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."
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