Cuttings: October 2018

How to write the perfect sentence - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian, based on his book First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life. "A good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness. It gets its power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought slid cleanly into the mind. A sentence, as it proceeds, is a paring away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. But even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single syntactic rule. "

First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran: how good writing makes sense of the world - review by John Mullan in The Guardian. "[Moran's] book recommends the pleasures of the well-made sentence, to writers and readers. For both, the sentence is the essential unit of expression. Moran remembers the Struldbruggs, the cursed immortals in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, who as they age lose even the solace of reading, 'because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the Beginning of a Sentence to the End'. A sentence is what you hold in your head... A sentence is where you make sense of the world. Moran says he wants to 'hearten, embolden and galvanise the reader', in order that he or she, as a writer, should take pains over making sentences. He also tells us what not to like. He eloquently laments the rise and rise of 'the argot of modern managerialism', with its 'nouny sentences'. As an academic, he feelingly deplores the bad habits of academic prose, with its conjunctive adverbs ('Moreover …', 'However …') and its twitchy meta-comment ('I will argue that …'). Yet he equally knows that less is not always best. In a brisk chapter called 'Nothing Like a Windowpane', he unpicks the doctrinaire plainness of Ernest Gowers and George Orwell. He even advocates the expressive subtlety of the subjunctive."

Tom Gauld on the power of a great sentence - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Great lost sentences. 1813: Jane Austen writes a sentence so charming and witty that it gets married to the richest man in Staffordshire. 1903: Henry James writes a sentence so long and circuitous that he becomes lost inside it for three days. 1947: Raymond Chandler writes a sentence so hard-boiled that it spikes his drink, steals his savings and frames him for a murder."

Font of all knowledge? Researchers develop typeface they say can boost memory - article by Lisa Martin in The Guardian. "Australian researchers say they have developed a new tool that could help students cramming for exams – a font that helps the reader remember information. Melbourne-based RMIT University’s behavioural business lab and design school teamed up to create 'Sans Forgetica', which they say uses psychological and design theories to aid memory retention. About 400 university students have been involved in a study that found a small increase in the amount participants remembered – 57% of text written in Sans Forgetica compared with 50% in a plain Arial. Typography lecturer Stephen Banham said the font had an unusual seven-degree back slant to the left and gaps in each letter. 'The mind will naturally seek to complete those shapes and so by doing that it slows the reading and triggers memory,' Banham told the Guardian."

Belief is back: why the world is putting its faith in religion - article by Neil MacGregor in The Guardian, based on his book Living with the Gods. "It must surely be one of the most beguiling and evocative posters of the 1970s. High above the Earth, floating serenely among the stars and loosely tethered to a speeding spaceship, Yuri Gagarin smiles out at us and salutes.... Above the skies, he looks around and tells us what he can see, or rather what he can not see: Boga Nyet!: There is no God!... All that has changed.... Belief is back. Around the world, religion is once again politically centre stage. It is a development that seems to surprise and bewilder, indeed often to anger, the agnostic, prosperous west. Yet if we do not understand why religion can mobilise communities in this way, we have little chance of successfully managing the consequences.... 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' Joan Didion’s famous sentence is not a reflection on religion, but it speaks to exactly that compelling need we all have for stories that give shape and significance to our individual lives. Religious stories are part of a similar strategy, but for communal survival. ... The power of such narratives, beliefs and rituals to sustain communities through danger and across centuries is a recurrent fact of history. ... For many today, in areas of economic disruption and dysfunctional states, it may be the only architecture available. And it is surely part of the reason why across much of the world, belief is back. It is a view of religion with which many Europeans struggle.... Many find it hard to see here forces that will shape a better world, which perhaps explains the growing focus across the west on the individual quest for truth and for private spirituality. But this risks blinding us to the power of narratives that articulate an ideal, that offer fulfilment in the context of a community, make demands on everyone, and – above all – hold out hope. It may be a matter for regret, it may represent a failure of secular politics, but it should certainly be no surprise that so many societies now see in such narratives of faith their best way forward."

How the World Thinks: a global history of philosophy - review by Tim Whitmarsh in The Guardian. "Julian Baggini’s contribution is an engaging, urbane and humane global history.... In his view, people everywhere grapple with the same moral questions, which are fundamentally about balancing contradictory imperatives: individual autonomy versus collective good; the social need for impartial arbiters of truth versus awareness of subjective experience; adherence to rules versus commonsense flexibility; and so forth. The differences between people lie not in the issues they face, but in the positions they end up adopting on the scale between the extremes. The analogy he draws is with a producer in a recording studio: 'By sliding controls up or down, the volume of each track can be increased or decreased.' All cultures play the same song, but some prefer the cymbals higher up in the mix."

