Dreamfall Chapters – most-anticipated adventure game of 2016, sequel to Dreamfall (2006) and the top-rated and much-loved The Longest Journey (1999).
Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye – collection of talks by the master film editor (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather(s), The Conversation), the title deriving from his contention that the psychological basis for why a film cut works, and is not simply confusing, lies in eye blinking.
Sound of Musicals, with Neil Brand – expert analysis of key numbers from the history of musicals, demonstrated at the piano with student singers, set within the shifting patterns of stage entertainment.
The Art of France – another fine art tour with Andrew Graham Dixon.
Milkmaid of the Milky Way – neat, simple (but not simplistic) adventure game, with rhyming couplet text (no voice acting) and pixel graphics. Plot summary: A Norwegian milkmaid runs her own dairy farm, selling milk and cream and butter, until one day a spaceship arrives and steals her cows, so she boards the spaceship to rescue them.
JLL Achieve Ambitions Launch Film – high production values promotional film, produced by my son Rauf Bayraktar.
John Berger: The Art of Looking – touching documentary about the radical art critic, made for his 90th birthday and shown again after his death. Still opening eyes, all those years after his eye-opening Ways of Seeing in the 1970s. (The TV programmes stand up well, except for the clothes fashions!)
The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990) – steampunk SF novel in an alternative Victorian Britain, in which Babbage’s prototype computers were perfected and the social hierarchy now has scientists and engineers at its apex. Just as nasty as what actually happened, in my reading.
The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 – top-ranking sequel to a top-ranking adventure game, funny, ingenious, and very very good value especially at App store prices.
Vera series 7 – we like Vera, oh we do like Vera.
Clouds over Sidra – striking short film (available in VR360, binocular and monocular) about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee girl in the Zaatari camp in Jordan.
Wednesday 17 May 2017
Saturday 13 May 2017
Cuttings: March 2017
The dangers of nostalgia: we need to imagine a brighter future - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian, based on his book Exit West. "As I travel the world on my phone and computer and by foot and aircraft, it seems to me that nostalgia is a terribly potent force at this moment of history. Nostalgia manifests itself in so much of our political rhetoric. Islamic State and al-Qaida call for a return to the imagined glories of the early years of Islam. The Brexit campaign was fought with a rallying cry of taking back control from Brussels, promising a return to the imagined glories of pre-EU Britain. Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US election wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words 'Make America Great Again', words chanted by his supporters, envisioning a return to the imagined greatness of an America recently victorious in the second world war. In China and India, too, leaders seek a return to imagined past greatnesses, usurped by foreign invaders, colonisers and barbarians. All of these movements are, at heart, projects of restoration. Nostalgia manifests itself in our entertainment and artistic culture as well. The most viewed films of our time revolve around protagonists created a generation, or multiple generations, ago: superheroes, super villains, super secret agents, super space adventurers, super ironic symbols of super sexy pasts. And on television, where we are told great storytelling happens, much of what we see in popular and acclaimed shows comes situated in a past where characters can still plausibly be almost all white. ... Since well before the dawn of history, human beings have gathered together around flickering campfires to tell and listen to tales. We still do, even if the campfires are now more often glowing screens – in cinemas, on television sets, or in our hands. There are a great many reasons for this: fictional narratives offer us so many things. But in our present moment it is worth remembering one reason in particular: storytelling offers an antidote to nostalgia. By imagining, we create the potential for what might be. Religions are composed of stories precisely because of this potency. Stories have the power to liberate us from the tyranny of what was and is.... Take back control? Make America great again? Restore the caliphate? We can do better than these. Storytellers, now is the time to try."
How Robert Evans changed movies for ever, and for the better - article by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "Half a century ago, Hollywood was at a crossroads. The major studios were in the doldrums, haemorrhaging money on bloated star vehicles such as Paint Your Wagon that were relics from a different era. Iconoclastic social critiques such as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider were generating headlines and queues around the block. No one knew what the public wanted next. All bets were off. 'There was a brief window where someone could go into a studio and propose any film,' explains Simon McBurney, the 59-year-old actor and artistic director of groundbreaking theatre company Complicité... McBurney is steeped in the era and its social and cultural impact again now that he is directing an adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture, the scandalous, hard-boiled show-business memoir by producer Robert Evans, who transformed the industry when he became head of production at Paramount. In shepherding to the screen hits including Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown, he took the studio from ninth place (of nine) to No 1."
Abigail’s Party at 40: 'I was sure it would sink without trace' - article by Mike Leigh in The Guardian. "Abigail’s Party opened on 18 April 1977. It was a smash hit, the hottest ticket in town. So successful was it that Rudman and Aukin decided to revive it later in the year, over the summer. Again, it was a sellout. Now no less than seven West End managements wanted to transfer it. But we had hit a snag. The nuisance was Alison’s and my other project. She was pregnant. No way could she do a West End run, and naturally I wouldn’t contemplate her being replaced. Our doctor said she could do four weeks, no more. But this was plainly no use to a commercial producer. This seemingly intractable situation was suddenly solved by the inspired Margaret Matheson. On seeing the play, she simply said, 'Let’s do it on television.'... It was a great success on television.... The show was screened again, and yet again, always on BBC1. In those days there were only three television channels, and this third transmission coincided with an all-out strike on ITV, and with an esoteric highbrow programme on BBC2. Moreover, tempestuous storms raged throughout the British Isles that evening. So 16 million viewers stayed at home and watched Abigail’s Party. While it is gratifying that this unexpected exposure resulted in the play becoming celebrated as a classic, it is equally satisfying that it has enjoyed a healthy life as a stage play."
Failing to See, Fueling Hatred - article by Danah Boyd on Backchannel, referenced in John Naughton Memex 1.1 blog. "I grew up with identity politics, striving to make sense of intersectional politics and confused about what it meant to face oppression as a woman and privilege as a white person.... These days, I am surrounded by civil rights advocates and activists of all stripes—folks who remind me to take my privilege seriously.... Yet, with my ethnographer’s hat on, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with how this dynamic is playing out. Not for me personally, but for affecting change. I’m nervous that the way that privilege is being framed and politicized is doing damage to progressive goals and ideals. In listening to white men who see themselves as 'betas' or identify as NEETs ('Not in Education, Employment, or Training') describe their hatred of feminists or social justice warriors, I hear the cost of this frame. They don’t see themselves as empowered or privileged and they rally against these frames. And they respond antagonistically in ways that further the divide, as progressives feel justified in calling them out as racist and misogynist. Hatred emerges on both sides and the disconnect produces condescension as everyone fails to hear where each other comes from, each holding onto their worldview that they are the disenfranchised, they are the oppressed. Power and wealth become othered and agency becomes understood through the lens of challenging what each believes to be the status quo."
