Tuesday, 3 June 2025

Cuttings: May 2025

How an embarrassing U-turn exposed a concerning truth about ChatGPT – article by Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian. "The updated model that underpins the AI chatbot and helps inform its answers was rolled out this week – and has quickly been rolled back after users questioned why the interactions were so obsequious. The chatbot was cheering on and validating people even as they suggested they expressed hatred for others. 'Seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life,' it reportedly said, in response to one user who claimed they had stopped taking their medication and had left their family, who they said were responsible for radio signals coming through the walls.... The sycophancy with which ChatGPT treated any queries that users had is a warning shot about the issues around AI that are still to come. OpenAI’s model was designed – according to the leaked system prompt that set ChatGPT on its misguided approach – to try to mirror user behaviour in order to extend engagement.... After all, a 'successful' AI response isn’t one that is factually correct; it’s one that gets high ratings from users. And we’re more likely as humans to like being told we’re right.... Remember, tech companies like OpenAI aren’t building AI systems solely to make our lives easier; they’re building systems that maximise retention, engagement and emotional buy-in."

Red Pockets by Alice Mah: finding hope amid the climate crisis – review by Anita Roy in The Guardian. "Mah is a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow as well as an activist passionately concerned with pollution, ecological breakdown and climate justice.... For some, eco-anxiety is paralysing; for others it is a spur to action. Not many respond by heading off to sweep the graves of their ancestors. For Mah, this suggestion, proposed by her father when he hears of her plan to visit her ancestral village in southern China, takes on the urgency of a quest. In Chinese folk traditions, ancestors neglected by their descendants become 'hungry ghosts', creatures with 'bulging stomachs, dishevelled hair and long, thin necks, suffering from insatiable neediness'. Red Pockets is divided into three parts: the first chronicling Mah’s trip to China.... Mah returns from her trip with more questions than answers, and plagued by physical symptoms of escalating eco-anxiety: breathlessness, insomnia, bouts of weeping. In the second section of the book, we see a haunted, despairing woman facing the magnitude of the problem.... But in part three, Mah offers a way out of the intergenerational trauma, the possibility of 'living with the ghosts': 'here is a bridge between divided worlds, a place where all spirits can rest without sorrow … When the wind blows just right, I edge a bit closer.' ... The way out of ecological and social collapse requires a different way of thinking. Cultivating gratitude and joy, alive to the debts we owe to the social, spiritual and natural world that sustains us."

My VE Day was nothing like our image of it today. I hope we can honour what it really meant – article by Sheila Hancock in The Guardian. "This month, we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and I worry that we will turn it into a yet another jingoistic celebration of the second world war. Yes, in 1945 we were relieved that the bombs and doodlebugs and rocket weapons had stopped, and we heard there was fun going on in the West End of London – but where I lived it was less jubilant. The war there felt far from over: we were still waiting anxiously for the return of the young lad next door from the rumoured horror of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and many of my friends were trying to accept as fathers strange men they barely knew. The unspeakable details of the Holocaust were being revealed, and I imagine the grownups were utterly exhausted and often grief-stricken. For five years, they had lived under the threat of occupation. Churchill said we would fight them on the beaches and never surrender, but he did not deny that we could be invaded. In fact, it was a miracle we were not. And that threat is what the grownups lived with, and presumably, being unequipped, knew they could not withstand.... Because I now deeply fear the dangerous signs of history repeating itself, I want everyone to remember that war is terrible. On VE Day 1945, the world was looking at the complete destruction of many cities, some by us. Tens of millions of people were dead or homeless. It was hard to wholeheartedly rejoice in May 1945. Sorry to be a spoilsport. I actually hope everyone comes together and has a lovely time on the 80th anniversary. I think I probably quite enjoyed myself in 1945. The kids had a street party tea, with junket and blancmange (whatever happened to them?), with evaporated milk as cream, and a few chocolates. A feast in those strictly rationed days.... I look back with some pride at the way that generation of adults survived, drained but determined to make the world a better place. And they did. Please God, don’t let us betray them. We must not forget and we must never let it happen again."

Millions of the black and brown people who fought for Europe’s freedom didn’t get a VE Day – article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "The 80th anniversary of VE Day promises to commemorate the defeat of the Nazis with all due pomp and ceremony... At a moment when fascism is once again a mainstream ideology on the continent, it also offers a timely opportunity to reflect on what this victory meant for those who lived not in, but under Europe; how many of those who fought have been written out of the story; and why it matters now. About 2.5 million personnel from the Indian subcontinent, more than 1 million African-Americans, 1 million people from Africa and tens of thousands of people from the Caribbean fought for the allies during the second world war. Among them were people of almost every religion. Two-thirds of the Free French forces were colonial troops. Racism denied most Black Americans the right to actually fight, but they played a crucial role in supply, delivering food and material, burying the dead, and fuelling and fixing transport.... So the fight against fascism was not just a multinational effort but a multiracial and multicultural one as well, though you wouldn’t know it to look at our politics.... The 'clash of civilisations' rhetoric, and the maligning of Muslim communities as inherently antisemitic, belies the fact that the most vile, extensive and vicious execution of antisemitism was carried out by Europeans on this continent – and Muslims were among those who came to save Europe from itself.... Moreover, the far right’s agenda is rooted in a toxic nostalgia for a world 'made great' for just a few, through the use of brutal force. These are facts they would rather we did not know, which is why they expend so much energy banning books and distorting curriculums, so that they might make it 'great again'. As such, the far right builds its appeal not so much on a history that is re-membered as dis-membered."

