Cuttings December 2014

What should we do with private schools? -  article by David Kynaston in The Guardian. "Are we sure that the systematic pursuit of social mobility is necessarily such a good idea? ... There is the argument that to bang on about social mobility is, whether out of naivety or pragmatic calculation, to be choosing the soft option. Or put another way, that it may in its own terms be justified to pursue greater equality of opportunity, but that what matters far more to the welfare of most people is greater equality of outcome – a far tougher policy objective, but one almost entirely written out of the script during the New Labour years and now only falteringly returned to."

What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."

The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."

Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."

Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' -  meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."

Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"

Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."

Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."

That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.

Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."