Stet by Diana Athill – pithy autobiographical reflections from the celebrated editor at André Deutsch, notable for its insight into the post-war publishing industry and for the skilful way she makes one interested in people of whom one has no previous interest. (Neat trick that, but one would expect nothing less from a master editor.)
Doctor Who, Series 11– with Jodie Whittaker very good as the new Doctor, though I’m even more impressed by the show's pruned-back stories, without the frequent internal references which had made the show intimidating for anyone who wasn't keeping up, and the reintroduction of an ensemble cast.
A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad – morbidly fascinating documentary(see review). Bashar al-Assad remains an enigma (is he lying? is he deceiving himself? how did this mild-mannered eye doctor become a brutal dictator?) but at least we can understand the powerful forces at work on him and on Syria (the legacy of his father, the continuing influence of his mother, the dominance of the military).
Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – characteristically witty reflections on how legendary figures (such as King Arthur and King Alfred), historical periods (such as the Middle Ages) or recurrent themes (such as the countryside) have been mythologised by different ages to suit their own needs.
The Little Drummer Girl – mini-series adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1983 thriller. Proper television: demanding (and deserving) commitment and attention through its snail-like progress, with occasional bursts of action as reminders of the terrible violence lying just under the surface the whole time. For me this is up there with the great TV adaptations of Le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People) and I’m sad that people found it boring. But at least they appreciated the vivid reconstruction of period styles and fashions.
Robot and Frank – funny, touching and clever SF-lite, in which an elderly former jewel thief (Frank Langella) is presented with a care robot by his concerned children. Initially he is resentful of the robot, but their relationship changes when he realises he can use it to help him in a heist, with which the robot is happy to assist since having a project is good for his wellbeing.
The History of Christianity - smarter-than-the-average-documentary series by Diarmaid MacCulloch, first transmitted in 2009 but still fresh. With a generosity of spirit towards all denominations, he avoids the clichéd and self-serving patterns of familiar histories, starting for example with the early forms of Christianity which spread East of Jerusalem as far as China, at a time when it was quite conceivable that its headquarters would be Baghdad and not Rome.
Mrs Wilson – Ruth Wilson excels playing her own grandmother, who discovered after her husband’s death that he was keeping at least two, if not three, other wives and families elsewhere, though to what extent as part of a secret service cover and to what extent his own fantasising run amok was and to this day remains unclear. Great period detail and superb dramatisation, flicking back and forth in time between their post-war life and her horrified investigations in the 1960s, cleverly preparing us for each stunning new revelation. A story well-worth telling, one that you would dismiss as implausible were it not true.
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema / Christmas Cinema Secrets – great illustrative clips, though I gather what he says about tropes and genre is pretty trivial stuff for series film academics. Illuminating for the rest of us, though, and also revealing about the conservatism of the Hollywood film industry.
The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand – much more than just a celebratory clip show, the best bits being when Brand sits down at his piano and takes apart the classic numbers. More proper television.
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Who am I? The best I’ve ever seen, with Professors Alice Roberts and Aoife McLysaght having an easy manner with the kids and skilfully addressing a wide range of ages and previous knowledge (typical trick: using the proper technical term but immediately glossing it in folk speech), with some great demonstrations using the full breadth and height of the lecture room. Helped also by more editing than previously, to shorten the scene shifting and the volunteers coming down from the audience, which keeps up the pace. A pointed celebration of diversity, which seemed to be welcomed by kids, to judge by the final sing-along of ‘This is me’.
Panmorphia – beautifully illustrated puzzle game, not too hard – assuming you set the Easy option and use the in-game hint system, as I did. (See review.)
Tuesday 8 January 2019
Wednesday 2 January 2019
Cuttings: December 2018
Creating a simple style guide - post by Kate Clark in her blog 'The View from my Kitchen Table'. "Three easy steps for creating your style guide: decide on your tone of voice; list formal titles (proper nouns) that you need to get right; decide how to express terms you use regularly."
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: how capitalism works - review by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. ... [Their] essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness.... The seven 'things' of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. ... One of the most persuasive aspects ...is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the 'real work' it makes possible. 'Writing a history of work without care work,' they write, 'would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water.'"