Hitler on his moderation - from feature 'Hunger, outrage and bombs: how the Manchester Guardian reported the 1930s' in The Guardian, including this summary of an interview with Adolf Hitler originally published 3 February 1933. " 'I only ask four years; after that the nation can do what it will with me – crucify me if it likes,' said Hitler during an interview which he gave this afternoon to a small group of British and American journalists. There was no middle course left for Germany, he said. Either the Bolshevik standard would fly over Germany or she would recover herself. Appealing for no premature judgment of the press of the world on his Government, he asked that its deeds should be awaited. 'I have been represented as having made bloodthirsty and firebrand speeches against foreign countries, and now the world is surprised at my moderation,' he went on. 'I never delivered firebrand speeches against foreign countries – even my speeches of ten years ago can testify to that. Anyone like myself who knows what war is, is aware of what a squandering of effort, or rather consumption of strength, is involved.' As to a possible future war, the result could only be conjectured, and therefore nobody wanted peace and tranquillity more than himself and Germany. 'But like all other nations, we insist upon equality and our proper place in the world, just as much as the Englishman insists upon the same thing for his country.' "
The problem with ‘facts’ - blog post by John Naughton, commenting on an article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times magazine. "He starts in an unusual place — the way the tobacco industry reacted to the research in the early 1950s that smoking caused lung cancer. Summary: the ‘facts’ didn’t carry the day — or at any rate took an awful long time to have a major impact.... So what’s wrong with the strategy of fighting lies with facts? Harford sees three. (1) 'A simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember.' ... (2) Facts tend to be boring.... (3) The truth can feel threatening if accepting it means that you have to rethink your own behaviour.... Is there a solution? Harford cites a study exploring the role of scientific curiosity (rather than scientific literacy).... what we need, Harford thinks, 'is a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science — somebody who can create a sense of wonder and fascination… at the workings of our own civilisation: health, migration, finance, education and diplomacy'."
What writers really do when they write - article by George Saunders in The Guardian. "When I write, 'Bob was an asshole,' and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, 'Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,' then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, 'Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,' and then pause and add, 'who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,' – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame. But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from 'pure asshole' to 'grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice'. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to 'me, on a different day'. How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded ourselves that it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving."
Cold War Freud and Freud, An Intellectual Biography: the politics of psychoanalysis - reviews by Lisa Appignanesi in The Guardian. "Herzog shows with telling detail how the variety of psychoanalysis that was developed in the US after the second world war had little in common with Freud’s initial project. A wholesale flight from sexuality and an insistence on conservative conformity within the patriotic family dominated many analysts’ repertoire. The sign of 'cure' for the ego psychologists became an individual’s ability to control her impulses and adapt to reality. What was understood by 'reality' was delimited by the norms of the 50s."
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson: the future is fun - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "[The claims of] Steven Johnson’s Wonderland ... can be condensed into a sentence. “'When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze,' he writes, 'they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.' ... A technophile whose best-known previous book is Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson has a disarming but not always convincing optimism. Not that he ignores the darker aspects: he suggests that the desire for cotton, which greatly intensified the slave trade and the gruesome working conditions of early industrialisation, may have been the worst thing to happen to the world between 1700 and 1900. But the basic arc is towards a more enlightened present. 'You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,' he writes in his introduction. By his conclusion we have arrived at a 'connected world' that is 'at peace with itself, and at play'. I do hope he is right, but this sense of history as pulled along by 'the propulsive force of delight' feels a little overtaken by events. He must have finished this book before we gave the nuclear codes to a man who does not know what play is, and who turns everything, even a social networking site whose very name suggests playfulness, into a grim ego battle. If play really did make the modern world, then today’s playground bullies are doing their best to knee us in the gonads and steal our ball."
Have we got Machiavelli all wrong? - article by Erica Benner, based on her book Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom. "Most people today assume that Machiavelli didn’t just describe their methods, he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics. ... But what if we’re overlooking Machiavelli’s less obvious messages, his deeper insights into politics? ... Machiavelli was convinced the real threats to freedom come from within – from gross inequalities on the one hand, and extreme partisanship on the other. He saw first-hand that authoritarian rule can take root and flourish in such conditions with terrifying ease, even in republics like Florence that had proud traditions of popular self-government. His city’s tempestuous history taught Machiavelli a lesson he tries to convey to future readers: that no one man can overpower a free people unless they let him. 'Men are so simple,' he tells us, 'so obedient to present necessities, that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived.' To each of us, he says: don’t become that someone. Citizens need to realise that by trusting leaders too much and themselves too little, they create their own political nightmares. 'I’d like to teach them the way to hell,' he told a friend toward the end of his life, 'so they can steer clear of it.'"
Ideological shakeup will create a ‘squeezed middle’ of universities - column by Peter Scott in The Guardian. "The higher education and research bill is now slouching through parliament to the inevitable royal assent. Its main provisions are to open the door wide to 'challenger' – mainly for-profit – providers, and impose the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which claims to measure the quality of teaching, but won’t and can’t.... The effects of the new market are fairly easy to predict. Russell Group and other favoured universities will recruit more students, even if they become less selective in the process, because it looks good – and, frankly, pays – in spite of their complaints that the fees do not cover their costs.... At the other end greedy challenger providers will pile in to offer cheap-and-cheerful courses and recruit students who can afford to pay but cannot get into mainstream universities.... The squeezed middle will be many of the big urban post-1992 universities that have done most to reach out to new kinds of students, and also most to bring the worlds of higher education and industry closer together. The more resourceful of them will fight fire with fire by creating their own low-cost HE-lite subsidiaries to compete with the challenger providers. A new-look academic gig economy that cuts costs to the bone will emerge."
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder: how to defend democracy in the age of Trump - review by Richard Evans in The Guardian. "How we defend our most fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency. The historian Timothy Snyder has produced this short book as one response.... 'Do not obey in advance,' he says. 'Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.' After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regime’s main opponents. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly those on the political left, were thrown into concentration camps and brutally mistreated. The great mass of Germans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent."
Freedom, revolt and pubic hair: why Antonioni’s Blow-Up thrills 50 years on - article by Anthony Quinn in The Guardian. "The photographer, fed up with the birds and the mod fashion shoots, goes off in search of fresh air – and fresh mischief. He finds himself in a park, where the breeze sounds in the tops of the trees like the sea at low tide. In the distance, he sees a man and a woman, together, canoodling. He points his camera and takes a few snaps of them. On his way out, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) chases after him and demands, urgently, that he hands over the film. He refuses. She tracks him back to his studio where they smooch, smoke a joint, play some music – and he sends her away with the wrong roll. And here is where the film unfolds its most brilliant and memorable sequence, the part you want to watch over and over again. Alone in his dark room, our hero blows up the photos from the park and discovers that he may have recorded something other than a tryst. Cutting between the photographer and his pictures, Antonioni nudges us ever closer until we see the blow-ups as arrangements of light and shadow, a pointillistic swarm of dots and blots that may reveal a gunman in the bushes, and a body lying on the ground. Has he accidentally photographed a murder?"
