Cuttings: April 2022

Finding the right self-help book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Customer: Do you have a copy of 'Achieve: The art of always getting exactly what you want'? Bookseller: It's out of stock, I'm afraid. Customer: How about 'Almost: Why second-best isn't the worst option'? Bookseller: I just sold the last copy. Customer: 'Accept: Coming to terms with life's many disappointments'? Bookseller: Yes! That'll be £18.99."

The Car by Bryan Appleyard: freedom on four wheels – review by Anthony Andrew in The Guardian. "As sharply as he draws portraits of the key players [including Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan], Appleyard, one of the liveliest minds in journalism, is at his most acute when musing on the cultural effects of the car. When four wheels replaced the horse as the main mode of transport, people were still severely restricted in their movements. Particularly in America, the world beyond major cities was not easily accessible. Paved road systems changed that. The roads were paved because that’s what cars required and, equally, cars were built to fill the paved roads. All of this circular activity brought city dwellers into contact with the great outdoors, the 'unspoilt' wilderness beyond city limits. But of course the building of roads, and the cars they bore, encroached on the wilderness, spoiling the very nature that drivers and their passengers wanted to savour. Part of the automobile’s attraction was the autonomy it offered to individuals, the sense of freedom of movement, of personal liberty, a freedom whose cost we are only now really counting."

Freedom to Think by Susie Alegre: the big tech threat to free thought – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... defends rights to freedom of both 'thought' and 'opinion': some delegates understood 'thought' to mean religious belief, while others considered it superfluous as an addition to 'opinion'; it was the Soviets who insisted it remain, 'out of respect for the heroes and martyrs of science'. But if 'opinion' was merely a private, internal affair, why did its freedom need protecting at all? This was, Alegre explains, at the behest of the British, who 'insisted that "in totalitarian countries, opinions were definitely controlled by careful restriction of the sources of information", stressing that interference could happen even before an opinion was formed'.... If propaganda undermines the right to freedom of opinion, however, then we are all in trouble. And this is one of the main arguments that Alegre pursues. The modern online environment, polluted as it is by fake news, violates our freedom to form reliable thoughts... [But] If it should be impermissible ... for 'governments, companies or people' to seek to 'manipulate our opinions', on the grounds that this violates our right to freedom of thought, one wonders what kind of persuasive speech would still be allowed in such a brave new world. Aren’t arguments of all kinds – political, scientific, artistic – attempts to manipulate the opinions of others? How do we sort the good kind of manipulation from the bad?"

Contrarian kids: cartoon – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "When Billy was born, the doctor told us about his condition. Mother: 'What is it, doctor?' Doctor: 'It's a lovely, healthy contrarian commentator. " Even as a baby, you could tell he was a natural. Father: 'Emma! Billy has just made his first defence of a dominant power structure while simultaneously bleating about his victimhood!' Billy as a baby: 'Doggy chase cat... And I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Mother: 'Well done darling.' At school, his talent really blossomed. Billy as a child: 'You're gonna give me your lunch money... and I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Other boy: 'What.' Father: 'Nowadays we're always so proud of our strange, unpleasant son.' Newspaper headline: 'The Dominant Power Structure Should Remain - And I'll Probably Be Cancelled For Saying So'."

This Breathless Earth – sonnet by Malcom Guite. "We bolted every door but even so // We couldn’t catch our breath for very fear: // Fear of their knocking at the gate below, // Fear that they’d find and kill us even here. // Though Mary’s tale had quickened all our hearts // Each fleeting hope just deepens your despair: // The panic grips again, the gasping starts, // The drowning, and the coming up for air. // Then suddenly, a different atmosphere, // A clarity of light, a strange release, // And, all unlooked for, Christ himself was there // Love in his eyes and on his lips, our peace. // So now we breathe again, sent forth, forgiven, // To bring this breathless earth a breath of heaven."

