Cuttings: October 2023

How women drove evolution: Cat Bohannon on her radical new history of humanity – interview by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "Eve is a hugely ambitious piece of work... The book sets out to turn our male-centric understanding of the human body, and history, on its head. Bohannon creates female characters out of our earliest common ancestors, and rewrites the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to argue that perhaps it was women who led the development of language, tools and walking on two legs.... As Caroline Criado Perez revealed in her Royal Society prize-winning 2019 book, Invisible Women, and as Bohannon herself discovered, the issue of females being excluded from scientific research is huge. 'It’s not just a cultural problem,' Bohannon says. 'This isn’t just classic sexism. It’s that even when scientists are trying to do it right, the data just isn’t there.' ... There was one particular chapter, however, that Bohannon dreaded working on. In the section about the brain, she writes: “My task, you see, is to wrestle with whether men’s and women’s brains are functionally different and, if they are, whether those differences are tied to something innate. Each part of that task is surrounded by a sociopolitical gender debate so dense it threatens to obscure the science.” She was intrigued to find that male and female brains are strikingly similar in humans – much more so than in some other mammals. Our voices and hearing, on the other hand, show far greater variation. And could it not make sense that women’s voices, which have crooned to nursing babies for millions of years, and their ears, which interpreted their infants’ cries, might have been the first to form words and grammar?"

For Labour to reach alienated working-class voters, Starmer needs to treat them less like tools – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "To understand how Keir Starmer’s team sees class, it helps to know a story. It’s told by his head of strategy, Deborah Mattinson, about a series of her own focus groups. She asked people to bring in a symbol of their social status, and started with those who called themselves middle class. At the first session, an overwhelming majority turned up with the exact same item.... Five out of the eight chose a cafetiere, while a sixth person waved Twinings Earl Grey teabags. The indiscreet charm of the British bourgeoisie clearly lay in its hot beverages. Her working-class subjects were another story. Their proofs of class ID were the tools of their trades. The joiner carried his chisels, and the beautician displayed her acrylic nail swatches, while one man 'delved into his rucksack to find his muddy working boots', which he plonked on the table. An epiphany struck Mattinson: middle-classness was 'about being discerning, while being working class was about the kind of work you do'. What they did was who they were, she believed, and who they were had to be respected. In Beyond the Red Wall, this builds to an argument about why Jeremy Corbyn got bulldozed in the 2019 general election. Over decades, she writes, Labour had condescended to the working classes – now it was paying a heavy price. Not long after that book was published, Mattinson became one of Starmer’s top generals, and her analysis has shaped his pitch to be prime minister. Far from ignoring class, he genuflects before it as devoutly as a choirboy crosses himself.... Today Starmer is trying to woo back working-class voters even while holding on to his centrism. He claims to be on the workers’ side while offering them little more than spare change. Since 2010, the UK has had wave after wave of elections in which the real winner is anti-Westminster sentiment....The next election will be another anti-Westminster ballot, in which voters will show their revulsion at an economy and a politics that are clearly broken. The beneficiary of that revulsion is likely to be Starmer. But what happens afterwards, as he tries and fails to rise to the moment, could be more frightening yet."

They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? – article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, referenced in The Guardian Daily Briefing. "Near the end of Obama’s first term, vast swaths of overly clever behavioral science began to come unstrung. In 2011, the Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published a journal article that ostensibly proved the existence of clairvoyance. His study participants were able to predict, with reasonable accuracy, which curtain on a computer screen hid an erotic image. The idea seemed parodic, but Bem was serious, and had arrived at his results using methodologies entirely in line with the field’s standard practices. This was troubling. The same year, three young behavioral-science professors—Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn—published an actual parody: in a paper called 'False-Positive Psychology,' they 'proved' that listening to the Beatles song 'When I’m Sixty-Four' rendered study participants literally a year and a half younger. 'It was hard to think of something that was so crazy that no one would believe it, because compared to what was actually being published in our journals nothing was that crazy,' Nelson, who teaches at U.C. Berkeley, said. Researchers could measure dozens of variables and perform reams of analyses, then publish only the correlations that happened to appear 'significant.' If you tortured the data long enough, as one grim joke went, it would confess to anything. ... The three men—who came to be called Data Colada, the name of their pun-friendly blog—had bonded over the false, ridiculous, and flashy findings that the field was capable of producing. The discipline of judgment and decision-making had made crucial, enduring contributions—the foundation laid by Kahneman and Tversky, for example—but the broader credibility of the behavioral sciences had been compromised by a perpetual-motion machine of one-weird-trick gimmickry. Their paper helped kick off what came to be known as the 'replication crisis.' Soon, entire branches of supposedly reliable findings—on social priming (the idea that, say, just thinking about an old person makes you walk more slowly), power posing, and ego depletion—started to seem like castles in the air.... Some senior figures in the field were forced to consider the possibility that their contributions amounted to nothing.... In the spring of 2021, Data Colada was contacted by Zoé Ziani, a recent Ph.D. recipient [who had] set out to replicate [rising star Francesca] Gino’s study. She asked for the data, and, after some delay, received it. That April, she used an online survey platform to re-create the experiment. It took a few days, and she found none of the reported effects. She also determined, more worrisomely, that there was almost no way the paper’s effect size could have been naturally generated. ... One day, Ziani came across the field study from the [classic] car-insurance paper [of a study in which applicants signed an honesty pledge either before or after entering their mileage]. This data was the fishiest of all, and she sent the file to Data Colada in triumph. On a Zoom call, Simonsohn looked more closely and realized, 'Hey, wait a minute. This wasn’t Francesca?' The study had been conducted by [leader in the field Dan] Ariely. Later, they opened the file for Gino’s contribution to the same paper, and that, too, seemed incommensurable with real data. It was difficult not to read this as a sign of the field’s blight. Simmons told me, 'We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper. And it’s a paper about dishonesty.'”

‘This was his revenge on art’: is Marcel Duchamp’s greatest work a fake? – article by Dalya Alberge in The Guardian. "For more than a century, the art world has celebrated Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. His work, simply a urinal signed and dated “R Mutt 1917”, is widely regarded as a pinnacle of 20th-century art.... [Now] research by Glyn Thompson, a former lecturer in art history at Leeds University, asserts that Fountain could not have been the idea of Duchamp and that he had instead stolen it from a German Dada artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Thompson has identified her distinctive handwriting on the urinal, and he can now show that Duchamp could not have bought his urinal in a New York plumbing shop as he had claimed because it was a unique model from Philadelphia. It is a city that Duchamp never visited but where Von Freytag-Loringhoven was based at the time, escaping charges of shoplifting in New York.... Julian Spalding, former director of galleries in Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow, will include the research in his forthcoming book, Art Exposed... He argues that Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work was more complex than Duchamp’s, and that she had submitted her urinal to an exhibition as the world expected America to declare war against her motherland, Germany. This, he claims, explains the signature R Mutt – mutter in German meaning mother, as well as armut, meaning poverty. 'She was saying to America "don’t piss on my country". Elsa’s urinal has many layers of meaning. These are all hidden under Duchamp’s puerile misappropriation.'”

Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984 – article by Sandra Newman in The Guardian. "A few years ago, I got what, for a writer of political fiction, is a dream job. I was invited by the estate of George Orwell to write a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Julia, the lover of the protagonist, Winston Smith.... When my Nineteen Eighty-Four book was announced, described as a 'feminist retelling', I was treated to a personal experience of how far things had gone. The news attracted a storm of misogynist and antisemitic abuse in rightwing tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, even newspaper articles. This was long before the novel was available to be read – before I’d barely written a few chapters. Still, all the attackers were sure what would be in it: a full-throated endorsement of Big Brother. They also declared there was a plot to replace Nineteen Eighty-Four in school curricula with my book – despite the fact that it was being published in the US by Orwell’s publisher and had been endorsed by the Orwell estate, two organisations that would be out of pocket were Nineteen Eighty-Four to be dropped. It’s still unclear to me whether the attackers believed what they were saying. Were they lying or deluded? Or was this a real feat of doublethink – the ability to believe two contrary ideas at once – where no such distinction can be drawn?"

Julia by Sandra Newman: a new Nineteen Eighty-Four – review by Natasha Walter in The Guardian. "Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.... As she probes his vision and moves beyond it, Newman also provides an imaginative and intellectual critique of Orwell’s novel. At the start of the second chapter, Julia signs out of her shift at the Ministry of Truth using the excuse 'Sickness: Menstrual', and immediately the novel travels into places where Smith could not and would not go. At the dormitory hostel where she lives, Julia’s connections with other women are revealed. These intimate and compromised relationships become the beating heart of the novel, and demonstrate how women’s lives under this totalitarian state inevitably differ from men’s at every point. Surveillance and loss of private life weigh differently on women, and the stakes – in terms of abuse, lack of physical autonomy, unwanted pregnancy – feel higher, even before the plot turns to its more deadly phase. As she maps out this new territory, Newman forges a work that has its own emotional logic, and a character with her own vivid life. The portrait of Julia’s childhood is an ambitious mix of horror and freedom, and brings the reader to a deeper understanding of her gritty focus on survival. I was convinced by the way Newman maps Julia’s sexuality, how it is necessarily shaped by her constant experiences of voyeurism and abuse, but how she still courageously holds on to her right to pleasure. I was also jolted, even shocked, by some of the decisions taken by this reincarnation of Julia. Because even though we think we know the plot, Newman takes an unexpected turn early on, and never stops surprising the reader. I’m unable to recount her best inventions without spoiling them, but by about halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia’s responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith’s."

