Wednesday, 1 December 2021
Cuttings: November 2021
Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) – Wikipedia entry. “Martín de Porres Velázquez OP (9 December 1579 – 3 November 1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order who was … canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people … and all those seeking racial harmony…. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, Don Juan de Porras y de la Peña, and Ana Velázquez, a freed slave of African and Native descent. … Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.”
The big idea: Is democracy up to the task of climate change? – article by Rebecca Willis in The Guardian. “It’s time to acknowledge a difficult truth: our democracies are failing us on the climate crisis. … Faced with a problem of these proportions, some are running out of patience. The veteran Earth scientist James Lovelock puts his faith in eco-authoritarianism. Climate change is so severe, he has said, that ‘it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’. … My experience leads me to a very different conclusion to that of the eco-authoritarians.… Could it be that the problem here is not too much democracy, but too little? … That if we designed a meaningful dialogue between citizens, experts and governments, we would get better outcomes? Just before Covid-19 struck last year, I was part of an incredible experiment that did just this. Climate Assembly UK was a citizens’ assembly commissioned by parliament, bringing together a representative group of 108 citizens. Over a series of weekends, they learned about climate science, impacts and action; discussed and debated with experts and each other; and then voted on recommendations. The assembly’s findings are a coherent, far-reaching set of proposals for tackling the climate emergency – created by a different sort of democratic body. Processes such as this aren’t intended to replace our system of representative democracy, but to make it work better. They allow citizens and politicians alike to talk about what they need from each other.”
Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins: gloriously interwoven tales – review by Edith Hall in The Guardian. “There is no shortage these days of lively, well-written retellings of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but Charlotte Higgins has embraced a central metaphor – weaving – that leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings. Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity…. Inspired by the ancient world’s favourite literary technique of ekphrasis – not only describing a static tableau but telling a story that moves through time via a description of an artwork – she uses the personae of her weavers to add psychological depth, emotional clout and sometimes philosophical profundity to dozens of embedded narratives. Weaving was a metaphor at the heart of ancient metaphysics, since the Fates measure out and cut off the threads of human life itself.”
The Every by Dave Eggers: scathing big-tech satire sequel – review by Rob Doyle in The Guardian. “If you meant to read Shoshana Zuboff’s important and demanding The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, … The Every tackles the same concerns from a shared perspective of humanist outrage, in the form of a gulpable fictive entertainment. The Circle’s titular startup turned metaphysical empire (think: Googlebook) has merged with an unmistakable e-commerce site referred to, doubtless for legal reasons, only by its nickname: ‘the jungle’. Messianically rebranded as The Every, the corporation is now run by Mae Holland, The Circle’s fast-rising, newbie protagonist. Under Holland, The Every pursues its heedless agenda of a worldwide, soft totalitarian order of mass behavioural compliance through surveillance. … Enter another newbie, Delaney Wells [and] her housemate Wes… . The pair settle on a strategy of terroristic accelerationism: if they can introduce enough vile or moronic apps into The Every’s portfolio, it might trigger a popular insurrection that will bring about the company’s downfall. Predictably, it doesn’t work out this way. Both The Every and regular people embrace their innovations even as they bring ‘a new kind of self-hatred and ruination upon all humans’. Delaney begins to realise how much humiliation and diminished liberty the people of the world are willing to suck up in exchange for safety,”
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries: how we became postmodern – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers.… The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance…. Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault… Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth.… Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds?… The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffries’s compelling critique will help to sort them out.”
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English: a lexical treasure chest – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Those Anglo-Saxons did have a way with words – ‘word’ itself being one of those that has survived unchanged from the first millennium to ours. Hana Videen’s delightful thesaurus (from the Greek for ‘treasure-house’) of Old English is, she says, inspired by ‘hord-wynn’ (‘hoarding joy’), and organised around spheres of activity: eating and drinking, reading and writing, travelling or the natural world. There is, though, no word for ‘nature’ in Old English: a salient reminder that those times are as alien in some ways as they are familiar in others. …There was no call for a word for ‘nature’, one supposes, because Anglo-Saxons had not yet invented its opposite. They simply lived, like everything else, in ‘sceaft’ – creation. Which was elf-haunted and sometimes wyrm-ravaged…. What is most striking to the modern reader, perhaps, is what strong pleasure the Anglo-Saxons evidently took in smashing words together to form compounds: devil-sickness, slaughter-mist, war-sweat. Some such forms, if deliberately metaphorical or riddling, are known as kennings (as in ‘beyond my ken’). So ‘day-candle’ is the sun; ‘bone-locker’ is the body; and a ‘weaver-walker’ is a spider. Probably it’s too facile to suggest that such a combinatorial habit of description embodied a view of everything as more interconnected and interdependent, which it might be salutary for us moderns to recover. In which case, it’s a pleasure just to be reminded of their world-craft.”
‘We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. “Earlier this year, two researchers based at the University of Cambridge – Dolly Theis and Martin White – published a paper showing that from 1992 to 2020, there were no fewer than 689 separate obesity policies put forward in England. Like failed diets, almost none of these initiatives have been realised in any meaningful way.… When it comes to food policy, there has long been an attitude of ‘leave it to the market’… Recent English obesity policies have spoken endlessly of ‘action’ to help people eat healthier diets, but what they deliver, often as not, is another raft of patronising diet information leaflets… Given that poorer UK households would have to spend nearly 40% of their income to buy food for a healthy diet, according to recent data from the Food Foundation, to frame healthy eating as simply a matter of ‘choosing’ is dishonest. It’s not choice if you can’t afford it…. Earlier this year, the need for a radical rethink of food policy in the UK was set out in Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy: The Plan, an independent review commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).… There are signs that the pandemic has finally jolted us into new ways of thinking about food. Marcus Rashford’s passionate advocacy has made far more people recognise how unacceptable it is to live in a country where mothers like his struggle to buy ‘a good evening meal’ on minimum-wage jobs. Our great-grandchildren may laugh when we tell them that English schools routinely used to sell sugary drinks for profit, that hospital food courts provided burgers and chips to people who had just undergone heart surgery, and that farmers were paid to produce the very foods that caused the most damage to health and the environment. ‘That was what it was like,’ we will say, ‘living in a country where the politicians didn’t know that food mattered.’”
Tuesday, 2 November 2021
Cuttings: October 2021
Covid by Numbers: how to make sense of the statistics – review by Oliver Johnson in The Guardian. “Every internet user can access accurate and timely information on Covid cases, deaths, hospitalisations and vaccines, broken down by age, gender and location. However, while this wealth of information can be immensely valuable, it can also cause problems. Taken out of context and spun in a misleading way, raw coronavirus numbers can be a source of disinformation, which through social media can spread as efficiently as the virus itself. A simple fact, such as the median age of coronavirus victims (83) actually exceeding UK life expectancy at birth (81) can lead to governments and the public not taking Covid as seriously as they should. (Having lived to 83, one would ordinarily expect to live longer still – what matters is life expectancy conditional on having reached this age.)… The right way to think involves not raw data but its analysis via the academic discipline of statistics.… There can be few better people to do this than David Spiegelhalter, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and Anthony Masters, the Society’s ‘statistical ambassador’. Readers of their Observer column will not be surprised that in this book they give a clear and extremely readable guided tour of the pandemic, mostly from a UK viewpoint.”
Minding our language: How editors can frame questions without judgement – blog post by Louise Harnby. "Are the words I placed in bold [in an extract from Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me] ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t. Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have."
HarperCollins removes story from David Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “David Walliams’ story about a Chinese boy called Brian Wong, which was criticised by campaigners for its ‘casual racism’, is set to be removed from future editions of his short story collection The World’s Worst Children. Walliams’ bestselling anthology, which was published in 2016, was criticised earlier this year by the podcaster Georgie Ma over the Brian Wong story, which tells of a boy who was ‘never, ever wrong’, and who was a ‘total and utter swot’. ‘There are so many racist jokes on ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] community with the surname Wong and associating it with wrong,’ Ma said on Instagram. ‘If David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this.’ Ma, who said the story was ‘normalising casual racism from an early age’, particularly criticised Tony Ross’s illustration of the character. ‘You can see it’s just got the stereotypical small eyes, and the glasses, and it’s just complete casual racism,’ she said.”
Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists And The New Right – article by Chris Horner in 3 Quarks Daily, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades,… [we find] a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’…. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’… Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc…. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed? A first step would be for liberals and radicals to listen to each other, and to reflect on what they both stand for and oppose.…”
The big idea: does practice make perfect? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it.… ‘Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that may be labelled “practice”.’ And this is the key idea of Ericsson’s own research: it’s not so much how much you practice, as what kind of practice you do. Simply repeating a task until it has become automatic and then doing it a lot – like, say, driving a car – does not count as real practice. (Indeed, people tend to become worse at driving over time.) That’s ‘naive practice’… By contrast, improving at a complex skill such as a sport or a musical instrument requires ‘purposeful practice’, venturing repeatedly out of one’s comfort zone in a state of watchful self-criticism. For world-class performance, you additionally need a well-structured field of competitive endeavour (such as tennis or violin-playing) plus a teacher who can design the right kind of training activities. All that adds up to the ideal of what Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’, a method that has been widely adopted by sports psychologists.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.“
Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world – article by Howard W. French in The Guardian, extracted from his book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us learned in school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away in the heart of ‘darkest’ west Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home…. European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia… Bartolomeu Dias, another Portuguese explorer who knew Elmina well, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that…. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades between the Portuguese arrival at Elmina in 1471 and their landing in India in 1498. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”
Can Anyone Reshape the State? – blog post by Nicolas Colin from January 2020, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Transforming a large organization is difficult and prone to failure … but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here’s what we know about what works. … All large organizations that have overcome the innovator’s dilemma have taken the same path: not trying to reshape themselves, but creating something new and different on the side. There still aren’t many examples, however… Most of the time, that something new is barely connected to the parent organization. In fact, most of the output of corporate research is used by outside organizations rather than by whomever commissioned the research. Xerox developed the mouse, but it was Apple that innovated with it. … There are some cases in which large organizations have reinvented themselves without making a detour to the outside, but these are so few as to make it difficult to draw conclusions…. All of the above is why I think Dominic Cummings is bound to fail [in his then topical efforts to reshape the state]. Like many people with a Prometheus complex, he wants the best of both worlds. He wants the proximity to power and the intoxicating impression of being at the top, orchestrating it all. At the same time he wants to build new things. But it doesn’t work that way. If Cummings had the radical ambition of a Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t become a special advisor to Xerox’s CEO (in this metaphor, that’s Boris Johnson). Rather he would put as much distance as possible between himself and the top of the organization.”
A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent, and saved him –article by Patrick Stewart in The Guardian. “I never sat my 11-plus. … Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. … I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too. The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. … A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship.… It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: ‘What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!’”
‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building, … is a six-storey hymn to one of the main reasons for going to university: meeting other people. It is a place of wide sociable staircases, broad public terraces, and open-plan study areas that look across to dance studios and performance spaces. In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards. Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place, where even the public is free to roam from top to bottom. ‘It is a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas,’ said Lord Norman Foster, speaking on behalf of the Stirling prize jury. ‘In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning can delightfully coexist. That is no mean feat.’”
Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “‘Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.’ So said the director Bong Joon-ho, as he accepted his best picture Oscar for Parasite in 2020… The success of Netflix’s Korean series Squid Game… has proved him more than right. It has become Netflix’s biggest hit yet,… But it has also sparked an intense debate about what gets lost in that one-inch block of text – and raised questions over whether Netflix is investing enough in creating accurate versions of foreign-language scripts…. ‘If you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show,’ concludes Youngmi Mayer, the New York-based co-host of the podcast Feeling Asian. She released a TikTok video unpicking the flaws in Squid Game’s subtitles… One of the lead female characters … is represented as more subservient and less intelligent than in Korean. The ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ first game (Red Light, Green Light) is not properly translated, either, and the concept of ‘gganbu’ (a link between two equals – which becomes a major plot point) is glossed over. … ‘Netflix is notorious for its weak translations of Korean dramas,’ wrote Sharon Kwon in Slate. Alongside many others online, Kwon highlighted the translation of ‘sir’ instead of ‘boss’ – as used by the Pakistani character Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) to defer to others – arguing that by not using the latter, it lessens the impact of the anti-capitalist message of the series. Vice’s Eileen Cho wrote: ‘How will people learn about our culture if the streamer is mistranslating the language?’”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes up for the flaws of Mulan – article by Jingan Young in The Guardian. “This time last year I was disheartened by the troubling [Disney] live-action Mulan … so I had few expectations of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings… It was therefore a satisfying prove-me-wrong moment to watch the film…. I left with hope and elation, not disappointment. Shang-Chi is a film so very unlike Mulan, which featured a bland ‘superheroine’ who simply reacted to a series of fantastical, though unconnected, events around her. In stark contrast Shang-Chi is a heartfelt reimagining of the story by two Asian-American film-makers… Cretton and Callaham have created a modern bildungsroman, eradicating the ‘yellow peril’ origins of its superhero; Marvel’s initial comic series was developed as a spin-off from Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr Fu Manchu novels. Instead they offer up a story of revenge, redemption, grief and familial trauma – and several of the most spectacular fight sequences ever shown in cinema, the first being a balletic seduction scene which I have no doubt will be replicated many times.”
Out now: four new novels expanding the Hey-Diddle-Diddle universe – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Fiddle: can an idealistic kitten make it in the merciless world of professional violin playing? Little Dog: an inspiring journey from runt of the litter to a world of wonder, fun and laughter. Moon: how an ordinary cow overcame prejudice and ridicule to realise her incredible dream. Dish and spoon: they’ve run away together, but can their love bridge the gulf between crockery and cutlery?”
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: inequality is not the price of civilisation – review by David Priestland in The Guardian. “Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow [argue against the] common assumption [that] as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and ‘civilised’, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress…. It is this tale … which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ … simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.”
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? – article by Anna Leach and Miles Probyn in The Guardian. “Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two…. A diagram of story elements is not going to deradicalise someone who believes vaccines are implanting microchips in people’s arms. … But [this project] does raise one tantalising possibility that perhaps this mapping – what one of the authors, Pavan Holur, calls ‘an AI mirror held up to online conversations’ – lets people see the totality of the belief system they are tying themselves into. While someone might think vaccines are unsafe, they do not necessarily think 5G causes coronavirus. ‘If people are looking at it and thinking “Wait a minute, I don’t trust at least this part of the narrative”,’ Tangherlini says, ‘you might be able to fracture those low-probability links between domains. And if you can fracture or question them, you get the potential for community level change.’”
Minding our language: How editors can frame questions without judgement – blog post by Louise Harnby. "Are the words I placed in bold [in an extract from Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me] ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t. Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have."
HarperCollins removes story from David Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “David Walliams’ story about a Chinese boy called Brian Wong, which was criticised by campaigners for its ‘casual racism’, is set to be removed from future editions of his short story collection The World’s Worst Children. Walliams’ bestselling anthology, which was published in 2016, was criticised earlier this year by the podcaster Georgie Ma over the Brian Wong story, which tells of a boy who was ‘never, ever wrong’, and who was a ‘total and utter swot’. ‘There are so many racist jokes on ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] community with the surname Wong and associating it with wrong,’ Ma said on Instagram. ‘If David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this.’ Ma, who said the story was ‘normalising casual racism from an early age’, particularly criticised Tony Ross’s illustration of the character. ‘You can see it’s just got the stereotypical small eyes, and the glasses, and it’s just complete casual racism,’ she said.”
Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists And The New Right – article by Chris Horner in 3 Quarks Daily, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades,… [we find] a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’…. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’… Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc…. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed? A first step would be for liberals and radicals to listen to each other, and to reflect on what they both stand for and oppose.…”
The big idea: does practice make perfect? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it.… ‘Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that may be labelled “practice”.’ And this is the key idea of Ericsson’s own research: it’s not so much how much you practice, as what kind of practice you do. Simply repeating a task until it has become automatic and then doing it a lot – like, say, driving a car – does not count as real practice. (Indeed, people tend to become worse at driving over time.) That’s ‘naive practice’… By contrast, improving at a complex skill such as a sport or a musical instrument requires ‘purposeful practice’, venturing repeatedly out of one’s comfort zone in a state of watchful self-criticism. For world-class performance, you additionally need a well-structured field of competitive endeavour (such as tennis or violin-playing) plus a teacher who can design the right kind of training activities. All that adds up to the ideal of what Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’, a method that has been widely adopted by sports psychologists.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.“
Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world – article by Howard W. French in The Guardian, extracted from his book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us learned in school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away in the heart of ‘darkest’ west Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home…. European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia… Bartolomeu Dias, another Portuguese explorer who knew Elmina well, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that…. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades between the Portuguese arrival at Elmina in 1471 and their landing in India in 1498. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”
Can Anyone Reshape the State? – blog post by Nicolas Colin from January 2020, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Transforming a large organization is difficult and prone to failure … but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here’s what we know about what works. … All large organizations that have overcome the innovator’s dilemma have taken the same path: not trying to reshape themselves, but creating something new and different on the side. There still aren’t many examples, however… Most of the time, that something new is barely connected to the parent organization. In fact, most of the output of corporate research is used by outside organizations rather than by whomever commissioned the research. Xerox developed the mouse, but it was Apple that innovated with it. … There are some cases in which large organizations have reinvented themselves without making a detour to the outside, but these are so few as to make it difficult to draw conclusions…. All of the above is why I think Dominic Cummings is bound to fail [in his then topical efforts to reshape the state]. Like many people with a Prometheus complex, he wants the best of both worlds. He wants the proximity to power and the intoxicating impression of being at the top, orchestrating it all. At the same time he wants to build new things. But it doesn’t work that way. If Cummings had the radical ambition of a Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t become a special advisor to Xerox’s CEO (in this metaphor, that’s Boris Johnson). Rather he would put as much distance as possible between himself and the top of the organization.”
A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent, and saved him –article by Patrick Stewart in The Guardian. “I never sat my 11-plus. … Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. … I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too. The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. … A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship.… It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: ‘What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!’”
‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building, … is a six-storey hymn to one of the main reasons for going to university: meeting other people. It is a place of wide sociable staircases, broad public terraces, and open-plan study areas that look across to dance studios and performance spaces. In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards. Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place, where even the public is free to roam from top to bottom. ‘It is a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas,’ said Lord Norman Foster, speaking on behalf of the Stirling prize jury. ‘In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning can delightfully coexist. That is no mean feat.’”
Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “‘Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.’ So said the director Bong Joon-ho, as he accepted his best picture Oscar for Parasite in 2020… The success of Netflix’s Korean series Squid Game… has proved him more than right. It has become Netflix’s biggest hit yet,… But it has also sparked an intense debate about what gets lost in that one-inch block of text – and raised questions over whether Netflix is investing enough in creating accurate versions of foreign-language scripts…. ‘If you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show,’ concludes Youngmi Mayer, the New York-based co-host of the podcast Feeling Asian. She released a TikTok video unpicking the flaws in Squid Game’s subtitles… One of the lead female characters … is represented as more subservient and less intelligent than in Korean. The ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ first game (Red Light, Green Light) is not properly translated, either, and the concept of ‘gganbu’ (a link between two equals – which becomes a major plot point) is glossed over. … ‘Netflix is notorious for its weak translations of Korean dramas,’ wrote Sharon Kwon in Slate. Alongside many others online, Kwon highlighted the translation of ‘sir’ instead of ‘boss’ – as used by the Pakistani character Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) to defer to others – arguing that by not using the latter, it lessens the impact of the anti-capitalist message of the series. Vice’s Eileen Cho wrote: ‘How will people learn about our culture if the streamer is mistranslating the language?’”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes up for the flaws of Mulan – article by Jingan Young in The Guardian. “This time last year I was disheartened by the troubling [Disney] live-action Mulan … so I had few expectations of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings… It was therefore a satisfying prove-me-wrong moment to watch the film…. I left with hope and elation, not disappointment. Shang-Chi is a film so very unlike Mulan, which featured a bland ‘superheroine’ who simply reacted to a series of fantastical, though unconnected, events around her. In stark contrast Shang-Chi is a heartfelt reimagining of the story by two Asian-American film-makers… Cretton and Callaham have created a modern bildungsroman, eradicating the ‘yellow peril’ origins of its superhero; Marvel’s initial comic series was developed as a spin-off from Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr Fu Manchu novels. Instead they offer up a story of revenge, redemption, grief and familial trauma – and several of the most spectacular fight sequences ever shown in cinema, the first being a balletic seduction scene which I have no doubt will be replicated many times.”
Out now: four new novels expanding the Hey-Diddle-Diddle universe – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Fiddle: can an idealistic kitten make it in the merciless world of professional violin playing? Little Dog: an inspiring journey from runt of the litter to a world of wonder, fun and laughter. Moon: how an ordinary cow overcame prejudice and ridicule to realise her incredible dream. Dish and spoon: they’ve run away together, but can their love bridge the gulf between crockery and cutlery?”
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: inequality is not the price of civilisation – review by David Priestland in The Guardian. “Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow [argue against the] common assumption [that] as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and ‘civilised’, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress…. It is this tale … which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ … simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.”
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? – article by Anna Leach and Miles Probyn in The Guardian. “Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two…. A diagram of story elements is not going to deradicalise someone who believes vaccines are implanting microchips in people’s arms. … But [this project] does raise one tantalising possibility that perhaps this mapping – what one of the authors, Pavan Holur, calls ‘an AI mirror held up to online conversations’ – lets people see the totality of the belief system they are tying themselves into. While someone might think vaccines are unsafe, they do not necessarily think 5G causes coronavirus. ‘If people are looking at it and thinking “Wait a minute, I don’t trust at least this part of the narrative”,’ Tangherlini says, ‘you might be able to fracture those low-probability links between domains. And if you can fracture or question them, you get the potential for community level change.’”
Friday, 1 October 2021
Cuttings: September 2021
I was a therapist to killers in Broadmoor and felt ‘radical empathy’ for them – article by Gwen Adshead in The Guardian. "In our book, The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion... [Eileen Horne and I] take the reader into therapy rooms where I am assessing or treating people who our society labels 'monstrous': a serial killer, a stalker, a child sex-abuser, a girl who killed an old man as part of a teen gang, and others. These accounts demonstrate how radical empathy differs from 'regular' empathy; I am not trying to 'walk in their shoes'. Instead, I keep them company on their painful road towards greater self-knowledge as we work to get to the meaning of their violence. We are not always successful: without an ability to self-reflect, someone will have little capacity for recognising other people’s pain.... I have long wanted to try to share the things I’ve learned about human nature with a general audience, but my patients have also taught me that stories will find their moment to emerge when the teller and the listener are ready. As I watched the increased polarisation in our country and elsewhere in recent years, it struck me that ... we can still be blind to the essential truth that we are more alike than we are different.... I wonder if the present imbalance between condemnation and compassion might be righted if the methods my colleagues and I use in working with violent offenders were implemented at a societal level. This might mean more listening and less condemnation, fewer assumptions and more curiosity, and the willingness to get up close while maintaining both detachment and discernment."
What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "In 2018 [Merve] Emre, now an associate professor at Oxford University, wrote The Personality Brokers – an account of the strange and often troubling history of the MBTI.... Briggs Myers’s intentions ... were idealistic: she envisaged type as a way of achieving society-wide equilibrium, helping people to be efficient and at ease at work and home.... What Briggs Myers grasped, says Emre, was that the system would be more effective if it showed everyone to be good at something.... With just four letters, Briggs Myers created a simple, affirming framework in which we’d want to sort ourselves.... Yet what the MTBI’s mainstream impact belies is that most psychologists believe it to be deeply flawed – if not meaningless. With neither Jung, nor Briggs and Briggs Myers testing their theories against controlled experiments or data, it has no basis in clinical psychology. It parses people through false binaries, when most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum; and it produces inconsistent and inaccurate results.... Today, though the Myers-Briggs Company forbids unethical use of its assessment, its underlying logic of 'people sorting' has been absorbed by the growing use of data in human resources. As exposed in the recent HBO Max Documentary Persona (of which Emre is an executive producer), sophisticated psychometric testing is used to streamline hiring processes and filter candidates. [John Hackston, head of thought leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company] says, the MBTI is not a test with a right or wrong answer: 'It’s a process for you to find out for yourself, what type fits you best.' What you do with that information, he says, 'is entirely up to you – but it’s yours'."
Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan: scholarly anarchy – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Indexing is so arbitrary and anarchic. It chops up texts and can make prejudicial choices about what deserves to be emphasised; by following alphabetical order, the index, as Duncan says, 'turns from content to form, from meaning to spelling'. .... The index has often pretended to be morally useful. It began as a convenience for medieval preachers, who needed easy access to biblical quotations; more censoriously, it mimics our index finger, which we use to jab the air and make angry accusations..... Duncan can’t ignore the current worry about instantaneous online searches, which have slashed our attention span and made memory redundant..... [The subtitle is] A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ....-But [Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." See also review by Keith Khan-Harris in The Guardian.
Picture Stories: how one news magazine blew up British photography – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy. Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant... He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see."
Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year.... Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a 'zooflu' epidemic allows 'enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals' sending many people mad. When wildlife park guide Jean’s son loses his mind and sets out with his daughter Kimberly to find out what whale song really means, she follows him, along with Sue the dingo. 'In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along,' said the award’s director, Tom Hunter.... McKay wins prize money of £2021, as part of a tradition that sees the annual award money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Clarke [and] 2001: A Space Odyssey."
My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier: a British roasting – review by Jonathan Powell in The Guardian. "Five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages.... First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier ... focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began.... Second, Barnier says it was the unity of the 27, 'so unexpected for the British, that forced them to finally agree to pay their full share'. The British side repeatedly tried to negotiate with individual member states rather than the Commission, but kept being sent back to Barnier.... Third, the EU knew what it wanted and stuck to it. The British government spent a year negotiating rancorously and publicly with itself, which allowed the EU to take the initiative, set the agenda and frame the negotiations as it wished. It decided from the beginning that it would separate the divorce agreement from discussions on the future relationship, so the British could not use paying the leaving bill to buy access to parts of the single market.... The fourth reason for British failure was that Johnson made the disastrous tactical decision to try to provoke the EU in the hope it would be shaken, even briefing it as 'the mad man strategy'. .... Most disastrously, the threat of a no deal fell flat.... Finally, the EU used deadlines effectively to get its way, whereas the UK walked into a series of traps.... The fact is, the die was cast from the beginning. ... As Barnier writes: 'I still think it is insane that a great country like the UK is conducting such a negotiation and taking such a decision … without having any clear vision of it or a majority to support it.' ”
What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "In 2018 [Merve] Emre, now an associate professor at Oxford University, wrote The Personality Brokers – an account of the strange and often troubling history of the MBTI.... Briggs Myers’s intentions ... were idealistic: she envisaged type as a way of achieving society-wide equilibrium, helping people to be efficient and at ease at work and home.... What Briggs Myers grasped, says Emre, was that the system would be more effective if it showed everyone to be good at something.... With just four letters, Briggs Myers created a simple, affirming framework in which we’d want to sort ourselves.... Yet what the MTBI’s mainstream impact belies is that most psychologists believe it to be deeply flawed – if not meaningless. With neither Jung, nor Briggs and Briggs Myers testing their theories against controlled experiments or data, it has no basis in clinical psychology. It parses people through false binaries, when most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum; and it produces inconsistent and inaccurate results.... Today, though the Myers-Briggs Company forbids unethical use of its assessment, its underlying logic of 'people sorting' has been absorbed by the growing use of data in human resources. As exposed in the recent HBO Max Documentary Persona (of which Emre is an executive producer), sophisticated psychometric testing is used to streamline hiring processes and filter candidates. [John Hackston, head of thought leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company] says, the MBTI is not a test with a right or wrong answer: 'It’s a process for you to find out for yourself, what type fits you best.' What you do with that information, he says, 'is entirely up to you – but it’s yours'."
Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan: scholarly anarchy – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Indexing is so arbitrary and anarchic. It chops up texts and can make prejudicial choices about what deserves to be emphasised; by following alphabetical order, the index, as Duncan says, 'turns from content to form, from meaning to spelling'. .... The index has often pretended to be morally useful. It began as a convenience for medieval preachers, who needed easy access to biblical quotations; more censoriously, it mimics our index finger, which we use to jab the air and make angry accusations..... Duncan can’t ignore the current worry about instantaneous online searches, which have slashed our attention span and made memory redundant..... [The subtitle is] A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ....-But [Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." See also review by Keith Khan-Harris in The Guardian.
Picture Stories: how one news magazine blew up British photography – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy. Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant... He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see."
Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year.... Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a 'zooflu' epidemic allows 'enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals' sending many people mad. When wildlife park guide Jean’s son loses his mind and sets out with his daughter Kimberly to find out what whale song really means, she follows him, along with Sue the dingo. 'In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along,' said the award’s director, Tom Hunter.... McKay wins prize money of £2021, as part of a tradition that sees the annual award money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Clarke [and] 2001: A Space Odyssey."
My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier: a British roasting – review by Jonathan Powell in The Guardian. "Five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages.... First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier ... focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began.... Second, Barnier says it was the unity of the 27, 'so unexpected for the British, that forced them to finally agree to pay their full share'. The British side repeatedly tried to negotiate with individual member states rather than the Commission, but kept being sent back to Barnier.... Third, the EU knew what it wanted and stuck to it. The British government spent a year negotiating rancorously and publicly with itself, which allowed the EU to take the initiative, set the agenda and frame the negotiations as it wished. It decided from the beginning that it would separate the divorce agreement from discussions on the future relationship, so the British could not use paying the leaving bill to buy access to parts of the single market.... The fourth reason for British failure was that Johnson made the disastrous tactical decision to try to provoke the EU in the hope it would be shaken, even briefing it as 'the mad man strategy'. .... Most disastrously, the threat of a no deal fell flat.... Finally, the EU used deadlines effectively to get its way, whereas the UK walked into a series of traps.... The fact is, the die was cast from the beginning. ... As Barnier writes: 'I still think it is insane that a great country like the UK is conducting such a negotiation and taking such a decision … without having any clear vision of it or a majority to support it.' ”
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Cuttings: August 2021
The thermocline of truth – blog post by Rob Miller, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This month, the Court of Appeal finally quashed the remaining criminal convictions [of sub-postmasters accused by Royal Mail of embezzlement, when the appearance of missing money was due to errors in its new IT system]. How were [Royal Mail leaders] able to convince themselves almost to the last that their own systems couldn’t have been the source of the errors? How were those at the top seeing such a warped version of reality? In the ocean, … sometimes, what’s called a thermocline forms: a temperature barrier, a point at which the temperature changes rapidly. … In a 2008 blogpost, legendary IT consultant Bruce F. Webster applied the idea of the thermocline to large-scale IT projects. Why was it, Webster asked, that so many projects seemed to be on-track until just before their launch date, at which point it became suddenly clear that they were miles behind schedule? Webster observed that, generally speaking, those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. … Those at the top, though, have no such first-hand knowledge. They rely on the bubbling-up of information from below, in the form of dashboards and status reports. But, Webster noticed, those status reports tend to produce a comically optimistic view of the state of the project. … The result is that there is a thermocline within the organisation: not of temperature, but of truth. There is a clear line in the org chart, below which the truth of the project’s disastrous state is known, but above which everything looks rosy…. Thermoclines, to be clear, are not the fault of subordinates. They emerge because of the culture set by the leadership of an organisation. They are the inevitable consequence of an organisation that puts more emphasis on reputation than truth; that rewards good news and punishes bad; that has a leadership team disconnected from the delivery of the actual work; that instils fear and compliance with process into its employees, rather than a desire to do the right thing.”
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction – interview with Gaya Herrington by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.… Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse…. Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website …) independently ‘out of pure curiosity about data accuracy’. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Earlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth, the analyst wrote plainly: ‘Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.’”
The Truth About Lies by Aja Raden: a history of deceit, hoaxes and cons – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Raden takes us on a whistle-stop tour of hoaxes and cons. She’s not talking here about little fibs, the grownup version of hiding your spinach under your plate, but rather the swaggery whoppers that are capable of bringing down a whole peer group. Something like the Bernie Madoff scandal, a long con that lasted three decades and involved a lot of very rich people believing a criminal when he promised to make them even richer, without explaining how. … Why on earth would anyone – especially smart, rich anyones – fall for such obvious nonsense? Raden explains that it’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it benefits us to take information on trust.… That is why the most compelling hoaxes start with a nugget of truth. Take snake oil. The indentured Chinese labourers who built the American transcontinental railroad in the 19th century naturally looked to their medicine chests to soothe their smashed joints and sunburnt skin. Snake oil, made from the rendered fat of black water snakes, was extraordinarily rich in Omega-3 and worked a treat as an anti-inflammatory. Soon news of its efficacy had spread throughout the whole blistered-fingered west. Demand outstripped supply (the medicine had to be imported from China since there are no black water snakes in North America) with the result that any number of fakes started to appear. … The Truth About Lies claims to be a ‘taxonomy’ of deceits, hoaxes and cons, but actually it is no such thing. … What we get is a ragbag of anecdotes, from the original Ponzi scheme of the 1920s to the slips and sleights of big pharma that have led to the current opioid crisis. All hugely interesting, and certainly entertaining, but not quite the serious and scholarly investigation that Raden would have you believe.”
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks, so why do we lose so much time to online distraction? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, excerpted from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, also reviewed in The Guardian. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. … And so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. … What’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’ …. is that it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. … [Because] the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well… it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place. … Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter – the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives – that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives?… The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time. … what we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “Seventy-six years after his death, Hitler remains one of the most known men in the world and ubiquitous in western culture. … [Michael Tucker, one of the directors of the film The Meaning of Hitler,] calls it a ‘Hitler industrial complex’ unburdened by self-scrutiny. He comments: ‘Clearly, it’s not like these materials stop the spread of the ideology or that they curb antisemitism. If anything, the more they’re presented without context, the more they propagate these ideas. … ‘ Determined to avoid contributing to the cult of personality, Epperlein and Tucker use excerpts from former Observer journalist Sebastian Haffner’s penetrating 1978 book The Meaning of Hitler as a narrative spine. … They interview historians and writers … and Nazi hunters as well as an archaeologist forensic biologist, psychiatrist and sociologist in search of clues that might begin to explain how Hitler became Hitler. But historian Deborah Lipstadt … tells them: ‘When we try to figure out where Hitler’s antisemitism came from, what we’re trying to do is rationally explain an irrational sentiment. When people say, “Oh well, his mother was treated by a Jewish doctor and he couldn’t save her”, so what? The minute you’re trying to give a rational explanation for an irrational sentiment, you’re going to be lost.’ Thus the film presents a paradox. To try to understand Hitler is to risk humanising him and reducing his culpability; but to admit that he defies all understanding is to risk elevating him to superhuman status, to make him a modern Lucifer.”
‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology, then Covid hit – interview by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.… ‘Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,’ Taylor told the Guardian. … A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is psychological reactance – a motivational response to ‘rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice’. … ‘The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.’ That in turn, leads to what psychologists term ‘motivated thinking’, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.”
Being You by Professor Anil Seth: the exhilarating new science of consciousness – review by Gaia Vince in The Guardian. See also Seth’s ‘Consciousness: Eight Questions Science Must Answer’. “Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field…. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing. We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world that’s really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains…. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us,’ Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example…. What … is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being …? At its most fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seth’s often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our ‘self’ is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others’ minds.”
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction – interview with Gaya Herrington by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.… Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse…. Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website …) independently ‘out of pure curiosity about data accuracy’. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Earlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth, the analyst wrote plainly: ‘Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.’”
The Truth About Lies by Aja Raden: a history of deceit, hoaxes and cons – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Raden takes us on a whistle-stop tour of hoaxes and cons. She’s not talking here about little fibs, the grownup version of hiding your spinach under your plate, but rather the swaggery whoppers that are capable of bringing down a whole peer group. Something like the Bernie Madoff scandal, a long con that lasted three decades and involved a lot of very rich people believing a criminal when he promised to make them even richer, without explaining how. … Why on earth would anyone – especially smart, rich anyones – fall for such obvious nonsense? Raden explains that it’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it benefits us to take information on trust.… That is why the most compelling hoaxes start with a nugget of truth. Take snake oil. The indentured Chinese labourers who built the American transcontinental railroad in the 19th century naturally looked to their medicine chests to soothe their smashed joints and sunburnt skin. Snake oil, made from the rendered fat of black water snakes, was extraordinarily rich in Omega-3 and worked a treat as an anti-inflammatory. Soon news of its efficacy had spread throughout the whole blistered-fingered west. Demand outstripped supply (the medicine had to be imported from China since there are no black water snakes in North America) with the result that any number of fakes started to appear. … The Truth About Lies claims to be a ‘taxonomy’ of deceits, hoaxes and cons, but actually it is no such thing. … What we get is a ragbag of anecdotes, from the original Ponzi scheme of the 1920s to the slips and sleights of big pharma that have led to the current opioid crisis. All hugely interesting, and certainly entertaining, but not quite the serious and scholarly investigation that Raden would have you believe.”