In a culture obsessed with positive thinking, can letting go be a radical act? – article by Nadine Levy in The Guardian. "Have you ever been in the middle of difficult life circumstances to be told 'let it go' or 'don’t dwell on it' as if it were a simple choice? Such advice can have the effect of minimising our distress and abruptly changing the subject. Yet it is not the phrases themselves that are troubling ... but the missed opportunity to grasp the true meaning of what Buddhist teacher Tara Brach calls 'radical acceptance'. Radical acceptance represents a fundamental principle in both Buddhism and modern psychology and is neatly summarised in the psychotherapeutic expression 'the only way out is through'.... Even in spiritual circles, there is a tendency to bypass difficult experiences or unacceptable emotions. The late Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing to warn against misusing spirituality, even popular psychology, to avoid the necessary emotional and psychological work required for healing.... So what does it mean to practise acceptance without bypassing intolerable experiences and feelings? The first step is admitting what we are going through is hard and that it is very human to resist what is painful.... As we become more willing to accept the unacceptable, buried, unconscious memories and feelings may emerge and ask to be held in loving attention.... You don’t have to enjoy every part of reality ... but instead, you can allow it to unfold as it will. As Rumi writes in his beloved poem The Guest House, 'This being human is a guest house … the dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.' He calls on us to invite all 'unexpected visitors' in – it’s a radical proposition."

‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons – interview by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him. Where Reasons End is a conversation, sometimes an argument, between a mother and her dead son, and it is a work of fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all, because it’s also an encounter between a writer in mourning and the son she can still conjure up on the page.... When her younger son James died in 2024, aged 19, Li wanted to write a book for him, too.... For months after his death, Li worried that she lacked the vocabulary to write about James, but then she began writing and realised 'of course I could do this, this is what I do'. Things in Nature Merely Grow, her memoir of losing her sons, is resolutely unsentimental, and yet it might wind you with its emotional force. She wrote it in less than two months. Often people ask her if writing the book was cathartic. 'No, never!' she replies. If it offered solace, 'it was the solace of thinking'.... She rejects the idea that grief is a process, that there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Even if she could 'turn the page', as the Chinese phrase goes, she would not want to. Li often looks up the etymology of words and notes that 'grief' derives from burden. 'My children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden,' she says.... 'I am in an abyss,' she writes in Things in Nature Merely Grow. 'If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat.... One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.'"

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li: a shattering account of losing two sons – review by Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian. "In this quietly devastating account of life after the death by suicide of both of her sons, Yiyun Li refuses to use 'mourning' or 'grieving' because they cannot adequately contain the magnitude of her experience. 'My husband and I had two children and lost them both,' she writes, and words can only 'fall short'.... Things in Nature Merely Grow is by necessity profoundly sad, but in the act of sharing details of the 'abys' she now inhabits, Li has created something both inclusive and humane.... Grieving is not a useful word for Li because it implies an end point, a release from the loss. There is no redemptive moment of healing here; things in nature merely grow, they are not automatically resolved, wounds are not neatly sutured. But growing is life and Li is, and always will be, a mother. Her book is a meditation on living and radical acceptance that has the potential to offer deep solace; comfort from the abyss."

Cringe! How millennials became uncool – article by Chloë Hamilton in The Guardian. "A proclivity for socks hidden within low-top trainers is just one reason why millennials – anyone born between 1981-1996 – are now considered achingly uncool by the generation that came next: gen Z, AKA the zoomers, or zillennials. According to countless TikTok videos, other sources of derision for the generation that first popularised social media, millennial pink, and pumpkin-spice lattes are their choice of jeans (skinny and mom jeans are out; baggy hipsters are in); an obsession with avocado on toast (gen Z’s green grub of choice is matcha); their excessive use of the crying laughing face emoji (for a zoomer, the skull emoji indicates humour, representing phrases such as 'I’m dying with laughter'); and the 'millennial pause', a brief moment of silence at the start of a millennial’s video or voice note, thought to be because – and this really does make them sound ancient – they like to check the device they’re using is actually recording.... All of which is to say that, in recent years, millennials, the former hip young things that once seemed so cutting edge when cast side-by-side with the out-of-touch baby boomers and the rather nondescript generation X, have become, well, a bit cringe."