The 1930s were humanity's darkest, bloodiest hour. Are you paying attention? - article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "As the 30s move from living memory into history, as the hurricane moves further away, so what had once seemed solid and fixed – specifically, the view that that was an era of great suffering and pain, whose enduring value is as an eternal warning – becomes contested, even upended. Witness the remarks of Steve Bannon, chief strategist in Donald Trump’s White House and the former chairman of the far-right Breitbart website. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Bannon promised that the Trump era would be 'as exciting as the 1930s'. (In the same interview, he said 'Darkness is good' – citing Satan, Darth Vader and Dick Cheney as examples.) 'Exciting' is not how the 1930s are usually remembered, but Bannon did not choose his words by accident. He is widely credited with the authorship of Trump’s inaugural address, which twice used the slogan 'America first'. That phrase has long been off-limits in US discourse, because it was the name of the movement – packed with nativists and antisemites, and personified by the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh – that sought to keep the US out of the war against Nazi Germany and to make an accommodation with Hitler. Bannon, who considers himself a student of history, will be fully aware of that 1930s association – but embraced it anyway."
Gillian Beer: ‘I’m a historical remnant from the great days of free education’ - interview by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll sets the children’s classic in the intellectual wonderland of the late 19th century. Its anxieties about time, embodied in Alice’s first encounter with the White Rabbit and his fobwatch, are traced back to an age in which, as she writes, 'space and time were … coming to be understood more and more as being in intricate and shifting relations, both locally and worldwide'.... With an erudition and economy that is typical of Beer’s writing, such thought-clusters illuminate both the intellectual and geographic terrain that formed Carroll and the very English eccentricities that make his nonsense world so resonant a century and a half after the publication of Alice in Wonderland."
'Four-minute warning: time to boil your last egg': 100 years of anti-war protests - article by Lara Feigel in The Guardian. "The exhibition ['People Power: Fighting for Peace' at London's Imperial War Museum] makes good use of Ernest Rodker, the young activist rather unfairly immortalised as Tommy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, who marched at Aldermaston and later marched in February 2003, when a crowd of 2 million gathered in London to demonstrate against the proposed war in Iraq. In an interview for the museum’s show, he echoes the thoughts of those who thought 'this is going to have an impact' and were disillusioned when it didn’t. 'Many people thought ‘What’s the point?’ The biggest march that had ever been and no impact, just ignored by Blair.' Yet the exhibition is timely, because now we are on the march again. I’m part of a large cohort who hadn’t marched since the despair of 2003, but took to the streets once more for the Women’s March in January. As causes of outrage proliferate, I can see that I’ll be marching again before the year is out. Though I can’t share the optimism of the eager crowds leaving Aldermaston, I have lost some of the hopelessness I felt in the wake of the Iraq march, if only because in Trump we have an opponent who at least seems to care about the size of the crowds that turn out."
An American in Paris: how Gene Kelly's leap in the dark became a stage sensation - article by Sarah Crompton in The Guardian. "What Hollywood producer Arthur Freed was after instead was celebration, an all-singing, all-dancing explosion of colour and life with which his unit at MGM could rival musicals from before the war. He had heard George Gershwin’s An American in Paris (composed in Paris in 1928) at a concert and recognised that both the music and the title would make an excellent starting point for a movie musical.... Gershwin had died of a brain tumour in 1937 at the age of 38, but Freed bought the rights from his brother, Ira, for $158,750, over a game of pool. Ira insisted that the tone poem could not stand alone; it had to be surrounded by other Gershwin songs. In effect this makes An American in Paris an early jukebox musical – when Alan Jay Lerner wrote the script in three months he was working around established songs."
How Robert Evans changed movies for ever, and for the better - article by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "Half a century ago, Hollywood was at a crossroads. The major studios were in the doldrums, haemorrhaging money on bloated star vehicles such as Paint Your Wagon that were relics from a different era. Iconoclastic social critiques such as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider were generating headlines and queues around the block. No one knew what the public wanted next. All bets were off. 'There was a brief window where someone could go into a studio and propose any film,' explains Simon McBurney, the 59-year-old actor and artistic director of groundbreaking theatre company Complicité... McBurney is steeped in the era and its social and cultural impact again now that he is directing an adaptation of The Kid Stays in the Picture, the scandalous, hard-boiled show-business memoir by producer Robert Evans, who transformed the industry when he became head of production at Paramount. In shepherding to the screen hits including Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather and Chinatown, he took the studio from ninth place (of nine) to No 1."
Abigail’s Party at 40: 'I was sure it would sink without trace' - article by Mike Leigh in The Guardian. "Abigail’s Party opened on 18 April 1977. It was a smash hit, the hottest ticket in town. So successful was it that Rudman and Aukin decided to revive it later in the year, over the summer. Again, it was a sellout. Now no less than seven West End managements wanted to transfer it. But we had hit a snag. The nuisance was Alison’s and my other project. She was pregnant. No way could she do a West End run, and naturally I wouldn’t contemplate her being replaced. Our doctor said she could do four weeks, no more. But this was plainly no use to a commercial producer. This seemingly intractable situation was suddenly solved by the inspired Margaret Matheson. On seeing the play, she simply said, 'Let’s do it on television.'... It was a great success on television.... The show was screened again, and yet again, always on BBC1. In those days there were only three television channels, and this third transmission coincided with an all-out strike on ITV, and with an esoteric highbrow programme on BBC2. Moreover, tempestuous storms raged throughout the British Isles that evening. So 16 million viewers stayed at home and watched Abigail’s Party. While it is gratifying that this unexpected exposure resulted in the play becoming celebrated as a classic, it is equally satisfying that it has enjoyed a healthy life as a stage play."
Failing to See, Fueling Hatred - article by Danah Boyd on Backchannel, referenced in John Naughton Memex 1.1 blog. "I grew up with identity politics, striving to make sense of intersectional politics and confused about what it meant to face oppression as a woman and privilege as a white person.... These days, I am surrounded by civil rights advocates and activists of all stripes—folks who remind me to take my privilege seriously.... Yet, with my ethnographer’s hat on, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with how this dynamic is playing out. Not for me personally, but for affecting change. I’m nervous that the way that privilege is being framed and politicized is doing damage to progressive goals and ideals. In listening to white men who see themselves as 'betas' or identify as NEETs ('Not in Education, Employment, or Training') describe their hatred of feminists or social justice warriors, I hear the cost of this frame. They don’t see themselves as empowered or privileged and they rally against these frames. And they respond antagonistically in ways that further the divide, as progressives feel justified in calling them out as racist and misogynist. Hatred emerges on both sides and the disconnect produces condescension as everyone fails to hear where each other comes from, each holding onto their worldview that they are the disenfranchised, they are the oppressed. Power and wealth become othered and agency becomes understood through the lens of challenging what each believes to be the status quo."
