Cooking recipes from Real Fast Food is like having Nigel Slater by your side – article by Jay Rayner in The Guardian. “Some cookbooks give an insight into a specific culture. Others drill down on a set of techniques and methods. And then there’s [Nigel Slater’s] Real Fast Food, which introduced the world to a particular voice and sensibility; to an endlessly encouraging approach not to the blunt mechanics of cooking, but to the joys of eating and living well. It ripples with good taste. Nigel’s good taste.” “Almost three decades on, it remains in print and with good reason.”
An algorithm that generates ideas for stories about artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A [lonely / wicked / dying / well-meaning] [genius / plumber / billionaire / scientist] creates a [superintelligent / malfunctioning / beautiful / creepy / gigantic] robot that wants to [befriend / understand / murder / emulate] humans.”
Be more Alice! The fictional characters with lessons for lockdown – article by Josh Cohen in The Guardian, based on his book How to Live. What to Do. "If we try to enlist the help of novels by extracting rules and hacks and counsel from them, we will probably prove Plato right. ['As Plato observed (via a fictionalised Socrates), Homer’s stories were composed to stir and entertain rather than to instruct us.'] Novels, or at least the ones worth reading, draw us in not by offering moral instruction or practical guidance, but by helping us to see ourselves in all our strangeness and complexity. Having spent a large portion of my life reading fiction and practising psychotherapy, this strikes me as the essential overlap between the two. Each gets us to listen to the nuances and rhythms of human experience, to make ourselves available to the unsuspected thoughts, feelings and desires murmuring below the surface. Listening is the engine of curiosity, and so of change and growth. Like the psychoanalyst, the novelist can’t cure us of error and illusion and shouldn’t try.... But psychoanalysis and literature can help us to experience those errors and illusions from the inside rather than view them from on high, to enter deeply enough into the world of the person who made them to begin to understand why."
Value(s) by Mark Carney: call for a new kind of economics – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. “If 25 years ago anyone had suggested that one of the world’s most prominent ex-central bankers would launch an intellectual broadside at free market fundamentalism for shredding the values on which good societies and functioning markets are based, I would have been amazed. If, in addition, it was suggested he would go on to argue that stakeholder capitalism, socially motivated investing and business putting purpose before profit were the best ways to put matters right, I would have considered it a fairy story. ... In a mix of rich analysis mixed with pages that read like a dry Bank of England minute, he blames the three great crises of our times – the financial crash, the pandemic and the climate emergency ... – on twisted economics, an accompanying amoral culture, and degraded institutions whose lack of accountability and integrity accelerate the system’s dysfunction.”
Sherry Turkle: 'The pandemic has shown us that people need relationships' – interview by Ian Tucker in The Guardian. “I see the memoir [The Empathy Diaries] as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy – we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here’s a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others. I also wanted to write this book because I’ve wanted to read this kind of book. That is to say a book where you learn about the backstory of somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story. Many people have this book to write but daren’t because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place. And I knew that in my case, that wasn’t true.”
The disappearance of department stores will rob us of a certain kind of magic – article by Kitty Drake in The Guardian. “In department stores, life is broken down into helpful sections (baby, school, home). By contrast, online shopping – which I do compulsively – makes your options frighteningly limitless. Where Amazon Marketplace lists thousands of different options for a set of bed sheets, John Lewis offers just 64. ... If the department store is a place of dreams, the aspiration John Lewis sells is a slightly bland, middle-class British one. ... The shop represents a certain type of security and comfort that was, for many people, always illusory. And just as it has become more difficult to attain the markers of a middle-class lifestyle – a steady job, a house, a set of coordinated towels – the store that was one of the signifiers of such stability is now in a far less secure position.”
