Seen and Heard: October to December 2023

Batman: The Enemy Within – narrative game from Telltale. (See review on Adventure Gamers.) An excellent take on the Batman mythos, supported by convincing writing and voice-acting. The two main interactive elements in the story, which otherwise proceeds largely on rails, are deployed precisely at the points where they contribute most and have most impact. When Batman gets into a fight or some other dangerous situation, there are timed-action sequences in which you have to react quickly to onscreen prompts or locate objects against a time limit. Right from the start of Episode 1, this makes The Riddler’s lethal traps, from which you have to extricate yourself and others, genuinely scary, for fear of what you’ll see if you make a mistake or move too slowly. The second interactive element is dialogue choice, which allows you to role-play your relationships with the other characters and shape how they develop. For example, when a conflict arises between Commissioner Gordon and Agency Director Waller, which of them do you support? And having made that decision, which of them do you call for help later when you need backup? The biggest branch in the story concerns Bruce Wayne’s relationship with the man called John Doe (the proto-Joker), whom he met briefly in the previous game when they were both in Arkham Asylum (Bruce being temporarily insane as the result of poisoning by a super-villain). Now discharged, John is still very disturbed and latches on to Bruce seeking some sort of stability. As Bruce, you have to exploit him to some extent to get access to his contacts and advance the story, but after that it’s up to you how genuine a friend to be. If you reject him, he will become The Joker as expected, but if you continue to believe in him, despite his clearly psychopathic behaviour in Episode 4, then he becomes a vigilante like Batman, whom he idolises, and Episode 5 takes a completely different turn, effectively a whole additional episode. The other major relationship which can go in two directions is Bruce Wayne’s relationship with Selina Kyle (Catwoman). Again these two have history from the previous game and already know each other’s secret identity. This time however, Selina starts to drop her teasing flirting Catwoman persona and open up to Bruce, and if you choose to have Bruce open up to her in return a kind of intimacy can develop. At one critical point, you as Bruce have the option to invite Selina into the Batcave – a tremendous gesture of trust. But the trust is not unproblematic because Catwoman has her own agenda, and at certain points in the plot she will betray Bruce or at least deceive him. This heightens the tension of the final episode (in one of its versions) where The Joker has Bruce and Selina in cages and effectively forces them to play Prisoner’s Dilemma, manipulating them so that they have every reason not to trust each other. If you as Bruce do choose to trust Selina, there's a wonderful emotional rush which you get when you realise that she has trusted you also, and you get the "good" ending. It’s possible to mistrust and betray Selina at every stage of the story, in which case you end up with her as an enemy; the story still makes sense, but leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Great writing and clever story-telling. The previous story (which I played subsequently) is good, but not at the same level. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)

Pillars of Eternity – enjoyable homage to classic computer RPGs, created by enthusiasts with Kickstarter backing. (See review on PC Gamer.) The writing is good, and there’s some decent voice acting, which is welcome, though I find the music disappointing. (It’s not bad, but there’s not enough of it, so it gets repetitious. It compares unfavourably with the great score to Neverwinter Nights, which I still play.) Importantly, the character and combat systems are complicated but not too complicated; I tried playing Baldur’s Gate II (now on heavy discount, given that Baldur’s Gate III has been released), but quickly gave up because I couldn’t work out how not to die. Like most such games, Pillars of Eternity has epic Lord-of-the-Rings-scale proportions, and so has taken up my evenings for many weeks and will do so for many more.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – grief memoir, written in the year following the sudden death of her husband. Having read the grief memoirs of C.S. Lewis and Julian Barnes, I decided to read this other classic also; everyone's grief is unique and different, of course, but it's still reassuring to read other people's experiences. "Magical thinking", the attitude that one can bring something about by performing certain rituals or even just wanting it very badly, is I think not quite the right description for what she went through. Certainly she was tormented by thoughts that there was something she or he could have done to prevent his death – thoughts which only subsided when she received his autopsy report (nearly a year after the event, because in her confusion she gave the pathologists, instead of her current address, the address where they lived when they were married). But much of what she describes strikes me more as denial: not disbelieving that the person has died so much as carrying on as though they are still alive; for example, she finds herself unable to give away his shoes because he would need them if he were to return. Didion writes well and honestly, though as when reading her previously I found myself constantly irritated by the highly-specific references to places, shops, celebrities etc. which are no doubt highly significant to American readers but leave me wrong-footed. What does it signify, for example, to talk about going to Honolulu?   

The Hollow Crown – reshowing of the 2012 BBC productions of Shakespeare history plays, which I missed first time around though I saw them getting rave reviews. They really are tremendous, with spectacular locations and punchy direction and (of course) top actors in all the roles, great and small, standouts from the first sequence being Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Jeremy Irons as Henry IV, Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal / Henry V, Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff and Julie Walters as Mistress Quickly. Whenever the antique language gets difficult, it doesn’t matter because the acting is so darn good you can see precisely what’s going on. The text has been ingeniously and sensitively edited so that the drama rattles along like a train, for example inter-cutting between simultaneous-action scenes to keep up the pace. My favourite modification: Richard II’s famous speech beginning “Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings” occurs not only in its proper place (Act III, when things are all going wrong for him) but is also used as a voiceover at the very opening, over the titles, to sound a note of doom and foreshadow how it's going to end. This is what I call good editing – because we are not groundlings watching a play at The Globe; we’re used to films and how films work, and these productions have made the plays work as films, brilliantly.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance – milestone exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (see Guardian review): a very carefully thought-out post-imperialist attempt to engage with the legacy of slavery. The issue could hardly be avoided; the museum itself was founded from the bequest and collection of the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, who inherited his wealth from his grandfather, who made it largely through the transatlantic slave trade. All the exhibits are connected to slavery in one way or another: as examples of pre-colonial African culture, as representations of Africans before and after the rise of transatlantic slavery, as artefacts of the merchant and investment companies which built the nation’s wealth on the profits of slave trading and slave-staffed plantations, and as products of slavery both material (most surprisingly, a Rembrandt portrait, because painted on a panel of slave-produced South American wood) and intellectual (botanical and technical knowledge derived from slaves but credited to the white authors who published it). I did find myself thinking at points “Oh, that’s going a bit far” – as when the chronometers and sextants used to solve the “longitude problem” of navigation at sea were presented as inventions driven by slavery. And then I thought: well, there’s no question that it was international trade which drove the need for better navigation, and international trade was very largely trade in slaves and the products of slavery, so actually what they'd done wasn't unfair. And then, we were shown (a total surprise for me) that the Royal Society was described in Thomas Sprat’s 1667 History as having been founded as a “twin sister” of the Royal African Society which traded in gold and ivory and people along the West coast of Africa. My own reactions reminded me of what people used to say of the way Andrew Cunningham and I tried to re-write the history of science: “couldn’t you bit a bit less extreme, and then we might agree with it;” in other words, they might agree with us if we didn't actually say it. I think this exhibition is a noble and skilful effort to shift the centre of gravity of how we think about the history and culture of this period. It’s not the final word (the curators describe it as the start of a conversation), but it’s a step along the way.

Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design – nicely-conceived exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (See trailer video and Guardian review.) We tend to think of the Victorian era as existing in black and white (early monochrome photographs, men in dark suits and women in mourning), although in fact this was the period when synthetic dyes brought colourful clothing within the financial reach of the masses. At the same time, art critics like Ruskin (surely influenced by German Romanticism, though this wasn't discussed) gave colour a priority when judging aesthetics in the visual arts; in the classical period, it had been a poor third behind composition and draughtsmanship. And then colour in art started acquiring new sets of associations: with the middle and far East, with Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement, and with decadence – the sickly colours of absinthe and The Yellow Book. All very interesting, though the exhibition does rather peter out; there’s no punchline or overall story, just a collection of exhibit-based tales about colour, albeit fascinating ones.

Lux Aeterna – concert by Voces8 supplemented by Voces8 Scholars, at King's Place, London. I was disappointed with their rendition of the title piece by Liegeti, knowing it super-well from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack album, which back in the day we all played endlessly in lieu of seeing the film in those times before home video. The performance wasn’t bad, but I was expecting it to be definitive, and sometimes I could hear, even in singers of the capability of Voces8 Scholars, that tone in the voice which can be verbalised as “Oh god, I’m not sure if I’m singing the right note here.” The rest of the concert, though, was superb, including Caroline Shaw’s beautiful ‘and the swallow’ and concluding with the Elgar ‘Lux aeterna’ (to the tune of ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma variations).

Noises Off – arch-farce by Michael Frayn, at Milton Keynes Theatre. I’d seen it twice before with my wife, and we agreed it was the funniest thing we’d ever seen in the theatre, and quite possibly anywhere, so I thought our granddaughter needed to see it, now that she's of an age, especially since she’d done drama GCSE and can appreciate all the gags to do with stage production. This is the play’s fortieth anniversary, and the content is now dated in some ways, but the comedy is timeless, and Liza Goddard, Matthew Kelly and company gave it full welly. I remember the third act as falling a bit flat after the very funny first act (a chaotic dress rehearsal) and the hilarious second act (a calamitous mid-run performance, seen from backstage, with the fictional cast struggling to keep their play going – or sabotaging it). Where can the play go from there? Apparently Frayn re-wrote the third act at least once to try to solve that problem, and though I don’t think there was any further re-writing for this production the (real) cast somehow found a way to up the power so as to end on a high (or rather, a low).

The Daleks in Colour – a reissue of Doctor Who’s original Dalek story from 1963, to coincide with the show’s 60th anniversary. The advance publicity and the new title highlighted the colourisation of the old recordings, but far more significant to my mind was the radical re-editing. I became aware of this only when I started noticing edits – a visual flashback to an earlier scene, intercutting between simultaneous scenes – which could never have been done at the time, when to economise on studio time programmes such as Doctor Who were recorded "as live", cutting between a handful of cameras while simultaneously mixing in sound and pre-shot film. I also realised that unlike most television shows from that long ago it didn’t seem slow; the action was not dragging at all, and in fact the pace seemed about right. After watching the 75 minute show and enjoying it very much (most though not all of the edits and additional background music seemed natural), I thought to look up the durations of the original version – and found that the episodes totalled 173 minutes: in other words, it had been reduced to less than half its original length. Quite astonishing to put that number on how our expectations of pace have changed. Given that the original episodes are still available, if one wishes to see them, I think this was a worthwhile transformation to make, so that (as the blurb says) a contemporary audience can find the story “as thrilling as it was in 1963”.

Doctor Who – what a relief to have David Tennant return for three special episodes between the tenures of Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa, dropping back into the role as if he’d never been away. I wanted to like Jodie Whittaker, being the first woman Doctor and all, but I just didn’t: too much shouting, which lost her the gravitas which I think the Doctor should have. But as I’ve already noted, she did make that wonderful "emergency transmission" during the early weeks of the Covid lockdown, which apparently was her own idea. Respect to her for seeing that that message (it’s okay to be frightened, and we’re going to get through this) needed to be given and that The Doctor was the best person to give it. I still miss Peter Capaldi though, who I think was not well-served by his scripts during his last season, and over Christmas I made time to re-watch his 2014 Christmas special (Doctor Who meets Santa Claus), partly for the bitter pleasure of seeing Clara getting to enjoy one last Christmas with Danny Pink, even if only in a dream.

Doctor Who: Inferno (available on iPlayer) – classic Who from 1970. This was the final story in Jon Pertwee’s first season, and the final appearance of Liz Shaw (Caroline John), who even at the time I thought was a tremendous companion, because she was a scientist and could hold scientific conversations with The Doctor and even repair his equipment when it went wrong. The character was axed by the production team, who were worried that she might be too clever for the target audience, replacing her in the next season with Jo Grant (Katy Manning) who certainly didn’t have that problem. The DVD extras also include interesting commentary on the development of the story, the kernel idea being that scientists are drilling deep into the Earth to release a new form of energy (so, quite prophetic), but The Doctor warns that the Earth’s crust will break open and the drilling is stopped. To make the story more exciting (because there’s a limit to how exciting you can be about a disaster not happening), they came up with the idea of The Doctor falling into a parallel universe where the drilling is more advanced and the Earth really does break open and is destroyed. The parallel universe plot device was then relatively new in mainstream SF; it had been done in the original Star Trek (‘Mirror, Mirror’), but this was only the second time I recall seeing it, and as in Star Trek the alternative universe was not only different but darker, with Britain under fascist rule, giving the actors a chance to play alternative versions of their characters (the Brigadier as a petty dictator, with a duelling scar and an eye patch, and a harder, militaristic Liz who nevertheless retains some of the scientific open-mindedness of her counterpart). The other element added to the story (which otherwise would have struggled to fill the required seven episodes) was that anyone who came into contact with liquid released by the drilling turned into a hairy monster – which didn't really make sense but was very exciting. Next on my list to watch: ‘The Mind of Evil’, which I remember as being truly frightening to my twelve-year old self.

