Oliver Twiss and Martin Guzzlewit: the fan fiction that ripped off Dickens – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian, about Edward Lloyd and His World, eds Rohan McWilliam and Sarah Louise Lill. "Oliver Twiss was one of many plagiarisms of Dickens published by the press baron Edward Lloyd, with Barnaby Budge, Martin Guzzlewit, The Penny Pickwick and Nickelas Nickelbery also hitting shelves in the mid-19th century.... The imitations were much cheaper than the originals – The Penny Pickwick cost a penny, compared with a shilling for Dickens’ story. 'It’s very likely that, given these things saturated the market for a while, from about 1837 to 1845, many working-class readers first encountered Dickens not through his original works but in these weird doppelgangers that were going around,' says McWilliam.... After publishing The Penny Pickwick, Lloyd went on to build a publishing empire. He told the illustrators of his 'penny dreadfuls' – grisly horror novels that included the first appearance of the demon barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd, and Varney the Vampire – 'There must be blood … much more blood!' 'When we think of the 1840s, we think of the publication of major novels such as Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair,” says McWilliam. “The reality is that many readers were as likely to be consuming shockers issued by Lloyd, such as Ada the Betrayed.' "
Hello World by Hannah Fry: AI and why we over-trust what we don’t understand – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "Fry makes a convincing case for 'the urgent need for algorithmic regulation', and wants the public to understand the compromises we are making. And, in the case of Facebook and users’ data, 'how cheaply we were bought'. This book illustrates why good science writers are essential. 'We have a tendency to overtrust anything we don’t understand,' Fry says. And if we don’t understand it, those difficult questions will be answered by those who do – pharmaceutical companies, malign governments and the like. It’s time to pull back the curtain on the algorithms that shape our lives. Because, as Fry says, 'the future doesn’t just happen. We create it.'"
Britain’s story of empire is based on myth. We need to know the truth – article by Privamvada Gopal in The Guardian. "These days we’ve become wearily accustomed to depictions of Brexit Britain as oppressed by a villainously imperial Europe.... In a particularly far-fetched comparison, Ann Widdecombe MEP has compared Brexit with the resistance of 'slaves against their owners' and 'colonies against empires'. Prime ministerial frontrunner Boris Johnson too has spoken of Britain’s supposed 'colony status' in the EU though, with a familiar double standard, he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still 'in charge' of Africa. These bizarre comparisons can be made and go unchallenged because the stark fact remains that most Britons know very little about the history of the empire itself, still less the way in which its long afterlife profoundly shapes both Britain and the wider world today. This great amnesia or 'shocking lack of understanding' has led a respected race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust, to call this week for the teaching of the intertwined histories of empire and migration to be made compulsory in secondary schools. Migration and empire are 'not marginal events', its report rightly notes, but 'central to our national story'."
Guy Gunaratne: ‘In London, you learn to code-switch ... I’ve always thought of that as a superpower’ – interview by Claire Armitstead in The Guardian. "A lightly fictionalised version of the murder [of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby] opens the novel, and is all the more shocking for the reaction it provokes on the street. 'The black younger had stopped soldier-boy and struck him down with a cleaver,' we are told. 'He called himself the hand of Allah but to us he looked as if he had just rolled out the same school gates as us. He had the same trainers we wore. Spoke the same road slang we used. The blood was not what shocked us. For us it was his face like a mirror, reflecting our own confused and frightened thoughts.' Most of the novel is written in a pungent first-person patois, which the author calls 'road dialect' (while conceding that it’s officially known as Multicultural London English or MLE). But this opening rings out like an omniscient chorus. So how closely does it reflect his own feelings? Gunaratne was in Finland when the news of the murder broke but watched the endlessly repeated film footage. 'The thing that shocked me was one of the killers: the way he expressed himself really did remind me of the kind of people I grew up with. There was a perverse identification which disturbed me to the extent that I knew it was something I needed to navigate for myself.'"
Literary fiction nursery rhymes – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Tom, Tom, the piper's son, stole a pig and away did run, but he cannot run from the traumatic relationship with his overbearing father. (2) Hickety Pickety, my black hen, she lays eggs for gentlemen, then a chance encounter leads her to ask whether there could be more to life. (3) Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub, and each, in his own way, coming to terms with loss, failure and mortality."
Margaret Hamilton: ‘They worried that the men might rebel. They didn’t’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. "Margaret Hamilton, [MIT] computer programmer and working mother[,] led the team that created the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11. The computer system was the most sophisticated of its day. Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions... 'Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter, Lauren, into work with me. One day, she was with me when I was doing a simulation of a mission to the moon. ... She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon. The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission. I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake. Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. ... After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.'"