Hitler on his moderation - from feature 'Hunger, outrage and bombs: how the Manchester Guardian reported the 1930s' in The Guardian, including this summary of an interview with Adolf Hitler originally published 3 February 1933. " 'I only ask four years; after that the nation can do what it will with me – crucify me if it likes,' said Hitler during an interview which he gave this afternoon to a small group of British and American journalists. There was no middle course left for Germany, he said. Either the Bolshevik standard would fly over Germany or she would recover herself. Appealing for no premature judgment of the press of the world on his Government, he asked that its deeds should be awaited. 'I have been represented as having made bloodthirsty and firebrand speeches against foreign countries, and now the world is surprised at my moderation,' he went on. 'I never delivered firebrand speeches against foreign countries – even my speeches of ten years ago can testify to that. Anyone like myself who knows what war is, is aware of what a squandering of effort, or rather consumption of strength, is involved.' As to a possible future war, the result could only be conjectured, and therefore nobody wanted peace and tranquillity more than himself and Germany. 'But like all other nations, we insist upon equality and our proper place in the world, just as much as the Englishman insists upon the same thing for his country.' "
The problem with ‘facts’ - blog post by John Naughton, commenting on an article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times magazine. "He starts in an unusual place — the way the tobacco industry reacted to the research in the early 1950s that smoking caused lung cancer. Summary: the ‘facts’ didn’t carry the day — or at any rate took an awful long time to have a major impact.... So what’s wrong with the strategy of fighting lies with facts? Harford sees three. (1) 'A simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember.' ... (2) Facts tend to be boring.... (3) The truth can feel threatening if accepting it means that you have to rethink your own behaviour.... Is there a solution? Harford cites a study exploring the role of scientific curiosity (rather than scientific literacy).... what we need, Harford thinks, 'is a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science — somebody who can create a sense of wonder and fascination… at the workings of our own civilisation: health, migration, finance, education and diplomacy'."
What writers really do when they write - article by George Saunders in The Guardian. "When I write, 'Bob was an asshole,' and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, 'Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,' then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, 'Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,' and then pause and add, 'who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,' – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame. But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from 'pure asshole' to 'grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice'. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to 'me, on a different day'. How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded ourselves that it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving."
Cold War Freud and Freud, An Intellectual Biography: the politics of psychoanalysis - reviews by Lisa Appignanesi in The Guardian. "Herzog shows with telling detail how the variety of psychoanalysis that was developed in the US after the second world war had little in common with Freud’s initial project. A wholesale flight from sexuality and an insistence on conservative conformity within the patriotic family dominated many analysts’ repertoire. The sign of 'cure' for the ego psychologists became an individual’s ability to control her impulses and adapt to reality. What was understood by 'reality' was delimited by the norms of the 50s."
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson: the future is fun - review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "[The claims of] Steven Johnson’s Wonderland ... can be condensed into a sentence. “'When human beings create and share experiences designed to delight or amaze,' he writes, 'they often end up transforming society in more dramatic ways than people focused on more utilitarian concerns.' ... A technophile whose best-known previous book is Everything Bad Is Good for You, Johnson has a disarming but not always convincing optimism. Not that he ignores the darker aspects: he suggests that the desire for cotton, which greatly intensified the slave trade and the gruesome working conditions of early industrialisation, may have been the worst thing to happen to the world between 1700 and 1900. But the basic arc is towards a more enlightened present. 'You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,' he writes in his introduction. By his conclusion we have arrived at a 'connected world' that is 'at peace with itself, and at play'. I do hope he is right, but this sense of history as pulled along by 'the propulsive force of delight' feels a little overtaken by events. He must have finished this book before we gave the nuclear codes to a man who does not know what play is, and who turns everything, even a social networking site whose very name suggests playfulness, into a grim ego battle. If play really did make the modern world, then today’s playground bullies are doing their best to knee us in the gonads and steal our ball."
Have we got Machiavelli all wrong? - article by Erica Benner, based on her book Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom. "Most people today assume that Machiavelli didn’t just describe their methods, he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics. ... But what if we’re overlooking Machiavelli’s less obvious messages, his deeper insights into politics? ... Machiavelli was convinced the real threats to freedom come from within – from gross inequalities on the one hand, and extreme partisanship on the other. He saw first-hand that authoritarian rule can take root and flourish in such conditions with terrifying ease, even in republics like Florence that had proud traditions of popular self-government. His city’s tempestuous history taught Machiavelli a lesson he tries to convey to future readers: that no one man can overpower a free people unless they let him. 'Men are so simple,' he tells us, 'so obedient to present necessities, that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived.' To each of us, he says: don’t become that someone. Citizens need to realise that by trusting leaders too much and themselves too little, they create their own political nightmares. 'I’d like to teach them the way to hell,' he told a friend toward the end of his life, 'so they can steer clear of it.'"
Ideological shakeup will create a ‘squeezed middle’ of universities - column by Peter Scott in The Guardian. "The higher education and research bill is now slouching through parliament to the inevitable royal assent. Its main provisions are to open the door wide to 'challenger' – mainly for-profit – providers, and impose the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which claims to measure the quality of teaching, but won’t and can’t.... The effects of the new market are fairly easy to predict. Russell Group and other favoured universities will recruit more students, even if they become less selective in the process, because it looks good – and, frankly, pays – in spite of their complaints that the fees do not cover their costs.... At the other end greedy challenger providers will pile in to offer cheap-and-cheerful courses and recruit students who can afford to pay but cannot get into mainstream universities.... The squeezed middle will be many of the big urban post-1992 universities that have done most to reach out to new kinds of students, and also most to bring the worlds of higher education and industry closer together. The more resourceful of them will fight fire with fire by creating their own low-cost HE-lite subsidiaries to compete with the challenger providers. A new-look academic gig economy that cuts costs to the bone will emerge."
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder: how to defend democracy in the age of Trump - review by Richard Evans in The Guardian. "How we defend our most fundamental freedoms has once again become a matter of great urgency. The historian Timothy Snyder has produced this short book as one response.... 'Do not obey in advance,' he says. 'Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.' After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regime’s main opponents. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly those on the political left, were thrown into concentration camps and brutally mistreated. The great mass of Germans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent."