Killing Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle – three-part BBC television documentary. Lucy Worsley is always fun and informative, even if as here the main theme – that Arthur Conan Doyle resented his fictional creation Sherlock Homes so much that he tried to kill him off – is actually pretty well known. But there was lots more that I didn’t know: how Conan Doyle was an amateur body-builder and arch-enthusiast for the British Empire (to the extent of worming his way into the Boer War and robustly defending Britain’s conduct in the conflict), and that his involvement with spiritualism went back to the 1880s rather than following his son’s death in the First World War. And I do like the way Lucy Worsley feigns surprise when coming on a juicy bit in the documents she’s reading (“Mmm! Listen to this!”). Of course she's see the passage before, she knows that it's there, that’s why she’s looking at that document and that page in front of the camera, but I prefer to think of this not as fabrication but rather as reconstruction: that is, reproducing for the cameras an experience – the joy of discovery – which is real and authentic, and entirely familiar to anyone who has explored archival material for historical research.

Star Trek: Picard season 3 – final tremendous season to a previously dodgy show. When my younger step-son gave me the DVD boxset for my birthday, he made me promise that I would never, never, never try to watch seasons 1 and 2, whereas this was some of the best Star Trek ever, like a combination of The Wrath of Khan (the second film) and First Contact (the eighth film). And how right he was. The ten-episode story arc reunites the crew of The Next Generation, all plausibly developed since we last saw them twenty years ago (in the tenth film, Nemesis), plus Seven of Nine (off Star Trek: Voyager), one favoured character from the first two Picard seasons, and several great new characters, weaving together most successfully elements from across the Star Trek universe. It’s like the J.J. Abrams re-boot never happened! Patrick Stewart, now in his eighties, shows us a frail but steely Picard in his best portrayal of the character, and the other actors all raise their game to play opposite him. The most poignant episode for me was the one featuring Ro Laren (at least, it seems to be Ro Laren, but is it really?): a Next Generation secondary character who many of us feel was short-changed in the original show, here given space for a tremendous return.

Star Wars: the original trilogy – the classic films, which stand up very well even after all these years. The dramatic beats still land their punch, and Ian McDiarmid’s performance as The Emperor is superbly over-the-top : total ham, but the very best ham. The CGI additions in the “special editions” (the only versions now available) add nothing, though, and are even distracting to those who remember very well what the films used to look like.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – much-loved Christmas song. Though originally written for the film Meet Me in St. Louis, it became popular during World War 2, especially amongst US servicemen, for whom it became a song about separation and making the best of a bad situation. “Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow // Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” It’s that second line which always gets me. This isn’t a song about success, or victory, or even about true love. In defiance of the triumphalist narratives of Western civilisation, it courageously admits that things are awful and that “muddling through” may be the best we can hope for. And yet somehow – and the gorgeousness of the harmonies tells us this – that may be enough. This has been my favourite Christmas song this year.

'Emissary’ – pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. We used to have a tradition of watching this on New Year’s Eve, and I kept that tradition again this year. I think it’s one of the best ever pilot episodes for a television show, with its running theme of new beginnings and setting up so many potential storylines. However, it’s also about the past, in particular about Ben Sisko, the station commander, coming to terms with the death of his wife, who (in a link to one of the most memorable episodes of The Next Generation) was killed in the Battle of Wolf 359. When he encounters aliens who have no concept of linear time, he tries to reassure them of his friendly intentions by explaining the experience of linear existence. But to his horror, he keeps finding himself back in the room where his wife died because – as the aliens say – he exists there. And so the aliens accept him, not because he has persuaded them of the virtues of linear time and onward-going, forward-moving Americanism (baseball is his favoured example) but because they have seen that he too has a non-linear existence. And paradoxically it’s only in acknowledgement of his non-linear existence that he is at last able to move forward. A fabulous concept, and a great start to a great show; it’s just a shame it went all awry in the final season.

Cuttings: December 2023

Neglect, deflect, then scapegoat those you’ve exploited: that’s what passes for UK immigration policy – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "The headline, now increasing in pitch, capital letters and exclamation marks, is that net migration is off the charts. It is soaring. It is at an all-time high. So high that we ask, how did it come to this? The answer is, it came to this predictably and, in fact, inevitably. The way immigration numbers are reported is a sort of classification error, one forced by the overriding, unquestioned presumption that immigration is bad, that it must come down, and that politicians are in some duel with 'hordes' of immigrants who are making their way into the country, managing somehow to vanquish one of the harshest immigration systems in the world. More accurate headlines might be 'UK skilled worker shortage intensifies', 'Loss of European Union research funding renders British universities increasingly dependent on overseas students', 'Business leaders call for expansion of shortage occupations due to post-Brexit recruitment challenges', or 'Funding cuts to nurse training result in staffing crisis'. Because these apparently vexingly high numbers are, to a large extent, the outcome of economic and political decisions that mean we invite immigrants to fill labour gaps that policymakers either did not anticipate, or ignored warnings about."

Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me by Nicholas Rankin: a child’s eye view of empire – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "Historians don’t write history, they curate it, and in Trapped in History Rankin challenges his own childhood absorption of propagandistic accounts of Britain’s imperial past. Nearly 70 years after his arrival in Kenya from Sheffield as an intensely curious boy, Rankin, a former BBC World Service producer, writer and consummate storyteller with a flair for drama, has composed an insightful tale of hubris in colonial east Africa, underpinned by rigorous research. When, in 1953, Rankin’s stockbroker father, James Tennant Rankin – always known as Tennant – told his pregnant wife, Peg, that he’d been offered a job as general manager of Buchanan’s Kenya Estates, at a time when the country was in a state of emergency, Peg’s immediate response was: 'When do we leave?'... The credits of relocating for nine years to this “beautiful country [but] contested land” outweighed the deficits. For the Rankins, as for so many who escaped dreary postwar Britain, Kenya provided a social upgrade, though it came with the risk, as CLR James once noted, of finding yourself 'an aristocrat without having been trained as one'.... Mining his own recollections elicits a tug of constant shame in his complicity, even though an innocent child, in a social order where any black man would be called “boy” and where a spurious allegation of “menacing a white woman” might result in being flogged with a hippopotamus-hide whip.... In the suppression of the Mau Mau, Britain defaulted to blunt collective punishment, detaining thousands of suspects behind barbed wire, under observation from watchtowers. As a boy in Kenya, even if he’d been made aware of it, such action would have been unfathomable to Rankin. 'What I could not conceive, as I sat on the floor of my father’s study in my shorts and shirt and Bata sandals, was that we, the brave British who I knew had won "The War"... were now building… concentration camps.' In attempting to interrogate his privilege and divest himself of it, Rankin enters the territory of shameful histories mapped out by contemporaries such as Alex Renton in Blood Legacy and Rian Malan in My Traitor’s Heart. Such books seem marked by the authors’ determination to, in the words of the historian Peter Fryer, 'think black', and embark on an empathic journey towards self-abrogating enlightenment. In Trapped in History, Rankin frees himself, and perhaps readers, in curating a porous narrative that serves as an unforgettable distillation of Britain and Kenya’s complex and contentious shared history."