Rule by robots is easy to imagine: we’re already victims of superintelligent firms - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "What will it be like for humans to live with – or under – [super-intelligent] machines? Will they rapidly conclude that people are a waste of space? Does the superintelligent machine pose an existential risk for humanity? ... Nobody really knows. How could they? Surely we’d need to build the machines first and then we’d find out. Actually, that’s not quite right. It just so happens that history has provided us with some useful insights into what it’s like to live with – and under – superintelligent machines. They’re called corporations, and they’ve been around for a very long time – since about 1600, in fact. Although they are powered by human beings, they are in fact nonhuman entities to which our legal systems grant the status of legal personhood. We can therefore regard them as artificial superintelligences because they possess formidable capacities for rational behaviour, reasoning, perception and action. And they have free will: they can engage in purposeful behaviour aimed at achieving self-determined goals. They possess and deploy massive resources of financial capital and human expertise. And they are, in principle at least, immortal: they can have life spans that greatly exceed those of humans, and some are capable of surviving catastrophes that kill millions of people. ... On the positive side, such entities are capable of accomplishing astonishing things – from building a new city, road or rail network, to indexing the world wide web, connecting 2.24 billion people, scanning all the world’s books, launching heavy rockets into space (and bringing them back safely), etc. But these superintelligent entities have other characteristics too. The most disturbing one is that they are intrinsically sociopathic – they are AIs that stand apart from the rest of society, existing for themselves and only for themselves, caring nothing for the norms and rules of society, and obeying only the letter (as distinct from the spirit) of the law. ... The interesting thing about the tech companies is that, until recently, we failed to notice that they were just corporations too...."
Populism and the internet: a toxic mix shaping the age of conspiracy theories - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "For the last five years, ... academic colleagues ... have been leading a team of researchers studying the history, nature and significance of conspiracy theories with a particular emphasis on their implications for democracy. ... How has the internet affected all this? Our research showed that conspiracy theorists were early adopters, in that they perceived the unique usefulness of the early (pre-social media) web for people who believed propositions that would never get past the editorial gatekeepers of mainstream media. ... Many people who thought about these things initially dismissed online conspiracism as a politically irrelevant phenomenon. ... Two developments changed that. The first was the arrival of global social media platforms such as Facebook whose automated advertising engines could be weaponised by political agents and entrepreneurial conspiracists. The second was the arrival of Donald Trump and the rise of populism across the western world. Trump, a paradigmatic conspiracy theorist, proved to be a masterful exploiter of social media, which he deployed to bring conspiracist thinking out from the shadows and into the mainstream. And conspiracy theorising ... is part of the inner logic of populism. Populism, remember, is based on the claim that society is divided between “the people” and the illegitimate elites who rule and exploit them. This is useful not only for campaigning, but for when populists get into power and discover that governing is more difficult than they thought. Why? Because others are conspiring against them, of course."
The teachers asking pupils to make the case for Christmas have a lesson for us all - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "[At] a secondary school in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, ... its religious education teacher told students that unless they could make a persuasive argument as to why it was worth bothering with cards, parties, presents and Christmas trees then the whole thing would be binned and celebrations in school strictly confined to the baby Jesus. The inevitable parental furore, not to mention newspaper stories about stealing Christmas, followed.... [The school] seems to have hit on an ingenious way of teaching children how to defend ideas they didn’t imagine they would ever have to defend. In the current political climate, that seems like an extraordinarily useful skill."
Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? - article by Raluca Budiu on the Nielsen Normal Group website. "Machine-learning algorithms rely on user knowledge and patterns observed in the data to make inferences and suggestions about what we may like or be interested in.... Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually not transparent to the end users. People are not sure which of their actions are taken into account by these algorithms, and their outputs are not always easy to make sense of. Suggestions and recommendations may be right on spot or apparently random and nonsensical. Often, these algorithms sort their output according to invisible criteria or group it into ad-hoc categories that are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we examine some of the challenges that users encounter when interacting with machine-learning algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Google News, Netflix, and Uber Driver. Our discussion is based on a week-long diary study in which 14 existing users of these systems video-logged their interactions with them."
Love can thrive if we leave our comfort zones, even in the age of Brexit and Trump - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Arguing the toss with someone you love – whether that’s a partner, friend or family member – means being forced to think harder, disagree better, play the ideological ball rather than the person. Rows within a family or a friendship circle have consequences and while that makes them uncomfortable, in an ideal world it’s also what makes them capable of teaching us to argue with some restraint. It’s the polar opposite of the hit-and-run way we have learned to fight with strangers on social media, where everything goes nuclear in seconds because you’re never going to find yourselves having to stack the dishwasher together in awkward silence later."