Freedom, revolt and pubic hair: why Antonioni’s Blow-Up thrills 50 years on - article by Anthony Quinn in The Guardian. "The photographer, fed up with the birds and the mod fashion shoots, goes off in search of fresh air – and fresh mischief. He finds himself in a park, where the breeze sounds in the tops of the trees like the sea at low tide. In the distance, he sees a man and a woman, together, canoodling. He points his camera and takes a few snaps of them. On his way out, the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) chases after him and demands, urgently, that he hands over the film. He refuses. She tracks him back to his studio where they smooch, smoke a joint, play some music – and he sends her away with the wrong roll. And here is where the film unfolds its most brilliant and memorable sequence, the part you want to watch over and over again. Alone in his dark room, our hero blows up the photos from the park and discovers that he may have recorded something other than a tryst. Cutting between the photographer and his pictures, Antonioni nudges us ever closer until we see the blow-ups as arrangements of light and shadow, a pointillistic swarm of dots and blots that may reveal a gunman in the bushes, and a body lying on the ground. Has he accidentally photographed a murder?"
The 1930s were humanity's darkest, bloodiest hour. Are you paying attention? - article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "As the 30s move from living memory into history, as the hurricane moves further away, so what had once seemed solid and fixed – specifically, the view that that was an era of great suffering and pain, whose enduring value is as an eternal warning – becomes contested, even upended. Witness the remarks of Steve Bannon, chief strategist in Donald Trump’s White House and the former chairman of the far-right Breitbart website. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Bannon promised that the Trump era would be 'as exciting as the 1930s'. (In the same interview, he said 'Darkness is good' – citing Satan, Darth Vader and Dick Cheney as examples.) 'Exciting' is not how the 1930s are usually remembered, but Bannon did not choose his words by accident. He is widely credited with the authorship of Trump’s inaugural address, which twice used the slogan 'America first'. That phrase has long been off-limits in US discourse, because it was the name of the movement – packed with nativists and antisemites, and personified by the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh – that sought to keep the US out of the war against Nazi Germany and to make an accommodation with Hitler. Bannon, who considers himself a student of history, will be fully aware of that 1930s association – but embraced it anyway."
Gillian Beer: ‘I’m a historical remnant from the great days of free education’ - interview by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll sets the children’s classic in the intellectual wonderland of the late 19th century. Its anxieties about time, embodied in Alice’s first encounter with the White Rabbit and his fobwatch, are traced back to an age in which, as she writes, 'space and time were … coming to be understood more and more as being in intricate and shifting relations, both locally and worldwide'.... With an erudition and economy that is typical of Beer’s writing, such thought-clusters illuminate both the intellectual and geographic terrain that formed Carroll and the very English eccentricities that make his nonsense world so resonant a century and a half after the publication of Alice in Wonderland."
'Four-minute warning: time to boil your last egg': 100 years of anti-war protests - article by Lara Feigel in The Guardian. "The exhibition ['People Power: Fighting for Peace' at London's Imperial War Museum] makes good use of Ernest Rodker, the young activist rather unfairly immortalised as Tommy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, who marched at Aldermaston and later marched in February 2003, when a crowd of 2 million gathered in London to demonstrate against the proposed war in Iraq. In an interview for the museum’s show, he echoes the thoughts of those who thought 'this is going to have an impact' and were disillusioned when it didn’t. 'Many people thought ‘What’s the point?’ The biggest march that had ever been and no impact, just ignored by Blair.' Yet the exhibition is timely, because now we are on the march again. I’m part of a large cohort who hadn’t marched since the despair of 2003, but took to the streets once more for the Women’s March in January. As causes of outrage proliferate, I can see that I’ll be marching again before the year is out. Though I can’t share the optimism of the eager crowds leaving Aldermaston, I have lost some of the hopelessness I felt in the wake of the Iraq march, if only because in Trump we have an opponent who at least seems to care about the size of the crowds that turn out."
An American in Paris: how Gene Kelly's leap in the dark became a stage sensation - article by Sarah Crompton in The Guardian. "What Hollywood producer Arthur Freed was after instead was celebration, an all-singing, all-dancing explosion of colour and life with which his unit at MGM could rival musicals from before the war. He had heard George Gershwin’s An American in Paris (composed in Paris in 1928) at a concert and recognised that both the music and the title would make an excellent starting point for a movie musical.... Gershwin had died of a brain tumour in 1937 at the age of 38, but Freed bought the rights from his brother, Ira, for $158,750, over a game of pool. Ira insisted that the tone poem could not stand alone; it had to be surrounded by other Gershwin songs. In effect this makes An American in Paris an early jukebox musical – when Alan Jay Lerner wrote the script in three months he was working around established songs."
Thursday 11 May 2017
Cuttings: February 2017
A Woman’s Work by Harriet Harman: a life confronting sexism - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "The depths of her struggle with maternal guilt will surprise some. Pregnant when a byelection unexpectedly cropped up in the seat she hadn’t expected to fight so early, Harman had two more children while rising up the opposition ranks. She writes beautifully of her longing to be with her babies, and the nagging feeling that because she wasn’t part of the school gate crowd she must be doing it all wrong.... But to admit she was struggling would have damaged her, so she pushed on, pretending to be coping well.... There is a telling anecdote about how, having promised to take her son for a half-term treat, she declined a last-minute request to cover for a colleague in parliament. Summoned by her then boss, Robin Cook, to explain herself, she didn’t dare admit the truth and simply refused to say where she’d been – at which point he instantly forgave her, assuming she must be sneaking around having an illicit affair. Bunking off to see the children would have been unforgivable but going awol for sex simply made you one of the gang."
The education gap and its implications - blog post by John Naughton. "In October last year, my colleague David Runciman wrote a sobering piece in the Guardian under the headline 'How the education gap is tearing politics apart'. His starting point was an observation in The Atlantic in March 2015 that the best single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary was the absence of a college degree. ... Turning then to Brexit, David observed that: 'Voters with postgraduate qualifications split 75 to 25 in favour of remain. Meanwhile, among those who left school without any qualifications, the vote was almost exactly reversed: 73 to 27 for leave.' ... This is really sobering stuff. It shows, in a picture, why a failure to invest in education and tackle educational underachievement eventually imposes massive social costs (possibly including the breakdown of democracy). It’s not rocket science, either. In an information economy, people who are poorly educated are always going to find it hard to find employment. And when they do it will be in precarious, exploitative, under-paid jobs. No wonder they voted the way they did — for the first charlatan who came along and said he could fix it."
How to overcome bias - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian Mindhacks blog. "One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe.... Once you learn about this mental habit – called confirmation bias – you start seeing it everywhere.... How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens.... For their follow-up study [on confirmation bias], [Charles] Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational instructions told participants to be 'as objective and unbiased as possible', to consider themselves 'as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair and impartial manner'. The alternative, cognition-focused,instructions were silent on the desired outcome of the participants’ consideration, instead focusing only on the strategy to employ: 'Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.' So, for example, if presented with a piece of research that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were asked to analyse the study’s methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way. They called this the 'consider the opposite'' strategy, and the results were striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment.... The 'consider the opposite' participants, on the other hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation effect – they weren’t driven to rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones that disagreed, and didn’t become more extreme in their views regardless of which evidence they read. The finding is good news for our faith in human nature."
