A Little History of Religion by Richard Holloway: God versus oppression - review by Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian. "This history is 'little' not in the sense of being compact, punchy or condensed, but in the way that you might say 'that’s a nice little house', or 'I’ll just have a little cup of coffee”'. It is a 'little history' because it is written from a comfortable armchair. Holloway’s is an unashamedly, but apparently unselfconsciously, Protestant account. He takes it for granted that the only religious experience that matters is divine revelation, when God talks directly to human beings: none of that ritual mumbo-jumbo that bothers the anthropologists. So we race past entire areas of human experience. He explicitly states that Shinto, ancient Greek polytheist and native American beliefs aren’t proper religion; presumably he would say the same about the indigenous cultures of Africa or South America, since he never mentions them.... Holloway is at his best in the closing chapters, where he explores the meaning for us today of thousands of years of reflection on religion, this most peculiar aspect of human culture. Here he captures sympathetically and undogmatically the impasse that we have reached, where science, liberal values, secularism, religious conservatism, global diversity, postcolonialism and fundamentalism are on a terrifying collision course. His diagnosis of the situation is spot-on. If there is a solution to be found, however, it will lie not in partisan 'little histories' like this, but in an expansive, generous, self-aware and intellectually sophisticated understanding of how we ended up here."
‘Oh Excellent Air Bag!’: two centuries of laughing gas - review by Frances Wilson in The Guardian. "This exuberant anthology of responses to nitrous oxide, edited with wit and imagination by Adam Green, begins with extracts from Davy’s Researches and ends with a one-act play by Theodore Dreiser called Laughing Gas (1916).... The press that has brought us this heavenly volume is the publishing wing of the Public Domain Review, an internet journal dedicated to releasing out of copyright material from the history of ideas. An Aladdin’s cave of curiosities, it is for me the best thing on the web, and '"Oh Excellent Air Bag!"' has all the generosity, waywardness and rollicking spirit of the online project. How many other books furnish their reader with an 'Index of Exclamations and Similes'?"
In the age of the algorithm, the human gatekeeper is back - article by Michael Bhaskar in The Guardian. "The more we have, the more we rely on algorithms and automated recommendation systems. Hence the unstoppable march of algorithmic recommendations, machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data into the cultural sphere. Yet this isn’t the end of the story. Search, for example, tells us what we want to know, but can’t help if we don’t already know what we want. Far from disappearing, human curation and sensibilities have a new value in the age of algorithms.... Curation can be a clumsy, sometimes maligned word, but with its Latin root curare (to take care of), it captures this irreplaceable human touch. We want to be surprised. We want expertise, distinctive aesthetic judgments, clear expenditure of time and effort. We relish the messy reality of another’s taste and a trusted personal connection. We don’t just want correlations – we want a why, a narrative, which machines can’t provide. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this won’t be left solely to algorithms. Unlike so many sectors experiencing technological disruption, from self-driving cars to automated accountancy, the cultural sphere will always value human choice, the unique perspective."
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin - article by Julie Phillips in The New Yorker. "The history of America is one of conflicting fantasies: clashes over what stories are told and who gets to tell them. If the Bundy brothers [the armed anti-government agitators who occupied an Eastern Oregon wildlife refuge] were in love with one side of the American dream—stories of wars fought and won, land taken and tamed—Le Guin has spent a career exploring another, distinctly less triumphalist side. She sees herself as a Western writer, though her work has had a wide range of settings, from the Oregon coast to an anarchist utopia and a California that exists in the future but resembles the past. Keeping an ambivalent distance from the centers of literary power, she makes room in her work for other voices. She has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or 'McMagic' but the imagination as a subversive force. 'Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption,' she has written, 'and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.'”
How we got to The Girl on the Train: the rise of the psychological thriller - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "Calling a thriller 'psychological' credits it with a kind of literary complexity. The very first recorded use of the term 'psychological thriller' was in an admiring review of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil in 1925. Most dictionaries of literary terms lack an entry for this genre, as if it were a figment of reviewers’ or publishers’ imaginations.... In one way these stories are the opposite of the serial killer fantasies with which we have been diverting ourselves for several decades. In the psychological thriller the killer is not a dedicated monster, it is someone close to us, someone familiar. The genre thrives in domestic settings.... In his great novels of the 1860s, [Wilkie] Collins invented a series of narrative tricks and peculiar plot elements that thriller writers still draw on. The Girl on the Train depends on the fact that one of its narrators, Rachel, suffers from alcohol-induced memory loss. She struggles through the book to recover the memories that might explain a woman’s mysterious disappearance. She even wonders whether she might somehow be responsible. It was Collins who introduced to the English novel this strangest of possibilities: that a person might not know what they know – might not even know what they have done.... [Collins] pioneered the use of multiple narrators. His preface to The Woman in White declared, 'An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the book.' Collins made it possible that a narrator might even be a culprit. He showed how to extract thrills from narrative unease."
The History Thieves by Ian Cobain: how Britain covered up its imperial crimes - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "Britain’s retreat from empire is remembered in a popular iconography that contains only a little violence.... For a postwar generation like mine, too young for national service and a troopship to the colonies, most of it happened inside the local Regal or Odeon. Movietone footage would show Princess X or Prince Y standing on a podium to witness a ceremony of national independence, smiling at the native dancers as fireworks explode overhead. This book supplies a more troubling image: as the sun sets on the greatest empire the world has ever seen, long columns of smoke fill the tropical skies. In a thousand bonfires, Britain is burning the historical evidence... This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been 'migrated' to the UK or destroyed abroad."