Degrees for the rich, apprenticeships for the poor: that’s not a world of parity - article by Laura McInerney in The Guardian. "Somewhere, right now, a 17-year-old is afraid to tell her family she wants to go to university. At £9,000-plus a year it feels like a luxury, a thing for other people. Even though she achieved the highest results in her school, and has spent her whole life wanting to be an engineer, she knows her parents are terrified of university debt and that attending the best institutions, in far-flung cities, would mean moving away. Now imagine this 17-year-old was listening earlier this year as the education secretary – the guardian of aspiration – announced that poorer young people would be better off studying near to home through a 'commuter degree' in order to save pennies.... Oh well, thinks the 17-year-old, studying engineering at Durham was a nice thought but it will be cheaper to do an apprenticeship with the local factory.... Across town there’s another 17-year-old, with wealthy parents, studying in a private school that pumps children into top universities, with a sense that his future shouldn’t depend on a single employer because one day he intends to be the employer. Let’s be serious: this kid won’t be taking the apprenticeship route – and [the education secretary] knows it."
Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld: the roots of our current predicament -review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Rosenfeld’s model of democratic truth as always contingent, arising through endless discussion, in a world in which people accepted that differences of opinion were inevitable, captures something distinctively new and valuable about Enlightenment approaches to knowledge. But it largely ignores a powerful alternative presumption, at least as prevalent in the 18th century as it is today – that truth, in politics as in other spheres, was simple, self-evident and unitary. It needed only to be revealed: if some people couldn’t yet see it, that was only because they were deluded, or acting in bad faith. To early advocates of this strain of thought, the point of freedom of speech was not to encourage pluralism, but simply to allow the truth to break free from bondage and superstition. In such circumstances, the judgment or will of the people, they believed, was always bound to be united: divergence of opinion was a sign of error, conspiracy or worse."
Dream job: the writer paid to send millions to sleep - interview with Phoebe Smith, by Alison Flood, in The Guardian. "Smith was a travel writer and journalist when she was approached last year by Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of the sleep app Calm. She’d written an article about the Trans-Siberian Railway and he asked her if she’d like to rewrite it for him, 'as a story to send people to sleep'. ... A year on, she has written 15 pieces for Calm, whose catalogue of “sleep stories” has been listened to 100m times. ... 'With most kinds of writing I’m trying to build the tension – here, I’m doing the opposite. Anything exciting needs to go right at the beginning and then it’s all about winding people down, while also encouraging their imagination to play,' she says. ... She is careful with her word choices, avoiding any disruptive sounds that might cause someone to wake up. There’s lots of immersive description, lots of onomatopoeia, lots of soothing, sonorous language."
Why Michelle Obama’s memoir should have demanded more of us - review by Yiyun Li in The Guardian. "Two years ago I drove my son and a friend of his to an event. They were 15, and discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest at her school. She had read the previous winners’ poems, she said. They were composed of words such as injustice, inequality, empowerment, action and descriptions of police brutality, of which, the girl pointed out, none of the poets would have direct knowledge. (She was right: she goes to one of the most preppy high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.) 'What I don’t understand is –' the girl said, 'why can’t we write about flowers any more.'... This awareness of the audience may mean that their need becomes the priority. It is perhaps unavoidable in a memoir by a public figure. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, delivers what it promises: her triumphant life journey from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, with intimate moments to connect with readers, and stirring passages to inspire. But one wishes that someone of her calibre could have defied that convention. ... What if she had chosen to forgo the vocabularies of empowerment and inspiration and patriotism? After all, she is a person who can make herself heard. The language she chooses to use will be incorporated into hundreds of thousands of minds and become infallible truth."
Posh is so passé: today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Education ... has come to be a marker of the values one holds and the place one possesses in society. One of the key signifiers of attitudes to Donald Trump and to Brexit is education. Today, we simultaneously deride poshness and want to be seen as having the common touch (hence Dimbleby’s outrage at being called posh), while also showing contempt for those who are deemed too common and whose commonness exhibits itself in the refusal to accept the wisdom of expertise and in being in possession of the wrong social values. Trump supporters, wrote David Rothkopf, ... regard knowledge as 'not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman'. Much the same has been said about Brexit supporters."
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: how capitalism works - review by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. ... [Their] essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness.... The seven 'things' of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. ... One of the most persuasive aspects ...is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the 'real work' it makes possible. 'Writing a history of work without care work,' they write, 'would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water.'"
