The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now – article by Nick Cohen in The Guardian. "A shameful fact is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young. To understand their ineptitude, think of how conservatism turned into a know-nothing culture in the past decade, and ask what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be doing in an alternative universe where they never came close to power. I don’t think you need a wild imagination to find the answer. Trump would be propagating corona conspiracy theories about 5G and Bill Gates as enthusiastically as he endorsed the straight lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as US president. Johnson would have been egging on his colleagues at the Telegraph as they insisted last week the lockdown was a 'pant-wetting' response to the virus from a government of 'nervous nellies'. When it was Johnson’s turn to offer his two pennies’ worth, he would repeat the Brexit right’s party line that the government had 'petrified the public' to the point where it was overwhelmingly against lifting the lockdown and going back to work as it jolly well should. My guess is he would remind readers, for they are never allowed to forget, that he managed a second-class classics degree from Oxford sometime in the 1980s by deadlifting a Latin phrase and announcing “aegrescit medendo' – the cure is worse than the disease. For that is what the world that provided his most loyal support believes. ... We are witnessing the Oxbridge arts graduate’s fear of expertise, particularly the expertise of scientists who cannot cut a good figure or turn a catchy phrase. In Johnson’s days at Oxford, they were dismissed as 'northern chemists' – chemist being a catch-all term covering everyone studying subjects the suave could not understand."
How to have fun during lockdown – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "What I think we probably ought to be doing, to whatever extent possible, is having more fun. Not meditation or gratitude journalling or jogging (unless you find those fun). Not things you think are supposed to be fun. I mean the things you actually find fun.... Ask yourself Carl Jung’s question: 'What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?' And, in fact, this doubles as useful parenting advice for those who find themselves spending much more time with small children at the moment: consider selecting activities based on what you – not the kids – would find most fun. ('You can only have fun helping other people have fun if you’re having fun doing it,' as De Koven put it.) Surprisingly frequently, it works."
The country is being run by a second-rate ad agency. No wonder we feel vulnerable – article by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. "This exhortation to keep yourself fit in the middle of a pandemic ... is clearly about moving the narrative from collective to personal responsibility. And personal failure. We are told to 'stay alert', but if alertness could conquer this virus, we would all be fine.... We have to use the dread words 'common sense'. Whenever common sense is invoked, I shudder: all kinds of ideological posturing follows. Common sense may say 'I’m all right, Jack' or 'you get it from 5G' and 'you only live once'. Common sense may say keep calm and carry on. Dominic Raab spoke of common sense: you can meet your parents in a park. Then a government source had to announce that 'they can see both parents, but not at the same time – they would have to see them individually'. Common sense turns out to be remarkably like unpoliceable chaos. .... This is not surprising because what common sense never does well is risk assessment."
Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let's start with education – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "During the lockdown, I’ve been doing something I’ve long dreamed about: experimenting with an ecological education.... We started by constructing a giant painting, composed of 15 A4 panels. Each panel introduces a different habitat, from mountaintops to the deepest ocean, the forest canopy to the soil, on to which we stick pictures of the relevant wildlife. The painting becomes a platform for exploring the processes and relationships in every ecosystem, and across the Earth system as a whole. These, in turn, are keys that open other doors. For example, rainforest ecology leads to photosynthesis, that leads to organic chemistry, atoms and molecules, to the carbon cycle, fossil fuels, energy and power. Sea otters take us to food webs, keystone species and trophic cascades. We’ve done some fieldwork in soil ecology... We’re now making a model landscape, to demonstrate the water cycle, river dynamics, stratigraphy, erosion, soil formation and temperature gradients. ... Because of the circular nature of Earth systems, it doesn’t matter where you begin: eventually you go all the way round. As on many previous occasions, I’m struck by children’s natural affinity with the living world. The stories it has to tell are inherently fascinating."