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks, so why do we lose so much time to online distraction? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, excerpted from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, also reviewed in The Guardian. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. … And so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. … What’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’ …. is that it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. … [Because] the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well… it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place. … Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter – the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives – that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives?… The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time. … what we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “Seventy-six years after his death, Hitler remains one of the most known men in the world and ubiquitous in western culture. … [Michael Tucker, one of the directors of the film The Meaning of Hitler,] calls it a ‘Hitler industrial complex’ unburdened by self-scrutiny. He comments: ‘Clearly, it’s not like these materials stop the spread of the ideology or that they curb antisemitism. If anything, the more they’re presented without context, the more they propagate these ideas. … ‘ Determined to avoid contributing to the cult of personality, Epperlein and Tucker use excerpts from former Observer journalist Sebastian Haffner’s penetrating 1978 book The Meaning of Hitler as a narrative spine. … They interview historians and writers … and Nazi hunters as well as an archaeologist forensic biologist, psychiatrist and sociologist in search of clues that might begin to explain how Hitler became Hitler. But historian Deborah Lipstadt … tells them: ‘When we try to figure out where Hitler’s antisemitism came from, what we’re trying to do is rationally explain an irrational sentiment. When people say, “Oh well, his mother was treated by a Jewish doctor and he couldn’t save her”, so what? The minute you’re trying to give a rational explanation for an irrational sentiment, you’re going to be lost.’ Thus the film presents a paradox. To try to understand Hitler is to risk humanising him and reducing his culpability; but to admit that he defies all understanding is to risk elevating him to superhuman status, to make him a modern Lucifer.”
‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology, then Covid hit – interview by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.… ‘Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,’ Taylor told the Guardian. … A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is psychological reactance – a motivational response to ‘rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice’. … ‘The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.’ That in turn, leads to what psychologists term ‘motivated thinking’, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.”
Being You by Professor Anil Seth: the exhilarating new science of consciousness – review by Gaia Vince in The Guardian. See also Seth’s ‘Consciousness: Eight Questions Science Must Answer’. “Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field…. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing. We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world that’s really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains…. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us,’ Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example…. What … is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being …? At its most fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seth’s often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our ‘self’ is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others’ minds.”
Sunday, 5 September 2021
Cuttings: July 2021
The internet is rotting – article by Jonathan Zittrain in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has ‘billions of books and no central filing system.’. … Some colleagues and I joined those investigating the extent of link rot in 2014 and again this past spring. The first study… focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.… The problem isn’t just for academic articles and judicial opinions. With … the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted…. The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
Wednesday, 21 July 2021
Seen and Heard: April to June 2021
Magic Mobile by Michael Frayn – lovely collection of short funny pieces, including many perceptive pastiches of people's extraordinary use of language. My favourites: 'As true as I'm standing here', a documentary presenter is determined to render the film-making process transparent to viewers by including ALL the shot footage. 'Well done ya!', a telesales caller is treated to unsolicited replies to their unsolicited questions. 'Oh, you shouldn't have' The MD of a gas company sends an inappropriately chatty letter to a customer who has just paid their final demand bill under threat of legal action.
Agent A: Puzzle in Disguise – very enjoyable escape room puzzle game. The sixties spy thriller theme – it both looks and sounds (musically) like The Incredibles – has you playing in first person as the eponymous secret agent (gender unspecified), in pursuit of the femme fatale Ruby La Rouge, who has set numerous obstacles and traps in your path while carelessly also leaving around sufficient tools, hints and passcodes for you to overcome them. See also a review (of Part 1 only), an interview with the designer, and a walkthrough guide.
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – another escape room puzzle game, but this one is creepy: a bit David Lynch. Astonishing how hard puzzles can be, even in a very limited setting with very restricted possible actions. Thank goodness for walkthroughs...
Funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – a most impressive display, actually made more impressive by Covid restrictions, without thousands of public spectators, and the Windsor Castle chapel choir replaced by four soloists who did a stunning job. See a detailed commentaries on the musical choices by John Rutter and on the performance by James MacMillan (composer).
Saved by a Stranger – BBC TV documentary series. The concept sounded a bit cheesy - people whose lives have been saved are reunited with the people who saved them - but it was actually moving and soul-enlarging, mainly down to two things. The first was the time and care taken to reconstruct for us the life-threatening circumstances (the 7/7 London terrorist bombings, the Bosnian genocide, HIV infection in the 1980s, the Belfast 'Troubles' etc). The second was Anita Rani as presenter and interlocutor for the survivors, displaying the necessary compassion and sensitivity to an extraordinary degree.
Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles – astonishing fly-on-the-wall documentary series of life-saving surgery inside the womb. If you needed to have it done, this is the team you’d want to have doing it.
Call the Midwife, series 10 – another set of challenging but heart-warming episodes, now up to 1966.
Gris – the game looked good, with an intriguing premise, but I just couldn't manage the platforming, and quickly abandoned it.
Jenny LeClue: Detectivú – well-reviewed cartoon adventure game. Now this is more like it! A game that isn't too hard (arguably it's too easy), yet manages to continually baffle and surprise. Jenny LeClue is the heroine of Arthur Finklestein's series of children's detective stories, now facing declining sales as readers start to find them too safe and trite. Under pressure from his publisher, Finkelstein throws Jenny into a challenging story, involving conspiracy, corporate cover-up and (gasp!) actual death, at least apparently. Pitch-perfect scripting and (in the enhanced edition) voice acting brings the story to life. Once again, indie studios show how it should be done.
The Odyssey – in a new well-received translation by Emily Wilson, breaking with the tradition (going back to Alexander Pope) of rendering it in portentous language. "Homer's language is markedly rhythmical, but it is not difficult or ostentatious.... Stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric." (Translator's note, p. 83) Her straight-forward, ordinary language certainly makes it easier to see what is happening, and indeed not happening. The surprise for me was how little of the work is actually occupied by heroic adventures (which are all one gets in popular re-tellings), and how much by people being entertained as guests in each other's courts. Is this in fact a work primarily about hospitality? The ending – in which Athena abruptly intervenes to prevent all-out war between Odysseus's family and the relatives of the suitors he slaughtered – is just baffling.
Extra Life – BBC documentary series, in which David Olusoga and Steven Johnson recount the history and the science of four key developments which led to the past century's dramatic increase in life expectancy, with more than an eye on the current Covid pandemic: vaccination, drugs, data and hygiene behaviour. No dumbing down or presentational gimmicks, and great history from Olusoga (as you’d expect), always pointing out the social and political setting of what might otherwise appear as simple scientific progress. TV at its best.
Agent A: Puzzle in Disguise – very enjoyable escape room puzzle game. The sixties spy thriller theme – it both looks and sounds (musically) like The Incredibles – has you playing in first person as the eponymous secret agent (gender unspecified), in pursuit of the femme fatale Ruby La Rouge, who has set numerous obstacles and traps in your path while carelessly also leaving around sufficient tools, hints and passcodes for you to overcome them. See also a review (of Part 1 only), an interview with the designer, and a walkthrough guide.
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – another escape room puzzle game, but this one is creepy: a bit David Lynch. Astonishing how hard puzzles can be, even in a very limited setting with very restricted possible actions. Thank goodness for walkthroughs...
Funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – a most impressive display, actually made more impressive by Covid restrictions, without thousands of public spectators, and the Windsor Castle chapel choir replaced by four soloists who did a stunning job. See a detailed commentaries on the musical choices by John Rutter and on the performance by James MacMillan (composer).
Saved by a Stranger – BBC TV documentary series. The concept sounded a bit cheesy - people whose lives have been saved are reunited with the people who saved them - but it was actually moving and soul-enlarging, mainly down to two things. The first was the time and care taken to reconstruct for us the life-threatening circumstances (the 7/7 London terrorist bombings, the Bosnian genocide, HIV infection in the 1980s, the Belfast 'Troubles' etc). The second was Anita Rani as presenter and interlocutor for the survivors, displaying the necessary compassion and sensitivity to an extraordinary degree.
Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles – astonishing fly-on-the-wall documentary series of life-saving surgery inside the womb. If you needed to have it done, this is the team you’d want to have doing it.
Call the Midwife, series 10 – another set of challenging but heart-warming episodes, now up to 1966.
Gris – the game looked good, with an intriguing premise, but I just couldn't manage the platforming, and quickly abandoned it.
Jenny LeClue: Detectivú – well-reviewed cartoon adventure game. Now this is more like it! A game that isn't too hard (arguably it's too easy), yet manages to continually baffle and surprise. Jenny LeClue is the heroine of Arthur Finklestein's series of children's detective stories, now facing declining sales as readers start to find them too safe and trite. Under pressure from his publisher, Finkelstein throws Jenny into a challenging story, involving conspiracy, corporate cover-up and (gasp!) actual death, at least apparently. Pitch-perfect scripting and (in the enhanced edition) voice acting brings the story to life. Once again, indie studios show how it should be done.
The Odyssey – in a new well-received translation by Emily Wilson, breaking with the tradition (going back to Alexander Pope) of rendering it in portentous language. "Homer's language is markedly rhythmical, but it is not difficult or ostentatious.... Stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric." (Translator's note, p. 83) Her straight-forward, ordinary language certainly makes it easier to see what is happening, and indeed not happening. The surprise for me was how little of the work is actually occupied by heroic adventures (which are all one gets in popular re-tellings), and how much by people being entertained as guests in each other's courts. Is this in fact a work primarily about hospitality? The ending – in which Athena abruptly intervenes to prevent all-out war between Odysseus's family and the relatives of the suitors he slaughtered – is just baffling.