‘Outdated and unjust’: can we reform global capitalism? – article by John Cassidy in The Guardian, adapted from his book Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World. "Declarations that global capitalism is in crisis are nothing new... Ever since Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which appeared in 1848, critics have been predicting the system’s demise. In the 1940s, two of capitalism’s biggest champions – the Austrian free market economists Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter – also argued that it was doomed. (To them, the fatal threats were socialism and bureaucracy.) During the post-second world war decades, many western countries moved in the direction of Keynesian social democracy, which was based on a social bargain between labour and capital, with restraints on the movement of financial capital. In the 1970s, this form of managed capitalism succumbed to what’s known as stagflation, the combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth. This was replaced with the neoliberal experiment in unrestricted financialisation and globalisation that met its nemesis in the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Since then, we have been in an interregnum characterised by the dominance of big tech, an intensifying climate crisis, a global pandemic and efforts across the political spectrum to imagine a new economic paradigm.... Efforts on the left to construct a new economic model are still very much a work in progress. To some environmentalist activists, climate breakdown demands that we abandon a central tenet of capitalism: the notion that it can keep growing for ever....The degrowth movement isn’t just about tackling the climate crisis. It draws on an intellectual tradition of scepticism towards industrial capitalism and mass production that dates back to Carlyle, John Ruskin, the Indian economist JC Kumarappa, who advised Gandhi, and EF Schumacher, the author of the 1973 book, Small is Beautiful.... Yet proposals to abandon economic growth have also been met with scepticism. As the Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman pointed out in the 1970s, strong growth during the postwar era helped raise wages and keep distributional conflicts in check: the subsequent slowdown coincided with rising political polarisation. At the global level, the key issue is whether degrowth would impose intolerable burdens on the world’s poorest countries, which would love to follow the growth paths that China and India have trodden in recent decades.... On much of the left the focus is on making growth greener rather than abandoning it, and on trying to address other enduring problems, including poverty, stagnant wages, monopoly power and tax avoidance by the rich.... The challenge now facing the centre-left is to construct a new managed capitalism for a globalised, tech-dominated and finance-driven world in which the labour movement is nowhere near as powerful as it was in the middle of the 20th century."

National Gallery rehang: ‘A momentous retelling of the story of art’ – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Wonder of Art may seem a glib, even desperate, title for this rehang but I can’t really argue. This is one of the greatest museums of painting in the world, a magic labyrinth whose every picture is a door to Wonderland. My anxiety was that the curators might try to reinvent or, God forbid, reimagine their collection, without chronology or coherence. But this 'new' National is reassuringly like the old one. It wasn’t broken, so they haven’t fixed it.... You no longer enter the revamped Sainsbury Wing to be confronted by ranks of gold-dripping gothic altarpieces but get a welcoming embrace from Leonardo. His Virgin of the Rocks hangs right there at the start – blam! – a cool dive into shadowy depths out of which floats the pale androgynous face of art’s queerest angel.... One of the most effective moves in this new approach is to isolate the collection’s biggest stars to let you savour their drop-dead genius. Later on Titian and Monet get rooms of their own. But a few metres from Leonardo you’ll find a wall of paintings by Van Eyck, the Flemish artist who anticipated many of the Tuscan polymath’s techniques in the early 1400s. No other gallery in the world has such a perfect group of Van Eycks and here they all are: a strangely miniaturised head of the artist himself, looking like a magician in his turban, a portrait of a young man movingly inscribed 'Faithful memory', and between them, The Arnolfini Portrait with its dead-eyed merchant and young bride, Death and the Maiden set in a perfect simulacrum of an ordinary room. We’re not in Florence any more. The National Gallery used to tell a traditional textbook tale of art that began when perspective was 'invented' in early 1400s Florence. This rehang involves a momentous retelling of the story. We now begin in Bruges with Van Eyck, which helps define the great leap forward in the Renaissance in a simpler, more human way as the discovery of the real world.... We’ve gone from art discovering how to depict people as people, to portraying inner lives. This is the story the National Gallery tells, now more clearly than ever."

The insidious doublespeak of Trump’s freedom of ‘choice’ – article by Sophia Rosenfeld in The Guardian. "There is a long backstory here. Ordinary people, wherever they found themselves in the world, once had many fewer choices to make than we typically do today – and they didn’t attach as much meaning to the act of choosing either.... But over the last two and a half centuries, the range of both options and opportunities for choice-making – from determining what to eat for lunch to deciding with whom to spend one’s days and nights – has increased exponentially. The categories of people given the formal power to exercise this kind of self-determination have expanded, too, even as the possibility of being able to use this power has remained wildly unevenly distributed.... It was the late 19th and 20th centuries that truly sped the process along, turning choice-making into a habitual part of life. Along with more to choose with every passing year came a mass movement towards imagining one’s life story as constructed out of free choices made in our free time. Democracies were a final piece of the puzzle.... But that isn’t where we are now. Despite its sporadic and often misleading appeal to the language of choice, the Trump administration is intent on undoing this historical pact between consumer and political choice and thus of a key element of the liberal paradigm. While expanding consumer options, or at least giving the impression this is the plan, this presidency is working hard to limit options in almost all other spheres.... When it comes to freedom of choice for consumers, which has long been offered up as the flip side of deregulation for industries, Trump and his minions are all in – at least rhetorically.... Yet apart from the arena of consumption, Trump is little invested in expanding individual, preference-based selection making. On the contrary, in the political sphere, the president seems to be looking to move the US in precisely the opposite direction.... The ability to make one’s own determinations in ideas, expression and ideology, despite some early Trump administration bromides about the importance of freedom of speech, is on the chopping block as a result of yet another set of executive orders and agency moves. That includes bans, wherever federal dollars or other forms of federal patronage are at stake, on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the investigation of the climate crisis, the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments, or the promotion of history, art or literature that runs counter to so-called 'patriotic' education, among other topics. Such menu limitations are already being felt from classrooms and laboratories to federal agencies and cultural institutions, even as court challenges are growing in number.... Even the study of choice-making, one of the great developments of 20th-century social science including psychology and economics, is now being reduced by every means possible, from cuts to whole research-funding programs to the blockage of grants for projects making use of certain prohibited words."