Escape from the rabbit hole: the conspiracy theorist who abandoned his dangerous beliefs – article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "For 15 years, [Brent] Lee collected signs that so-called Illuminati overlords were controlling global events. He convinced himself that secret societies were running politics, banks, religious institutions and the entertainment industry, and that most terrorist attacks were actually government-organised ritual sacrifices. He was also inclined to believe in UFOs, and that Stanley Kubrick staged and directed the filming of the moon landing. He saw satanic symbols in the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and spent most of his time discussing these theories with an online community of fellow believers. But in 2018 something shifted, and he began to find the new wave of conspiracy theories increasingly implausible.... In 2003, Lee ... downloaded a series of videos from the internet that offered alternative perspectives on 9/11 and suggested the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 was self-inflicted by the US government, as a way of justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. His starting point was a strong anti-war stance and a healthy scepticism about politicians’ motivations, but from there he came to believe that a network of secret societies and cults was running the world.... When the 7/7 attacks took place in London in 2005, killing 52 people, Lee was online, searching with fellow truthers for evidence that the terror attack was orchestrated by the UK government..... Naomi Klein examines the mushrooming of conspiracism in her new book Doppelganger, noting that people often come under its sway because they are searching for a practical solution to a sense of unfairness. Conspiracists have a 'fantasy of justice', hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped. 'Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right,' she writes. 'The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit … the feeling that important truths are being hidden.'... Lee’s appetite for conspiracies started to wane when the 'alt-right' US broadcaster Alex Jones began claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that no one died and the parents of the 20 children who died were 'crisis actors' – hired to play disaster victims. Lee found this implausible and felt irritated by other wild theories swirling around the internet – that Justin Bieber and Eminem were Illuminati clones, that a paedophile ring, involving people at the highest level of the Democratic party, was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant.... As a former conspiracist, Lee hopes he will be better equipped to help people still caught up in these beliefs. Rather than antagonising them, he is able to take a more empathetic approach. 'These ideas aren’t alien to me – they are second nature. Most conspiracists want a better world. They think something bad has happened, and they want to expose it. I think if you can lean into that with them, and say: "Yes, I understand why that would worry you, but perhaps it’s not actually what’s happening." I think that’s a better way to approach it.'”

A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel: B-sides and rarities – review by John Self in The Guardian. "Her long essays on female writers show Mantel at her best. She encapsulates the contradictions of Rebecca West ('It’s her vices, as much as her virtues, that make her letters so compelling'), and doesn’t mince her words on Elizabeth Jane Howard. 'The real reason [her] books are underestimated – let’s be blunt – is that they are by a woman.' Indeed she excels at writing about writing generally, and is unsparing in defence of her trade, against both non-readers – 'show me a man – it’s usually a man – who "doesn’t see the point of fiction" and I’ll show you a pompous, inflexible, self-absorbed bore' – and female writers 'who want to write about women in the past but can’t resist retrospectively empowering them. Which is false.' One Reith Lecture constitutes a punch-the-air manifesto for fiction. 'Leave the reader hungry,' she writes. 'You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged.'”

A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel: smart reflections on Wolf Hall, religion… and RoboCop – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "For the last 12 years of her life, with the critical and commercial success of her Wolf Hall trilogy, Mantel was celebrated as the pre-eminent writer of historical fiction in English, and her 2017 Reith lectures are published here, forming what amounts to the clearest analysis of the historical novel in recent literary criticism (and a succinct practical guide for would-be writers). But she was also keenly interested in contemporary culture. Readers newer to her work may not know that she was the Spectator’s film critic from 1987 to 1990, producing more than 160 reviews; selected highlights appear here under the heading Writing in the Dark. If you’ve ever wondered what she made of RoboCop or Withnail and I, the wait is over – though inevitably these reviews are the pieces that have dated most obviously. But Mantel was, above all, a reader – 'addicted to the physical act of reading' – and, while her selected literary essays from the New York Review of Books are fascinating, the pieces that feel timeless here are those that illuminate the unique alchemy of reading and writing that sparked her own work. Observing that she often becomes ill after completing a novel, she writes in 2008, at the end of Wolf Hall, 'imagine the cold I’m going to have when the whole project’s finished, another two or three years from now.' A wry editorial footnote reminds us that the Wolf Hall trilogy was 'finally finished 12 years later'."

The big idea: why do we find cuteness so hard to resist? – article by Joshua Paul Drake in The Guardian. "According to the internet at least, the most adorable thing [about the new Barbie movie] is not the eponymous heroine but her consort, Ken. Margot Robbie’s Barbie may be glamorous, but Ryan Gosling’s Ken is cute... Scientists have been studying the nature of cuteness for decades. It’s now widely accepted that we are hardwired to both look and act cute when we’re very young and to respond to cuteness ourselves. When kids are cute, women and men alike pay attention to them and care for them, which not only helps children to survive but also to learn how to communicate and cooperate. That’s why characteristics that make something cute tend towards the baby-like. Our cuteness detector is generally set off by a big, round head with large, low-set eyes, chubby cheeks and limbs, plus an awkward, tottering gait. Brain scans show that objects with these qualities immediately capture our attention, even before conscious thought occurs. Cute things activate the pleasure centres of our brains and prepare us to act with empathy and compassion. ... While humans don’t have floppy ears or tails, we have smaller, rounder skulls and reduced brow ridges compared with other early hominins. Simply put, we’re cuter than Neanderthals. Are we also tamer than they were? Violence and sexism are still endemic to our species, but overall we are less aggressive and patriarchal than chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Aeons ago, did women prefer cute, sociable Kens to belligerent cavemen? Over time, such choices may have bent the arc of our evolution away from our ape-like ancestors and made us who we are."

A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett: a fantasist’s formative years – review by A L Kennedy in The Guardian. "When Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel appeared, it was a revelation. Just as Douglas Adams shifted the foundations of sci-fi, Pratchett rejuvenated fantasy.... Like Adams, Pratchett knows what his point is and gets to it. True to his journalistic roots, he picks a great title and cracks on. His prose is light-footed, melodious, conversational and deceptively deep. His plotlines are inventive, generous and even offer fully formed female characters. Underlying his work is a characteristic sense that any thoughtful human might consider their species with weary fondness and cynical optimism. ... And he’s funny, all the kinds of funny: slapstick, funny names, absurdity, black humour, existential humour, scientific humour, dad jokes, puns … Plus paragraph breaks for comedy timing. A Stroke of the Pen is a postmortem collection of short fiction.... It’s very early work, but Pratchett is already unmistakably Pratchett.... Written for the Western Daily Press – a publication with an obvious appetite for Christmas content – these pieces rattle along entertainingly and sometimes nudge the profound. Published during the 70s and 80s using the pseudonym Patrick Kearns, they conjure a strange, distant time when unions could have power, aristocrats could be penniless, eccentricity and science had room to breathe – and so did the short story."

Instagram apologises for adding ‘terrorist’ to some Palestinian user profiles – article by Josh Taylor in The Guardian. Meta has apologised after inserting the word 'terrorist' into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation. The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word 'Palestinian' written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word 'alhamdulillah' written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: 'Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.'... After the first video, Instagram resolved the issue. The auto-translation now reads: 'Thank God'.... Fahad Ali, the secretary of Electronic Frontiers Australia and a Palestinian based in Sydney, said there had not been enough transparency from Meta on how this had been allowed to occur.....'Is it stemming from the level of automation? Is it stemming from an issue with a training set? Is it stemming from the human factor in these tools? There is no clarity on that. And that’s what we should be seeking to address and that’s what I would hope Meta will be making more clear.'”

Mat Collishaw: AI plants put the shock and sensation back into British art – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "Something evil is blooming in a shady corner of Kew Gardens. Poisonous plants produce red fleshy flowers and sinister insects pretend to be harmless petals – or are the petals posing as insects? Mat Collishaw has created a creepy and beautiful, horrible and exquisite cabinet of botanical curiosities that puts the shock and sensation back into British modern art.... It starts gently enough with flowers swaying in the breeze beside a rippling pool. Collishaw has taken two watercolours by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer and converted them into animated 3D lightboxes. Still life becomes restlessly mobile life.... The unease [develops] in a new series of paintings he has developed using AI tools. You see lovely still lifes of pink, yellow and red blooms that look like 17th-century Dutch paintings. On closer inspection the flowers are swarming with insects. Yet this is just one layer of the illusion. The flowers are actually imitating insects to trick real insects into collecting their pollen in a phenomenon called Pouyannian mimicry. These deceptive blooms are shown along with Collishaw’s rancidly erotic, meaty sculptures of flowers that seem infected with human depravity: ripe red stamens rising from stinking waste ground. Nature, it is implied, will have its revenge, and evolution will produce life to rule the post-human Earth."