Do we still need Doctor Who? Time travel in the internet age - article by James Gleick in The Guardian, based on his book Time Travel. "In his 77th year, Wells tried to recall how his ideas for the novel had come to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. 'I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 ... I find it impossible to disentangle ... The old ideas and impressions were made over in accordance with new material, they were used to make up the new equipment.' Yet if ever a story was kicking to be born, it was The Time Machine. The object of Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future, that shadowy, inaccessible place. 'So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,' says the Time Traveller."
The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins - review by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames.... Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times 'wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it', they write in The Econocracy. 'We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.' ... After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren’t being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn’t work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better."
Édouard Louis: ‘For my family, a book was a kind of assault’ - article by Édouard Louis in The Guardian. "My parents have never read a book in their lives; there wasn’t a single book in our house. For us, a book was a kind of assault: it represented a life we would never have, the life of people who pursue an education, who have time to read, who have gone to university and had an easier time of it than us. ... Culture, the education system, books had all given us a feeling of rejection: in return, we rejected them. If culture paid us no attention, we would have our revenge. We despised it. It should never be said that the working classes reject culture, but rather that culture rejects the working classes, who reject it in turn. It should never be said that the working classes are violent, but rather that the working classes suffer from violence on a daily basis, and because of that they reproduce this violence by, for example, voting for the Front National. The domination comes first; those in positions of dominance are always responsible. I am more aware than some of the violence that literature can represent, because at a certain point in my life, I made use of that violence to hurt the people around me. Thanks to a series of accidents and failures, I made it into a lycée and then to university. I was the first person in my family to do this. During the week I would board at school or stay with friends, so I would only spend weekends with my parents. As soon as I walked into the house, I would sit on the sofa with a book, one that, most of the time, I would only be pretending to read. I wanted to let my family know that I wasn’t like them, that I no longer belonged to the same world as them, and I knew that a book would be the most violent instrument I could use to do that."
An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State - letter by Allen Frances to The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither). Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers. His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological."
Parallel lives: how the Brexit vote revealed Britain's divided culture - article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. " 'We all need to remember, every day more and more, that in the last resort there is no such thing as the "common man",' Richard Hoggart wrote, seven years before the birth of Nigel Farage. 'If we do not, we may in the end have allowed individual decision to slip away in our dutiful democratic identification of ourselves with a hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us.' Hoggart, who died in 2014 at the age of 95, spent his extraordinarily productive working life urging us to watch out for men such as Farage and Donald Trump: 'mass persuaders' whose cynicism and self-interest knew no bounds. The Uses of Literacy, published 60 years ago next month, was his second and by far his most famous book. In it, Hoggart argued that collective engagement in a project of civic literacy would grow naturally out of the increasing education of the working classes, and that knowledge really would translate into power. And in some ways his hopeful prediction came true. From the 1960s onwards thousands of young people entered higher education, catering to the first mass cohorts of grammar school children, and then, in the 1990s, furnishing nearly half of under-25s with a degree. But what of the other half? This tacit segregation was laid bare by analysis of how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Statistically at least, if you were born before the era of mass higher education, and held few or no qualifications, you voted to leave. If you were under 40 – the biggest waves of university expansion happened after 1992 – and held a degree, you voted to remain.... it was tempting to view “leave” and “remain” voters as opposing factions in a culture war. Mail readers versus Guardian types; town dwellers versus city dwellers; pub-goers versus tapas-eaters. Tempting, yes, but too easy. Britain’s cultural divide is an expression of another, more pernicious divide that has been growing for decades, that of social class."
The World of Mr Casaubon by Colin Kidd: in defence of George Eliot’s pedant - review by Rosemary Hill in The Guardian. "Ever since their discovery of the Americas, Europeans had readjusted their ideas about history and the nature of creation. In an age in which religion and politics were synonymous, all social order depended on the Christian system of belief – so each new discovery had to be accommodated to fit the evidence of different peoples’ faiths into a single absolute truth. The Flood, widely believed to have been a real historical event, had left unharmed only Noah’s family, who had gone out and populated the Earth. Perhaps, in the process, the truths of the Old Testament, which prefigured the birth of Christ, had taken on different local forms, though proceeding from one source. This quest for a spiritual equivalent of the Unified Field Theory lasted for centuries and took many forms. Indeed, as Colin Kidd implies in his deft guided tour of some of the more labyrinthine byways of intellectual history, it is with us still. Kidd uses Mr Casaubon, the pedant of Middlemarch, whose purblind quest for the key to all mythologies sucks the life out of his young wife, Dorothea, as a pivotal figure. From different moments in the novel, Kidd shows that Casaubon was less out of touch or, by the lights of his time, deluded than George Eliot makes him appear. As a novelist and apologist for her own free-thinking views, she necessarily played down the size and complexity of the field in which he laboured. Kidd, however, comes neither to bury nor to praise a fictional character but aims to understand mythography. By an exercise of historical imagination he rescues this tale of red herrings and blind alleys from the condescension of posterity."
The echoes of HG Wells - letter to Guardian Review, 18 February 2017, by Will Prentice, British Library Sound Archive. "In later life HG Wells may not have remembered the inspiration behind his conception of time travel in 1878 or 79 ('Quantum Leaps', 11 February), but it probably had its origins in Edison's phonograph, demonstrated in London in February 1878. Edison's invention recorded and reproduced sound, and therefore time, several years before film. The ability to immerse oneself in a moment in the past was utterly new. Wells's story of technology that can juxtapose moments in time resonated nicely with this new idea. Wells himself captured moments in time featuring his own voice, and sent them hurtling into the far distant future. So far they have reached 2017, and can be heard at the British Library."
The education gap and its implications - blog post by John Naughton. "In October last year, my colleague David Runciman wrote a sobering piece in the Guardian under the headline 'How the education gap is tearing politics apart'. His starting point was an observation in The Atlantic in March 2015 that the best single predictor of Trump support in the Republican primary was the absence of a college degree. ... Turning then to Brexit, David observed that: 'Voters with postgraduate qualifications split 75 to 25 in favour of remain. Meanwhile, among those who left school without any qualifications, the vote was almost exactly reversed: 73 to 27 for leave.' ... This is really sobering stuff. It shows, in a picture, why a failure to invest in education and tackle educational underachievement eventually imposes massive social costs (possibly including the breakdown of democracy). It’s not rocket science, either. In an information economy, people who are poorly educated are always going to find it hard to find employment. And when they do it will be in precarious, exploitative, under-paid jobs. No wonder they voted the way they did — for the first charlatan who came along and said he could fix it."