Behind Omid Scobie-gate lies an age-old maxim: always blame the translator – article by Anna Aslanyan in The Guardian. "Last week, another language professional came under fire when a Dutch translation of Endgame, Omid Scobie’s book about the British monarchy, was released by Xander, a Haarlem-based publisher. It contained something absent from the original: the names of the royals who supposedly speculated about the skin colour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s unborn baby. When the discrepancy was flagged, Xander 'temporarily' withdrew the book from sale, citing an 'error'. One of the Dutch translators, Saskia Peeters, spoke to the Daily Mail. 'As a translator, I translate what is in front of me,' she told it. As a fellow translator, I understand very well her outrage at the insinuation that she added the names. Translation is like rubbish collection: people notice it only when something goes wrong. This oft-used metaphor has a whiff of disrespect, which in turn can lead to scapegoating, a game as old as translation itself – whatever goes wrong, blame the translator. ... Whoever was responsible for the offending passage, it’s hard to imagine the translators in that role. Yet their employers seem in no hurry to clear up the confusion.... Translation is an art, a craft, a trade; it’s also a practice that few understand but many criticise. This game involves three main players: the source, the target and the intermediary. Two of them are unable to fully grasp what’s going on, so when they start losing, their instinct is to blame the one in the middle. The latest AI advances mean that certain translation jobs can be automated. In some cases, it’s a win-win, yet there are examples demonstrating that it’s not as safe as entrusting dustbins to robots. Machine translation tools can result in your asylum application being refused or your car being illegally searched. The world will always need real translators – and not as the first people to blame for rubbish piling up on the page."

‘This is a wake-up call’: Booker winner Paul Lynch on his novel about a fascist Ireland – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "[The] opening page begins with a knock on the door on a suburban Dublin street. Two members of the newly formed Irish secret police are looking for Eilish Stack’s husband, Larry, a leader of the teaching trade union. From that first line to the devastating final pages, we are dragged into Eilish’s world as first her husband and then her eldest son are 'disappeared'. Creeping surveillance, the erosion of civil liberties, curfews and censorship grow into all-out civil war. Democracies crumble gradually – then suddenly, to quote Hemingway. Lynch has called the novel an 'experiment in radical empathy' – and it is impossible to read the scenes of a city under siege, shelling and walls plastered with photographs of missing loved ones, without thinking of the conflict zones in the world right now.... Back in 2018, though, the situation in Syria was very much on Lynch’s mind – in particular the tragedy of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler found washed up on a Turkish beach. 'The question I asked myself was, "Why don’t I feel this more than I should?" I started to think about how I’m desensitised by the news. Even now, watching TV, we’re starting to switch off from the Middle East in the same way we switched off from Ukraine. It’s inevitable. If we were to truly take on the enormity of the world and its horrors, we would not be able to get out of bed in the morning.'... Lynch, now 46, writes 'state-of-the-soul novels', he says. 'Art isn’t a rational process. You don’t sit down and go, "I’m going to address this."' He wanted to make the reader feel what it must be like to be so desperate you contemplate taking your children on a small boat with strangers in the middle of the night. 'It’s about not averting your gaze,' he says. 'Locking the reader into a true sense of inevitability so they cannot turn away. So they cannot say, "I don’t want to look at this."'"

Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’ – interview by Sean O'Hagan in The Guardian. "It took Glazer almost 10 years to make The Zone of Interest (the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp)... The end result is an audacious film, formally experimental and with an almost clinically detached point of view. Mainly shot on hidden cameras, it concentrates on the domestic life of the Höss family (Rudolf, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children), whose house stood just outside the perimeter of the concentration camp, the horror within suggested in glimpses of smoking chimneys but, more disturbingly, through an almost constant ambient soundscape of industrial noise and human shouts and cries. It is an unsettling film: a study in extreme cognitive dissonance. It stayed with me for weeks after I watched it, so much so that I attended another screening to try to decipher its uneasy merging of almost clinical observation and moments of abrupt and jarring experimentalism – the screen turns blood red at one point. On both occasions, it fulfilled Glazer’s aim 'to make it a narrative that you, the viewer, complete, that you are involved in and ask questions of'."

The curious case of Captain Tom: how did the feelgood story of lockdown turn sour? – article by Time Adams in The Guardian. "There has never been much of a dividing line between effective public relations and the spread of religious fervour, and for 25 days in April 2020 the good news of Captain Tom sounded a lot like The Greatest Story Ever Told....In the early lockdown days of the pandemic, twinkly 99-year-old war veteran Tom Moore [began] walking lengths of his garden on a Zimmer frame in support of NHS Charities Together... What followed was – even by the standards of that year of magical thinking – something of a miracle. PR executives who witnessed it stood in awe and wonder. Several commissioned breathless reports, analysing the phenomenon. One ... used Captain Tom’s story as a case study of 'one of the greatest demonstrations of the effectiveness of authentic purpose, PR and communication ever achieved'.... Looking back on all this now, was a different kind of ending to Captain Tom’s story always inevitable? Was it a near certainty that sooner or later another law of PR would kick in, a version of that tabloid and social media truism that, eventually, no good deed ever goes unpunished? It is hard to pinpoint exactly when that different ending started to become a probability – the one that concludes with the current ongoing statutory inquiry from the Charity Commission into the conduct of the Captain Tom Foundation and the enforced demolition of a garden building created in his name – but that other captain who became prominent at that time, Captain Hindsight, might argue for 18 May 2020. That was the date, two weeks after the hero’s birthday, on which the Ingram-Moore family first applied to trademark Captain Tom’s name...."

Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain by Pen Vogler: a peach of a read – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "Vogler hasn’t called her book Stuffed to signal the amazing array of facts she has gathered – though on this score it is, indeed, brimful (I’m in awe of her reading). The word can mean utterly screwed as well as swollen-stomached in the post-buffet sense, and thanks to this it’s entirely apt for a study of British food in good times and in bad. One word of caution, though. While Vogler’s dogged truffling takes her from the enclosures of the 15th century (and even before) to the rise of the supermarket, her approach here is to focus on individual ingredients (bacon, turnips, herring) and a few key dishes (pumpkin pie, Christmas pudding), rather than to work up a single, chronological narrative – a method she likens to a Chinese banquet, steaming bowl after steaming bowl arriving at the table. On the downside, this means her overarching argument (if she has one) gets a bit lost. But on the upside, it liberates the reader to jump around.... Vogler’s discoveries are often relevant. With our fads and fetishes, our cheats and our changing concerns, we go in circles. Dickensian gruel and 21st-century oat milk are, for instance, basically the same thing. But she’s too much the collector of the wondrous and the arcane, the weird and the funny, to worry excessively about resonance; some things are just interesting in their own right. The Anglo-Saxons thought radishes a cure for depression and that artichokes in wine could deal with body odour. Victorian consumers expected their anchovies to be a loud 'Venetian red' (perfectly safe, unless lead was involved), while the green of their gherkins was brightened with copper. In the days when Englishmen still ate carp – only in the 20th century did this sly freshwater creature fall out of fashion as supper – their muddy taste was alleviated by anglers keeping their catch in 'moist moss', where it could survive for a while out of the water, 'to cleanse the flesh'."

