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.
Sunday 15 October 2023
Tuesday 3 October 2023
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'.)
‘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'.)
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