Listen up: why we can't get enough of audiobooks – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Are audiobooks the new… books? It was recently revealed that audiobook sales rocketed by 43% in 2018, while those of print books declined (by 5%) for the first time in five years. Can people no longer be bothered to read for themselves? Is this, rather than the ebook, the harbinger of the slow death of print, about which we have been warned for so long? And if so, what does that mean for literary culture? Let us first retain some historical perspective by noting that Homer’s Iliad was essentially an audiobook before it was ever written down. Oral literary culture long precedes the book and there are many reasons for its rising popularity.... But is there really a measurable difference between reading with the eyes and “reading” with the ears? According to an oft-cited 2016 study (Beth A Rogowsky et al), 91 subjects were found to display no significant difference in either comprehension or recall after two weeks whether they had read a non‑fiction passage or listened to it, or done both simultaneously. However, this investigation used ebooks for the reading part, and other studies have suggested that reading comprehension and recall is lower for reading on screens versus print.... Books have the advantage that you can rapidly re‑scan a sentence visually if you didn’t take it in the first time... The mood in publishing seems to be that audiobooks are not cannibalising print sales to any large degree yet; more likely they are competing with podcasts, music and television as a more passive but still semi-highbrow entertainment experience."
What caused Britain’s national nervous breakdown? – article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "When did our country lose grip of its senses? ... Researching my new novel, which focuses on the period between millennium eve and the financial crash of 2008, I was left in very little doubt about when it all started.... many of the forces I discovered were technological – but found their expression psychologically.... Most significantly there was the sudden growth of the internet, the unleashing of social media, and the accompanying change in our consciousness, which had at least as many negative effects as it had positive ones.... Instead of having a national conversation, we began to indulge in mass national bickering and mudslinging – in real time. The irony is that just as we were showing signs of collective derangement, our understanding of mental health was growing exponentially. "
The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan: a strange sliver of history – review by Clare Clark in The Guardian, "A few years ago, ... Alix Nathan came across a curious entry [in a 1797 reference work]. In a single short paragraph, it described what appeared to be some kind of scientific experiment, conducted by a Mr Powyss of Moreham in Lancashire. Some years earlier Mr Powyss had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 a year for life to any man willing to live for seven years underground without seeing another human face.... His conditions would be comfortable, even luxurious: his 'commodious apartments' would include meals served from Mr Powyss’s own table, a bathtub with cold running water, a chamber-organ, and 'as many books as the occupier should desire'. According to the Register, a labouring man with a large family had accepted the post. He was, by 1797, in the 'fourth year of his probation'. Intrigued, Nathan tried to discover more about Powyss and the outcome of his experiment, but without success. Nothing of either remained. Instead she turned to fiction, writing a pair of short stories that imagined the peculiar undertaking, the first from Powyss’s point of view, 'An Experiment: Above', and then, in 'An Experiment: Below', from the solitary subterranean perspective of his confined subject. Both were included in her excellent 2014 collection, His Last Fire, which attracted acclaim from, among others, Hilary Mantel, who praised Nathan as 'an original, with a virtuoso touch'."
Pearson shifts to Netflix-style subscription model for textbooks – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. "[Pearson] has for years profited from the demand for specialist textbooks at US universities, which students can be required to purchase despite them sometimes costing hundreds of dollars, [but they have] been badly affected by the growth in secondhand sales and falling revenues. The company has come to accept consumer behaviour has changed and, as a result, it is shifting to a model where material is rented, not owned – similar to the change that has taken place in the music and television industry. John Fallon, the chief executive of Pearson, announced on Tuesday that the company would focus on convincing students to subscribe to access online publications. 'Our digital-first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues,' he said.... The print editions of its 1,500 academic textbooks – which have traditionally been refreshed on a three-year cycle – will now only be updated infrequently. Students who want up-to-date teaching materials will instead have to subscribe to the electronic versions, which will be updated on a regular basis to reflect recent developments in academic fields."
Exhalation by Ted Chiang: stories from an SF master – review by Adam Roberts in The Guardian. "[Ted Chiang] has never published a novel, yet his 15 stories have won all the genre’s most prestigious awards: Hugos and Nebulas, Sturgeons, Tiptrees and BSFAs galore – more than two dozen prizes in all.... [This] collection’s two finest stories both achieve this expert balance of the emotional and the cerebral. 'The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate' is an intricate and delightful Arabian Nights-style yarn about a time gate; and the title story ['Exhalation'] deftly creates an alien world, bounded by solid chromium, in which live touchingly thoughtful robotic creatures. One dissects its own head in an attempt to understand how the myriad flaps of gold leaf inside its brain generate its consciousness and in doing so discovers a profound truth about the strange cosmos it inhabits. Chiang makes this entropic revelation ring like a bell, and his quaint world suddenly focuses a truth about all existence. It’s Chiang at his best, and worth the price of admission on its own."
