Cuttings: May 2017

Francois-René de Chateaubriand, 1841, quoted by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “When steam power will be perfected, when, together with telegraphy and railways, it will have made distances disappear, it will not only be commodities which travel, but also ideas which will have wings. When fiscal and commercial barriers have been abolished between different states, as they have already been between the provinces of the same state; when different countries, in daily relations, tend toward the unity of peoples, how will you be able to revive the old mode of separation?”

Big stories are complex: here's how we're trying to explain them better - article by Vicky Frost, Nick Haley and Natalie Hanman in The Guardian. "You may have noticed some small blue boxes sitting within articles on the Guardian’s site and app. These are what we have called 'explainer atoms' – ... a user-, digital- and mobile-friendly way to explain and contextualise news events. These distinctive explainers answer questions such as 'Why do migrants and refugees head for the north coast of France?' inside an article about the refugee crisis, or 'Who is Emmanuel Macron?' for people reading about his victory in the first round of the French elections. By answering questions such as these inside an article, we aim to provide a richer, clearer reading experience for those who haven’t followed every cough and spit of a story (or even for those who have, but never quite caught the initial explanations), and to do it in such a way that it isn’t intrusive for readers with more knowledge. That means communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum number of words. We trialled this approach over the EU referendum last summer, with 100-word explainer atoms considering 'What is article 50?' (the question everyone was asking the morning after the night before), 'How might Brexit affect Ireland?', or 'Why is the referendum happening now?'. The idea was that, whenever you joined in the debate, you could catch up with the important elements of it."

Part-time student numbers collapse by 56% in five years - article by Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian. "The latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that part-time student numbers in England have fallen 56% since 2010.... The Open University, which solely delivers distance learning and relies on older, employed learners, ... as its bread and butter, has been hit especially hard, with its numbers falling by 30% between 2010-11 and 2015-16.... Part-time enrolments in England hit the floor in 2012 when the government raised the cap on part-time fees, doubling or even tripling the cost of many courses. To counter this, the government extended loans for tuition fees to part-timers, who previously hadn’t been eligible to apply. But ... research shows that about two-thirds of would-be part-time students were not eligible for this support, often because they were studying a more bite-size course, or already had a degree."

Raymond Tallis: [My working day] ‘In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’ - article by Raymond Tallis in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "My books ...begin in notebooks, emerging by a process akin to crystallisation. Eventually a provisional title announces itself, signalling and reinforcing commitment to a topic, to a line of inquiry. The lineaments of a structure loom through the fog in the form of chapter headings that both provoke ideas and give them a home. Thus the journey from initial tingles – the whoosh of a connection, the micro-illumination of a phrase, the sudden sense of an expanding cognitive space – to a completed work. With successive drafts, writing becomes an increasingly clerical activity – synopses, cross-referencing, footnotes. Paul Valéry spoke of the conflict between the process of thinking and the products of thought. Teasing out an idea is fundamentally different from seeing where it might fit into a publishable book."

Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin: the damage done by Silicon Valley - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The argument of Taplin’s new book: the titans of the digital age frequently behave like spoiled and ignorant brats with far, far more money than sense; and their victims include many of the artists who create things of real value and who can no longer earn a living from doing so. Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling. Unfortunately, the two parts of the argument don’t really hang together. The first claim is hard to dispute – Silicon Valley does increasingly resemble some kind of nightmarish children’s playground, populated by overgrown babies with no idea of the consequences of their actions – but the evidence he marshals is mainly second hand, drawn from newspaper commentary and some well-known histories of the digital revolution. As a result, it feels a little overfamiliar.... He leans too heavily on the assumption that the 1960s and 70s represented an artistic golden age whose like we will never see again. Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t quite enough to build a case like that. Any era will value its own products, and that will be especially true of the people who helped make them. Imagine a period 30 or 40 years from now when podcasting has been destroyed by some new economic model (though it will probably happen far sooner than that)."

Jill Lepore on the Challenge of Explaining Things - interview by B.R. Cohen on Public Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "At the moment, I am trying to write a history of the United States from 1492 to the present... I’ve been trying to weave a history of technology into an account of the origins of American political ideas and institutions, which is A) not easy, and B) alarming. ... I do think about things like the Constitution as having a vital relationship with the technologies of writing and printing.... It’s difficult not to be susceptible to technological determinism. We measure the very moments of our lives by computer-driven clocks and calendars that we keep in our pockets. I get why people think this way. Still, it’s a pernicious fallacy. To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.... I once wrote a piece about the history of the breast pump. I was using a breast pump at the time and every time I hooked myself up to that monstrosity I felt like I was in a Mary Shelley story... So I looked into it. And do you know why we have breast pumps in the United States? Because we don’t have maternity leave. Pumps are a very cheap and crappy substitute." See her website https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home.

Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner on death threats: ‘I never imagined I’d have to fight for my child’s legacy’ - article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "Even in a country all too used to mass shootings, the merciless killing in Newtown, Connecticut of 20 six- and seven-year-olds, along with six of the school’s employees, retains a terrible hold on the US’s imagination, gripping the memory after too many other shootings have faded away. For most, it is too horrible to mention without a shudder. But for a tenacious few, it is too horrible to believe, and soon after Noah was killed, when Pozner thought he had already seen the worst of humanity, he came into contact with the latter group. Just days after the massacre, when the US was still reeling from the tragedy, and Pozner himself was, he says, 'pretty much in a catatonic state', the theories started spreading: Sandy Hook had never happened, it was staged by actors, the children had never existed, it was a ruse by President Obama/the anti-gun movement/the 'New World Order global elitists'. So-called Sandy Hook truthers – Pozner prefers the term hoaxer – pored over photos of the families and children on social media, triumphantly pointing to any visual similarities they could find between the dead children and living ones. The families were harassed by hoaxers, online and off, insisting that they stop their fake grieving. When Pozner roused himself from his catatonic grief to post photos of Noah online, hoaxers would leave comments: 'Fake kid', 'Didn’t die', 'F***ing liar'. "

Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis: one of the greatest political memoirs ever? - review by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for self-justification during the Greek crisis."

'Strong and stable leadership!' Could Theresa May's rhetorical carpet-bombing backfire? - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "'In general, there is evidence that repetition of political frames tends to be effective,' [says political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka] 'especially when the aim is to reach an audience that is not highly knowledgable about politics.' Repetition, of course, has been a key device in the art of rhetoric for millennia. And there is a view that brute repetition itself can smuggle an idea past the critical faculties to nest in the subconscious. This is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, according to Victor Klemperer, who lived through the era and analysed its rhetoric in his classic book The Language of the Third Reich. Nazism didn’t prevail in Germany because of the individual speeches of Hitler or Goebbels, Klemperer explains. 'Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.' It is instructive to compare this with what Tony Blair’s former director of communications, Lance Price, told the BBC: 'You have to do it over and over again. It doesn’t matter that journalists are sick and tired of hearing it; the point is that voters have to hear it a lot before it sinks into their subconscious and starts to have some resonance.' "

Constructing the Golem - blog post 123 by Ursula K. Le Guin, 21 February 2017. "The legend of the golem varies according to the teller, but I will follow the version that tells how in a time of persecution a rabbi made a mighty giant out of mud, a golem, and wrote a sacred word on its forehead — 'Truth' — that gave it life. With its frightening size and enormous strength, the golem was to defend and safeguard the Jews. But the golem was not rational, not controllable. It was a danger in itself. So the rabbi removed a single letter from the word on its forehead, which then read 'Death,' and the life went out of the giant, leaving only mud.... Looking at the New World from the ancient one I inhabit, I am appalled at the constant, obsessive attention paid to Trump. ... Attention is what he lives on. Celebrity without substance. ... Every witty parody, hateful gibe, clever takeoff, etc., merely plays his game, and therefore plays into his hands.... I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way. He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud."

Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis: is this really a new era of politics? - review by John Gray in The Guardian. "Blair’s assertion that the world is fashioned from our beliefs was echoed by an anonymous aide of George W Bush (widely thought to be Karl Rove) when in an interview reported in October 2004 he dismissed the 'reality-based community' – 'people who believe solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality' – as no longer important in politics. 'That’s not the way the world really works any more … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' If the post-truth era is defined by the conviction that reality is constructed through the exercise of power, this is when it began to shape democratic politics.... While the notion that we entered a new age 12 months ago is far-fetched, D’Ancona’s punchy polemic asks questions that are urgently topical and undeniably important. He is right that the internet and social media have transformed communication, giving disinformation and deception in markets and politics added potency. Davis considers how this has happened, and in a rich and probing analysis of the use and misuse of the media suggests the answer can be found in the economics of information. What seems like an irrational message may contain information of a subtle and tacit kind to which people respond. Even when what is being communicated has little or no cognitive content, there are rational explanations as to why such messages can be so effective. Distinguishing between post-truth, post-fact, nonsense and gibberish, Evans’s ambition seems to be to develop a general theory of bullshit."

Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian Headquarters blog. "There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this ‘negativity bias’ than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.... I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.... In this month’s Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour."

Grayson Perry: ‘I am nostalgic for a time when art galleries were empty’ - article in The Guardian. "As an artist I have long been interested in the decreasing value of the rebellious stance. The counterculture has always been the perfect R&D lab for capitalism. What starts as a creative revolt soon becomes co-opted as the latest way to make money. As we have seen over the past few years, the hippie free-for-all face of the internet was a mask that soon fell away to reveal a predatory capitalist robot. I would characterise the art establishment’s reaction to challenge as 'Oh! Jolly good! Rebellion! Welcome!' Part of the historic recipe of modern art has been revolution, the overthrow of the old order. But what if the ethos of that rebellion is now mainstream? Punks are now pensioners, tattoos are as dangerous as reading Harry Potter, a Damien Hirst show is a nice day out with the kiddies. The mutinous subcultural pose is now the norm. The only people who call art shocking these days are lazy journalists. One of the most unsettling gestures in recent British art history was [Tracey] Emin saying she voted Tory. The Tories seem very popular these days."