‘John McEnroe was my reference point’: how we made hit Mozart movie Amadeus – interviews by Chris Broughton in The Guardian. Michael Chandler, film editor. "My background was in documentaries, which meant I wasn’t intimidated by the sheer quantity of footage. Right from the start, [director] Miloš [Forman] said: 'If I can do it myself, I don’t need you – I want you to surprise me.' It gave me the freedom to do all kinds of stuff. He asked me to fix the beginning, which had Salieri shouting Mozart’s name from a window, and seemed too on the nose. I found all these seconds of empty, cobbled Prague streets, and used those with Salieri’s voice over the top. These shots had never been intended to be used, but it made for a much more evocative opening. We had the opposite problem at the end – we needed to get from the sublime scene of Mozart’s funeral back to Salieri talking to the priest, which wrapped up the film. Whatever we did, Miloš was unhappy. In the end I took a snide laugh Salieri did later in the scene and moved it to the front, so the people crying, the climax of Mozart’s Lacrimosa and the dirt being shovelled into the grave are suddenly interrupted: 'Ha ha ha!' The laugh insults the audience and propels us into the next scene. That’s the documentary skills coming in again – going in and finding these scraps and repurposing them."

In this neverending news cycle of violence, art speaks to our shared humanity – article by Katy Hessel in The Guardian. "A man crouches in despair. His back is hunched and he is facing down, leaning over an empty bottle. His features are unidentifiable and his body is frail as he struggles to support himself on impossibly spindly legs, visible through his trousers. It’s an image of hardship, heightened by the four infants who stand around him, waiting. They look stoic, yet you can sense their vulnerability. What does he have to give? I saw this installation ... at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge last week. It’s by the Northern Ireland-born artist Cathy Wilkes and is part of Real Families: Stories of Change, an exhibition exploring the dynamics of family life.... The headlines we are currently reading are almost too horrific to comprehend, detailing scenes of violence played out on a neverending news cycle. While art can’t give us the answers, it can, I think, convey emotion on a primal level, in ways that transcend time, class and demographics. From printmaking to abstraction to installations such as this one, certain works – whether they were made 10 or 100 years ago – have the power to speak to the very basics of an individual’s experience, our shared humanity. Parent, carer, lover, child – no one could look at these works and not find themselves grappling with their emotions, feeling for the grief, suffering and loss endured by innocent people."

‘It splintered our sense of reality’: how JFK’s assassination spawned 60 years of conspiracy theories – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "If you wanted to trace the origins of our conspiracy-addled times, Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 might well be ground zero. The assassination of JFK was probably the genesis of the post-truth, fake-news, 'don’t trust the experts', 'do your own research' brand of media scepticism and alternative information ecosystems. Of course, conspiracy theories existed before the assassination of JFK. But it was one of the first events to unfold in real time in the age of mass media. [Also] it wasn’t just the death of a president: JFK’s assassination 60 years ago also represents the death of a whole postwar worldview of security, stability and certainty.... It was the beginning of a move in the US 'away from conspiracy theories about the external threats of communist Russia and towards a more inward-looking suspicion about one’s own government', says [Clare] Birchall [professor of contemporary culture at King’s College London]. As the 1960s and 70s unfolded, there were further reasons to distrust official narratives: the Vietnam war, Watergate and the US’s shady interventions in foreign countries from Chile to Indonesia, not to mention the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK’s brother Bobby.... As it became more of a fringe concern, the JFK conspiracy began to be merged with others: government cover-ups about UFOs; secret military programmes; paranormal phenomena.... In the 21st century, though, everything began to flip. The internet hastened the rise of a new breed of conspiracist – and of conspiracist enterprise. Chatrooms and social media helped people spread and monetise their content, while rejection by the mainstream media became a badge of honour. There were fresh conspiracies to examine, from 9/11, to renewed claims that the moon landings were faked, to endless speculation about the 'murder' of Diana, Princess of Wales.... By this time, most left-leaning conspiracists and X-Files fans had got off the bus.... Conspiracism had become predominantly a rightwing concern. In the Kennedy era, the left was suspicious of an 'invisible government' secretly tipping the scales against them; now, the right denounces the 'deep state' for doing the same to them."

Seen and heard: July to September 2023

The White Stone: The Art of Letting Go by Esther de Waal – reflections from the well-regarded spiritual writer, on her preparing to leave the cottage in the Welsh Marches where she has lived for over fifty years and moving to sheltered accommodation in Oxford. I was disappointed, expecting more because of the reputation of her classic book on Benedictine spirituality, or perhaps I just missed it. The one bit which did something for me was her commentary on "Noli me tangere" (as said by the risen Christ on appearing to Mary Magdalene) - which she renders not as "Do not touch" but "Do not cling". "Here again is the message: letting go, refusing to cling to the past, is an essential step into living fully and happily in the present, and moving into an unknown future." (p 100)

The Apartment – classic Billy Wilder film, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Never having seen it before, what struck me was its brutally explicit depiction of a corporation's power over its employees. We see Jack Lemmon's character first bribed then blackmailed into letting out his apartment to senior managers for their extra-marital assignations, and Shirley MacLaine's character pressured into being one of those assignations. For a comedy, a most depressing film, the only note of optimism being that these two characters do in the end rebel against the corporation and refuse to go along with their exploitation - though jobless and without any prospect of a good reference, you wonder whether they might come to regret their rebellion. At least I've learned the source of the expression "That's how it crumbles cookie-wise": at a time when men like Shirley MacLaine’s exploiter thought it smart and witty to create adverbs out of nouns or adjectives by adding “-wise” on the end, it’s what she says to him when she tells him she’s walking out.

Mission Impossible 1-6 – the whole series of films, shown on television to coincide with the cinema release of the seventh film. Like many lovers of the original sixties television show, I had found the first film hard to take when it came out (though I was very impressed with Vanessa Redgrave's character and the thrilling denouement on the TGV in the Channel Tunnel) so I never bothered with the sequels until I found myself watching number 5 (Rogue Nation) on a hotel TV channel and to my surprise found it rather good. Watching them in sequence, though, revealed to me just how long it took them to find the winning formula, with Simon Pegg’s Benji as comic relief and female characters who aren’t totally wet and just there for sexual interest. But the films are a total reversal of the television show’s formula, in which the spies always had a plan which was followed out, the thing being that we didn’t know what the plan was and only discovered it gradually. It would, I can see, have been hard to sustain that for the length of a feature film (the television show had to keep throwing in potential disruptors to the plan in order to create tension), so I understand why the film makers went to the opposite extreme, with the spies usually having no plan at all; the emblematic move, from number six, Fallout, is Tom Cruise leaping onto the runners of the bad guy’s escaping helicopter without the slightest idea of what he is going to do next. The other big difference is that in the films the spies are talking constantly, whereas in the television show they were rigidly taciturn – which was cool in the sixties and was also a structural necessity because they couldn’t talk much without revealing their plan. One thing both films and television have in common though is the constant delivery of surprises (for example, in the Burj Khalifa climbing sequence from Ghost Protocol, spoofed in Paddington). In that, they’re actually rather like the films of Buster Keaton.

Harry Potter 1-8 – another series of films with which I acquainted myself on television, again having given up after seeing the first when it came out. I thought that film, and the book, were okay but (for one brought up on a decent diet of fantasy novels and school stories) nothing special and I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Having seen the whole sequence, I still think they’re quite derivative, but I’m mightily impressed by the architecture, as well as the courage to have a mixed cast of characters growing up through adolescence – which no traditional school story (set in single-sex schools, of course) ever did. But I still prefer Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and the cycle which followed.

50 Years of Text Games by Aaron A. Reed – a labour of love (and Kickstarter support), running from the early classics such as Super Star Trek (1974 – I and my friends wrote a version for our school computer), Adventure (aka Colossal Cave, 1976) and The Hobbit (1982) to Fallen London (2009), 80 Days (2014) and Weyrwood (2018). What really makes this book is the way the author discusses expertly just what made each game innovative and compelling (and we’re talking game design here, not technology) with long extracts to illustrate his points. I’d never before realised just how much creativity has been put into text games, especially those which have broken with the classic “parser model” (in which you enter text commands, as though you were running DOS) in ingenious and sophisticated ways. It quite makes me want to get out my quill.