This Faithful Machine - article by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in The Paris Review, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Gag pieces advertising pencils or fountain pens as feature-laden 'word processors' became a staple of the 1980s computer press. Peter McWilliams stretched the joke to a short book about the fictitious McWilliams II Word Processor (Portable! User friendly! Prints characters from every known language!). Users of all stripes were coming to grips with the strange new ontology of writing on the screen. 'Writing with light' was the phrase authors invoked over and over again. 'It seemed like the future,' Peter Straub said of his own IBM Displaywriter, bought to collaborate long-distance on The Talisman with Stephen King, who had at the time what he delighted in referring to as his 'great big Wang.' But writing with light had its perils, too: notoriously temperamental floppy disks were given to spawning 'bad sectors,' a phenomenon so rampant that Amy Tan founded a Kaypro computer-support group with that name shortly before the start of her own fiction career in San Francisco. Other writers worried what would happen when their words slid off of the edge of the glowing glass screen—the manual accompanying Perfect Writer, the Kaypro’s default software, came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users."
Virtual reality: the Guardian's 6x9 is shown at the White House - article by Francesca Panetta in the online members only section of The Guardian. "Some of you may have seen 6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement, which we launched on theguardian.com in April. For those of you unfamiliar with the project, you can watch it on your smartphone by downloading an app, and using a pair of goggles such as the affordable Google Cardboard or a Gear VR. Once 6x9 begins, you are transported into a room that measures six foot by nine foot – the average size of so-called “supermax” isolation cells in the US. There are between 80,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement in the US, and the piece gives a glimpse from the inside: the claustrophobia; the inhumane conditions where you live next to your toilet while your food arrives on a tray through a slot twice a day; the psychological disturbances that can result from sensory deprivation. In 6x9, you get a very real sense of the disturbances experienced by the formerly incarcerated prisoners who feature in the piece. You hallucinate, float to the ceiling, your vision begins to blur. Before its White House appearance, 6x9 travelled from the Sundance festival in Utah to the Tribeca festival (where it was watched by, among others, Robert de Niro) in New York. But South by South Lawn was particularly important because of the event’s aims. With 6x9, we wanted to allow our audience to feel what it is like to be in solitary confinement, but we also wanted to effect change." (See also video.)
The Terranauts by TC Boyle: ‘an ark to save humanity’ - review by M. John Haarrison in The Guardian. "Hermetically sealed under three-eighths of an inch of armoured glass in the remote Arizona desert, Ecosphere 2 contains several artificial biomes, including savanna, a rainforest and a bijou sea with its own coral reef. Internal air pressure is controlled by vast mechanical lungs. Two thousand sensors gauge 'everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity'. The whole contraption burns thousands of kilowatt-hours of energy a day to support the eight human beings who live inside. Their aim? To survive for two years, sustained only by what they produce. Nothing in, nothing out. ... Life inside is hard, but sometimes idyllic. Much of the time they’re exhausted.... They dream about food, and they remember in detail the food they ate in the days before the door closed on the real world, which they call Ecosphere 1, or E1. They argue about who’s working the hardest. When they aren’t arguing, they have sex. They have a lot of sex, and it’s sex that, inevitably, blows the whole thing up; at which point all their barely veiled resentments are dragged to the surface like fish from the ecosphere pond.... Based on a similar experiment in the Arizona desert in the 1990s [Biosphere 2], Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at."
Do students know what’s good for them? - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog. "Of course they do, and of course they don’t. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassemble in the mind of the learner, and the related impossibility of its direct transmission from the mind of the teacher. Believe this, and student input into how they learn must follow.... Obviously we learn best when motivated, and when learning is fun, and allowing us to explore our curiosity is a way to allow both. However, putting the trajectory of their experience into students’ hands can go awry. One reason is false beliefs about how much we know, or how we learn best. Psychologists studying memory have long documented such metacognitive errors, which include overconfidence, and a mistaken reliance on our familiarity with a thing as a guide to how well we understand it, or how well we’ll be able to recall it when tested (recognition and recall are in fact different cognitive processes).... Education scholars have reacted against pure student-led or discovery learning, with one review summarising the findings from multiple distinct research programmes taking place over three decades: 'In each case, guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer'."
Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI - article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "If you’re a video game fan of a certain age, you may remember Edge magazine’s controversial review of the bloody sci-fi shooting game, Doom. ... 'if only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances … Now that would be interesting.' Of course, we all know what happened. There would be no room in the Doom series, nor any subsequent first-person blast-’em-up, for such socio-psychological niceties. Instead, we enjoyed 20 years of shooting, bludgeoning and stabbing, the ludicrous idea of diplomacy cast roughly aside. But during this era, something else was happening in game design, and in academic thinking around video games and artificial intelligence. Buoyed by advances in AI research and aided by increasingly powerful computer processors, developers were beginning to think about the possibilities of non-player characters (NPCs) who could think and act in a more complex and human way – who could provide the emotional feedback that the Edge reviewer was thinking about."
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