Extra Life – BBC documentary series, in which David Olusoga and Steven Johnson recount the history and the science of four key developments which led to the past century's dramatic increase in life expectancy, with more than an eye on the current Covid pandemic: vaccination, drugs, data and hygiene behaviour. No dumbing down or presentational gimmicks, and great history from Olusoga (as you’d expect), always pointing out the social and political setting of what might otherwise appear as simple scientific progress. TV at its best.
Saturday, 3 July 2021
Cuttings: June 2021
Thelma & Louise at 30: a groundbreaking road movie that still strikes a nerve – article by Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. “There is plenty about [Thelma & Louise] that remains audacious, but still now, I think one of the boldest decisions taken by writer Callie Khouri and director Ridley Scott is to let it be funny, despite the weight of some of its storylines. It is quick, sarcastic, even silly. Thelma tells Louise to shoot the cop’s radio, she blows out the one playing music in his car. Darryl, Thelma’s grotesque, preening, deadbeat husband, is so incapable of talking to her nicely that when he answers the phone with a pleasant ‘Hello’, she immediately knows he’s being watched by the police. ‘My husband wasn’t sweet to me,’ she tells the sexist truck driver who crudely heckled her and Louise on the road, ‘and look how I turned out.’ There is an obscene number of air-punch moments like this …, though brilliantly, Khouri always leads the audience into a kind of moral murk. Thelma is famously robbed by Pitt’s JD, though he has given her fair warning that he is a robber. He leaves her with the gift of his criminal playbook, and she turns out to be really very good at a life of crime. It is satisfying to watch her stick up a store, charmingly, with the exact lines JD gave her. But is her choice to commit armed robbery worse than Louise’s spontaneous decision to shoot Harlan in the heart? Should they blow up the moron’s truck? Is it cathartic? Is it earned? Films, at their best, should challenge your perspective.”
Spain’s postal service accused of racism over flesh-toned stamps – article by Sam Jones in The Guardian. “Spain’s state-owned postal service has been accused of a damaging and counterproductive approach to equality after issuing a set of flesh-toned, anti-racism stamps in which the stamp with the lightest skin colour is worth more than twice as much as the darkest one. On Tuesday, Correos España unveiled the set of four ‘equality stamps’: a pale, €1.60 one, a slightly darker €1.50 one, a brown €0.80 one, and a black €0.70 one.”
The empty office: what we lose when we work from home – article by Gillian Tett in The Guardian. “Although [Xerox PARC] had initially been dominated by scientists, by the time JSB [John Seeley Brown] arrived, a collection of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists were also there. One of these anthropologists was a man named Julian Orr, who was studying the ‘tribe’ of technical repair teams at Xerox…. These technicians were routinely ignored, partly because the managers assumed that they knew what they did. But Orr and JSB suspected this was a big mistake, and that the technicians did not always think or behave as their bosses thought they should. JSB first noticed it … when he met a repairman known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’, who said to him: ‘Well, Mr PhD, suppose this photocopier sitting here had an intermittent image quality fault, how would you go about troubleshooting it?’ JSB knew there was an “official” answer in the office handbook: technicians were supposed to ‘print out 1,000 copies, sort through the output, find a few bad ones, and compare them to the diagnostic’…. ‘Here is what I do,’ Mr Troubleshooter told JSB… ‘I walk to the trash can, tip it upside down, and look at all the copies that have been thrown away. The trash can is a filter – people keep the good copies and throw the bad ones away. So just go to the trash can … and from scanning all the bad ones, interpret what connects them all.’ In short, the engineers were ignoring protocols and using a solution that worked – but one that was ‘invisible … and outside [the] cognitive modelling lens’ of the people running the company, JSB ruefully concluded…. Like many other anthropologists before him, [Orr started] looking at the group rituals, symbols and spatial patterns that the technicians used in their everyday life. [he] quickly realised that many of the most important interactions took place in diners.”
David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’ – interview by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. “Mitchell translated the autism memoir The Reason I Jump from Japanese to English with his wife, Keiko Yoshida. Written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13, the book became an international bestseller and has now been turned into an award-winning documentary also featuring Mitchell. ‘The book challenges stereotypes about autism. Was that important for you?’ ‘By its very existence, it explodes some of the more pernicious, hurtful, despair-inducing myths. If autistic people have no emotional intelligence, how could that book have been written? … And, practically, it helped us understand things like our son’s meltdowns, his sudden inconsolable sobbing or his bursts of joyous, giggly happiness.’ ‘What was the most valuable thing the book taught you?’ To assume intelligence. Don’t assume the lack of it. Assume complete comprehension and act accordingly. No baby talk, don’t adjust your vocabulary, don’t treat an autistic person any differently to a neurotypical person. Let them out of infantilisation prison and allow them full human credentials, which they’re too often denied. You’re doing no harm at all and good things can happen.’ “
The Father: Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower… Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on.… What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise[,] keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.”
Less storytelling, please: why documentaries will benefit from getting real – article by Simran Hans in The Guardian. “‘Main character. Three acts. Heroic journey. Climax. Resolution. Nothing else seems to suffice in today’s documentary marketplace. A good story reigns supreme,’ writes the Toronto-based film-maker Brett Story in an essay for World Records Journal about ‘story’ as documentary’s hottest commodity…. With the intellectual property market booming, there is pressure on those who work in nonfiction – film-makers, long-form journalists, audio producers – to shoehorn the lives of real people into the tried and tested template of classic storytelling. … In her essay, Story argues that ‘story’ is only as natural as capitalism. It’s easier to sell a neat, narrativised nugget of information – but to become reliant on story as an organising principle is to lose something unique to the documentary form…. Documentary films have the power to make viewers understand their subjects rather than to simply identify with them. … Through their juxtapositions, [documentary] film-makers are able to ask questions, convey scale and create emotional resonances that reflect the mundanities, digressions and complexities of real life.”
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. “Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. ‘What’s the aim of the book?’ ‘We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. … We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”
Spain’s postal service accused of racism over flesh-toned stamps – article by Sam Jones in The Guardian. “Spain’s state-owned postal service has been accused of a damaging and counterproductive approach to equality after issuing a set of flesh-toned, anti-racism stamps in which the stamp with the lightest skin colour is worth more than twice as much as the darkest one. On Tuesday, Correos España unveiled the set of four ‘equality stamps’: a pale, €1.60 one, a slightly darker €1.50 one, a brown €0.80 one, and a black €0.70 one.”
The empty office: what we lose when we work from home – article by Gillian Tett in The Guardian. “Although [Xerox PARC] had initially been dominated by scientists, by the time JSB [John Seeley Brown] arrived, a collection of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists were also there. One of these anthropologists was a man named Julian Orr, who was studying the ‘tribe’ of technical repair teams at Xerox…. These technicians were routinely ignored, partly because the managers assumed that they knew what they did. But Orr and JSB suspected this was a big mistake, and that the technicians did not always think or behave as their bosses thought they should. JSB first noticed it … when he met a repairman known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’, who said to him: ‘Well, Mr PhD, suppose this photocopier sitting here had an intermittent image quality fault, how would you go about troubleshooting it?’ JSB knew there was an “official” answer in the office handbook: technicians were supposed to ‘print out 1,000 copies, sort through the output, find a few bad ones, and compare them to the diagnostic’…. ‘Here is what I do,’ Mr Troubleshooter told JSB… ‘I walk to the trash can, tip it upside down, and look at all the copies that have been thrown away. The trash can is a filter – people keep the good copies and throw the bad ones away. So just go to the trash can … and from scanning all the bad ones, interpret what connects them all.’ In short, the engineers were ignoring protocols and using a solution that worked – but one that was ‘invisible … and outside [the] cognitive modelling lens’ of the people running the company, JSB ruefully concluded…. Like many other anthropologists before him, [Orr started] looking at the group rituals, symbols and spatial patterns that the technicians used in their everyday life. [he] quickly realised that many of the most important interactions took place in diners.”
David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’ – interview by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. “Mitchell translated the autism memoir The Reason I Jump from Japanese to English with his wife, Keiko Yoshida. Written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13, the book became an international bestseller and has now been turned into an award-winning documentary also featuring Mitchell. ‘The book challenges stereotypes about autism. Was that important for you?’ ‘By its very existence, it explodes some of the more pernicious, hurtful, despair-inducing myths. If autistic people have no emotional intelligence, how could that book have been written? … And, practically, it helped us understand things like our son’s meltdowns, his sudden inconsolable sobbing or his bursts of joyous, giggly happiness.’ ‘What was the most valuable thing the book taught you?’ To assume intelligence. Don’t assume the lack of it. Assume complete comprehension and act accordingly. No baby talk, don’t adjust your vocabulary, don’t treat an autistic person any differently to a neurotypical person. Let them out of infantilisation prison and allow them full human credentials, which they’re too often denied. You’re doing no harm at all and good things can happen.’ “
The Father: Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower… Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on.… What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise[,] keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.”