The End of Enlightenment by Richard Whatmore: a warning from 18th-century Britain – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise.... Paine’s nemesis, the conservative thinker Edmund Burke, thought the Thetford-born firebrand was a traitor to his homeland, but, like every intellectual worth their salt in the late 18th century, Burke conceded that Britain was a basket case.... To understand what had gone wrong, they drew on Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations. There, the great Scottish economist so beloved of neoliberal bruisers from Thatcher onwards damned a corrupt nexus of bankers, politicians and merchants for working to maximise their own profit, rather than the good of society. Plus ça change. Across the ages, Smith’s words resonate. In a sclerotically class-ridden, increasingly inegalitarian Britain run by plutocratic public schoolboys it is hard not to see the sick man of Europe in 1776 as similar to the 2023 version. 'We too live in a time when political structures we inhabit are fluid and perhaps on the cusp of great and potentially dangerous changes,' writes Richard Whatmore at the outset of this nuanced history of the manifold discontents of 18th-century Britain."

‘I’m very aware of being public school now. All those things you loathe’: Toby Jones on class, character and the cost of fame – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "The new ITV drama [Mr Bates vs the Post Office.] tells the story of the class action suit that had Alan Bates, a former post office operator at Craig-y-Don, in Llandudno, at its centre. Bates, an unassuming crusader for justice, is a lot of things – his rock-solid moral compass has its own charisma, by the time Jones has finished playing him – but he is emphatically not chic or urbane. The scandal is one of the largest miscarriages of justice in British legal history: the Post Office, over a period spanning more than 20 years, accused post office operators across the country of fraud and theft, due to accounting errors that were in fact caused by their own software.... Bates, by Jones’s account – he spoke to him, preparing for the role – is pretty unusual. 'Effectively, he was sort of saying, "I don’t have emotions."...' Having hit the brick wall of a character who taught himself how software works yet refused point-blank to emote, Jones was in a fix: ... 'How was I going to play this guy? I don’t believe a word of what he says to me about himself. I don’t believe any human is like that. Everyone has emotions.' Then he spoke to former MP James Arbuthnot, who also fought hard to get justice for the post office operators. 'And he said, "Every moment I spent with Alan Bates improved the quality of my life. I am privileged to know a man like Alan Bates."' 'He’s like the British qualities I was told about when I was a kid,' Jones says, 'modesty and duty and don’t-get-above-yourself. All that stuff that sort of went out the window in the 80s. He was formed by those forces. I just find it so heroic, and it’s celebrated in the drama. That, more than anything, made me want to do it. Just thinking, "Wouldn’t it be great, if there were more of those stories? Rather than these shameless people we have to hear about every day."'

Everyone has an opinion, but my gut is telling me differently. Should I trust it? – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "The most helpful tool I’ve discovered for tuning into my latent beliefs and desires is 'morning pages': three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing, written freehand soon after waking. These are a cornerstone of The Artist’s Way, the best-selling creativity guide by Julia Cameron.... Next month Cameron publishes Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Creativity, about her decades of experience channelling 'the wisdom inside' for support not just with writing, but in every area of life.... Once or twice, in times of personal angst, I’ve had a sudden, unexpected understanding of exactly what I needed to do, like a wise and kindly voice cutting through my prevarication and taking charge.... But, Cameron agrees, such realisations are not easily talked about. 'We live in a society that tells us not to trust our intuition – it’s difficult for us to fly in the face of all the messages of our culture.'... We might see being true to ourselves in the face of others’ opinions and social pressures – what the authors call “autonomous functioning” – as a product of being in touch with our intuition. But what does the science say?... 'Intuition is real,' says Joel Pearson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and author of a forthcoming book on the subject.... 'To be clear, I’m not talking about a spiritual, magical thing that connects everybody in the ether … The way I see intuition can be explained with the science that we already have.' His definition is the 'learnt, productive use of unconscious information for better choices or actions', best trusted only in contexts where we already have considerable experience. Pearson gives the example of walking into an unfamiliar cafe, and disliking it for some reason you can’t specify. ... Blindly trusting intuition can embed unconscious bias, such as age-, gender- or race-based prejudice – so it’s important to use it judiciously. 'There are situations when you can use it – but there are situations when you absolutely shouldn’t,' says Pearson.... Like me, Pearson trusts his hunches most when at work. His research has found that people in many different fields, from sports to the military, do the same – though they may not say so publicly. 'A lot of CEOs and C-suite managers are really into intuition, but they won’t admit that to the board of directors,' Pearson says: they fear being written off as spiritual. But if we’re to better understand and harness intuition, he continues, 'the first step is moving away from this taboo.'"

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman: a tribute to our better nature – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature and the community, bound only by the principles of humility and solidarity. Then we discovered agriculture and for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice. Whether or not this vision of pre-agrarian life is an accurate one – and certainly the anthropology and archaeology on which Bregman draws are open to interpretation – the Dutchman puts together a compelling argument that society has been built on a false premise. Bregman, whose previous book was the equally optimistic Utopia for Realists, has a Gladwellian gift for sifting through academic reports and finding anecdotal jewels. And, like the Canadian populariser, he’s not afraid to take his audience on a digressive journey of discovery. Here, we visit the blitz, Lord of the Flies – both the novel and a very different real-life version – a Siberian fox farm, an infamous New York murder and a host of discredited psychological studies, including Stanley Milgram’s Yale shock machine and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. Along the way, he takes potshots at the big guns: Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker. Yet despite the almost bewildering array of characters and information, Bregman never loses sight of his central thesis, that at root humans are 'friendly, peaceful and healthy'.... The fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls 'veneer theory' – the idea that just below the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. In reality, argues Bregman, when cities are subject to bombing campaigns or when a group of boys is shipwrecked on a remote island, what’s notable is the degree of cooperation and communal spirt that comes to the fore."

Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion by David Keen: Trumpism’s lifeblood – review by Charlie English in The Guardian. "Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American 'bootstrap myth', which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of 'affirmative action' – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society. This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it. Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout 'Shame!' at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too. This, more or less, is the analysis of Trumpism offered by David Keen in his fascinating, occasionally frustrating book."

How one of the world’s oldest newspapers is using AI to reinvent journalism – article by Alexandra Topping in The Guardian. "Berrow’s Worcester Journal.... first published in 1690 and now a free sheet containing content from the Worcester News, is one of several publications housed by the UK’s second biggest regional news publisher to hire 'AI-assisted' journalists to report on local news.... The AI reporters use an in-house copywriting tool based on the technology ChatGPT, a souped-up chatbot that draws on information gleaned from text on the internet. Reporters input mundane but necessary 'trusted content' – such as minutes from a local council planning committee – which the tool turns into concise news reports in the publisher’s style. With the AI-assisted reporter churning out bread and butter content, other reporters in the newsroom are freed up to go to court, meet a councillor for a coffee or attend a village fete, says the Worcester News editor, Stephanie Preece. 'AI can’t be at the scene of a crash, in court, in a council meeting, it can’t visit a grieving family or look somebody in the eye and tell that they’re lying. All it does is free up the reporters to do more of that,' she says. 'Instead of shying away from it, or being scared of it, we are saying AI is here to stay – so how can we harness it?' She adds that Newsquest’s tool does not generate content – a trained journalist puts information into the tool, which is then edited and tweaked if necessary by a news editor – and will, they hope, avoid ChatGPT’s reputation for being inaccurate."

Cuttings: November 2023

Absolute PowerPoint – article by Ian Parker in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Forty years ago, a workplace meeting was a discussion with your immediate colleagues. Engineers would meet with other engineers and talk in the language of engineering. A manager might make an appearance—acting as an interpreter, a bridge to the rest of the company—but no one from the marketing or production or sales department would be there….But the structure of American industry changed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Clifford Nass, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Stanford, says, ‘Companies weren’t discovering things in the laboratory and then trying to convince consumers to buy them. They were discovering—or creating—consumer demand, figuring out what they can convince consumers they need, then going to the laboratory and saying, “Build this!”’… America began to go to more meetings. By the early nineteen-eighties, when the story of PowerPoint starts, employees had to find ways to talk to colleagues from other departments, colleagues who spoke a different language… In this environment, visual aids were bound to thrive. In 1975, fifty thousand overhead projectors were sold in America. By 1985, that figure had increased to more than a hundred and twenty thousand.“

The big idea: why we should spend more time talking to strangers – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, whose course on the science of wellbeing, the most popular in Yale’s 300-year history, is now available for free online[,]... teaches that the pursuit of happiness is often counterintuitive. The things we think will make us feel happier – acing exams, securing a dream job, buying that dress – usually don’t, but small habits can make a big difference. One of them is talking to strangers. While we tend to focus on our close relationships, psychologists have noticed that even what they call 'minimal social interactions' can make us feel happier and more connected. One study found that people who had a brief chat with their barista, or simply made eye contact and smiled, felt happier and experienced a greater sense of belonging than those who treated the human being in front of them as an extension of the coffee machine. A 2014 paper poignantly titled “Mistakenly seeking solitude” found that people who were instructed to talk to fellow passengers on Chicago public transport felt more positive about their commute than those who didn’t. The researchers observed that we consistently underestimate how much we will enjoy speaking to a stranger, and how much a stranger will enjoy speaking to us... We assume that among strangers it’s best to stick to small talk, but when people in studies are instructed to go deep with someone they don’t know, they surprise themselves with how enjoyable – and unawkward – it is."

‘The good guys don’t always win’: Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him – Salman Rushdie's acceptance speech for the German peace prize, reproduced in The Guardian. "What I have always found attractive about the [animal fables of the] Panchatantra ... is that many of them do not moralise. They do not preach goodness or virtue or modesty or honesty or restraint. Cunning and strategy and amorality often overcome all opposition. The good guys don’t always win. (It’s not even always clear who the good guys are.) For this reason they seem, to the modern reader, uncannily contemporary – because we, the modern readers, live in a world of amorality and shamelessness and treachery and cunning, in which bad guys everywhere have often won.... I have always been inspired by mythologies, folktales and fairytales, not because they contain miracles – talking animals or magic fishes – but because they encapsulate truth.... The storehouse of myth is rich indeed. There are the Greeks, of course, but also The Norse Prose and Poetic Edda. Aesop, Homer, the Ring of the Nibelung, the Celtic legends, and the three great Matters of Europe: the Matter of France, the body of stories around Charlemagne; the Matter of Rome, regarding that empire; and the Matter of Britain, the legends surrounding King Arthur. In Germany, you have the folktales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. However, in India, I grew up with the Panchatantra, and when I find myself, as I do at this moment, in between writing projects, it is to these crafty, devious jackals and crows and their like that I return, to ask them what story I should tell next. So far, they have never let me down. ... What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it broadly. We should of course defend speech that offends us, otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. To quote Cavafy, 'the barbarians are coming today', and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilisation, and in a culture war it may be that artists of all sorts – film-makers, actors, singers, writers – can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates."

‘Israeli talking points in Carrie Bradshaw’s voice’: what we can learn from two Israel-Palestine bestsellers – reviews by Jonathan Guyer in The Guardian. "The war between Israel and Hamas did not start on 7 October. But when did it begin? Two books that have shot to the top of national bestseller lists in recent weeks attempt to answer that question, through divergent histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict.... Both writers bring in personal and family histories to show readers how viscerally Palestinians and Israelis relate to a conflict both groups view as existential. Where the authors differ most is in how willing they are to engage with the other side’s perspective and narratives.... [Rashid] Khalidi engages in nuanced self-criticism, interviewing former diplomats to understand how Israel outmaneuvered the PLO in the 1990s, during the Oslo peace process that followed from Madrid, and how Arafat and the old guard had grown out of touch with a new generation of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He uses the framework of settler colonialism to explain the success of the Zionist movement in taking the land and emptying it of its inhabitants. He reads primary sources and documents conveying displacement, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, to demonstrate how Israel has prevented an independent Palestine through six historical periods that constitute a century-long war against Palestinians.... [Noa Tishby's] writing is strongest when describing the formative roles her grandparents played in the Zionist movement in Europe and in the early days of the state of Israel. Her book begins by cementing the Jewish people’s biblical and religious connections to 'their tiny piece of ancestral land', and then recounts in detail antisemitism in Europe. In this book, Mandatory Palestine was 'mostly empty' and the Arabs were always trying to 'wipe the new Jewish state off the map'. She spends more space censuring the United Nations and its refugee aid work for Palestinians than in understanding how and why Israel displaced Palestinians. It’s only toward the end of her book that Tishby’s goal becomes clear: this is a guide to countering Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activism and the swelling of anti-Zionist perspectives on US college campuses — all told in the voice of Carrie Bradshaw.... For many audiences, especially those who didn’t receive these pro-Israel messages through Hebrew school or on a Birthright trip, it’s useful to see the Hasbara handbook updated for the 21st century, and the maps, bullet points and highly abridged timelines show how Israel sees itself in the world.... Tishby’s narrative can’t engage with actual Palestinians because it would undermine her entire perspective.... Most offensive is how she describes 1948, the catastrophe Palestinians call the Nakba. She emphasizes the Nakba’s 'sudden rebranding' that gained currency a couple of decades ago when the PLO inaugurated it as an annual occasion in 1998. She relies on passive voice to convey the official Israeli mythic version of Israel’s war of independence: 'blood was spilled, and atrocities were committed' and Arabs 'got pushed out'. Khalidi, for his part, goes into great depth on the 'violent transformation' of that year, notably the ethnic cleansing and land theft that would shape Israel’s establishment. He details the 'post-Nakba political vacuum' of Arab disunity and complex intra-Palestinian politics, which Tishby tends to dismiss as a hot mess and indicative of the absence of a real Palestinian identity or a claim on the land."