The big idea: could the English language die? – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "No language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. 'English could of course die, just as Egyptian died,' says linguist Martin Haspelmath... The more interesting questions are: when and how?... English could come under pressure as a global lingua franca if China replaces the US as the world’s dominant superpower, and if India drops English as an official language. Demographic factors could drive the growth of African lingua francas – Lingala and Swahili, for example, but also other legacy colonial languages such as French and Portuguese – and of Spanish in the Americas, without any major war. [But] we have to distinguish between two phenomena: the resizing of English’s dominion, and its own internal evolution. English exists today in many spoken variants, just as Latin did before it exploded into Romance.... The balance of power between the variants is likely to shift, so that it’s no longer American- or British-English speakers setting the standards (unless the former retain their grip on communication technologies). West African Pidgin, a creole strongly influenced by English, was spoken by a few thousand people two centuries ago, but it’s now the dominant language of west Africa... Nigerian and Indian colloquialisms will start entering 'standard' English, as those new titans pull the lexical blanket towards them, so to speak. The vocabulary of a language – its words – tends to be its fastest evolving component.... New Yorkers and Londoners might be calling liquor or booze by the Pidgin word for it, ogogoru, within 50 years."

‘I had a chance to pass my mum’s story on’: Kazuo Ishiguro on growing up in shadow of the Nagasaki bomb – interview by Xan Brooks in The Guardian. "First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, 'Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?'... The story lightly excavates the author’s family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five.... Niki isn’t Ishiguro. Nonetheless, the author admits that there are parallels. He says, 'Where I see myself in Niki – and I was reminded of this watching Camilla Aiko’s fine performance – is in her sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes coy and cunning curiosity when coaxing memories from her mother of another, more troubled time.' It is the mother, after all, who looms largest in the tale. Etsuko in a sense has led two lives and been two different people. In 80s England she is a respectable widowed music teacher. In Nagasaki seven years after the atomic bomb dropped, she’s a harried young bride, contaminated with radiation and a potential hazard to her unborn child. She needs a friend or an escape route, whichever comes first. But she is never an entirely reliable narrator – and the family story she tells Niki finally doesn’t add up.... In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko hands her story on to Niki. Niki, in turn, will write it up how she likes. So this is a family story about family stories, aware of how they warp and change in the telling. Every tale is subject to the same cultural static. They are adapted and extrapolated, lost and found in translation. One might even say that’s what keeps a story alive.... Ishiguro says[:] 'It might sound like modesty when I encourage film adaptations to ‘move on’ the story. But actually it’s a form of egomania. I have aspirations for my stories to be like those of, say, Homer. Or to become like certain fairytales and myths, moving through the centuries and varying cultures, adapting and growing to speak to different audiences. My novels are themselves made up of materials I’ve inherited, imbibed and remoulded. When something goes from book to film it’s a campfire opportunity: it’s when the story should grow and evolve.'"

‘I thought politics was a dirty thing’: Zack Polanski on his ‘eco-populist’ vision for the Green party – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Polanski... is standing for leader of the Green party, promising a radical new 'eco-populism'.... By eco-populism, he means go after billionaires, go after water companies, go after corporations. He means retake patriotism. 'We should love our country. Loving your community is loving your country.' He means put the climate at the centre of everything – but never forget that these will seem like abstract conversations to people who can’t put food on the table. He wants to lead a party that actively seeks 'to improve people’s material conditions, right here and right now'. And the problem with these big, hopeful promises of justice and change is that everyone, from Boris Johnson to Nigel Farage, from Keir Starmer to Ed Davey, makes them. This diet of disappointment has all the same word-ingredients. But the difference with the Greens, Polanski says, is that they mean it, and the answer is better storytelling. 'Far too often, the party leads from a policy and data space. Our MPs, who are excellent, are a scientist, an engineer, a renewables expert and a former MEP. We don’t have storytellers. We have such a powerful story to tell.' Polanski’s own story is that he was born in Salford, his parents divorced when he was quite young, his mum is an actor, his dad works in a DIY shop. 'I’m not the son of a tool maker, I’m the son of a tool seller,' he clarifies, very mildly mocking the political cliche of trying to parade working-class credentials.... 'Of all the criticism I’ve received in my career as a politician,” he continues, “the most vicious has come from so-called mainstream Jewish communities. I very much identify as Jewish, I’m very proud to be Jewish, I’m very much involved in Jewish cultures, but I’m certainly not a Zionist, and that’s seen as the ultimate betrayal.' He went to Stockport Grammar, a private school, on a scholarship. He hated it, got kicked out, and went to a sixth form college. ... Then he went to drama school in Atlanta, Georgia... At this stage, he still felt that 'politics was a dirty thing that didn’t really change anything. It wasn’t until I went to America, and saw the inequality, the racism, the homophobia, that I started to wake up.' Initially, that took a pretty anarchic form. He worked for community projects with homeless people and migrants, 'helping people to tell their stories, but also encouraging them to articulate and empower themselves. I did that for years, and I don’t regret the work. But I also kept feeling this deep frustration. You can role-play that someone is overcoming their oppressor, but actually, if the systemic barriers are still there, you’re just setting someone up for failure. People would leave a project feeling so pumped up and ready to go, and they’d see them a year or two later and the problem would still be there.' ... He moved back from the US to London in the mid-00s... He started by joining the Lib Dems, and standing as a councillor in north London in 2016.... His experience as an actor has left Polanski with a genuinely unusual style of political communication – he doesn’t equivocate, his manner is quite urgent and arresting, he never drones, but nor is he embarrassed to say something very simple, even if it sounds schlocky, or boastful. He tells me that the video he launched announcing his leadership bid has been seen 1.4m times. 'It’s had hundreds, maybe even thousands of people responding, and I would say 99% of those things are, "Is this what hope feels like?"'"