Duruflé Requiem – performed by the Bach Choir and Britten Sinfonia, in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. An unexpectedly moving concert, opening with a bang: a Tallis hymn - the one which Vaughan Williams used as the theme in his Fantasia - delivering the heart-rending harmonies with full welly. Which then segued seamlessly into the Fantasia itself, without even a break for the choir to sit down (they sat down a minute or so in at a suitable lull in the music). Then a new choral work by Richard Blackford, Vision of a Garden, of which I had minimal expectations, but which again packed an unexpected punch, the text being taken from the ICU diary of a Covid patient, including (as was apparently common) the messages written by the nursing staff, the kinds of things they would say to him if he’d been conscious: “Hi Peter, my name is Sini, me and Alvin are looking after you tonight…”. When he wakes up, his mind is still foggy and he struggles to disentangle what is a real memory from what was a hallucination of his illness, and when taken outside in a wheelchair is delighted to discover that his vision of a garden, a triangular open space surrounding a granite monolith, is real. And the piece ends with the nursing staff greeting another patient: “My name is Evie, one of the critical care nurses…” And then we had the Duruflé Requiem, which was as exquisitely performed as you would expect from these musicians. I cried in the ‘In Paradisum’, the killer bit being the final line, “aeteram habeas requiem”, sinking down onto an open tonic chord, with the addition – quietly in the organ part – of the supertonic, which introduces a bend so that the chord is not quite stable. This isn’t a static depiction of paradise; it’s dynamic, which for me is the only kind of paradise I think I’d be happy to enjoy for all eternity.

Museum of London, Docklands – a really good museum housed in a former warehouse by the West India Dock, which I learned was the first to be constructed, at a time when the whole of the Docklands area was swamp. A commemorative plaque records its inaugural event, attended by the Lord Mayor of London, the Lord Chancellor, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and so on – in other words, this was a massively important development out of which they all expected to make a lot of money, largely (this being a dock for ships going to and from the West Indies) directly or indirectly from slavery. My nine-year-old niece had a great time there, partly because they have a kid’s trail based on the Children’s BBC television show Dodger (the adventures of The Artful Dodger and Fagin’s gang, without that boring goody-goody Oliver Twist) which is one of her favourite programmes. I watched a couple of episodes with her afterwards, and as I find often the case with CBBC it was better written, better acted and generally better made than most adult productions.

Lullabye (‘Goodnight My Angel’) by Billy Joel – sung by a supergroup consisting of The King’s Singers and Voces8. I posted this before, but I’ve been listening to it again because Polymnia (in which I sing) performed another Billy Joel (‘And So It Goes’) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and I suggested to Jess Norton, our conductor, that we might do this one too. But next year, by which time I hope to be able to sing it without crying – because although it is a lullabye, it’s also a song about death.

The Beatbox Collective: What’s Your Sound? – one-hour show on the Edinburgh Fringe by five champion UK beatboxes. Great fun, with sound-effect-accompanied skits as well as virtuoso rhythmic displays.

Journey to the West – fascinating show by experimental Chinese theatre company (director Huang Ying) on the Edinburgh Fringe, loosely based on the much-adapted classic novel, which is a standard in Chinese opera, though this production mashed up traditional opera skills (declamation, movement) with modern theatre techniques: the equivalent of Shakespeare done by four people in T-shirts, swopping all the parts between them. My heart went out to this production, though it was probably something of a niche show, as reflected by the half-empty church auditorium. (Another production of Journey to the West on the Fringe, billed as a family show, with audience participation, probably got better audiences but would have been less interesting to me.)

Smash Hits – Grayson Perry retrospective at the National Gallery of Scotland. The Guardian Arts correspondent was very snooty about this (I suppose once you get your own Channel 4 show that dooms you as far as most critics are concerned) but I enjoyed exploring his warped but compassionate vision of people in today’s society. One thing which struck me though was the heavy dependence on contemporary cultural references, especially in his tapestries, which means they’re going to date very quickly; already some of the references to things that were big in the 1980s require explanation. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. The pieces which most moved me were not his vases, nor his tapestries, but two bronze sculptures called Our Father and Our Mother. Both the figures are laden with objects, attached to their back or their belt or hanging round their neck. The father carries a machine gun, a set of books, an iPod, and a basked containing paintings and barbed wire; the mother carries a baby, a basket of twigs, a ghetto blaster, a reliquary, a petrol can and a cooking pot. They look weighed down. It made me think of all the things (not just physical things) we carry through life, many of which we inherit got our parents.

The Sandman – audio adaptation by Dirk Maggs, following his masterly radio adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Good Omens, as well at the later books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. This perhaps doesn’t work as well, because of the disjointed nature of the original comic book sequence which means that there’s no feeling of overall architecture to the episodes; some run as a sort of sequence, but then that story arc ends and another begins. The aural realisation, though, is tremendous and thoroughly compelling, and well suited to the fantastic nature of the stories. The writing is economical and powerful, conjuring a character, a situation, a plot twist, with just a few words. And Neil Gaiman proves to be an excellent voice artist, as the scene-setter and narrator of everything which isn’t dialogue.

A Spy Among Friends – great ITV drama based on the unmasking of intelligence officer Kim Philby as a Soviet agent and his interrogation by his former friend Nicholas Elliott. The production values are those of the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (the original Alex Guiness version, not that silly Hollywood movie), which it naturally resembles. Damian Lewis is excellent as Elliott, but even better is Anna Maxwell Martin, who in her interrogation of Elliott serves as a contrast and outside viewpoint to the male, posh culture of the secret service. I thought her character was wonderful; a shame it was entirely made up for dramatic purposes, because we could do with more people like her in the intelligence services, to say nothing of government.

Lost Words: Beyond the Page (see review) – beautifully-made adventure game (really, a visual novel with light platforming), on the subject of bereavement. The story of the young wannabe writer Izzy coming to terms with the sickness and death of her beloved gran is interwoven with the story Izzy is writing, in which the protagonist (who can be called Grace, Georgia or Robyn according to player choice) first sees her village destroyed by fire (a powerful metaphor for stroke), then in her quest to return the sacred fireflies encounters first an uncommunicative djinn in a barren desert, then an angry giantess in a cavern of molten lava, then the strange inhabitants of a cold dark underwater world, and finally a whale who rekindles her spirit and a dragon who forces her to acknowledge the inevitability of endings. So, you get it, this is something like the aspects of grief, so that the two stories mirror each other. The gameplay gimmick is that written words are important: in Izzy’s journal, they are objects you need to climb on or move to advance the narrative, and in Izzy’s story words such as Rise, Break and Repair are tools with which Grace (or Georgia or Robyn) can manipulate her environment. Good writing by Rhianna Pratchett (daughter of you-know-who) and exceptionally good voice acting make this a classic. Gaming enthusiasts may complain that there’s minimal challenge, but I don’t think that’s a problem; the challenge is in the themes and experiences described, isn’t it.

Last Day of June (see review) – another adventure game about bereavement, in which the widowed Carl struggles to change the timeline to avoid the death of his beloved wife in a car crash. The actions of six people between six and seven o’ clock in the evening on the fateful day interweave and interact: change one thing and a different outcome results. For example, the car crashed because Carl swerved to avoid a boy whose football had gone into the road. If you can get the boy to play with his kite instead, the football won’t be there. However, the car will still crash because of the boxes which have fallen off the truck of their neighbour who is moving house. It starts as a puzzle game but gradually turns into something different, because to Carl’s growing anger and frustration the crash continues to happen, despite avoiding one cause after another. The ending (including a post-title scene) is very moving and powerful, all the more so because the story is told without words, the characters expressing themselves through emotive mumbles. A unique and charming product.

I Claudius – repeat of the surprise hit television show of 1976, which I remember watching in my last year at school. (We were allowed to stay up late to watch it, because the teachers thought it would be important for our classical education – but we watched it for the sex and violence.) It’s just as powerful today as I remembered it: great performances from top actors who were then early in their careers (Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, John Hurt, Sian Phillips, Patrick Stewart), but also great writing from master-adapter Jack Pulman. What you remember is the killer dialogue (“By the way, don’t touch the figs,” and so on) which was pretty much all his invention, contemporary colloquial without feeling anachronistic, and not a single word without a purpose. On this viewing, I appreciated the skill with which he constantly reminds us of the characters and their relationships. When Claudius talks about “my brother Germanicus” , for example, despite the fact that his interlocutor surely knows that Germanicus is his brother, it is of course a form of “As you know, Bob” – but a subtle and very necessary one, given how many characters there are, ageing, remarrying and repeatedly shifting their alignment in a deeply confusing way.

2001: A Space Odyssey – a cinema revival of the classic, which made a huge impression on me when I saw it with my father on its release in 1968. It’s a film which (without prior explanation) is pretty much impossible to understand on first viewing. I still think this is absolutely appropriate: the story hinges on the idea of contact with aliens beyond our comprehension, so there need to be things in it which we just can’t understand (the monolith, the Rococo bedroom). For that reason, it became something of an obsession amongst science fiction fans in the 1970s, in those days before videos and streaming when seeing a film outside a cinema was a practical impossibility. I was fortunate enough to see it a second time when my father was working in Sri Lanka and there was a showing of it at the Colombo Film Society, introduced by Arthur C. Clarke (the co-author of the screenplay) himself, who had lent his own copy for the occasion. It had a cinema re-release in I think 1979, advertised with an endorsement by George Lucas, after Star Wars had demonstrated the cinema-goer appetite for science fiction, and I saw it repeatedly then to make the most of its limited availability. Over forty years later, like many people I have misgivings about the “man-the-tool/weapon-maker” story of human evolution which it sets up in the first part, but I’m still bowled over by its vision and its courage to be incomprehensible, to take its story-telling slowly, and to have total silence on the soundtrack when appropriate. And in the character of HAL it has the best fictional AI ever.