The big idea: how to win the fight against disinformation – article by Eliot Higgins in The Guardian. “In recent years, the internet has become the venue for a general collapse in trust. Trolling, fake news and ‘doing your own research’ have become such a part of public discourse, it’s sometimes easy to imagine that all the online revolution has brought us is a myriad of new ways to be confused about the world…. Why do counterfactual communities form? A key factor is distrust in mainstream authority. For some, this is partly a reaction to the UK and US government’s fabrications in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sometimes, it stems from a sense of injustice around the Israel-Palestine conflict. These are of course legitimate positions, and are not by themselves indicative of a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. But a pervasive sense of distrust can make you more vulnerable to slipping down the rabbit hole.… as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues. These are the internet users who want to inform themselves while guarding against manipulation by others, or being misled by their own preconceptions. Once established, they will not only share and propagate factchecks in a way that lends them credibility, but often conduct the process of factchecking themselves…. . At Bellingcat, a collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists I founded in 2014, we’ve seen this play out in real time during the Russian invasion of Ukraine…. But there’s more to do than simply waiting for crowds of investigators to emerge and hoping they’re interested in the same things we are. We must take a broader approach. The answer lies in creating a society that’s not only resilient against disinformation, but has the tools to actively contribute to efforts towards transparency and accountability.… Teaching young people how to engage positively with issues they face and then expanding this work into online investigation is not only empowering, it gives them skills they can use throughout their lives.“

‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "In early 2017, Peter McIndoe, now 23, was studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, and visiting friends in Memphis, Tennessee.... It was the weekend of simultaneous Women’s Marches across the US (indeed, the world), and McIndoe looked out of the window and noticed 'counterprotesters, who were older, bigger white men'.... McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. 'It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: "I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on." An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.' That statement was 'birds aren’t real'. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The 'deep state' had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you. Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement."

‘Heat the human, not the home’: Martin Lewis guide for ‘desperate’ households – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. “The UK’s best-known consumer finance journalist, Martin Lewis, was uncharacteristically downbeat about the new edition of his newsletter, which went out to 8.4 million UK subscribers on Wednesday morning, writing: ‘This is a guide I really wish we needn’t be publishing.’ … As one respondent put it: ‘It’s a damning indictment of the depths to which this country has sunk when the cheerful guy who provided advice about the best savings, offers and phone deals is now tearfully providing advice on how not to die from cold or malnutrition. Thank you – I wish it wasn’t necessary.’”

Lost in La Mancha: landmark doc of Terry Gilliam’s cinematic nightmare –  review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “The creative heroism of Terry Gilliam is saluted once again in this 20-year-anniversary rerelease of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Gilliam’s incredible ordeal in the late 90s in trying to make a movie version of Don Quixote: a salutary warning about the physical and mental nightmare of independent film-making. Gilliam’s leading man, veteran French star Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc midway through shooting and was unable to carry on, dealing a death blow to an under-funded, over-ambitious production already traumatised by biblical floods that swept away their equipment in the Spanish desert, Nato jets overhead which ruined the soundtrack, and insurers who wouldn’t pay out on Rochefort’s illness and became the obstructive legal owners of the script by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni…. When I first saw this movie, I felt that there was a kind of perfect poignancy in Gilliam’s Quixote never getting made and existing only in his head – but Gilliam proved me and all other doubters wrong by finally getting it done in 2018 with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver in the leading roles. If it wasn’t quite the masterpiece we hoped for, it was still an entertaining and affecting piece of work.“

The vision collector: the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future – article by Sam Knight in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Premonitions Bureau. “In the days after his visit to Aberfan [following the 1966 disaster], [psychiatrist John Barker] came up with an idea for an unusual study. Given the singular nature of the disaster and its total penetration of the national consciousness, he decided to gather as many premonitions as possible of the event and to investigate the people who had them. Barker wrote to Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, and asked him to publicise the idea…. The article described the kinds of vision that Barker was interested in: ‘a vivid dream’, ‘a vivid waking impression’, ‘telepathy at the time of the disaster (affecting someone miles away)’ and ‘clairvoyance’. … Of the 60 plausible premonitions, there was evidence that 22 were described before the mine tip began to move. The material convinced Barker that precognition was not unusual among the general population – he speculated that it might be as common as left-handedness. In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world. Wintour agreed to the experiment.”