How to overcome bias - article by Tom Stafford in The Guardian Mindhacks blog. "One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe.... Once you learn about this mental habit – called confirmation bias – you start seeing it everywhere.... How we should to protect our decisions from confirmation bias depends on why, psychologically, confirmation bias happens.... For their follow-up study [on confirmation bias], [Charles] Lord and colleagues re-ran the biased assimilation experiment, but testing two types of instructions for assimilating evidence about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent for murder. The motivational instructions told participants to be 'as objective and unbiased as possible', to consider themselves 'as a judge or juror asked to weigh all of the evidence in a fair and impartial manner'. The alternative, cognition-focused,instructions were silent on the desired outcome of the participants’ consideration, instead focusing only on the strategy to employ: 'Ask yourself at each step whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.' So, for example, if presented with a piece of research that suggested the death penalty lowered murder rates, the participants were asked to analyse the study’s methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way. They called this the 'consider the opposite'' strategy, and the results were striking. Instructed to be fair and impartial, participants showed the exact same biases when weighing the evidence as in the original experiment.... The 'consider the opposite' participants, on the other hand, completely overcame the biased assimilation effect – they weren’t driven to rate the studies which agreed with their preconceptions as better than the ones that disagreed, and didn’t become more extreme in their views regardless of which evidence they read. The finding is good news for our faith in human nature."
Do we still need Doctor Who? Time travel in the internet age - article by James Gleick in The Guardian, based on his book Time Travel. "In his 77th year, Wells tried to recall how his ideas for the novel had come to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. 'I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 ... I find it impossible to disentangle ... The old ideas and impressions were made over in accordance with new material, they were used to make up the new equipment.' Yet if ever a story was kicking to be born, it was The Time Machine. The object of Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future, that shadowy, inaccessible place. 'So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,' says the Time Traveller."
The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins - review by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames.... Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times 'wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it', they write in The Econocracy. 'We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.' ... After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren’t being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn’t work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better."
Édouard Louis: ‘For my family, a book was a kind of assault’ - article by Édouard Louis in The Guardian. "My parents have never read a book in their lives; there wasn’t a single book in our house. For us, a book was a kind of assault: it represented a life we would never have, the life of people who pursue an education, who have time to read, who have gone to university and had an easier time of it than us. ... Culture, the education system, books had all given us a feeling of rejection: in return, we rejected them. If culture paid us no attention, we would have our revenge. We despised it. It should never be said that the working classes reject culture, but rather that culture rejects the working classes, who reject it in turn. It should never be said that the working classes are violent, but rather that the working classes suffer from violence on a daily basis, and because of that they reproduce this violence by, for example, voting for the Front National. The domination comes first; those in positions of dominance are always responsible. I am more aware than some of the violence that literature can represent, because at a certain point in my life, I made use of that violence to hurt the people around me. Thanks to a series of accidents and failures, I made it into a lycée and then to university. I was the first person in my family to do this. During the week I would board at school or stay with friends, so I would only spend weekends with my parents. As soon as I walked into the house, I would sit on the sofa with a book, one that, most of the time, I would only be pretending to read. I wanted to let my family know that I wasn’t like them, that I no longer belonged to the same world as them, and I knew that a book would be the most violent instrument I could use to do that."
An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State - letter by Allen Frances to The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither). Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers. His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological."
Parallel lives: how the Brexit vote revealed Britain's divided culture - article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. " 'We all need to remember, every day more and more, that in the last resort there is no such thing as the "common man",' Richard Hoggart wrote, seven years before the birth of Nigel Farage. 'If we do not, we may in the end have allowed individual decision to slip away in our dutiful democratic identification of ourselves with a hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us.' Hoggart, who died in 2014 at the age of 95, spent his extraordinarily productive working life urging us to watch out for men such as Farage and Donald Trump: 'mass persuaders' whose cynicism and self-interest knew no bounds. The Uses of Literacy, published 60 years ago next month, was his second and by far his most famous book. In it, Hoggart argued that collective engagement in a project of civic literacy would grow naturally out of the increasing education of the working classes, and that knowledge really would translate into power. And in some ways his hopeful prediction came true. From the 1960s onwards thousands of young people entered higher education, catering to the first mass cohorts of grammar school children, and then, in the 1990s, furnishing nearly half of under-25s with a degree. But what of the other half? This tacit segregation was laid bare by analysis of how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Statistically at least, if you were born before the era of mass higher education, and held few or no qualifications, you voted to leave. If you were under 40 – the biggest waves of university expansion happened after 1992 – and held a degree, you voted to remain.... it was tempting to view “leave” and “remain” voters as opposing factions in a culture war. Mail readers versus Guardian types; town dwellers versus city dwellers; pub-goers versus tapas-eaters. Tempting, yes, but too easy. Britain’s cultural divide is an expression of another, more pernicious divide that has been growing for decades, that of social class."
The World of Mr Casaubon by Colin Kidd: in defence of George Eliot’s pedant - review by Rosemary Hill in The Guardian. "Ever since their discovery of the Americas, Europeans had readjusted their ideas about history and the nature of creation. In an age in which religion and politics were synonymous, all social order depended on the Christian system of belief – so each new discovery had to be accommodated to fit the evidence of different peoples’ faiths into a single absolute truth. The Flood, widely believed to have been a real historical event, had left unharmed only Noah’s family, who had gone out and populated the Earth. Perhaps, in the process, the truths of the Old Testament, which prefigured the birth of Christ, had taken on different local forms, though proceeding from one source. This quest for a spiritual equivalent of the Unified Field Theory lasted for centuries and took many forms. Indeed, as Colin Kidd implies in his deft guided tour of some of the more labyrinthine byways of intellectual history, it is with us still. Kidd uses Mr Casaubon, the pedant of Middlemarch, whose purblind quest for the key to all mythologies sucks the life out of his young wife, Dorothea, as a pivotal figure. From different moments in the novel, Kidd shows that Casaubon was less out of touch or, by the lights of his time, deluded than George Eliot makes him appear. As a novelist and apologist for her own free-thinking views, she necessarily played down the size and complexity of the field in which he laboured. Kidd, however, comes neither to bury nor to praise a fictional character but aims to understand mythography. By an exercise of historical imagination he rescues this tale of red herrings and blind alleys from the condescension of posterity."
The echoes of HG Wells - letter to Guardian Review, 18 February 2017, by Will Prentice, British Library Sound Archive. "In later life HG Wells may not have remembered the inspiration behind his conception of time travel in 1878 or 79 ('Quantum Leaps', 11 February), but it probably had its origins in Edison's phonograph, demonstrated in London in February 1878. Edison's invention recorded and reproduced sound, and therefore time, several years before film. The ability to immerse oneself in a moment in the past was utterly new. Wells's story of technology that can juxtapose moments in time resonated nicely with this new idea. Wells himself captured moments in time featuring his own voice, and sent them hurtling into the far distant future. So far they have reached 2017, and can be heard at the British Library."