Apple Vision Pro trailer – impressive technology, which might actually be a gamechanger, like the iPhone was, which virtual reality headsets and Google Glass have spectacularly failed to be. It’s very expensive, but as one reviewer commented, you can see where the money has gone: not only into the digital technology but into the design of the headset to make it comfortable to wear for a long period of time – say, the length of a feature film. (The current best headsets, I gather, are such that you don’t want to wear for more than half a hour.) But the most interesting thing to me is that this is being promoted as an operating system or a “spatial computer”, not as virtual reality. In other words, they’re not selling it as an escape into another world but as a way of living more fully in this one: what’s called “augmented reality”. This seems to be a product whose design has been driven not by fantasy but by close thinking about how people might actually want to use it. It’ll be interesting to see how it comes up against actual users.

Levels of Life, by Julian Barnes (see Guardian review / interview) – a book of two halves, the second half being observations and reflections on his experience of grief after the death of his wife, the agent Pat Kavanagh, and the first – which is about three nineteenth-century balloonists – setting up the imagery which he’s going to use in the second. Both are very fine pieces of writing; his historical writing made me fall in love with history again and reminded me how much I enjoyed those of his novels that I’ve read. The grief memoir is or should be a classic of its kind, to set alongside those of C.S. Lewis and Joan Didion. Everyone’s experience is different, of course (I never, for example, found it hard to be amongst people or to see others being cheerful and carrying on as normal), but honesty and authenticity bridge any gap of difference. His gratitude to others when they note and comment on his wife’s absence struck a chord with me; for him (as for me) this has been a kindness. People in general seem to avoid mentioning the person who died, either because it reminds them of their own mortality or just because they’re worried about saying the wrong thing.

Cuttings: September 2023

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie: nerds who loved words – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Officially, the first headquarters of the [Oxford English Dictionary] was an iron shed in a north Oxford garden, grandly designated a 'scriptorium' by the lexicographers who toiled inside it, often solemnly costumed in academic gowns and mortar boards. But from the beginning this was a crowdsourced project, and Ogilvie, tracking down leads from an address book kept by one of the earliest editors, has unearthed hundreds of anonymous volunteers on all five continents who collected recondite words or trawled unreadable books for illustrative quotations. A few of Ogilvie’s dictionary people are lurid characters: she identifies three murderers, one cannibal and several institutionalised lunatics.... Mostly, however, Ogilvie’s obsessives are harmless academics, hoarders of arcane information that passes for knowledge. She visits one Oxford household whose occupants have to sleep in the kitchen because everywhere else is stuffed with papers. Another dotty boffin perambulates in a coat whose 28 pockets store letters, books and philological offprints along with a clanking armoury of nail clippers, a knife-sharpener and a corkscrew, not to mention a scone that he carries for emergencies. Ogilvie concludes with a touching diptych in honour of two very different devotees, both proudly self-taught. In 1915, James Murray, a draper’s son who was snubbed by collegiate Oxford during his decades editing the OED, composes his own envoi. After elegiacally deciding on a definition for twilight, he puts down his pen, removes his scholar’s cap, takes to his bed with pleurisy and promptly dies, his mission complete. Then in 2006, on a return trip to her native Australia, Ogilvie meets Chris Collier, who over the course of 35 years sent the dictionary 100,000 quotations from a Brisbane tabloid, all carefully cut and pasted in what he called his office, which was a park behind a pub; he posted them to Oxford wrapped in cereal packets with a residue of crumbled cornflakes and tufts of dog hair." See also 'Porn addicts, vicars, madmen and murderers: Sarah Ogilvie on the Oxford English Dictionary’s unlikely writers', interview by Ella Creamer.   

‘Who gets remembered and why?’: the exhibition asking uneasy questions about the Atlantic slave trade – article by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "Research increasingly reveals... the extent to which Britain’s wealth was predicated on the centuries-old rapacious plunder of millions of African people. It was not confined to bank accounts and bequests. There are charged traces of slavery’s legacy throughout the land, in fine art and botanical gardens, and in stately homes and museums, such as Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam. The Black Atlantic exhibition is not an attempt, argue the curators Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery, to detoxify the art and artefacts of slavery. Rather it intends to frame the discussion of this aspect of British history in a way that invites reflection. 'We all tend to be lazy lookers,' says Avery. So, she says, Black Atlantic is concerned with 'letting go of entrenched ideas' and 'unlearning', rather than defaulting to faux anti-woke outrage. 'The exhibition isn’t one side in a culture war,' adds Richards. 'It’s the start of a conversation.'.... Featured [in the exhibition] are two contrasting, elegant 18th-century portraits, Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit and Portrait of The Hon Richard FitzWilliam (the museum’s founder). The paintings are 'effectively in dialogue', says Avery. 'We know the provenance, the whole deal' about the Richard FitzWilliam portrait but 'nothing about the other sitter … We open with this fundamental question [about privilege]: who gets remembered and why?' Richards adds a fascinating detail about Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, which was originally called Portrait of an African until curators in Exeter (from where the portrait is loaned) deleted African, 'because quite reasonably those curators didn’t know for sure where this man was born, or how he might have identified himself'."

The BBC’s Marianna Spring: ‘The more violent the rhetoric, the more important it is I expose it’ – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[The Mariana in] Conspiracyland [podcast] is [Mariana] Spring’s latest plunge into the world of Covid hoaxers and anti-vaxxers, the cranks who would once have seemed harmless (and probably have had more harmless theories, such as homeopathy is good for athlete’s foot) but are now possessed by a fiery righteousness that has completely burned through their neighbourliness. As a piece of investigative reporting, Conspiracyland is vivid and thorough. As a social snapshot, it is unsettling, full of people who seem community-centred but harbour violent fantasies about seeing their adversaries hang; people who seem soft and lefty but are enmeshed in the tropes of the far right. It is so fair-minded that at times it feels like it is taking a set of scales to a gun fight, but we will talk about that later.... Of all the online abuse directed at the BBC and its staff, 80 per cent is aimed at her; and these are what they call 'escalations', messages deemed serious enough – whether because they contain physical threats, violent language, negative sentiment or doxing – that they have been flagged for further assessment.... She can’t pick up her phone without seeing a fresh stream of abuse. 'The thing that I find difficult is how personal a lot of that hate becomes. It’s often very misogynistic. It’s very much about me, it’s not about my journalism. It’s someone saying, "You are a whore", "you are a slag," "I hope you get run over". And that is not legitimate opposition or criticism.'... 'I don’t want to sound like your mum', I start, before swerving to, 'I don’t want to sound too Guardian', but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the BBC in all this, allowing one woman to become the face of everything extremists hate about the institution and all it stands for. The BBC is brilliant and she is very well protected, she says.... Once you are talking about real-life violence, you have to admit that the thing Spring and – at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself – the mainstream media finds really hard to say is that this is not apolitical crankery: these are the narratives of the far right.... All these worldviews that start with the idea that, as Spring puts it, 'your vote doesn’t count for anything, don’t trust democracy, the government is lying', end with totalitarianism and necropolitics, the politics of who gets to live and who has to die. Just because the far left also thinks the government is lying doesn’t mean conspiracyland is a post-political territory. It is necessary to the far right in a way that it isn’t to the far left."

Ultra-processed foods: the 19 things everyone needs to know – article by Rachel Dixon in The Guardian. "... What exactly should I look for on the label? ... According to [the] journal article, Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them, food substances not used in home kitchens tend to appear at the beginning or in the middle of the ingredients list (ingredients are listed in order of weight). These include protein sources (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, mechanically separated meat); sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrates, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose); soluble or insoluble fibre; and modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oil). Additives appear at the end of the ingredients list. Cosmetic additives, used to make the final product more palatable or more appealing, include flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents.... What foods are definitely not UPF?... Category one is 'unprocessed or minimally processed food'. This includes fresh, frozen and dried fruit and vegetables; milk and plain yoghurt; fresh meat and fish; grains and legumes; fungi; eggs; flour; nuts and seeds; herbs and spices; pasta and couscous. Category two covers 'processed culinary ingredients. This includes things such as butter and vegetable oils; honey and maple syrup; and sugar, salt and vinegar. Category three is 'processed foods'. These include freshly made bread and cheese; tinned food – vegetables, fish, fruit; cured meats and smoked fish; and salted or sugared nuts and seeds. And what almost certainly is UPF? Top offenders in category four, ultra-processed foods, include fizzy drinks; packaged snacks; sweets and chocolate; ice-cream; biscuits, cakes and pastries; sausages and burgers; packaged pies and pizzas; and chicken nuggets."