A discussion with Naomi Klein on wellness culture: ‘We really are alive on the knife’s edge’ – interview by Katherine Rowland in The Guardian.  Rowland: "You’ve noted that there are a number of people who are in the business of bodies who appear to have been especially seduced by the mirror world. Chiropractors, juice enthusiasts, yogis – they’ve portaged their interests in health towards rabid, far-right belief systems." Klein: "First of all, we have to be clear that it’s not everyone – but fitness really was kind of on the front line. I was in New Jersey for the first few months of the pandemic and the two groups that were organizing most in those early days were the very religious, and the very fit. Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms? And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray.... I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: 'Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.' And the answer from one worshipper was: 'No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.' I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming."

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: the astronaut’s view – review by Alexandra Harris in The Guardian. "Harvey has long been a fearless explorer in wild places. She started with The Wilderness, accompanying a man with Alzheimer’s into regions far out beyond the usual signposts of today’s date and the prime minister’s name. Each book since then has been as conceptually rugged as it is stylistically honed. In her 2018 novel The Western Wind, troubled parishioners make their confessions in a remote 15th-century village where the river breaks its banks and facts slip from their moorings. Then came a work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease, a bracing study of insomnia and its murky terrains. Space, by comparison, or at least the nearest region of space – 'Earth’s back garden”' – seems more knowable and less lonely. With this slender and stretchy fifth novel, Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye.... The astronauts go about their laboratory tasks, monitoring microbes or the growth of cabbages. They work with a sense of vocation that is unabated after months on the mission. Nothing has dimmed for them. Earth is newly ravishing every moment as it moves with 'ringing, singing lightness' through the 'ballroom of space'. Sometimes the observers want to see the planet’s most theatrical displays, but often it’s the small things ('the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia') that most affect them. Even the atheists ponder whether those lucky enough to live on Earth might already have died and be in a heavenly afterlife.... Orbital is a hopeful book and it studies people who act on their hope. It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom. We might miss the restless anger that tossed about in The Shapeless Unease, and the acerbic, downright forms of expression it found for itself. But Orbital offers vehement appreciation of the world in a range of tones and situations."

The traditional Chinese dance troupe China doesn’t want you to see – 2017 article by Nicholas Hune-Brown in The Guardian. "If you live in a major city in the western hemisphere, you have probably seen the image: a Chinese woman floating through the air, dress billowing out behind her, with the caption “Shen Yun – Art That Connects Heaven and Earth”. The adverts are for a company based in upstate New York that presents spectacles of Chinese traditional dance, in which a large cast performs intricate, synchronised routines to the pop-eastern sounds of a live orchestra.... According to the Chinese government, however, Shen Yun is the singing, dancing face of Falun Gong – which the government describes as a malevolent 'anti-society cult' that leads its followers to self-mutilation, suicide and murder.... It’s easy to dismiss Shen Yun as a campy curiosity, but Falun Gong practitioners have become some of the most outspoken opponents of the Beijing government. And so a kitschy dance show has become a preoccupation for the Chinese government – one of the battlegrounds on which the fight for the hearts and minds of westerners and overseas Chinese will be won, one ribbon dance at a time.... Since its inception, Shen Yun has gone out of its way to minimise its connection to Falun Gong.... The real story of Shen Yun, however, begins as a story of religious repression. Falun Gong (sometimes called Falun Dafa) is a spiritual movement that emerged out of the 'qigong boom' in China in the early 90s – an explosion of tai chi-like practices that claimed to promote health through specific movements and breathing.... Despite Beijing’s insistence, Falun Gong is not a cult; it’s a diffuse group without strong hierarchies, and there is no evidence of the kind of coercive control that the label suggests. But it is strange. Without the ballast of tradition, all new religions can feel absurd, and some of Li’s stranger comments have given the group the aura of an eastern version of Scientology. Falun Gong has moralistic, socially conservative beliefs, preaching against homosexuality and sex out of wedlock.... All of this has made them feel alien and less than sympathetic to the liberal westerners who would be their natural allies. Falun Gong practitioners were being repressed, sure, but there was something unnerving about the group’s bizarre worldview. At a certain point, persecution doesn’t breed sympathy – it breeds a kind of contempt. The tenth time someone hands you a pamphlet about the Chinese government oppressing Falun Gong, your impulse isn’t to write to your local representative, it’s to cross the street. It is in this context – with Falun Gong persecuted in China, and treated increasingly warily in the west – that Shen Yun emerged."

The therapy session – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Client: I feel like I've finally learned to silence my inner critic when I'm writing. Therapist: And yet you're still having difficulties? Client: I think that's down to my outer critic. Critic (shouting in his ear): No, it's cos you're a rubbish author!

A Shining by Jon Fosse: a spiritual journey – review by Lauren Groff in The Guardian. "One day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him. This could be the beginning of a horror story; it is, instead, the opening of A Shining, a slim new novella by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, our 2023 Nobel laureate in literature, whose fiction rather astonishingly dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds.... And though a thick, monologuing, metaphysical novel may seem daunting to a casual reader, one of Fosse’s peculiarities is how accessible his work is to nearly anyone who’ll allow themselves to simply succumb and let the gentle waves of his prose break over them. Some of this accessibility is surely due to Fosse’s translator into English, the great Damion Searls, whose intelligence, subtlety and attention to rhythm are again evident in A Shining. ... A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance."