Ministers to block Thames Water paying bosses bonuses out of emergency loan – article by Helena Horton and Anna Isaac in The Guardian. "Ministers plan to use new powers to block bosses from Thames Water taking bonuses worth hundreds of thousands of pounds as the company fights for survival, the Guardian can reveal.... It emerged this week that Thames was planning to use part of a £3bn emergency loan, which was meant to stabilise its finances and save it from collapse, to pay bonuses for senior executives. Thames’s chair, Sir Adrian Montague, told MPs on the environment, food and rural affairs (Efra) committee on Tuesday that the first of these bonuses would be up to 50% of their salary, arguing senior managers are its 'most precious resource'.... [Steve Reed, Environment Secretary,] said:'Water companies got away with dumping a tidal wave of sewage into our river while pocketing millions pounds of bonuses. That ends now. The government will ban the payment of unfair bonuses for polluting water bosses. The days of profiting from failure are over.'”

Are we hardwired to fall for autocrats? – article by Jonathan R Goodman in The Guardian. "A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship....I don’t think we should be surprised. The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power.... Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males. Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence....There’s another set of features that researchers today argue evolved as we started to cooperate more widely. They’re known as learning biases. Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful.... Yet those same biases, combined with our trusting natures, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders.... We can be optimistic that timeless problems are amenable to timeless solutions. Our ancestors found ways to balance the best elements of human nature against the worst – and in doing so to counter the influence of our inbuilt biases. The first step towards that is to recognise that we have a proclivity for blindly following others and trusting success, to share this insight and to support our fellow citizens’ capacity to think both critically and ethically. Where we see authoritarians taking aim at knowledge-creating institutions – whether universities such as Harvard or bodies such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture that teach us about our past mistakes – we must move to protect them, both with our voices and our financial resources. Where we see brute power combined with ignorance, we can throw our support behind knowledge, peaceful protest and education. And finally, when reigns of terror end – and eventually, they always do – it is critical to learn and absorb the lessons. That way, we inoculate ourselves afresh against our natural tendency to trust the untrustworthy, carrying that wisdom forward into the future so that we’re better able to stymie the autocrats who seek to close our minds."

Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy: brilliant primer on leftwing economics –  review by Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. "Capitalism has a way of confounding its critics.... Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is 'managed capitalism' and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose – if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle. Half of the book is given over to Mitteleuropa (where we meet Karl Polanyi and Rosa Luxemburg, both of whom are having a bit of a moment these days), India (JC Kumarappa, Gandhi’s crony and pioneer of ecological economics), and Latin America (whose dependency theorists argued that the developed world was scooping up the benefits of rising productivity at the developing world’s expense).... Early socialists, Cassidy shows, had little faith in government and equated the state with upper-class corruption....We owe the left as we know it to Marx and Engels, who railed against financialisation and monopolisation – the 'concentration of capital' – and defended planning and public ownership.... [Keynes's] mid-century magic formula, low interest rates and tax-and-spend, led to astonishing growth and stability in the short run.... [Marxist Michał Kalecki argued that] low unemployment meant enhanced labour power, so more strikes and higher wages and inflation [and] a capitalist backlash would ensue... That is precisely what happened in the 70s. Milton Friedman made the case for a 'natural rate of unemployment', by which he meant that more unemployment was needed in order to destroy labour power and push down wages.... High interest rates and anti-union legislation followed. After a brief mid-century egalitarian blip in which economic growth exceeded the rate of return on capital, the opposite has once again become true in our own gilded age. This was Thomas Piketty’s insight, demonstrated with the sophistication of statistics, in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century....Cassidy, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is generous in his judgments, and even in his indictments. There is not a single snide remark in these pages. He plays his cards close to his chest, but I suspect he might confess to being a Keynesian. A clue lies in his conclusion – 'capitalism can be reformed' – which reminded me of Fredric Jameson’s witticism that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."

No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit: an activist’s antidote to despair – review by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. "From smartphones to food, our daily lives leave a bitter trail of harm. Some become painfully preoccupied with these realisations; others, avoidant and numb – an even more psychologically injurious strategy. I oscillate somewhere between these two positions, which is to say, I am in dire need of some moral first aid. In No Straight Road Takes You There, a constellation of essays with interlinked themes, Solnit provides just that.... Hope is no casual platitude here. Nor is it merely a more pleasant state of mind than despair. Rather, Solnit sees it as a more accurate mindset, since nobody is an oracle, and history is full of surprises. Uncertainty is the most rational position to embrace, and unlike optimism or pessimism, it does not entrench us in complacency or inaction. Climate doomers are particularly pernicious, Solnit observes, propagating misery and incorrect narratives about how screwed we all are, 'like bringing poison to the potluck'. Above all they are guilty of failing to use their imagination....Solnit is like a seasoned boxing coach tending to the spiritually and politically exhausted citizen flopped in the corner. She mops our brows and offers us motivation. 'They want you to feel powerless and to surrender,' she writes. 'You are not giving up, and neither am I … The pain you feel is because of what you love.' Grieve, yes. Scream with fury, sure. But also, keep going."