To dye for: why Victorian Britain was more colourful than we think – article by Skye Sherwin in The Guardian. "Early photography’s sepias tint our impression of the 19th century. Yet a real-life encounter with an everyday 1860s gown reveals a startling truth: 'It’s electric purple and still shocking now,' curator Matthew Winterbottom enthuses. And, as the exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design will explore, its garishness was typical in the 19th century. A decade earlier, the flamboyant purple dresses made fashionable by the style leader Empress Eugénie of France were the preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet in just a few years, colours once made with expensive vegetable dyes were being industrially produced cheaply, thanks to an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesise quinine from aniline, a derivative of coal tar, Perkin realised the intense purples this colourless chemical produced could be used as a dye. He quickly established a factory for his new 'mauveine' as he called this early synthetic dye and chemists across Europe soon followed suit, expanding the synthetic colour palette. 'The modern world of ubiquitous colour begins at this point,' says Winterbottom. 'London’s streets and train stations are covered in brightly printed posters. People wear brightly coloured clothes. Everything from books to postage stamps becomes colourful.'”

Goldilocks picks her next book to read – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Too long. Too short. Too grown-up. Too childish. Too scary. Too gentle. Too simple. Too complex. Too depressing. Too jolly. Too many characters. Too similar to the last book I read."

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein: a case of mistaken identity –  review by William Davies in The Guardian. "Today, things are far more complicated than [the] simple axes of left-right and liberal-authoritarian imply. The problem in the age of big tech, the climate crisis, Covid lockdowns, online influencers and collapsed trust in 'mainstream' politics and media is that everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied to and manipulated – and they’re right. Where they disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose of the manipulation. The rhetoric of critique and liberation has become ubiquitous, no longer serving to distinguish left from right, truth from falsehood. Virtually everyone now wants to unmask the elites and decode their messaging in one way or another. For leftist critics such as Naomi Klein, who made their names in a simpler pre-Trump, pre-YouTube age, this provokes an identity crisis. The premise of Doppelganger is so unlikely as to be almost absurd: Naomi Klein has spent several years being mistaken for the feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and has chosen to write a book about this.... You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left, in particular the loss of its monopoly (if it ever had one) over the language of political resistance, and how, in the process, that language has lost its grip on the world."

‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind [Mustafa Suleyman] on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it – interview by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "He likes to think of himself as someone who confronts problems rather than rationalising them away. After he left Oxford he worked in policy for the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, before helping NGOs arrive at a common position during the Copenhagen climate summit. It wasn’t until 2010 that he got into AI, creating DeepMind with the coding genius Demis Hassabis, the brother of a school friend, and becoming chief product officer. DeepMind’s mission was to develop artificial general intelligence, AI with human-like adaptability. Four years later it was acquired by Google for £400m, making Suleyman and his colleagues unimaginably rich.... Given ... the havoc that AI might be about to wreak, does Suleyman ever feel guilty about the part he’s played in its development? No, because he sees technological change as arising from the 'collective creative consciousness'. 'That’s not a way of disowning responsibility. It’s just an honest assessment: very rarely does an invention get held in a kind of private space for very long.' At the same time, he does believe he can nudge the sector towards greater social public-spiritedness. 'What I’ve always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission "to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone".' He reckons this early stand set the tone. 'I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard.' The Coming Wave is partly an effort to continue this role of shaping and bolstering the industry’s conscience."

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman: AI, synthetic biology and a new dawn for humanity – review by John Naughton in The Observer. "The oncoming wave in his title is 'defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology', and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original..... Translated into terms of technological waves, Suleyman’s evolutionary sequence looks like this: humans first used technology to operate on the physical world – the world of atoms; then they worked on bits, the units of information; and now they are working on creating new forms of biological life. Or, to put it more crudely: first we invented mechanical muscles; now we are messing with our brains; and soon we will be doing this with our biology. However you portray it, though, the reality is that we are in the process of creating monsters that we have no idea how to manage.... So what’s needed? The conventional answer is regulation, which Suleyman rightly regards as woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge. Regulation is the last refuge of an exhausted mind: something that kind-of worked in the past, and so will hopefully work again – in an entirely transformed context. Instead, he proposes 'containment', a term with echoes of the cold war and George Kennan’s strategy for keeping Soviet power under control in the postwar era – requiring long-term, patient, firm and vigilant restriction of the adversary’s expansionist tendencies."

Too much too young: I talked to 10,000 children about pornography. Here are 10 things I learned – article by Abbey Wright in The Guardian. "1. Children as young as six are encountering pornography.... 2. For nine- to 11-year-olds, exposure to pornography is frequent.... 3. I met a 12-year-old boy who was dealing with pornography addiction.... 4. Teenagers are learning more from pornography than sex education classes.... 5. For young people exploring their sexuality, pornography can end up filling gaps in their education.... 6. Pornography is confusing the issue of consent.... 7. Pornography use doesn’t always conform to gender stereotypes.... 8. For many young people, pornography is their introduction to sex.... 9. Pornography is stopping young people from connecting in the real world.... 10. Very little is known about the effect pornography is having on young people...."

The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins: talk like a pro – review by Luca Turin in The Guardian. "Most of us are not subject to the demands made on TV news journalists such as Ros Atkins. They must, in just hours, familiarise themselves with a topic to which they have not necessarily paid attention until then. They must decide which information is reliable, vivid and important. They must then string these pearls in a logical sequence without gaps, non sequiturs or distractions. And they must deliver this information to camera convincingly, frequently in the face of unexpected glitches. Early in his career, which he chronicles disarmingly, missteps and all, the BBC’s analysis editor developed a technique to catch, sort, grade, clean, fillet, pack and deliver information. This book, The Art of Explanation, explains how he does it.... Anyone who has watched one of his three-minute backgrounders on the BBC will have gone through the same stages of delight and disbelief as I have. Who is this guy? How, in the name of all that’s holy, does he pack so much info into so little time? Why do I feel he is talking to me alone? And where do I learn to make that microscopic pause before important words, just like he does? I am sorry to report that this last question is not answered, but the others are. By the sound of it, Atkins has long been arguing that the space for facts inside people’s heads is not rent-free and must be earned second by second. Everything must either contribute to the push or be gone. He also believes, correctly, that every opportunity for communication demands our full attention and can be improved, streamlined and focused."

The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey: it’s a long, long way from Westminster – review by John Harris in The Guardian. “In Tillydrone, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of [Aberdeen], McGarvey met Michael, who had 'moved from England to work as a scaffolder on the oil and gas rigs but, like many, had fallen on hard times since the [oil price] collapse of 2008'. He told McGarvey that he had been homeless for two years since being evicted from his flat. 'I went down south to visit my family, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years,' Michael said. 'I planned to stay for three days but ended up being there for three weeks. When I got home, I had been evicted. They said it was because I abandoned my flat, but I didn’t.' When this happened, he was 75. More shockingly still, his landlord was the city council. 'He was frozen out by an opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers,' McGarvey writes. 'An organisational jigsaw puzzle where decisions with life-and-death implications are made behind a curtain of unaccountable officialdom.' Herein lies the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term 'proximity': the fact that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks around and manipulates. When it comes to the central state, moreover, decision-making turns even more cold and cruel, largely because in Westminster and Whitehall, the domination of political and administrative matters by privileged cliques is at its worst."

Beasts of England by Adam Biles: Animal Farm for the post-Brexit era – review by Patrick McGuiness in The Guardian. "The past decade in world politics offers plenty of easy opportunities to invoke George Orwell. But writing a sequel to Animal Farm, a book that exemplifies Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic – that we don’t need to have read it to know it – is a riskier undertaking. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles has updated and retooled Animal Farm for today, and in this clever, resourceful and at times painful novel, the risk pays off.... Beasts of England is a state-of-the-nation farmyard novel, in which populism, sleaze, Partygate, Brexit, the refugee crisis, Covid, Johnson, Trump, Farage, the Murdoch press, targeted Facebook ads, the Daily Mail et al are allegorised in such detail that it takes on the air of a roman à clef. Biles has a lot of political and cultural dysfunction to pack in, and if there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that Beasts of England, at more than twice the length of Animal Farm, tries to cover too much of it. But the writing is lively and humorous, and the satire is only sharpened by the freshness and innocence of the characters (Martha the goose, Benjamin the donkey, Cassie the mule) who watch the darkness encroach. Biles knows that today’s post-truth world is very different from its 1940s incarnation – indeed, his ability to exploit similarities without implying false equivalences is part of what makes Beasts of England so historically and politically literate, as well as entertaining."