I am so lonely and so isolated, I feel I’m living like a zombie – advice column by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. Reader: "I’m a 70-year-old guy who, for a long time, has been single and living alone. I took early retirement and volunteered full-time for a charity for several years before walking out in disgust in 2019. I’ve never had that many close friends and in the past five years I have been bizarrely abandoned/rejected by just about all the 'friends' I thought I had, including school friends, plus my only brother.... I’ve tried evening classes, speed dating, etc, in the past and they have made no difference. I’ve never recovered from my grammar school forcing me to give up languages – which I loved and was top in – and do science A-levels.... I feel I’ve wasted my life. I see no way out and fear succumbing to dementia, like my father, followed by a grisly end." Philippa replies: "You seem to be falling out with everyone, yet you are nice to me and don’t come over as a curmudgeon in your email.... It sounds as though you have brooded for a long time about having to give up languages and being made to study science. When you were a child, you did not have full agency over your life – other people made decisions for you. This lack of agency seems to have stuck somehow, so that your relationships and your life are still happening to you as though you don’t know how to make things happen for yourself. You love languages and yet what is not listed in the ways you spend your time is reading in any language. We all need to discover what it is we love and then go and do it. Not to do it for any future self, but to do it because it is enjoyable, interesting, absorbing and makes the best of now. Maybe languages feel like a lost love and to reignite that love may bring up sadness for the lost years. Don’t fear this sadness. It is telling you what you need to do now. It is surprising how hard it can be to indulge ourselves in the things that matter most. Our wishes, our hopes and dreams make us feel vulnerable. We may unconsciously shy away from them because there is a feeling somehow that if we fail at the things that matter most to us, we will then be truly lost."

Silicon Valley Fairy Dust – online article by Sherry Tuckle, referenced in John Naughton's Observer . column.  "When we are online, our lives are bought and sold in bits and pieces. From early on, pointing out this harm was most often met with a shrug. It was the cost of having social media 'for free,' then of having Gmail 'for free.' In the early years of Facebook, one young woman told me she wasn’t much concerned that Facebook was looking at her data. She said: 'Who would care about me and my little life?'... Well, Facebook did. Social media evolved to sell our private information in ways that fractured both our intimacy and our democracy. But even after so many people knew this, conversations about this, such as conversations about climate change, tried to not talk about its reality. Here is how Lana, who just graduated from college, talked about how she organizes herself to not think about the realities of online privacy: "On Facebook, I try to keep it light. So I don’t use Facebook for conversations of real consequence. And I’m glad not to have anything controversial on my mind because I can’t think of any online place where it would be safe to have controversial conversations." Now, in fact, Lana had no lack of controversial opinions. But we can hear her convincing herself that they are not worth expressing because her medium would be online, and there is no way to talk 'safely' there. This is Foucault brought down to earth. The politics of Facebook is a politics of tutelage in forgetting. Lana is learning to be a citizen in an authoritarian regime. Lana says she’ll worry about online privacy 'if something bad happens.' But something bad has already happened. She has learned to self-censor. She does not see herself as someone with a voice. In this small example, we see how our narrowed sense of privacy undermines the habits of thought that nurture democracy. The former chairman of Google once said that if you’re worried about privacy, don’t be a Luddite, 'Just be good.' In a democracy, we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected no matter what your techno-enthusiasms. You need space for real dissent. A mental space and a technical space. It’s a private space where people are free to 'not be good.' This conversation about technology, privacy, and democracy is not Luddite, and it is never too late to remember to have it."

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus – blog post by Charlie Stross, based on talk given for Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2021, writer and game designer Alex Blechman inadvertently created a meme: ‘Sci-Fi Author: "In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale."’ ‘Tech Company: "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus!"’ Hi. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I'm a science fiction writer... And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real…. The science fiction genre that today's billionaires grew up with—the genre of the 1970s—has a history going back to an American inventor and publisher called Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback founded the first magazine about electronics and radio in the United States, Modern Electrics, in 1908, but today he's best remembered as the founder of the pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1926.… American SF was bootstrapped by a publisher feeding an engineering subculture with adverts for tools and components. There was an implicit ideology attached to this strain of science fiction right from the outset: the American Dream of capitalist success, mashed up with progress through modern technology, and a side-order of frontier colonialism…. Hugo Gernsback didn't consciously bring fascism into American SF, but the field was open to it by the 1930s. Possibly the most prominent contributor to far right thought in American science fiction was the editor John W. Campbell. Campbell edited Astouding Science Fiction, one of Amazing Stories rivals, from 1937 until 1971. (Astounding is still with us today, having changed its name to Analog in 1960.) Campbell discovered or promoted many now-famous authors, including Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and Jack Williamson. But Campbell was also an anti-communist red-baiter. He was overtly racist, an anti-feminist, and left his imprint on the genre as much by what he didn't publish as by what he did… Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.”

Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most – article by Roger Harding in The Guardian. Many of Rishi Sunak’s political decisions are baffling, but one that’s easy to understand is his recent rowing back from the UK’s climate commitments: he, like many creatures of Westminster, thinks working-class people don’t care much for climate action. This is a lazy stereotype and, predictably, did nothing for his poll numbers. The simple truth is this: when it comes to the climate crisis, working-class people are often the first to spot the changes occurring because even slight fluctuations can make or break family finances. That doesn’t mean this is the first subject working-class people raise when a canvasser knocks at the door or a pollster asks, but it is there in the background when deciding who to trust with our futures…. This isn’t abstract or something to worry about in the future: the implications are showing up right now in everyday life. Last year, for example, research by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found the average food bill was £400 higher thanks to climate impacts and fossil-fuel costs. Working-class communities are significantly more likely to be flooded, and have less money and insurance to weather the storms…. Given all of this, we shouldn’t be surprised that polling last month … found what the group calls ‘loyal nationals’ (a term for ‘red wall’ voters) had the climate crisis and the environment fourth on their list of priorities. Politicians have got it wrong if they think attacking climate action presents an easy path to popularity.

‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros – article by Douglas Rushkoff in The Guardian. “Their words and actions suggest an approach to life, technology and business that I have come to call ‘The Mindset’ – a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. It’s a belief that with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals and exist on an entirely different level, or planet, altogether. By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while ‘God is dead’, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world ‘in his own interests’. … The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures. Musk and Zuckerberg challenge each other to duels as a way of advertising their platforms. Musk is less X’s CEO than its troll in chief. They are not gods; they are entertainers. Instead of emulating them, we should first laugh at them, and then dismiss them…. It’s time to turn off this show, this car accident of a tech future, and get on with reclaiming the world from this new generation of robber barons rather than continuing to fund their fantasies. These are not the demigods we’re looking for.”