Cuttings: January 2017
Cuddles, not bombs: how one woman helped children in Syria - article by Juliet Rix in The Guardian. "Fatima... starts to talk about her life in Syria.... 'I will never forget the airstrikes. The children were terrified … And the things they saw … their grandfather’s dead body after he had been tortured … their uncle taken away with his T-shirt over his head [he has not been seen since] … The house hit by a barrel bomb. We were out, but the neighbour and her child were killed.'... [Aala] El-Khani worked with Rachel Calam, professor of child and family psychology at the University of Manchester, and psychologist Dr Kim Cartwright to produce a leaflet explaining to parents that bedwetting, nightmares, withdrawal and even aggression are normal responses to childhood trauma, and offering basic reminders and suggestions for looking after themselves and their children. 'When you become focused on survival,' says El-Khani, 'you forget to praise your children, play, cuddle, or talk to them.' One young mother, after meeting El-Khani, later told her she had gone back to her tent and read her child a bedtime story for the first time since arriving in the camp.... Two sheets of paper (the leaflet and a feedback form) and a pen were tucked inside the wrappers of 3,000 flatbreads and delivered to families and caregivers in northern Syria. Sixty per cent responded, a high figure anywhere, let alone in a conflict zone. El-Khani remembers the excitement of opening the feedback forms. More than 80% of those displaced families who responded said the leaflet was useful; 400 had added comments. Most were positive remarks about the leaflet, some were prayers for better times, others asked for more information, particularly about bereavement and anxiety. The leaflet had hit a nerve." See details of the work and leaflet download.
John Berger remembered – by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "I heard John Berger speaking at the end of 2015 in London at the British Library. Someone in the audience ... asked what Berger thought about the huge movement of people across the world. He put his head in his hands and sat and thought; he didn’t say anything at all for what felt like a long time, a thinking space that cancelled any notion of soundbite. When he answered, what he spoke about ostensibly seemed off on a tangent. He said: 'I have been thinking about the storyteller’s responsibility to be hospitable.' As he went on, it became clear how revolutionary, hopeful and astute his thinking was. The act of hospitality, he suggested, is ancient and contemporary and at the core of every story we’ve ever told or listened to about ourselves – deny it, and you deny all human worth. He talked about the art act’s deep relationship with this, and with inclusion. Then he gave us a definition of fascism: one set of human beings believing it has the right to cordon off and decide about another set of human beings."
Tim Wu: ‘The internet is like the classic story of the party that went sour’ - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The cue for [Tim Wu's] new book, The Attention Merchants, is an observation the Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made in 1971. 'In an information-rich world,' Simon wrote, 'the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.' ... The Attention Merchants chronicles the attempts that publishers and entrepreneurs have made to capture and resell human attention over nearly two centuries, from [Benjamin] Day [creator of New York's first scandal sheet] in 1833 to BuzzFeed, Instagram, Google and Facebook today, with a major detour into state propaganda (Britain during the first world war, Goebbels during the second) along the way. In large measure, this is a story of communication technologies, starting with print, moving on to broadcast media (radio, television) and winding up with the internet and the technologies it has spawned (email, blogging, search engines, social media). But the striking feature of the book is the way it interweaves this story of technological development with two other strands. The first is an account of how the human subjects whose attention is being sought eventually rebel, giving rise to outbreaks of resistance that sometimes lead to regulatory intervention, but more often to changes of tack by the attention merchants. The second strand is a series of meditations on the cultural implications of the attention merchants’ success."
Bob Bates interview with Ingmar Böke, on the Adventure Gamers website. "Ingmar: What it is like to develop serious games for the US government? // Bob [Bates, former games author and design for Infocom, Legend and Synga]: The hardest part of working on any serious game is the design phase, when you need to ask three questions: What does the player need to learn? How will the game know when he has learned it? And who else needs to know that he has learned it? Most serious games are content to deal with the first two questions, but when your client is the US government, you also must deal with the third. It is not enough for the player to have learned something; the government wants proof that the training has been effective. This problem of proof is called 'assessment,' and you have to build into the game a way to demonstrate the player has learned what he needs to. Apart from that, the other hard part is finding a way to make the game entertaining when the client is notoriously averse to humor. It’s possible, but very hard."
John Berger remembered – by Ali Smith in The Guardian. "I heard John Berger speaking at the end of 2015 in London at the British Library. Someone in the audience ... asked what Berger thought about the huge movement of people across the world. He put his head in his hands and sat and thought; he didn’t say anything at all for what felt like a long time, a thinking space that cancelled any notion of soundbite. When he answered, what he spoke about ostensibly seemed off on a tangent. He said: 'I have been thinking about the storyteller’s responsibility to be hospitable.' As he went on, it became clear how revolutionary, hopeful and astute his thinking was. The act of hospitality, he suggested, is ancient and contemporary and at the core of every story we’ve ever told or listened to about ourselves – deny it, and you deny all human worth. He talked about the art act’s deep relationship with this, and with inclusion. Then he gave us a definition of fascism: one set of human beings believing it has the right to cordon off and decide about another set of human beings."
Tim Wu: ‘The internet is like the classic story of the party that went sour’ - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The cue for [Tim Wu's] new book, The Attention Merchants, is an observation the Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon made in 1971. 'In an information-rich world,' Simon wrote, 'the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.' ... The Attention Merchants chronicles the attempts that publishers and entrepreneurs have made to capture and resell human attention over nearly two centuries, from [Benjamin] Day [creator of New York's first scandal sheet] in 1833 to BuzzFeed, Instagram, Google and Facebook today, with a major detour into state propaganda (Britain during the first world war, Goebbels during the second) along the way. In large measure, this is a story of communication technologies, starting with print, moving on to broadcast media (radio, television) and winding up with the internet and the technologies it has spawned (email, blogging, search engines, social media). But the striking feature of the book is the way it interweaves this story of technological development with two other strands. The first is an account of how the human subjects whose attention is being sought eventually rebel, giving rise to outbreaks of resistance that sometimes lead to regulatory intervention, but more often to changes of tack by the attention merchants. The second strand is a series of meditations on the cultural implications of the attention merchants’ success."
Bob Bates interview with Ingmar Böke, on the Adventure Gamers website. "Ingmar: What it is like to develop serious games for the US government? // Bob [Bates, former games author and design for Infocom, Legend and Synga]: The hardest part of working on any serious game is the design phase, when you need to ask three questions: What does the player need to learn? How will the game know when he has learned it? And who else needs to know that he has learned it? Most serious games are content to deal with the first two questions, but when your client is the US government, you also must deal with the third. It is not enough for the player to have learned something; the government wants proof that the training has been effective. This problem of proof is called 'assessment,' and you have to build into the game a way to demonstrate the player has learned what he needs to. Apart from that, the other hard part is finding a way to make the game entertaining when the client is notoriously averse to humor. It’s possible, but very hard."
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