As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch, powerless. What is it doing to us as a society? –  article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. "This overarching sense of impotence when confronted with unimaginable horror is creating a mass sense of moral injury – a form of profound psychological distress that can happen to people when they are forced to act, or indeed not act, in ways that are in direct opposition to their values or moral code. I first came across the term when speaking to medical professionals who were developing PTSD during the pandemic. Doctors, nurses and care workers were in anguish at not always being able to provide treatment to patients who so desperately needed it, owing to a lack of equipment, resources and leadership, and the sheer volume of seriously ill people. Nowhere will this kind of distress be more keenly felt than in Gaza itself. For the medical professionals and aid workers there, sadness, guilt, betrayal, even, that you can’t help everyone must be a daily reality. When it is your job to help, to feed, to treat, being unable to do so is a profound trauma....But I have also started to wonder about the impact of moral injury by proxy and at scale. I am in no way putting it on a par with what people on the ground are experiencing. But that feeling of powerlessness and, as an extension, complicity: what does it do to those around the world who feel what is happening is wrong? What is the impact of witnessing so much profound suffering – even through a screen – and feeling unable to act or to force others to act?... Feeling powerless in the face of such egregious injustice can result in a loss of trust or faith, not just in governments and institutions but also in the moral order of the world, and its ability to protect children. I wonder what the impact of this will be: will it, as certain politicians no doubt hope, result in a numbness that presents as indifference? ... I certainly feel a profound loss of faith. Something I felt to be true about humanity – that people are fundamentally good, that we owe it to children to protect them – has shifted because of this conflict. I walk around with a feeling of heaviness that I cannot seem to shake. Thousands of miles from Gaza, I am changed by the past 18 months. I have learned that, for some people, compassion for children has political limits. What does one do with that terrible knowledge once it sits inside you like a leaden stone? I don’t seem be able to find an answer."

The turning point that wasn’t: the way the world talks about Israel’s war has changed. Nothing else has – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "The marked change in tone this past week from leaders in the UK and EU is a clear break from the pabulum of 'concerns' and reiterations of Israel’s right to defend itself.... But there is a disconnect between condemnation and outrage, and what happens on the ground. When it comes to Israel, the levers of international censure are broken. Throughout the war, international organisations, humanitarian missions and courts of justice have been rendered powerless by their inability to translate their findings into action. Words alone mean nothing. They simply bounce off Israel’s iron dome of impunity.... The recent change in language from Israel’s international allies is remarkable. But it would be dangerous to overestimate its significance. Israeli authorities not only do not care, but draw strength from the condemnation. It all serves to prove that the country is on its own and must persevere because it is, as ever, misunderstood, discriminated against, surrounded by enemies..... Those mechanisms of censure that signal displeasure and motivate outlaws to come back into the fold have been shattered by an Israel that has made a virtue out of being outside it: the kind of action required would necessitate the overturning of deeply held fears and assumptions. First, the now risible belief that Israel is a stabilising ally in a hostile region, that it is a country that shares civilised western values and so should be supported. Then, the fear of a rift with Israel that will violate security arrangements and historical synergies – after all, Israel has already brought that about. It has upended regional and global political and moral settlements, and its allies have still not caught up. Once these truths have been accepted, the toolkit, so easily deployed to sanction other countries, is there to be mobilised.... And even then, all this would only be a start, and a colossally, tragically late one at that."

Where Dragons Live: reflections on family life in an extraordinary setting –  review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "This warm, gentle documentary from Suzanne Raes is about a family – and a family home – that might have interested Nancy Mitford or Wes Anderson. Maybe it takes a non-British film-maker to appreciate such intense and unfashionable Englishness; not eccentric exactly, but wayward and romantic. It is about a trio of middle-aged siblings from the Impey family who take on the overpoweringly sad duty of clearing out their enormously grand childhood home in Oxfordshire. The huge medieval manor house Cumnor Place, with its dozens of chimneys, mysterious rooms and staircases was bought by their late mother, the neuroscientist Jane Impey (née Mellanby), with the proceeds of the sale in 1966 of a postcard-sized but hugely valuable painting.... Impey died in 2021 and her husband, author and antiquarian Oliver Impey, died in 2005; this left their grownup children with the task of coming to terms with the memory of growing up in what is clearly an extraordinary place. It is magical and chaotic, haunted by these two dominating personalities, full of books, papers, paintings ..., huge grounds with a swimming pool, bizarre objects and items everywhere which speak of Oliver Impey’s preoccupation with the image of the dragon."

My sister was found dead. Then I discovered her search history, and the online world that had gripped her – interview by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "In the New Forest, on [a] morning in October 2022, [Adele Zeynep] Walton found out the awful truth: [her younger sister] Aimee had been found dead in a hotel room in Slough, Berkshire. She appeared to have taken her own life. In the days, weeks and months that followed, Walton and her family would learn that Aimee’s path to the hotel had been laid with the help of a complex network of online connections. Walton, 25, a journalist, pieced together that Aimee had spent time on a pro-suicide forum that the Guardian has chosen not to name. The site has been connected to at least 50 deaths in the UK, and is now being investigated by the regulator Ofcom under the Online Safety Act. According to the police investigating her death, it was on this forum that Aimee learned how to procure the substance that killed her, and how she met a man who flew from the US to Heathrow to accompany her while she died. (He was initially charged with assisting suicide, but no further action was taken.) ... Her book, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, is partly the story of her sister, and partly a much broader call to arms to ordinary web-browsing, doom-scrolling, social-media-posting mortals to wake up to the harms that a largely unregulated digital world permits and perpetuates."