Like the Open University, we now need an Open School for the whole country – article by Tim Brighouse and Bob Moon in The Guardian. "Open Schools of great repute exist around the world. In Canada, the Open School of British Columbia has existed since 1919, and offers a rich range of resources and courses for all school grades. In Australia, Victoria’s Virtual School also goes back more than a century. These open schools were created to serve isolated communities but now provide a service to the whole school sector. Any teacher, and anyone else, can access the support provided. If the UK had an Open School, what would it look like? We believe it needs to be a free-standing, independent institution offering high-quality self-learning, tutored courses and resources in every subject. It should explain how teachers in schools could incorporate these resources into their teaching. It could create a forum for networking for students of all ages, learner to learner, school to school, across districts, regions, nationally and internationally."
The comedian going viral for lip-syncing Trump: 'People really hate him' – interview with Sarah Cooper by Poppy Noor in The Guardian. "Sarah Cooper never expected to become internet famous during a pandemic, but now she is a viral TikTok celebrity who makes people laugh without saying anything. How? She lets Trump say it all for her: Cooper lip-syncs Trump’s worst comments from press conferences. ... her first viral moment came following that press conference, when Trump suggested Americans ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus. Within hours of the press conference Cooper had uploaded the TikTok video, simply captioned 'How to medical' and watched as millions of laughs and likes came rolling in. ... Cooper says a lot without words. Much of the comedy in her videos lies in the way she punctuates Trump’s remarks – a subtle facial expression that gives away just how clueless he is, or a gesture that reminds you of the broader context around what he is saying." See also: '"People still need to laugh": how lipsyncing spoofs saved lockdown'.
Working methods – article by Keith Thomas in The London Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Scholars have always made notes. The most primitive way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself. It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin – the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’. Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall.... The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you. My old tutor, Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention.... Another help to the memory is the pocketbook in which to enter stray thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’. John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.’ ... In the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars tended to read books in an extrapolatory way, selecting passages to be memorised or copied into common-place books. Sometimes they kept their excerpts in the order in which they came across them. More usually, they tried to arrange them under predetermined headings: virtues and vices, perhaps, or branches of knowledge. Properly organised, a good collection of extracts provided a reserve of quotations and aphorisms which could be used to support an argument or adorn a literary composition.”
The Great British Battle: how the fight against coronavirus spread a new nationalism – article by William Davies in The Guardian. “The continuity between coronavirus Britain and Brexit Britain is greater than we might have imagined, and certainly greater than it appeared during those five weeks before Johnson’s hospitalisation. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Johnson – like Donald Trump – was elected to office on the back of an anti-metropolitan, anti-liberal cultural platform. Johnson’s core vote is predominantly outside of those Covid danger zones of the inner cities and clusters of prosperity. Johnson, like Donald Trump, represents people who believe in the value of hard work, but don’t do very much of the really unpleasant hard work themselves, either for reasons of wealth or age. They believe in ‘unleashing’ the economy, less in a macroeconomic sense, and more in the sense of ditching all the red tape and political correctness that comes from government administrators and universities.... The purpose of the economy, from this conservative perspective, is to inculcate independence, both at an individual and a national level. The national economy should be self-reliant, manufacture its own goods, and employ its own people. It’s this national economy that globalisation, Brussels and lockdown all inhibit, and therefore need overturning.”