Cressida Cowell: ‘Books are better than films at teaching children creativity and intelligence' –interview by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "When she was announced as the latest [Children's Laureate] on Tuesday, she unveiled her Laureate Charter, a 'giant to-do list' which asserts every child’s right to 'own their own book', to 'be read aloud to' and to 'see themselves reflected in a book'. ' Reading is a medium we cannot lose. I love films and telly [but] they get magically beamed into kids’ heads, whereas with books it’s much more of an effort. Books can easily represent something that makes kids feel stupid, and how can you love something that makes you feel stupid?' Her ultimate aim is to get children 'as excited about reading and books as they are about films and telly'. 'Because – I’ll just hit you with it,' she says, leaning forward in her armchair in excitement, 'because books are a kind of transformative magic that offer magical things that films aren’t as good at creating in children: empathy, creativity and intelligence. With a film, things happen out there, in a book it’s happening inside your head, so that’s empathy. Creativity – a book is partly what I say and partly what a reader imagines, whereas films are very bossy, they tell you how things would look and how they would sound. Intelligence is words. Those are the three magical powers, that’s why books have to survive – because, my goodness, we need empathetic intelligent creative people today.'"
The comma touch: Jacob Rees-Mogg's aides send language rules to staff – article by Kevin Rawlinson in The Guardian. "A list of rules has been sent to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s staff ... demanding that they use only imperial measurements and give all non-titled males the suffix Esq. ... Among the words and phrases considered unacceptable were: 'very', 'due to' and “ongoing”, as well as 'equal', 'yourself' and 'unacceptable'. Rees-Mogg’s aides also barred the use of 'lot', 'got' and 'I am pleased to learn'.... In a call for accuracy contained in his list, staff were told: 'CHECK your work.' Other directions include a call for a double space after full stops and no comma after the word 'and'.... Moreover, the phrase 'no longer fit for purpose' has been deemed no longer fit for purpose."
Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Directives from the Department of Getting Back to the Good Old Days. Always commence documents with a huge letter in a decorative box. Never use the words listed in the Books of Heresy! Women to be addressed thus: Maiden, Spinster, Goodwife. Preferred units of measurement: furlong, rood, barleycorn, tod, bovate, firkin, hogshead. Ask your chaplain, steward, or local witchfinder to check your text before giving it to the Town Crier."
Listen up: why we can't get enough of audiobooks – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Are audiobooks the new… books? It was recently revealed that audiobook sales rocketed by 43% in 2018, while those of print books declined (by 5%) for the first time in five years. Can people no longer be bothered to read for themselves? Is this, rather than the ebook, the harbinger of the slow death of print, about which we have been warned for so long? And if so, what does that mean for literary culture? Let us first retain some historical perspective by noting that Homer’s Iliad was essentially an audiobook before it was ever written down. Oral literary culture long precedes the book and there are many reasons for its rising popularity.... But is there really a measurable difference between reading with the eyes and “reading” with the ears? According to an oft-cited 2016 study (Beth A Rogowsky et al), 91 subjects were found to display no significant difference in either comprehension or recall after two weeks whether they had read a non‑fiction passage or listened to it, or done both simultaneously. However, this investigation used ebooks for the reading part, and other studies have suggested that reading comprehension and recall is lower for reading on screens versus print.... Books have the advantage that you can rapidly re‑scan a sentence visually if you didn’t take it in the first time... The mood in publishing seems to be that audiobooks are not cannibalising print sales to any large degree yet; more likely they are competing with podcasts, music and television as a more passive but still semi-highbrow entertainment experience."
What caused Britain’s national nervous breakdown? – article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "When did our country lose grip of its senses? ... Researching my new novel, which focuses on the period between millennium eve and the financial crash of 2008, I was left in very little doubt about when it all started.... many of the forces I discovered were technological – but found their expression psychologically.... Most significantly there was the sudden growth of the internet, the unleashing of social media, and the accompanying change in our consciousness, which had at least as many negative effects as it had positive ones.... Instead of having a national conversation, we began to indulge in mass national bickering and mudslinging – in real time. The irony is that just as we were showing signs of collective derangement, our understanding of mental health was growing exponentially. "
The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan: a strange sliver of history – review by Clare Clark in The Guardian, "A few years ago, ... Alix Nathan came across a curious entry [in a 1797 reference work]. In a single short paragraph, it described what appeared to be some kind of scientific experiment, conducted by a Mr Powyss of Moreham in Lancashire. Some years earlier Mr Powyss had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 a year for life to any man willing to live for seven years underground without seeing another human face.... His conditions would be comfortable, even luxurious: his 'commodious apartments' would include meals served from Mr Powyss’s own table, a bathtub with cold running water, a chamber-organ, and 'as many books as the occupier should desire'. According to the Register, a labouring man with a large family had accepted the post. He was, by 1797, in the 'fourth year of his probation'. Intrigued, Nathan tried to discover more about Powyss and the outcome of his experiment, but without success. Nothing of either remained. Instead she turned to fiction, writing a pair of short stories that imagined the peculiar undertaking, the first from Powyss’s point of view, 'An Experiment: Above', and then, in 'An Experiment: Below', from the solitary subterranean perspective of his confined subject. Both were included in her excellent 2014 collection, His Last Fire, which attracted acclaim from, among others, Hilary Mantel, who praised Nathan as 'an original, with a virtuoso touch'."