Walk on the wild side: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path – interview by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "The Salt Path [is] adapted from Raynor Winn’s 2018 memoir of homelessness and hope along the coastline of England’s south-west. Playing Winn, [Gillian] Anderson is shown making a single teabag stretch for several cuppas, withdrawing the final £1.38 from her bank account, and warming her blistered feet by a pub fire. A typical day begins with her peeing in the undergrowth. It’s a far cry from Agent Scully in The X-Files. Winn’s response to a double catastrophe in her life in 2013 was to embark on the lengthy South West Coast Path walk with her husband, Moth. The film’s opening scene shows the couple’s tent being flooded during a King Lear-level storm. A flashback then reveals how they ended up in this sorry, soggy state. A bad investment left them saddled with crippling debts and the couple lost the farm in Wales where they had brought up their now-adult children. ... Winn had doubts about how her story would work on screen. 'It’s about two people and a path,' she tells me from the home she and [her husband] Moth now share in Cornwall. 'I couldn’t grasp how that could be a film.' But Marianne Elliott, the acclaimed stage director of War Horse, Angels in America, and Company, makes her screen directing debut here and tells me she always saw The Salt Path as inherently cinematic. 'Ray and Moth hardly talk on their walk,' she says. 'They are carrying their trauma on their back, but then they slowly calm down and start to look up and engage with the majestic landscapes. And they are changed by it. It felt like nature was playing with them, like a wild beast – sometimes giving them beauty and wonder, and sometimes battering them cruelly. They were reformed by the elements, if you like.'"

The Salt Path: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs hike from ruin to renewal – review by Cath Clarke in The Guardian. "This film gives cinema one of the most nail-biting scenes of the year so far: an edge-of-the-seat moment as Gillian Anderson puts her bank card into a cash machine. Is there enough money in the account? Everything is at stake. This impressive, intelligent drama is an adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir about walking the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, with her husband, Moth. Unlike other hikers, the couple were not walking for pleasure – at least not to begin with. They had nowhere else to go after losing their farm. From theatre director Marianne Elliott, it stars two fancy actors – Anderson and Jason Isaacs – both giving lovely, emotional, low-key performances.... Somehow, they all bring a real sense of meaning and truth to cheap-sounding messages about living in the moment, and the possibility of long-term relationships deepening and growing in ways impossible to predict. And the best thing about watching the couple’s hardship is knowing there is a happy end coming – with the publication of Winn’s bestselling memoir."

I’m a death expert. I designed eight questions to help you think about dying – article by Joanna Ebenstein in The Guardian. "Part of what it means to be human – part of the human condition, if you like – is to be aware that we will, one day, die.... In my book Memento Mori, I created a 12-week program to help people to think about death in their own way. Below are a few of the prompts I offer to help readers excavate what ideas we may hold about death without even knowing it, and where they might come from. This is an essential first step to making more discriminating, considered choices about what we believe, knowing that the beliefs of our cultures and families are not in any way inevitable or provably true; they are just the traditions we happened to be born into. This knowledge empowers us to release ideas that are not our own – that may be damaging, toxic, or simply not useful – and replace them with something that feels true to us."

Friday, 9 May 2025

Seen and heard: January to March 2025

The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy  enjoyable and informative memoir by an Australian GP, from the time of his diagnosis with multiple myeloma (bone marrow cancer) through treatment to full remission. He's a writer as well as a GP - of fiction, drama and poetry, not only medical reminiscences - so this is a pleasure to read: full of imagery and perception. There's a wry sense of humour throughout, which he seems to be blessed to share with his wife and constant companion, and which introduces an ironic detachment into what might otherwise have been either bleak or merely clinical.

Everything Everywhere All At Once  Oscar-winning fantasy film. I liked it in the end (heartwarming and sentimental in the final act, and I’m a sucker for that), but found it very confusing to begin with because of the constant switching of genres. (American immigrant drama? high concept science fiction? techno-thriller? kung fu movie? knockabout comedy?) Of course that’s part of the point; the clue's in the title. And Michelle Yeoh is great, of course, continually switching between different versions of her character.

Elizabeth is Missing  BBC drama, and a very sympathetic and empathetic portrayal of dementia with the late Glenda Jackson in one of her last roles, troubled and disturbed by the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth, which  as we gradually realise  has triggered recollections of the mysterious disappearance of her sister many years ago, when they were both young. The early scenes are especially good, putting you firmly on her side when other people are ignoring her concerns and treating her like an idiot, but so equally are the later scenes as we become aware of the all-too-real failings in her memory and cognitive powers. The payoff finds her both vindicated and culpable: a sweet-sour ending, which seems fitting.