The counterculture class warrior who turned to Gove - article by Peter Wilby in The Guardian.  "Education’s knowledge wars – fought around what schools should teach children – began nearly half a century ago with three sociologists chatting in the bar of London’s Russell Hotel.... The result was Knowledge and Control, published in 1971. Adopted as a set book on the Open University’s first BEd course, it became hugely influential across the world. Teachers 'are coming out of college with Knowledge and Control in the bloodstream', one headteacher said in 1974. The book raised questions rarely asked before about the basics of formal education: the curriculum, examinations, subjects, definitions of intelligence, the teacher’s authority. School knowledge, Young suggested, could be seen as a ruling-class construction designed to ensure working-class children failed and meekly took their places on factory assembly lines. Such ideas thrilled young teachers who were attracted to the hippy inspired 'counterculture' that began in 1960s America. Partly because of Knowledge and Control, the following decades saw a significant growth in 'integrated' courses in secondary schools, cutting across subject boundaries – environmental studies, media studies, for example – which critics, mainly on the right, saw as dumbing down. Today, its author has changed sides in the knowledge wars. [Michael F D] Young has become a guru for the growing number of teachers who argue that children need knowledge and lots of it."

Boring talks are indeed longer - post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Lovely piece of informal research reported in Nature: ' I investigated this idea at a meeting where speakers were given 12-minute slots. I sat in on 50 talks for which I recorded the start and end time. I decided whether the talk was boring after 4 minutes, long before it became apparent whether the speaker would run overtime. The 34 interesting talks lasted, on average, a punctual 11 minutes and 42 seconds. The 16 boring ones dragged on for 13 minutes and 12 seconds (thereby wasting a statistically significant 1.5 min; t-test, t = 2.91, P = 0.007). For every 70 seconds that a speaker droned on, the odds that their talk had been boring doubled. For the audience, this is exciting news. Boring talks that seem interminable actually do go on for longer.' That figures. As Alex Tabbarok commented, ' the fundamental explanation is that a boring speaker doesn’t think about their audience. A speaker who cares puts herself in the audience’s shoes, thinks in advance about what is important, how much an audience can absorb in one sitting, where a graphic would be helpful and so forth. A good speaker plans and practices and thus ends up being interesting and ending on time.' "

Sometimes, it’s the data you’re missing that’s the key to understanding something - post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. " Nice salutary tale for data fiends: 'How Not to Be Wrong opens with an extremely interesting tale from World War II. As air warfare gained prominence, the challenge for the military was figuring out where and in what amount to apply protective armor to fighter planes and bombers. Apply too much armor and the planes become slower, less maneuverable and use more fuel. Too little armor, or if it’s in the “wrong” places, and the planes run a higher risk of being brought down by enemy fire. To make these determinations, military leaders examined the amount and placement of bullet holes on damaged planes that returned to base following their missions. The data showed almost twice as much damage to the fuselage of the planes compared to other areas, most specifically the engine compartments, which generally had little damage. This data led the military leaders to conclude that more armor needed to be placed on the fuselage. But mathematician Abraham Wald examined the data and came to the opposite conclusion. The armor, Wald said, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are; instead, it should go where the bullet holes aren’t, specifically, on the engines.... Planes that got hit in the engines didn’t come back, but those that sustained damage to the fuselage generally could make it safely back. The military then put Wald’s recommendations into effect and they stayed in place for decades.' "

Could populism actually be good for democracy? -  article by James Miller in The Guardian, based on his book Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. "Unlike democracy, 'liberalism' is a relatively late addition to our political lexicon. In Europe, the word first came into wide usage in the 19th century by various political theorists and statesmen in France, Germany and Italy, united in their horror at the bloodshed of the French Revolution, but otherwise varied in their positive views.Modern democracy also has no necessary connection to liberalism. The Protestant champions of popular sovereignty in the 16th century summoned it for the express purpose of dethroning rulers with whose religious views they disagreed... What is clear today is that while democracy may be widely admired, it is, in its liberal form, an embattled ideology. As the social scientist William Galston has sharply observed: 'Few leaders and movements in the west dare to challenge the idea of democracy itself. Not so for liberalism, which has come under mounting attack'” One result has been the rise of popular movements in which a majority of ordinary citizens has embraced a narrow conception of solidarity and rallied around a leader who claims to embody the will of such a closed community."

Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017) - article by Thomas Piketty, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for 'left-wing' (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. This corresponds to what one might label a 'class-based' party system: lower class voters from the different dimensions (lower education voters, lower income voters, etc.) tend to vote for the same party or coalition, while upper and middle class voters from the different dimensions tend to vote for the other party or coalition. Since the 1970s-1980s, 'left-wing' vote has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to what I propose to label a 'multiple-elite' party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the 'left', while highincome/high-wealth elites still vote for the 'right' (though less and less so) - i.e. the 'left' has become the party of the intellectual elite (Brahmin left), while the 'right' can be viewed as the party of the business elite (Merchant right). I show that the same transformation happened in France, the US and Britain..., despite the many differences in party systems and political histories between these three countries."

Have You Eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth: good grammar, with jokes - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "It beggars belief today, but Gyles Brandreth comes from a near-mythical time when a media-friendly MP could also be an intelligent and literate person with a broad cultural hinterland. ... Many competent writers can do everything Brandreth recommends in the book, but would be hard pressed to enunciate the rules in a clear and entertaining fashion. This is where Brandreth excels: he is brilliant, for instance, on the difference between the semicolon and the colon. 'Look at the colon and think of it as a pair of binoculars placed vertically on the table,' he advises. 'It is there to help you look ahead.' ... The book is also very funny, and often outright silly. He insists that beginning a letter 'Hi, Gyles', with a comma between salutation and name, is 'sinister', and [tells how] 'I was invited to host the British Funeral Directors’ Awards and found that the main prize of the night was for "thinking outside the box".' Anyone who uses the word 'whilst', meanwhile, he insists is 'subliterate'."