Rule by robots is easy to imagine: we’re already victims of superintelligent firms - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "What will it be like for humans to live with – or under – [super-intelligent] machines? Will they rapidly conclude that people are a waste of space? Does the superintelligent machine pose an existential risk for humanity? ... Nobody really knows. How could they? Surely we’d need to build the machines first and then we’d find out. Actually, that’s not quite right. It just so happens that history has provided us with some useful insights into what it’s like to live with – and under – superintelligent machines. They’re called corporations, and they’ve been around for a very long time – since about 1600, in fact. Although they are powered by human beings, they are in fact nonhuman entities to which our legal systems grant the status of legal personhood. We can therefore regard them as artificial superintelligences because they possess formidable capacities for rational behaviour, reasoning, perception and action. And they have free will: they can engage in purposeful behaviour aimed at achieving self-determined goals. They possess and deploy massive resources of financial capital and human expertise. And they are, in principle at least, immortal: they can have life spans that greatly exceed those of humans, and some are capable of surviving catastrophes that kill millions of people. ... On the positive side, such entities are capable of accomplishing astonishing things – from building a new city, road or rail network, to indexing the world wide web, connecting 2.24 billion people, scanning all the world’s books, launching heavy rockets into space (and bringing them back safely), etc. But these superintelligent entities have other characteristics too. The most disturbing one is that they are intrinsically sociopathic – they are AIs that stand apart from the rest of society, existing for themselves and only for themselves, caring nothing for the norms and rules of society, and obeying only the letter (as distinct from the spirit) of the law. ... The interesting thing about the tech companies is that, until recently, we failed to notice that they were just corporations too...."
Populism and the internet: a toxic mix shaping the age of conspiracy theories - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "For the last five years, ... academic colleagues ... have been leading a team of researchers studying the history, nature and significance of conspiracy theories with a particular emphasis on their implications for democracy. ... How has the internet affected all this? Our research showed that conspiracy theorists were early adopters, in that they perceived the unique usefulness of the early (pre-social media) web for people who believed propositions that would never get past the editorial gatekeepers of mainstream media. ... Many people who thought about these things initially dismissed online conspiracism as a politically irrelevant phenomenon. ... Two developments changed that. The first was the arrival of global social media platforms such as Facebook whose automated advertising engines could be weaponised by political agents and entrepreneurial conspiracists. The second was the arrival of Donald Trump and the rise of populism across the western world. Trump, a paradigmatic conspiracy theorist, proved to be a masterful exploiter of social media, which he deployed to bring conspiracist thinking out from the shadows and into the mainstream. And conspiracy theorising ... is part of the inner logic of populism. Populism, remember, is based on the claim that society is divided between “the people” and the illegitimate elites who rule and exploit them. This is useful not only for campaigning, but for when populists get into power and discover that governing is more difficult than they thought. Why? Because others are conspiring against them, of course."
The teachers asking pupils to make the case for Christmas have a lesson for us all - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "[At] a secondary school in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, ... its religious education teacher told students that unless they could make a persuasive argument as to why it was worth bothering with cards, parties, presents and Christmas trees then the whole thing would be binned and celebrations in school strictly confined to the baby Jesus. The inevitable parental furore, not to mention newspaper stories about stealing Christmas, followed.... [The school] seems to have hit on an ingenious way of teaching children how to defend ideas they didn’t imagine they would ever have to defend. In the current political climate, that seems like an extraordinarily useful skill."
Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? - article by Raluca Budiu on the Nielsen Normal Group website. "Machine-learning algorithms rely on user knowledge and patterns observed in the data to make inferences and suggestions about what we may like or be interested in.... Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually not transparent to the end users. People are not sure which of their actions are taken into account by these algorithms, and their outputs are not always easy to make sense of. Suggestions and recommendations may be right on spot or apparently random and nonsensical. Often, these algorithms sort their output according to invisible criteria or group it into ad-hoc categories that are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we examine some of the challenges that users encounter when interacting with machine-learning algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Google News, Netflix, and Uber Driver. Our discussion is based on a week-long diary study in which 14 existing users of these systems video-logged their interactions with them."
Love can thrive if we leave our comfort zones, even in the age of Brexit and Trump - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Arguing the toss with someone you love – whether that’s a partner, friend or family member – means being forced to think harder, disagree better, play the ideological ball rather than the person. Rows within a family or a friendship circle have consequences and while that makes them uncomfortable, in an ideal world it’s also what makes them capable of teaching us to argue with some restraint. It’s the polar opposite of the hit-and-run way we have learned to fight with strangers on social media, where everything goes nuclear in seconds because you’re never going to find yourselves having to stack the dishwasher together in awkward silence later."