Pearson shifts to Netflix-style subscription model for textbooks – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. "[Pearson] has for years profited from the demand for specialist textbooks at US universities, which students can be required to purchase despite them sometimes costing hundreds of dollars, [but they have] been badly affected by the growth in secondhand sales and falling revenues. The company has come to accept consumer behaviour has changed and, as a result, it is shifting to a model where material is rented, not owned – similar to the change that has taken place in the music and television industry. John Fallon, the chief executive of Pearson, announced on Tuesday that the company would focus on convincing students to subscribe to access online publications. 'Our digital-first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues,' he said.... The print editions of its 1,500 academic textbooks – which have traditionally been refreshed on a three-year cycle – will now only be updated infrequently. Students who want up-to-date teaching materials will instead have to subscribe to the electronic versions, which will be updated on a regular basis to reflect recent developments in academic fields."
Exhalation by Ted Chiang: stories from an SF master – review by Adam Roberts in The Guardian. "[Ted Chiang] has never published a novel, yet his 15 stories have won all the genre’s most prestigious awards: Hugos and Nebulas, Sturgeons, Tiptrees and BSFAs galore – more than two dozen prizes in all.... [This] collection’s two finest stories both achieve this expert balance of the emotional and the cerebral. 'The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate' is an intricate and delightful Arabian Nights-style yarn about a time gate; and the title story ['Exhalation'] deftly creates an alien world, bounded by solid chromium, in which live touchingly thoughtful robotic creatures. One dissects its own head in an attempt to understand how the myriad flaps of gold leaf inside its brain generate its consciousness and in doing so discovers a profound truth about the strange cosmos it inhabits. Chiang makes this entropic revelation ring like a bell, and his quaint world suddenly focuses a truth about all existence. It’s Chiang at his best, and worth the price of admission on its own."
Cressida Cowell: ‘Books are better than films at teaching children creativity and intelligence' –interview by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "When she was announced as the latest [Children's Laureate] on Tuesday, she unveiled her Laureate Charter, a 'giant to-do list' which asserts every child’s right to 'own their own book', to 'be read aloud to' and to 'see themselves reflected in a book'. ' Reading is a medium we cannot lose. I love films and telly [but] they get magically beamed into kids’ heads, whereas with books it’s much more of an effort. Books can easily represent something that makes kids feel stupid, and how can you love something that makes you feel stupid?' Her ultimate aim is to get children 'as excited about reading and books as they are about films and telly'. 'Because – I’ll just hit you with it,' she says, leaning forward in her armchair in excitement, 'because books are a kind of transformative magic that offer magical things that films aren’t as good at creating in children: empathy, creativity and intelligence. With a film, things happen out there, in a book it’s happening inside your head, so that’s empathy. Creativity – a book is partly what I say and partly what a reader imagines, whereas films are very bossy, they tell you how things would look and how they would sound. Intelligence is words. Those are the three magical powers, that’s why books have to survive – because, my goodness, we need empathetic intelligent creative people today.'"
The comma touch: Jacob Rees-Mogg's aides send language rules to staff – article by Kevin Rawlinson in The Guardian. "A list of rules has been sent to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s staff ... demanding that they use only imperial measurements and give all non-titled males the suffix Esq. ... Among the words and phrases considered unacceptable were: 'very', 'due to' and “ongoing”, as well as 'equal', 'yourself' and 'unacceptable'. Rees-Mogg’s aides also barred the use of 'lot', 'got' and 'I am pleased to learn'.... In a call for accuracy contained in his list, staff were told: 'CHECK your work.' Other directions include a call for a double space after full stops and no comma after the word 'and'.... Moreover, the phrase 'no longer fit for purpose' has been deemed no longer fit for purpose."
Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Directives from the Department of Getting Back to the Good Old Days. Always commence documents with a huge letter in a decorative box. Never use the words listed in the Books of Heresy! Women to be addressed thus: Maiden, Spinster, Goodwife. Preferred units of measurement: furlong, rood, barleycorn, tod, bovate, firkin, hogshead. Ask your chaplain, steward, or local witchfinder to check your text before giving it to the Town Crier."
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