What's the point of efficiency if you're in a rush to finish something trivial? – article from 2015 by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “The premise of gamification ... makes a certain intuitive sense: millions of players find video games compelling, perhaps even to the point of addiction, and they’re highly motivated to complete the sequential challenges around which most games are built. What if we designed our work projects, our time at the gym or even our romantic lives so that they exploit the same psychological principles, featuring mini-challenges, systems for winning points, completing quests and moving upwards through levels, culminating in an ‘epic win’?... The constant hazard with the contemporary cult of productivity, though, is that productivity itself quickly starts to feel inherently virtuous – as if merely getting things done were a good thing, regardless of what those things are. An exhausting weekend spent crossing tasks off your household to-do list is nothing to be proud of, if they’re not the right tasks. ... Gamification risks making all this worse precisely because it works so well: when you’re psychologically enmeshed in scoring points by acing challenges, it’s even easier to forget to keep asking whether they’re the right challenges.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how' – interview by James Yeh in The Guardian. “In her debut collection of essays, Gathering Moss, she blended, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet’s oldest plants. For Braiding Sweetgrass, she broadened her scope with an array of object lessons braced by indigenous wisdom and culture. From cedars we can learn generosity (because of all they provide, from canoes to capes). From the creation story, which tells of Sky woman falling from the sky, we can learn about mutual aid. Sweetgrass teaches the value of sustainable harvesting, reciprocal care and ceremony. The Windigo mindset, on the other hand, is a warning against being ‘consumed by consumption’ (a windigo is a legendary monster from Anishinaabe lore, an ‘Ojibwe boogeyman’). Ideas of recovery and restoration are consistent themes, from the global to the personal. ‘Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us,’ Kimmerer explains, ‘so my act of reciprocity is, having been shown plants as gifts, as intelligences other than our own, as these amazing, creative beings – good lord, they can photosynthesise, that still blows my mind! – I want to help them become visible to people. People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.’”
'Transcendentally boring': the joy of job simulation games – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. “Over the last five years there has been a renaissance in serious job simulator games. Titles such as Euro Truck Simulator, Bus Simulator and Train Sim World have attracted huge fanbases and critical acclaim, each replicating its profession with unremitting attention to detail. In an entertainment sector where ludicrous power fantasies rule, where players get to be space marines, ancient warrior princesses and football superstars, it seems antithetical that 25 million people have bought Farming Simulator, a game in which your main challenge is to harvest a successful wheat crop.... It’s easy to think of hardcore sim fans as pernickety obsessives, but there is a quiet joy in interacting with these lovingly replicated systems of lights, switches and signals. In an unpredictable world, it is calming to open the doors of a bus at the right time, to give the correct change, to set the heating system correctly, to obey the traffic signs. It is gratifying to see a button, to press it and to know something will happen.“
'Milli Violini': I was a fake violinist in a world-class miming orchestra – interview of Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman by Sian Cain in The Guardian. "A young violinist joins an award-winning ensemble led by a famous composer, only to find out that all of the musicians aren’t actually playing their instruments but are simply miming along to a CD instead. It is an incredible premise for a memoir, and might even make a great Coen brothers film, but Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman says this astonishing story happened to her.... The Composer wanted the musicians to mime, Hindman says, because that way ‘we sounded perfect, never had to rehearse and he could switch us up like socks’. The musicians, some of whom had PhDs from Juilliard, accepted it because, like Hindman, they couldn’t find full-time work and needed the money....Dedicated to ‘those with average talents and above-average desires’, Sounds Like Titanic has its own darker undercurrent. The book is really about millennial work culture, US healthcare and many other things that would push a young woman to mime to a CD for four years.”
Out of My Skull by James Danckert and John D Eastwood: the psychology of boredom – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Our guides’ careful analysis leads to a detailed conception of boredom as a combination of being mentally unengaged, and wanting to engage with something, yet being unable to – what they call ‘a failure to launch’. It seems that some people experience this more often than others: those blessed with a strong sense of ‘intrinsic motivation’, who pursue projects for their own sake – whether it be extreme rock-climbing or learning a musical instrument – might be less prone to boredom, or might just be better at learning from its early signals. But others will experience boredom more often if they generally lack a feeling of agency and satisfaction in their lives: such factors can’t be remedied by simply telling them that only boring people get bored.... People who are more prone to boredom, the authors report, are more likely to be narcissistic or hostile, and ‘some forms of aggression could be viewed as attempts to redress the lack of meaning that is associated with boredom’. So they identify boredom – in its existential mode as a sense of the meaninglessness of life – as one possible driving force behind tribalism and xenophobia. Did boredom, after all, lead to Brexit? Certainly one plausible hypothesis for why so many people voted for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, I’d suggest, is that voters were profoundly bored with a world in which nothing very important ever seemed to happen, so why not vote for a leader who would at least be entertaining? The events of this year, of course, illustrate at least one problem with that reasoning.”
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