Degrees for the rich, apprenticeships for the poor: that’s not a world of parity - article by Laura McInerney in The Guardian. "Somewhere, right now, a 17-year-old is afraid to tell her family she wants to go to university. At £9,000-plus a year it feels like a luxury, a thing for other people. Even though she achieved the highest results in her school, and has spent her whole life wanting to be an engineer, she knows her parents are terrified of university debt and that attending the best institutions, in far-flung cities, would mean moving away. Now imagine this 17-year-old was listening earlier this year as the education secretary – the guardian of aspiration – announced that poorer young people would be better off studying near to home through a 'commuter degree' in order to save pennies.... Oh well, thinks the 17-year-old, studying engineering at Durham was a nice thought but it will be cheaper to do an apprenticeship with the local factory.... Across town there’s another 17-year-old, with wealthy parents, studying in a private school that pumps children into top universities, with a sense that his future shouldn’t depend on a single employer because one day he intends to be the employer. Let’s be serious: this kid won’t be taking the apprenticeship route – and [the education secretary] knows it."
Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld: the roots of our current predicament -review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Rosenfeld’s model of democratic truth as always contingent, arising through endless discussion, in a world in which people accepted that differences of opinion were inevitable, captures something distinctively new and valuable about Enlightenment approaches to knowledge. But it largely ignores a powerful alternative presumption, at least as prevalent in the 18th century as it is today – that truth, in politics as in other spheres, was simple, self-evident and unitary. It needed only to be revealed: if some people couldn’t yet see it, that was only because they were deluded, or acting in bad faith. To early advocates of this strain of thought, the point of freedom of speech was not to encourage pluralism, but simply to allow the truth to break free from bondage and superstition. In such circumstances, the judgment or will of the people, they believed, was always bound to be united: divergence of opinion was a sign of error, conspiracy or worse."
Dream job: the writer paid to send millions to sleep - interview with Phoebe Smith, by Alison Flood, in The Guardian. "Smith was a travel writer and journalist when she was approached last year by Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of the sleep app Calm. She’d written an article about the Trans-Siberian Railway and he asked her if she’d like to rewrite it for him, 'as a story to send people to sleep'. ... A year on, she has written 15 pieces for Calm, whose catalogue of “sleep stories” has been listened to 100m times. ... 'With most kinds of writing I’m trying to build the tension – here, I’m doing the opposite. Anything exciting needs to go right at the beginning and then it’s all about winding people down, while also encouraging their imagination to play,' she says. ... She is careful with her word choices, avoiding any disruptive sounds that might cause someone to wake up. There’s lots of immersive description, lots of onomatopoeia, lots of soothing, sonorous language."
Why Michelle Obama’s memoir should have demanded more of us - review by Yiyun Li in The Guardian. "Two years ago I drove my son and a friend of his to an event. They were 15, and discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest at her school. She had read the previous winners’ poems, she said. They were composed of words such as injustice, inequality, empowerment, action and descriptions of police brutality, of which, the girl pointed out, none of the poets would have direct knowledge. (She was right: she goes to one of the most preppy high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.) 'What I don’t understand is –' the girl said, 'why can’t we write about flowers any more.'... This awareness of the audience may mean that their need becomes the priority. It is perhaps unavoidable in a memoir by a public figure. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, delivers what it promises: her triumphant life journey from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, with intimate moments to connect with readers, and stirring passages to inspire. But one wishes that someone of her calibre could have defied that convention. ... What if she had chosen to forgo the vocabularies of empowerment and inspiration and patriotism? After all, she is a person who can make herself heard. The language she chooses to use will be incorporated into hundreds of thousands of minds and become infallible truth."
Posh is so passé: today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Education ... has come to be a marker of the values one holds and the place one possesses in society. One of the key signifiers of attitudes to Donald Trump and to Brexit is education. Today, we simultaneously deride poshness and want to be seen as having the common touch (hence Dimbleby’s outrage at being called posh), while also showing contempt for those who are deemed too common and whose commonness exhibits itself in the refusal to accept the wisdom of expertise and in being in possession of the wrong social values. Trump supporters, wrote David Rothkopf, ... regard knowledge as 'not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman'. Much the same has been said about Brexit supporters."
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