The myth of meritocracy: who really gets what they deserve? - article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Guardian. "Inspired by the meritocratic ideal, many people these days are committed to a view of how the hierarchies of money and status in our world should be organised. We think that jobs should go not to people who have connections or pedigree, but to those best qualified for them, regardless of their background. ... In moving toward the meritocratic ideal, we have imagined that we have retired the old encrustations of inherited hierarchies. As [Michael] Young knew, that is not the real story....
What drove him was his sense that class hierarchies would resist the reforms he helped implement. He explained how it would happen in a 1958 satire, his second best-seller, entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. Like so many phenomena, meritocracy was named by an enemy. Young’s book was ostensibly an analysis written in 2033 by a historian looking back at the development over the decades of a new British society. In that distant future, riches and rule were earned, not inherited.... But one immediate difficulty was that, as Young’s narrator concedes, 'nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring'. And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal. ... What should have been mechanisms of mobility had become fortresses of privilege. [Young] saw an emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who can be insufferably smug... The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side....The carapace of 'merit', Young argued, had only inoculated the winners from shame and reproach."

The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers - article by Brooke Harrington in The Guardian. "If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe. In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. ... As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow: 'When a rich man doesn’t want to work / He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant / But when a poor man doesn’t want to work / He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger / He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk.' When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug. [Whereas] behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance."

Get real! Behind the scenes of Red Dead Redemption 2: the most realistic video game ever made - article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "For a long time, video games were obsessed with chasing realism. To players and developers who grew up playing with pixel characters or awkward early-3D puppets on bulky TVs, the idea of a game that looked indistinguishable from real life was the holy grail. Accordingly, video-game visuals and behaviour made technological leaps every few years... But the time when pushing creative and technological boundaries went hand in hand in game development has gone. In the past 10 years or so, as the technology has started to plateau and more people have turned to smartphones or older consoles, rather than state-of-the-art PCs, games have diversified. They were never homogenous, but they are less so now than ever... Realism sets ludicrous standards, which is why most developers do not commit to it.... But [Dan] Houser, Rockstar’s co-founder, has long been obsessed with creating games [such as Red Dead Redemption 2] that feel as lifelike as possible."

A Gradgrind ethos is destroying the school system - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Exams are educational dross to which politicians turn when they can think of nothing else for pupils to do. ... Examination implies a public loss of faith in the profession of teaching. We don’t judge doctors by patient longevity, or lawyers by cases won. Yet we reduce education simply to what can be recalled on a particular day, even if promptly forgotten. It scores not just children but teachers and schools. A teacher recently wrote to the Times that in Germany, largely exam-free schools 'are trusted to educate in the broadest sense, and objectively assess their own pupils, without recourse to any self-serving, outsourced exam industry'. I doubt that a modern English school would know what to do with its time without exams."

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘With the evil twins of Trump and Brexit … There was no way of not writing about that, it is just in the air’ - interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "One of her earliest public poems as laureate was 'The Last Post' in 2009, to mark the deaths of the last veterans of the first world war... ; her most recent was for the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May.... But don’t expect a poem for the new arrival: she’s never felt a royal baby poem to be 'necessary'. Although she feels no obligation, she wrote 'The Crown' to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, because 'I do get the sense that whether or not you are a monarchist or a republican, people respect and admire the Queen very much.' She is an ideal laureate in that she is happy to accept a wide range of commissions, a willingness I can vouch for having asked her to write poems for this paper on events including the Scottish referendum, the 2012 Olympics and the Manchester Arena bombing last year.... It’s a question of 'trying to keep your finger on the pulse of what people might be interested in, or where the voice or the language of poetry might be worth adding to the kind of national babble and blether and jabber,' she says."

Frankenstein and the gory gang: how the novel blazed a trail for high art horrors - article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The mad experimenters of the Romantic age, the people who really did seem able to create life from dead things, were not scientists. They were artists. Braving the anatomy theatre and the mortuary to study the human body, they transformed this dark knowledge into throbbingly vital art. The year Frankenstein was published, a young French painter named Théodore Géricault started a stupendously ambitious work ['The Raft of the Medusa'] that he planned to unveil at the Paris Salon the following year. ... Like Stubbs [who had dissected horses, hanging their carcasses from the roof of a barn], Géricault reasoned that to paint a truly extraordinary work of art, he had to delve deep into anatomy.... But can any of this compete with the terrifying masterpieces of Francisco Goya? ... Begun in 1819, Goya’s 14 horrifyingly brutal Black Paintings defiantly assert the freedom of art to think what it likes, to be what it likes, however dismal and despairing. It’s an assertion as bold as that of Frankenstein sculpting with the dead."