Julian Barnes: The sense of another ending – interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, 30 March 2013. "It is almost five years since Pat Kavanagh, the literary agent, died of a brain tumour. In that time, Julian Barnes, her husband of 30 years, has published three books: a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on the influence of other writers and a novel, The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker prize in 2011. His new book, Levels of Life, is another hybrid; part essay, part short story and part memoir, the latter of which will generate by far the most interest, as memoirs of the well known in turmoil will do. But it is a mistake to see the book as anything other than whole: an effort by Barnes, using everything he has, to look down on the landscape of loss.... Levels of Life is a hard book to describe; no summary will capture the experience of reading it – the way in which, as the slim volume progresses, something not quite central to your vision builds, so that by the end you are blindsided by a quiet devastation. The first two sections are concerned with late 19th-century France and feature Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, an awkward British cavalry soldier named Fred Burnaby, and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, the adventurer, photographer and – what links all three – enthusiastic balloonist. The book's guiding metaphor is Nadar's feat of being the first man to take an aerial photograph, from a balloon over northern Paris, and in that moment to experience a sort of existential freefall that finds its echo in the last third of the book." See also '"I didn’t think it was possible to be a novelist": Julian Barnes on literature, loss – and his late friend Martin Amis', interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian.

‘Big Bird’s hands were on my shoulders!’: the psychology professor who teamed up with Sesame Street – article by Hollie Richardson in The Guardian. "Big Bird is having a rotten day. There is a frown on his beak; his head is hanging down. He had been so excited to roller-skate around Sesame Street, but the rain ruined his plans. 'I don’t like this feeling. I want it to go away,' he says, before naively suggesting that the solution is to wish for the rain to stop. Luckily, he has a great new friend to help him deal with this feeling – Dr Laurie Santos, the professor behind Yale’s happiness course, the most popular course in the college’s history. She is also the host of the Happiness Lab podcast that Big Bird has joined her on 'Big feelings like disappointment don’t go away quickly,' she tells him. 'But there are things we can do … ' It’s not the first time the happiness expert has called on Sesame Street’s furry puppets for help. Earlier this year, Elmo joined her on her podcast to launch a new collaboration between The Happiness Lab and Sesame Workshop... In the new three-part miniseries, she also speaks to Abby Cadabby about gratitude and Grover about self-talk. This isn’t just for the benefit of the children, though – it has been made with adults and their little ones in mind."

Susie Dent: ‘English has always evolved by mistake’ – interview by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "Perhaps the world’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent is certainly one of the most positive people on British TV. For 31 years the queen of dictionary corner on Channel 4’s Countdown, she puts just as much energy into her books... This autumn, Dent will publish two new books full of linguistic jewels. The first, Interesting Stories About Curious Words: From Stealing Thunder to Red Herrings, is a book for adults about the weird stories behind some of our most common words and phrases. ... The next is Roots of Happiness: 100 Words for Joy and Hope, a book for children with beautiful illustrations by Harriet Hobday, which she calls 'the happiest thing I’ve ever written'. Dent is on a mission to revive English’s 'lost positives' – words such as 'feckful', 'couth', 'ruly' and 'full of gorm'. In modern English, they survive only in their negative forms, but once, we aspired to be ruthful (full of compassion) or ept.... So, what three joyous words would she use to describe herself?
... The first one she comes up with, because she thought of it when she woke up this morning, is 'elf-locked'. 'It looks back to the supposition that mischievous elves would come out at night and play havoc with your hair.' The second, a rediscovered positive, is 'feckful' – because 'I’d like to think I have some effect'. For the third word, she eventually decides on 'respairing'. Respair is the opposite of despair; it only has one record in the dictionary, and it means to recover from despair. 'But I think it also means hoping for better days around the corner. Having fresh hope and optimism.'"

‘The Iliad may be ancient – but it’s not far away’: Emily Wilson on Homer’s blood-soaked epic – interview by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Classicist Emily Wilson never expected her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which was published in 2017, to be such a hit.... [She] has a theory about why readers found it so captivating. 'A lot of it’s just that I managed to find a language that was able to speak to different kinds of people'... But then came the Iliad. She always knew she would tackle it, right after the Odyssey....The two poems are very different. 'There’s a lightness and playfulness and magic about the Odyssey that I wanted to get across in the translation,' she says. 'And of course, the Iliad has tons of magic to it: it has a huge sense of the divine. And yet, there’s also a deep sense of pain and darkness and constraint. I don’t want to make you laugh very much. I think you should be crying a lot more than you should be laughing.'... The poem contains multitudes: three finely drawn worlds, of the Greeks, the Trojans and the gods; a whole range of competing and complementary architectures; exquisite variation of tone. And perhaps its most striking aspect is the way in which worlds beyond the battlefield are evoked through its imagery: armies are like floods or wildfires or flies swarming round a milk pail; gods fly with the speed of imagination or of hawks; humans are as short-lived as leaves. The poem clangs and clatters, and it’s so gleaming in its visual effects that reading it can feel like staring into a midday Mediterranean sun. Through it all pulses death, death that at every moment renders life more intense."

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson: a bravura feat – review by Edith Hall in The Guardian. "There were nearly 50 English-language versions [of The Iliad] in the 19th century, at least 30 in the 20th, and a dozen or more already in the 21st.... Do we really need another? If it is this one by Emily Wilson, then we certainly do.... Wilson, who has published acclaimed translations of the dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, is a scholar of classical Greek at University of Pennsylvania, and it shows....She has so deeply assimilated the aural effects made by Homeric enjambment, alliteration and assonance that they seem to come to her writing spontaneously: when the Trojan ally, soothsayer Merops, forbids his sons to enlist in the army defending Troy, 'They disobeyed, because their destinies / of death and darkness carried them to Troy'. She revels in the similes, especially those evoking the natural world: Athena leaps down from the sky 'like a shearwater with outstretched wings / and shrill, clear cry'.... There are appealing features that distinguish her version from others. She is especially sensitive to the subtle individuation of characters when they are given direct speech (which constitutes a quarter of the poem). We can hear Agamemnon’s narcissism and negativity, Nestor’s senescent garrulity, Thersites’ demagogic snarls, Hecuba’s near-derangement after multiple bereavements and Andromache’s intelligence and despair....There is a bravura self-confidence in Wilson’s choices. In the first two lines of the poem, Achilles’ wrath, which sent so many heroes to their deaths, is called oulomenēn. This long, vowelly, mouth-filling participle is usually translated by a much slighter English word such as 'direful', 'ruinous' or 'destructive' Wilson’s choice of 'cataclysmic' proclaims her independence from tradition and the acuity of her ear.... Often a rarer word breathes new life into an old image, such as 'canister' for 'bucket'. I enjoyed the fresh, contemporary feel of the dialogue, especially army banter: 'delusional behaviour', 'I am done with listening to you'; 'master strategist'."

Exclusive revelations from Sauron the Dark Lords forthcoming memoir – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "I made mistakes, but I still believe that I delivered positive change for Middle Earth. A cabal of anti-growth left-wing wizards undermined my premiership. The hobbits never gave my Shire modernisation policies a fair chance. Losing my ring of power was very difficult, but I do not rule out a return to politics." (See 'Liz Truss to "share lessons" of her time in government in new book'.)

Cuttings: August 2023

The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution? – article by David Runciman in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. “Being a banker is a career; working for a bank is a job; devising a banking product is a task; closing a deal is an action.… New technology has changed the relationship between careers, jobs and tasks. Performing tasks is what machines are good at. The better they get at it, the more work becomes task-oriented. In many ways, talking about the prospect of machines taking people’s jobs is a misnomer, because once machines do the work these are no longer jobs. Machines don’t require job security, any more than they require the other appurtenances of modern employment regimes: holidays, healthcare, positive feedback, redundancy pay. Jobs are what humans do.“

‘Esther, the singing dog won’t sing!’ Rantzen and team on the joy of That’s Life! – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "A young BBC trainee was sent, in the late 1970s, to film an Edinburgh dog that was reputed to sing along to his master’s bagpipes. 'But,' he recalls, 'the film crew set up, the guy in a kilt started playing, and the dog didn’t sing at all. It just sat there.' The fledging director was Adam Curtis... Back then, he was a junior in the Talented Pets section of That’s Life!, ... a show that was first broadcast 50 years ago this spring and had 15-20 million viewers. Curtis worried the silent canine meant the end of his career. 'I rang Esther [Rantzen] and said, "He’s not singing!" And Esther said, "Darling" – it was always in that theatrical way – "Darling, that’s brilliant! Just keep filming!" So I took various shots of a dog sitting silently next to a man playing the bagpipes incredibly loudly in his front room. I took the footage back and Esther – she always did the editing – turned it into a three-minute film of a dog doing nothing while this guy piped away with increasing desperation. And it was incredibly funny.' In between amusing animals, though, Curtis could find himself working on 'stories about housing estates collapsing because councils had taken bribes to build on brownfield sites'. This mix of reporting and chortling was central from the start. 'I had been brought up to believe,' says Rantzen, 'that mixing comedy and tragedy was a great British tradition. Hence the Porter scene in Macbeth. Taxi drivers used to ask, "Is your show meant to be funny or serious?" And I said, "Yes."’... 'We started with high-street vox pops,' Rantzen explains. 'Then the first consumer item was also light-hearted, to seduce viewers into watching. Next we put a "half-hard" consumer item ...which led into the centre of the show where we put our most serious reports. The transition out of the most serious – and we did life-and-death issues, so they could be very serious – was usually done via recaps by the reporters, bringing past stories up to date. The last recap was a fun one, so we could finish with talented pets or a live piece of nonsense that meant we could end on laughter. Ruthlessly, I also used to start the show with a pre-title clip of the funniest item from the previous week, to remind viewers of what they missed if they failed to watch us. Serve them right.'"

