Can "distraction-free" devices change the way we write? – article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.... I tried 'distraction-free' writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die).... Then, in the late twenty-teens, focussed writing tools started cropping up everywhere.... The movement seemed to crest in the first months of the pandemic, as writers newly intimate with the routines of spouses and roommates—or with their own restlessness—sought peace with newfound desperation."
'Words to avoid' – from the .GOV style guide. Includes: "agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead"; "deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements)"; "key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’"; "transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing"; "utilise, use ‘use’"; "going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions)"; "one-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)".
Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow: the new thinking about feelings – review by Alison Gopnik in The Guardian. "Emotions are evolutionarily ancient, rooted in genes and brain structures we share with insects. And at the same time they are embedded in complex and sophisticated cultural scripts and schemas.... [Mlodinow] chronicles many of the disparate neural, evolutionary, social, cultural, cognitive and phenomenological aspects of emotion within what has become something like the received form for popular science books – the equivalent of the sonnet rhyme scheme. Instead of A, B, C and D, Mlodinow alternates between study summaries, illustrative stories and self-help tips.... What’s missing from the book, and the standard popular science form in general, are theories and explanations – the heart of science.... There is often an inverse relationship between how much psychological phenomena lend themselves to stories – how compelling they are – and how much they lend themselves to scientific explanations."
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter: sounding the alarm – review by H W Brands in The Guardian. "The key concept is that of 'anocracy', a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.... She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: 'Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.'... So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college.... And social media must be regulated."
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser: a panoramic history of getting dressed – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "People have always dressed above their station, and other people have always minded terribly.... Worn, though, consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads – linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool – she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that 'there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.'... Thanhauser, who lives in New York, travels to Texas where America’s modern cotton industry is based. At first sight there may no longer be slave labour of the kind that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on two centuries ago, but the underlying patterns have not changed greatly."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis: the art of getting better – review by Emily Mayhew in The Guardian. "Francis’s book explains recovery as a discrete therapeutic entity that deserves our full attention and why we should never give up trying to get better, even when it seems we couldn’t get much worse. Recovery is a difficult but essential part of what makes us human. In his characteristically deft case studies, he shows how it’s the time that recovery takes that is, over and over again, the greatest challenge to patient and care-giver... Francis recalls the rich history of slow-paced recovery and of the places and people who enabled it..... The underlying recognition of taking our time to rebuild ourselves is a profound insight into human regenerative capabilities. We used to know this, but somewhere in the white heat of changing medical technologies, we forgot and came instead to expect the instant and the effortless."
Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the 'Vimes Boots Index' as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the 'insidiously creeping prices' of basic food products. The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner.... 'The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,' wrote Pratchett [in the Discworld novel Men at Arms]. 'Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.'"
