic Emma Jones points out how the film reflects the rehabilitation of the emotions in our conception of human nature: not so long ago, such a film would have shown cognitive reason in charge of the mental headquarters, with the emotions relegated to a cupboard.