I really don’t know where I want to end up. How do I figure out what I want to do? – advice column by Eleanor Gordon Smith in The Guardian. "How do I figure out what I want? I feel like I am good at achieving goals that I care about, but I’m hopeless at deciding what goals to pursue...." "'Figuring out what you want' can get easily confused with two other questions that suck up your time and deplete your energy while dangling the possibility of getting it right just out of reach. The first is: 'What shouldI want?' Figuring out what you should want (not what you do want) is a miserable experience, because there are too many plausible responses....The second question we can accidentally embark on in the guise of asking what we want is: 'How can I have an ideal life?' When we ask that, we start to stress over all the possible ways we could improve things. Improvement is in principle never-ending, so the stress of trying to achieve it is also never-ending.... The question of what you want is separate to both. It’s about asking when you feel most like yourself. When do you feel at ease; like you have both feet firmly planted on the floor? When do you feel like the best of you is showing up in your interactions? When are you proud of yourself in that deep, lamp-in-the-soul type way?"

Coming soon! Classic novels improved by artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Android of Green Gables, Montgomery. A Suitable Bot, Seth. Portrait of the Automaton as a Young Machine, Joyce. Tech of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy. My Family and Other Algorithms, Durrell."

‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’: Why wasn’t Lucy Letby stopped as months of murder went by? – article by Josh Halliday in The Observer. "Dr Stephen Brearey recalls the [meeting at which] he first connected Lucy Letby to a series of unusual baby deaths on the neonatal unit where they worked. It was in a meeting with the hospital’s head of nursing and two other colleagues on Thursday, 2 July 2015. 'It can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy,' he told them. More than eight years later, 33-year-old 'nice Lucy' faces the rest of her life in prison after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six in crimes without parallel in modern Britain. Through exclusive interviews, the uncovering of internal confidential documents, and months of reporting from Manchester crown court, the Observer can today tell the full story of how concerns were raised about Letby for months before she was eventually removed from frontline care in July 2016...."

‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline – article by James Ball in The Guardian. "The 'wellness-to-woo pipeline' – or even 'wellness-to-fascism pipeline' – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories. It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. ... Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the 'incel' (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the 'secrets' of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to. What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But ... the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place. 'Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,' [says Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]. 'But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.' Women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to suffer from auto-immune disorders, chronic pain and chronic fatigue – and such patients often hit a point at which their doctors tell them there is nothing they can do. The conditions are under-researched and the treatments are often brutal. Is it any surprise that trust in conventional medicine and big pharma is shaken? And is it any surprise that people look for something to fill that void?... Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. 'New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,' he says.... Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them."

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder: inside a troubled marriage – review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian.  "Eileen [O'Shaughnessy] was ill-served by Orwell’s own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man’s wife. It’s clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental – that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold. What I object to is her process of correction. ... Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps. Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. ... Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? ... For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren’t how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong." See also Anna Funder, 'Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story'. 

Top 10 female spies in fiction – article by Kim Sherwood in The Guardian. "In [my] Double Or Nothing, the first novel in a series commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of 007, Bond has vanished and time is running out. A new ensemble cast of double O agents must work against the clock to find Bond and save the world from climate catastrophe. ... [Johanna] Harwood trains as a trauma surgeon before a life-altering event brings her to Moneypenny’s attention, now head of the double O section (in the world’s most overdue promotion). Harwood becomes 003. I hope to empower women to see themselves as the hero, while reflecting the diversity of real espionage. In a genre outwardly dominated by male writers and heroes, I sought out female spies in fiction to inspire me. Here are my Top 10..." 1. Sheila Matthews in While Still We Live, Helen MacInnes (1944)... 2. Stella in The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen (1948)... 3. Gala Brand in Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)... 4. Elsa in The Hothouse By the East River, Muriel Spark (1973)... 5. Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré (1983)... 6. Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow: The Name of the Rose by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (2011)... 7. Laura Last in A Quiet Life, Natasha Walter (2016)... 8. Juliet Armstrong in Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018)... 9. Who Is Vera Kelly? Rosalie Knecht (2018)... 10. Marie Mitchel in American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)

The Fraud by Zadie Smith: a trial and no errors – review by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Guardian. "Early on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations. ... In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, Hilary St Ives, though he’d never once visited the island. Mrs Touchet can trace back the gist of his knowledge about Jamaica to a propaganda booklet of the 1820s, when much of England could delude themselves into thinking that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was tantamount to the freedom of enslaved populations in British colonies. Ainsworth ignored the regular reports of tragic rebellions and vengeful colonial reprisals coming out of the Caribbean in the decades since to paint a prelapsarian portrait of 'long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa-trees'. ... Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.... In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as 'the English Victor Hugo', and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years.... At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of 'stolen truth': the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, the Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being 'high-born men' in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel. Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were 'two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined', joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s 'secret word': slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port."

AI prompt engineering: learn how not to ask a chatbot a silly question – article by Callum Baines in The Observer. "What is prompt engineering? ... Throw a question from the top of your head at ChatGPT and it may provide a satisfying answer, or not. Prompt engineering involves considering the idiosyncrasies of an AI model to construct inputs that it will clearly understand. This tends to produce outputs that are more consistently useful, interesting and appropriate to what you have in mind. Formulate the prompt well and the response may even surpass expectations.... So how do I do it? There are several popular prompting techniques. Employing personas is a common trick. Tell the system to act as a lawyer, personal tutor, drill sergeant or whatever else, and it will create outputs imitating their tone and voice. Or, as a reverse exercise, instruct it to complete a task with a specific audience in mind – a five-year-old, a team of expert biochemists, an office Christmas party – and you’ll get a result tailored for that demographic.... Chain-of-thought prompting, meanwhile, is more appropriate for problem-solving. Asking the model to 'think step by step' will encourage it to partition its output into bite-size chunks, which often makes for more comprehensive results.... What should I avoid? Vague language. Without additional information, AI models cannot infer your tastes, ideas or the vision of the product that’s in your head. Don’t skimp on specifics or context and don’t assume that if something is missing, the model will correctly fill in the blank."

What happens when AI reads a book – blog post by Etan Mollick, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Every author knows, and dreads, what most people want AI to do with books – summarize them. They want to distill down pages of thoughtful prose, carefully considered language, and specific phrases into a few pithy points. So, can AI do this? [After testing this on his own short book on entrepreneurship, the answer is] Yes. And surprisingly well. Further, it has enough 'sense' of context that you can ask for expansions – tell me the examples and research the book gives to support each point. And it does that, too.... What about the style and patterns of writing? Are there any phrases or verbal tics that repeat throughout the book?... Can it work as an editor? As an editor, offer both several broad suggestions, and several specific ones, about how the book could be made more accessible and like a pop science bestseller and also: create a better transition between chapters 2 and 3. give me the original and your changes, and why you made them.... Given that the AI has an impressive ability to understand text, one use case for this knowledge is to help teachers who often assign books to classes. Given the entire text of the book, can AI help an instructor create more meaningful learning as a result? I think the answer is yes. ... You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will make 5 quiz questions on the book suitable for college students. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an 'all of the above option.' At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer.... The AI did much better at a wide range of other educational tasks based around the book: write a case study in the style of a Harvard Business School case that would require students to use the lessons of the book and provide the instructor’s guide to the case resulted in an interesting in-class exercise that I could see using.... I was particularly interested in its ability to apply knowledge from the book in novel contexts and ways: Explain the main themes of the book to me at four different levels: first grader, 8th grader, college student, PhD student resulted in good summaries.... I also tried explain how the book might be useful to dairy farmer in Wisconsin, a ninja living in ancient Japan, an experienced venture capitalist, and Glormtok an orcish barbarian from the fantasy steppes (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This resulted in lessons that actually encapsulated what the book was about."

Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time – article by Frances Ryan in The Guardian. "Should someone off work with Parkinson’s be allowed a television? Does a supermarket assistant deserve a hobby? YouGov put a range of expenses to the public to ask at what income level they believed each should be attainable. The results are eye-opening. The survey shows that 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills, while 74% think they should have the means to eat a balanced diet – in effect, meaning that around a quarter of the public believe that people on out-of-work benefits shouldn’t be able to have electricity or a full complement of vitamins. Things get particularly interesting when respondents were asked about 'non-essentials'. Only 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for all, while 55% think everyone should be able to afford a television.... Such attitudes are grim, but hardly new. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in 1932: 'The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.' And yet it feels as if minds have hardened in recent years. The cost of living crisis has seen disposable income inequality in Britain rise, with the poorest fifth of the population enduring the biggest fall as they’re forced to spend more to cover the basics.Meanwhile, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours."