What Was the TED Talk? Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting" – article by Oscar Schwartz in The Drift. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "[Chris] Anderson [who purchased the TED franchise in 2001] insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED talk. I like to call this fusion 'the inspiresting.' Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism.... Perhaps the most incisive critique came, ironically, at a 2013 TEDx conference. In 'What’s Wrong with TED Talks?' media theorist Benjamin Bratton told a story about a friend of his, an astrophysicist, who gave a complex presentation on his research before a donor, hoping to secure funding. When he was finished, the donor decided to pass on the project. 'I’m just not inspired,' he told the astrophysicist. 'You should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.' Bratton was outraged. He felt that the rhetorical style TED helped popularize was 'middlebrow megachurch infotainment,' and had begun to directly influence the type of intellectual work that could be undertaken....'This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.'... The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years...."
The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you, and the planet, healthier? – article by Tim Spector in The Guardian. “I have two issues with Veganuary. First, dietary change should aim for a long-term, sustainable change rather than a one-month quick fix. Second, there is no clear evidence that strict veganism is better for health than vegetarianism, pescatarianism or flexitarianism (a diet where you’re allowed to eat occasional meat or fish). Second, it fuels the perception that all plant-based foods are healthier than all animal-derived ones, which is not always true. If people replace fish, meat, eggs and cheese with plant-based ultra-processed foods, it might actually do us – and the planet – more harm than good.”
Wordle: simplicity that works like a charm – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “The game has the elegance of a daily newspaper puzzle – a five-minute conundrum that slots pleasingly into even the most harried routine: guess the five-letter word. You have six attempts…. The simplicity is the charm. One Wordle is released each day, and it’s the same one for everyone around the world. There are no advertisements, no niggling notifications begging you to return each morning, no novelty skins with which to alter the appearance of your letters, and no offer coupons in exchange for recommending the game to friends. With so much traffic, the incentive to profit from Wordle’s success is considerable. But the game’s rejection of the capitalistic systems that define so many video games today has a refreshing, innocent quality. Long may Wordle remain so pure.“
How to win at Wordle using linguistic theory – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s helpful to understand what Wordle is mainly testing, and I think there are a couple of things: first, your knowledge of the frequency of individual letters in the English language… More interestingly, though, it probes your instinct for how letters can be combined.“
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia by Wendy Mitchell: a book of hope – review by Nicci Gerrard in The Guardian. “One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her.… Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.… People with dementia (and people who live with and care for them) know that much of the suffering and havoc that the illness can bring comes not from the condition itself, but from the way the world treats people who live with it. Mitchell learned this the hard way: her life, and her sense of who she was in that life, was demolished when she first got the diagnosis of early onset dementia and it took her many years to work out strategies that enabled her to ‘live well with dementia’ (though she dislikes that phrase for its implication that some people fail to live well). Her book, which she wrote with the help of Anna Wharton and which includes the comments of friends who also live with dementia, is a compilation of these strategies: a kind of how-to manual for people with the condition and those who support them. It proceeds by a practical and calming formula: take a difficulty and find a way to overcome it.“
‘They had their own cameras trained on me’: Louis Theroux on his showdowns with US extremists –article by Louis Theroux in The Guardian. “On Sunday, I have a new series going out on BBC Two. Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America is squarely in the sweet spot of problematic content. White nationalists, trigger-happy rappers and figures in the porn world accused of sexual misconduct – they all make appearances. … In the context of everything that’s happened in the last couple of years, the decision to put out a series chockful of troubling individuals giving expression to upsetting and extreme opinions might seem odd…. The term is ‘platforming’: the idea that it is irresponsible to amplify hateful voices and that in doing so one is contributing to their power and their harm…. At its simplest, this is a view so uncontroversial as to be almost banal. … Making it even more pressing nowadays is the demonstrable harm caused by the spread of false information online and the way this has empowered formerly marginal figures such as conspiracy theorists and nativists.… In this new landscape, every day seems to bring a new test case of whether some influencer or high-profile person should be deplatformed, or whether tech companies and media outlets are throttling free expression by deciding what we can and can’t see and hear.… I do understand how, viewed in this context, my decision to put some potentially dangerous and inflammatory figures on BBC Two primetime might appear flat-out weird and irresponsible…. And yet I believe I was right to make a programme about them. There are several reasons why. The most obvious one is the nature of the project. I make immersive documentaries, researching, shooting and editing over the course of months or even years. It is very far from the ‘here’s your mic, have at it’ atmosphere of a conventional debate or TV appearance…. I believe I can be trusted to tell these stories in a responsible way. By being informed, by doing the research, by spending time in the field – for hours or days or weeks even – questioning, challenging and revealing the reality of the people we are reporting on, and doing responsible journalism…. ‘But why do we need to hear from these people?’ you may ask. Well, you might not need to. But the reason you might choose to is because of what their existence says about the world we are living in, and because of the very real power they represent…. So the choice we are faced with is whether to be curious about that phenomenon, try to figure out why it’s growing, what it’s feeding on, how it can be challenged, or whether to ignore it and hope it goes away.”
BBC pulls another episode of We Are England current affairs show – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “The BBC has retracted another episode of its new regional current affairs programme amid concerns about editorial standards and low staffing levels on the series…. which has been made on a tight budget due to cuts after many experienced reporters took redundancy from newsrooms across England ahead of its launch…. Last week, the BBC pulled an episode of We Are England about a Birmingham man called Hanad Hassan at the last minute after the Guardian pointed out that his cryptocurrency had shut down in October, leaving behind many unhappy customers. The BBC has now retracted a second episode of We Are England, which praised a dance school attended by former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack for its work improving the mental health of children. The programme failed to mention a recent critical Ofsted report, accessible online, which found that staff had bodyshamed students, leaving them reluctant to eat after lessons, and told them to get ‘the desired physique’ if they wanted to be successful in auditions.”
‘At 6pm every evening the screen went blank’: the outlandish tale of the UK’s TV blackout – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “Abolished 65 years ago on Wednesday, the break in programming between 6pm and 7pm every night was a government policy, known colloquially as the toddlers’ truce.… This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to ‘wring out their moppets and put them to bed’. … Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. The rules, laid out by the postmaster general as the post office oversaw telecommunications and broadcasting, stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm."
Playing with fire: Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’ – interview by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. … When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back…. It’s a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as [her latest collection of essays] Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing.”
I don’t like how my female colleagues are treated. How can I support them without being targeted? – advice by Eleanor Gordon-Smith in The Guardian. “I’m starting to notice that my female peers aren’t treated as nicely as us men and I don’t know what to do…. I’ve witnessed my female colleagues being put in a position where they had to justify their actions that were the same as other male colleagues. Female managers have to put extra effort into putting their point across and the HR is barely existent. I’d gladly speak to the CEO, but he acts like a bully. … I’m not feeling safe enough to discuss this in the office. I’m afraid I’ll be seen as weak and inconvenient.” Reply : “We know the people responsible for this are bad at responding to evidence (otherwise they wouldn’t have this attitude towards women); we know they’re bad at handling conflict (otherwise they wouldn’t pick on people in these petty ways); we know they’re uninterested in the possibility of improving (otherwise there’d be a feedback system or an avenue for anonymous reporting). With those as our data points for the psychology of the culprits, I’m pessimistic that you’d be able to talk – or confront – them into changing.… Here’s a lesson many people learn when they have to band together under an oppressive eye: you don’t have to announce what you’re doing for it to be an effective form of resistance…. Are there tasks you can take off [the women’s] plate; private ways you can give credit for work well done? Are there moments you can increase airtime for women in an interaction – ‘I think Sandra mentioned this earlier, but …?’ … You could start by trying to minimise [the] impact [of the unfairness] on particular people. It takes very little to privately signal to someone ‘I saw that too’, but to that person, the sense of being seen is anything but small.In time, these small acts of solidarity might embolden you to do more.”
The addictive qualities of Wordle – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Therapist: "So, if I understand correctly: you’ve become so obsessed with Wordle that you can only use five-letter words?" Client: "Quite right, sadly." Therapist: "How long has this been going on?" Client: "About three weeks." Therapist: "And does it affect your daily life?" Client: "Makes basic tasks quite tough." Therapist: "One answer would be to stop playing." Client: "Never!" Therapist: "Or, try something with a larger vocabulary: Scrabble, crosswords?" Client: "Smart! Enjoy other games, learn extra words… Heard worse ideas." Therapist: "Come back and see me in two weeks." Client: "Great. Adieu!"