Less storytelling, please: why documentaries will benefit from getting real – article by Simran Hans in The Guardian. “‘Main character. Three acts. Heroic journey. Climax. Resolution. Nothing else seems to suffice in today’s documentary marketplace. A good story reigns supreme,’ writes the Toronto-based film-maker Brett Story in an essay for World Records Journal about ‘story’ as documentary’s hottest commodity…. With the intellectual property market booming, there is pressure on those who work in nonfiction – film-makers, long-form journalists, audio producers – to shoehorn the lives of real people into the tried and tested template of classic storytelling. … In her essay, Story argues that ‘story’ is only as natural as capitalism. It’s easier to sell a neat, narrativised nugget of information – but to become reliant on story as an organising principle is to lose something unique to the documentary form…. Documentary films have the power to make viewers understand their subjects rather than to simply identify with them. … Through their juxtapositions, [documentary] film-makers are able to ask questions, convey scale and create emotional resonances that reflect the mundanities, digressions and complexities of real life.”
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. “Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. ‘What’s the aim of the book?’ ‘We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. … We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”
Friday, 4 June 2021
Cuttings: May 2021
In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly – article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there. Everyone who has worked with him in journalism and politics describes a pattern of selfishness and unreliability. He craves affection and demands loyalty, but lacks the qualities that would cultivate proper friendship. The public bonhomie hides a private streak of brooding paranoia. Being incapable of faithfulness, he presumes others are just as ready to betray him, which they duly do, provoked by his duplicity. Johnson is driven by a restless sense of his own entitlement to be at the apex of power and a conviction, supported by evidence gathered on his journey to the top, that rules are a trap to catch weaker men and honour is a plastic trophy that losers award themselves in consolation for unfulfilled ambition.”
The obscure maths theorem that governs the reliability of Covid testing – article by Tom Chivers in The Guardian. “Maths quiz. If you get a positive result on a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what’s the chance that you’ve actually got Covid? Surely it’s 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don’t have enough information to make the judgment.... Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). ... it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example. Imagine you undergo a test for a rare disease. The test is amazingly accurate: if you have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time; if you don’t have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time.... But the disease in question is very rare; just one person in every 10,000 has it. This is known as your ‘prior probability’: the background rate in the population. So now imagine you test 1 million people. There are 100 people who have the disease: your test correctly identifies 99 of them. And there are 999,900 people who don’t: your test correctly identifies 989,901 of them. But that means that your test, despite giving the right answer in 99% of cases, has told 9,999 people that they have the disease, when in fact they don’t. So if you get a positive result, in this case, your chance of actually having the disease is 99 in 10,098, or just under 1%. ... Without knowing the prior probability, you don’t know how likely it is that a result is false or true. If the disease was not so rare – if, say, 1% of people had it – your results would be totally different. Then you’d have 9,900 false positives, but also 9,990 true positives. So if you had a positive result, it would be more than 50% likely to be true.” See also ‘Covid, false positives and conditional probabilities...’ by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.
The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea – article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. “A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: ‘The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.’ Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the ‘new religion of whiteness’ – a religion founded on the dogma that ‘of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan’ – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.”
The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health – article by Laura Barton in The Guardian. “Our Bodies, Ourselves [was] a book about women’s health and sexuality that would prove revolutionary. It sold more than 4m copies globally and became available in 33 languages, and is considered one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Across its nine editions, it addressed sexual health, sexual orientation, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, postnatal depression, abortion (still illegal in much of the US in the book’s early editions), violence and abuse, gender identity, birth control and desire.... In the spring of [1969] as the women’s movement gained momentum, a Female Liberation conference had been held at ... Emmanuel College [Massachusetts]. There were taekwondo demonstrations, talks called Women and the Church, How Women Oppress Themselves and, on the Sunday morning, a workshop called Women and Their Bodies, held by Nancy Miriam Hawley. At the end of the workshop, the attenders were reluctant to leave, and the discussions spilled on outside. Over the months that followed, they formed a group that would be named the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to discuss their bodies, their lives, sexuality and relationships. The next year, they published a book named after the original workshop title. In 1971, they changed the book’s title to Our Bodies, Ourselves, to reflect women taking ownership of their own bodies. “
Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers – article by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. “Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin,… is one of 10 electronic music pioneers featured in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s debut documentary, released this weekend. … Rovner’s big coup … is getting Laurie Anderson to narrate: the avant-garde composer signed up, delighted to hear that Oliveros and French composer Éliane Radigue would be properly getting their dues… . ‘It’s very interesting,’ Anderson says today, ‘that a lot of that early work in electronics was done by women. Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened, which is telling. They wanted to think about how sound could recalibrate our body and mind.’ “
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley review: how the modern world was made – article by Miles Taylor in The Guardian. “Few documents are venerated as much as the American constitution…. Yet, as Linda Colley’s brilliant new book shows, viewing constitutions as national tablets of stone tells us more about their contemporary charisma than the complex histories from which they were wrought. In this compelling study of constitutions produced around the world between the mid-18th century and the outbreak of the first world war, she upends the familiar version of history at every turn. Out goes the myth that constitutions were the product of democratic aspirations or revolution – rather they arose from the ashes of war or the threat of invasion. Nations may have been girded by constitutional documents, but these were borderless texts, available for adaptation across time and space. Above all, constitutions were ‘protean and volatile pieces of technology’ that travelled far and wide, assisted by the expansion of print media and the speeding-up of long-distance travel and communication…. Countries needed constitutions not to free the people, but to defend them from aggression from without, and disunion from within.“
‘It was exhilarating’: how the Guardian went digital ... and global – article by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian. “A trip to the US in 1993 to ‘see the internet’ left me in no doubt: the days of the daily printed newspaper were numbered. Once people learned about this thing they were calling the ‘world wide web’, there would be no going back. It might take 10 years, it might take 50, but it was clear that the future was digital. If that much seemed obvious, everything else was a mist of incomprehension and wild futurology. … The questions began in earnest, dozens of them, some concurrent, other consecutive. Was this a new medium, or simply a novel way of distribution?… If it was a new medium, did that require a different team with different skills to produce it?… How much should we invest in this new medium?… How could you protect your commercial revenues?… How could you run print and digital editorial operations in tandem?… What new skills did we need to enlist?… How could the Guardian adapt to being global?… Which came first: the paper or digital?… It took the Guardian nearly 140 years to be confident enough as a national paper to drop the word ‘Manchester’ from its title. It didn’t find a permanent home in London until 1976. Within 25 years of that move, it began to attract an enormous international readership – and it is now viewed on more than a billion browsers a year. The paper’s journey from local to national to global was bewilderingly sudden. Revolutions are fascinating things for historians to study. Living through one is unnervingly interesting. Decisions fly at you furiously fast. There is never enough time to think, and never enough data to help you make the right choice. If you get even half of the decisions right, you’re probably doing quite well. And you may not even know what ‘right’ was until many years later.”
Typo negative: the best and worst of Grauniad mistakes over 200 years – article by Elisabeth Ribbans in The Guardian. “‘If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.’ So wrote Ian Mayes, the Guardian’s first readers’ editor, in his debut column in that role in 1997. His appointment marked the start of a daily corrections and clarifications column, a first for a UK newspaper, which has mined a rich seam of typos and other slips for which ‘the Grauniad’ is fondly known. Thus we can recall how an April 1998 obituary declared the show that turned Joan Heal into a star was Grab Me a Gondolier (it should have read Grab Me a Gondola), while four months later the finance pages reported a £250,000 advance for Vikram Seth’s new novel, ‘A Suitable Buy’. We had a rather agile George Formby standing on a lamp-post, rather than leaning on one, in August 2002, which was around the same time we referred to a Miles Davis album as Sketches of Pain (when Spain was meant)….Sometimes the red pen must take itself to task. In 2007 it blushed: ‘We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26.’”
‘From a standing fart’: readers on their favourite Grauniad mistakes – letter to The Guardian. “ I enjoyed the litany of errors admitted to by the Guardian, but it brought to mind my own personal discomfort from a slip between copy and print. Many years ago, as a young would-be actor, I played Sally Bowles in a community theatre production of the musical, Cabaret. Imagine my dismay on reading the local newspaper critic’s eagerly awaited review, which opined that I had ‘failed totally to convince as Sally’. Later in the day, a knock at my front door revealed said critic, clutching his hand-typed review and apologising profusely. He had in fact not been quite as damning as first appeared, actually writing, ‘failed to totally convince’. Still not great, but it gave me something to work with. Getting ready in the dressing room that evening, the (very good) actor playing the MC popped his head round the door and, in vicious character, announced: ‘Anuzzer total failure tonight zen, Sally!’”
This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew: in praise of a Victorian New Woman – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Whenever someone mentions Charlotte Mew, they feel obliged to add context. The fact that Thomas Hardy said she was the ‘greatest poetess’ he knew, or that Siegfried Sassoon maintained she was ‘the only poet who can give me a lump in my throat’…. Walter de la Mare, trying hard to define the source of Mew’s power, ventured ‘she just knows humanity’. The reason why any account of Mew, including this fine biography by Julia Copus, feels obliged to begin by bigging her up is precisely because she has so often been done down. Even during her lifetime Mew’s name was familiar only to those who lived and breathed contemporary literature… For these readers Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (1912) was nothing short of a punch to the gut and a slap on the ear, and all in a good way. The poem is a dramatic monologue in which an unschooled farmer laments the refusal of his child bride to respond to his physical and emotional expectations. Mew gives us both the farmer’s bumbling cruelty and the girl’s blind terror as she slips away ‘shy as a leveret’ across the fertile fields. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ feels as old as the hills yet startlingly new, with its balladry, mixed-up metre and long, wayward lines.”
The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war –article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “During the [second world] war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. … Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under heavy attack from German U-boats. Following [a decision by the Attlee government], the police and immigration inspectorate in Liverpool, working with the shipping companies, began the process of forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats and sending them back to China. With the war over and work scarce, many of the men would have been more than ready to go home. But for others, the story was very different. In the preceding war years, hundreds of Chinese seamen had met and married English women, had children and settled in Liverpool. These men were deported, too. The Chinese seamen’s families were never told what was happening, never given a chance to object and never given a chance to say goodbye. Most of the Chinese seamen’s British wives would go to their graves never knowing the truth, always believing their husbands had abandoned them.”
The obscure maths theorem that governs the reliability of Covid testing – article by Tom Chivers in The Guardian. “Maths quiz. If you get a positive result on a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what’s the chance that you’ve actually got Covid? Surely it’s 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don’t have enough information to make the judgment.... Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). ... it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example. Imagine you undergo a test for a rare disease. The test is amazingly accurate: if you have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time; if you don’t have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time.... But the disease in question is very rare; just one person in every 10,000 has it. This is known as your ‘prior probability’: the background rate in the population. So now imagine you test 1 million people. There are 100 people who have the disease: your test correctly identifies 99 of them. And there are 999,900 people who don’t: your test correctly identifies 989,901 of them. But that means that your test, despite giving the right answer in 99% of cases, has told 9,999 people that they have the disease, when in fact they don’t. So if you get a positive result, in this case, your chance of actually having the disease is 99 in 10,098, or just under 1%. ... Without knowing the prior probability, you don’t know how likely it is that a result is false or true. If the disease was not so rare – if, say, 1% of people had it – your results would be totally different. Then you’d have 9,900 false positives, but also 9,990 true positives. So if you had a positive result, it would be more than 50% likely to be true.” See also ‘Covid, false positives and conditional probabilities...’ by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.
The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea – article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. “A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: ‘The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.’ Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the ‘new religion of whiteness’ – a religion founded on the dogma that ‘of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan’ – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.”
The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health – article by Laura Barton in The Guardian. “Our Bodies, Ourselves [was] a book about women’s health and sexuality that would prove revolutionary. It sold more than 4m copies globally and became available in 33 languages, and is considered one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Across its nine editions, it addressed sexual health, sexual orientation, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, postnatal depression, abortion (still illegal in much of the US in the book’s early editions), violence and abuse, gender identity, birth control and desire.... In the spring of [1969] as the women’s movement gained momentum, a Female Liberation conference had been held at ... Emmanuel College [Massachusetts]. There were taekwondo demonstrations, talks called Women and the Church, How Women Oppress Themselves and, on the Sunday morning, a workshop called Women and Their Bodies, held by Nancy Miriam Hawley. At the end of the workshop, the attenders were reluctant to leave, and the discussions spilled on outside. Over the months that followed, they formed a group that would be named the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to discuss their bodies, their lives, sexuality and relationships. The next year, they published a book named after the original workshop title. In 1971, they changed the book’s title to Our Bodies, Ourselves, to reflect women taking ownership of their own bodies. “
Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers – article by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. “Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin,… is one of 10 electronic music pioneers featured in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s debut documentary, released this weekend. … Rovner’s big coup … is getting Laurie Anderson to narrate: the avant-garde composer signed up, delighted to hear that Oliveros and French composer Éliane Radigue would be properly getting their dues… . ‘It’s very interesting,’ Anderson says today, ‘that a lot of that early work in electronics was done by women. Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened, which is telling. They wanted to think about how sound could recalibrate our body and mind.’ “
The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley review: how the modern world was made – article by Miles Taylor in The Guardian. “Few documents are venerated as much as the American constitution…. Yet, as Linda Colley’s brilliant new book shows, viewing constitutions as national tablets of stone tells us more about their contemporary charisma than the complex histories from which they were wrought. In this compelling study of constitutions produced around the world between the mid-18th century and the outbreak of the first world war, she upends the familiar version of history at every turn. Out goes the myth that constitutions were the product of democratic aspirations or revolution – rather they arose from the ashes of war or the threat of invasion. Nations may have been girded by constitutional documents, but these were borderless texts, available for adaptation across time and space. Above all, constitutions were ‘protean and volatile pieces of technology’ that travelled far and wide, assisted by the expansion of print media and the speeding-up of long-distance travel and communication…. Countries needed constitutions not to free the people, but to defend them from aggression from without, and disunion from within.“
‘It was exhilarating’: how the Guardian went digital ... and global – article by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian. “A trip to the US in 1993 to ‘see the internet’ left me in no doubt: the days of the daily printed newspaper were numbered. Once people learned about this thing they were calling the ‘world wide web’, there would be no going back. It might take 10 years, it might take 50, but it was clear that the future was digital. If that much seemed obvious, everything else was a mist of incomprehension and wild futurology. … The questions began in earnest, dozens of them, some concurrent, other consecutive. Was this a new medium, or simply a novel way of distribution?… If it was a new medium, did that require a different team with different skills to produce it?… How much should we invest in this new medium?… How could you protect your commercial revenues?… How could you run print and digital editorial operations in tandem?… What new skills did we need to enlist?… How could the Guardian adapt to being global?… Which came first: the paper or digital?… It took the Guardian nearly 140 years to be confident enough as a national paper to drop the word ‘Manchester’ from its title. It didn’t find a permanent home in London until 1976. Within 25 years of that move, it began to attract an enormous international readership – and it is now viewed on more than a billion browsers a year. The paper’s journey from local to national to global was bewilderingly sudden. Revolutions are fascinating things for historians to study. Living through one is unnervingly interesting. Decisions fly at you furiously fast. There is never enough time to think, and never enough data to help you make the right choice. If you get even half of the decisions right, you’re probably doing quite well. And you may not even know what ‘right’ was until many years later.”
Typo negative: the best and worst of Grauniad mistakes over 200 years – article by Elisabeth Ribbans in The Guardian. “‘If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.’ So wrote Ian Mayes, the Guardian’s first readers’ editor, in his debut column in that role in 1997. His appointment marked the start of a daily corrections and clarifications column, a first for a UK newspaper, which has mined a rich seam of typos and other slips for which ‘the Grauniad’ is fondly known. Thus we can recall how an April 1998 obituary declared the show that turned Joan Heal into a star was Grab Me a Gondolier (it should have read Grab Me a Gondola), while four months later the finance pages reported a £250,000 advance for Vikram Seth’s new novel, ‘A Suitable Buy’. We had a rather agile George Formby standing on a lamp-post, rather than leaning on one, in August 2002, which was around the same time we referred to a Miles Davis album as Sketches of Pain (when Spain was meant)….Sometimes the red pen must take itself to task. In 2007 it blushed: ‘We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26.’”
‘From a standing fart’: readers on their favourite Grauniad mistakes – letter to The Guardian. “ I enjoyed the litany of errors admitted to by the Guardian, but it brought to mind my own personal discomfort from a slip between copy and print. Many years ago, as a young would-be actor, I played Sally Bowles in a community theatre production of the musical, Cabaret. Imagine my dismay on reading the local newspaper critic’s eagerly awaited review, which opined that I had ‘failed totally to convince as Sally’. Later in the day, a knock at my front door revealed said critic, clutching his hand-typed review and apologising profusely. He had in fact not been quite as damning as first appeared, actually writing, ‘failed to totally convince’. Still not great, but it gave me something to work with. Getting ready in the dressing room that evening, the (very good) actor playing the MC popped his head round the door and, in vicious character, announced: ‘Anuzzer total failure tonight zen, Sally!’”
This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew: in praise of a Victorian New Woman – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Whenever someone mentions Charlotte Mew, they feel obliged to add context. The fact that Thomas Hardy said she was the ‘greatest poetess’ he knew, or that Siegfried Sassoon maintained she was ‘the only poet who can give me a lump in my throat’…. Walter de la Mare, trying hard to define the source of Mew’s power, ventured ‘she just knows humanity’. The reason why any account of Mew, including this fine biography by Julia Copus, feels obliged to begin by bigging her up is precisely because she has so often been done down. Even during her lifetime Mew’s name was familiar only to those who lived and breathed contemporary literature… For these readers Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (1912) was nothing short of a punch to the gut and a slap on the ear, and all in a good way. The poem is a dramatic monologue in which an unschooled farmer laments the refusal of his child bride to respond to his physical and emotional expectations. Mew gives us both the farmer’s bumbling cruelty and the girl’s blind terror as she slips away ‘shy as a leveret’ across the fertile fields. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ feels as old as the hills yet startlingly new, with its balladry, mixed-up metre and long, wayward lines.”
The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war –article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “During the [second world] war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. … Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under heavy attack from German U-boats. Following [a decision by the Attlee government], the police and immigration inspectorate in Liverpool, working with the shipping companies, began the process of forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats and sending them back to China. With the war over and work scarce, many of the men would have been more than ready to go home. But for others, the story was very different. In the preceding war years, hundreds of Chinese seamen had met and married English women, had children and settled in Liverpool. These men were deported, too. The Chinese seamen’s families were never told what was happening, never given a chance to object and never given a chance to say goodbye. Most of the Chinese seamen’s British wives would go to their graves never knowing the truth, always believing their husbands had abandoned them.”
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