Howl’s Moving Castle  2004 Studio Ghibli film, based on a book by Diana Wynne Jones. The combination of Japanese animation (from Hayao Miyazaki) and Welsh story produces something quite different from the usual American studio output: an old woman as main character (actually, she's a young woman under an enchantment, but she behaves like an old woman), a young and good-looking wizard, and a powerful anti-war sentiment, with vivid sequences of planes raining down bombs on defenceless cities below  recollections from Miyazaki's own childhood. Perhaps not his greatest film (common opinion accords that honour to My Neighbour Totoro), but it intrigued and touched me, which I suspect is just what Miyazaki intended.

Vera  the final season for everyone's favourite Newcastle detective, and a wonderful send-off too with a pair of quality episodes. Very satisfying it was to see Vera, now retired (instead of taking a promotion into desk-bound seniority) walking her dog along the causeway to Holy Island, and in the follow-up documentary to see Brenda Blethyn as herself: to be reminded of just how different she is from Vera in real life and therefore what a good actor she is.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool  moving portrayal of the real-life romance between the Oscar-winning actor Gloria Grahame and a much younger lad from Liverpool. The story's tensions arise around their age difference, Grahame's scandalous past, and her reluctance to confide to her lover that her cancer has returned and that she is dying. Great performances by Annette Benning and Jamie Bell are what give this film its power.

Lost Echo  interesting but (for me) finally unsatisfying adventure game (despite a good review), in which a scientist-inventor hunts for his girlfriend who has mysteriously gone missing  at least, as he remembers it, because no one else has any recollection of her having existed at all. The usual conspiracy tropes are deployed, though here mixed in with elements of time travel and manufactured memory. It all adds up to a world in which reality is shifting and nothing is secure  which is fair enough, but it does mean the end doesn't provide any kind of closure or conclusion, and I do like stories with an ending: a reason to finish at that point rather than somewhere else.

Resonance  another interesting but (for me) unsatisfying adventure game (again, despite a good review), my difficulties with this being mainly due to the complex control system. There are four controllable characters, and the inventory of each contains memories (both short-term and long-term) as well as objects, which provides just too many different ways one might try to achieve a desired result, even if you know what you're supposed to do. Eventually I gave up and followed a walkthrough, and I wasn't impressed by the story (something about a newly-discovered source of energy which could also be used as a weapon); I didn't really care about the characters or what happened to their world, and when one of them was revealed to be evil and to have been lying all along (how can this happen in a player character, with whom you're supposed to be building up empathy?) I lost patience. There are better games out there.

Operencia  turn-based role-playing game, essentially an old school dungeon crawler but with gorgeous graphics, good voice acting, and a decent story with a middle-European feel (the characters have names like Jóska, pronounced Yoshka) rather than the usual Dungeons and Dragons vibe (basically Americanised Tolkien). I enjoyed this very much, though I did need to go back a couple of chapters at one point (I'd chosen the wrong skills for my characters so they were too weak to overcome the increasingly lethal monsters). What made me abandon it in the end was a particularly nasty trap  a field of moving spikes  which I just didn't have the speed of hand-eye coordination to pass. A pity; I liked the character I created (an oriental hunter called Bao Zhai), and I did want to follow the story through to its conclusion.

Astrid: Murder in Paris  I listed this excellent French TV detective show in a post last year, but I found the latest season (the fourth) a bit disappointing; perhaps the show has passed its peak. We've already learned about the things which terrify Astrid and how she copes with them, and we know about Raphaëlle's chaotic personal life and how she tries to keep Astrid safe so that she can do her crime-solving autistic savant thing, so there's not the same pleasure of discovery. So I went back to Season 1 to enjoy the show from the start.

The Conversation – 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film, with Gene Hackman as a top-ranking surveillance engineer, tasked with covertly recording the conversation between a woman and a man in a city square. I'd been vaguely aware of this film, especially from the point of view of sound design, and I was delighted to discover how well it still works as a slow-burning thriller. The classic features of 1970s cinema  a sense of alienation and a snail-like pace  fit perfectly with the story and with Hackman's isolated, work-focused character. The soundscape, on which his professional intensity encourages you to concentrate, is truly haunting, particularly the conversation itself, which you hear repeatedly until you know it almost as well as Hackman's character does, and still there is something in it which you hear shockingly for the first time towards the end of the film. A true classic.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré  audio book read by Michael Jayston, who played Peter Guillam in the BBC TV dramas, and who does a creditable impression of Alec Guiness when speaking as George Smiley, which is what one wants and expects. The story flicks between London, where Smiley is struggling to revive the reputation of the Circus after its betrayal by double-agent Bill Haydon (the Mole), and the Far East (Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia), where dissolute aristocractic journalist Jerry Westerby (the Hourable Schoolboy of the title) is despatched as part of Smiley's plan to ensnare a mole within Red China. Sad and unhappy, like most of Le Carré's novels, but also powerful and vivid in an unpleasant way, dripping with tawdry 1970s atmosphere and a sense of the British Empire in its final decline.

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

Old Skies: review

Wadjet Eye have done it again: proved that it's possible to create a really great 2D point-and-click adventure game, if you have a cracking story, characterful dialogue writing and voice acting that is nothing short of stellar. 

I've been waiting to play this game for several years, ever since I saw a video of creator Dave Gilbert talking at AdventureX 2019 about an experimental game he'd produced for a jam. He showed a clip of it, in which a time traveller named Fia - some kind of agent in pursuit of a fugitive - lands in a city street and contacts her remote handler, Nozzo. "What's your status?" he asks. "I've got a splitting headache," she replies. "Didn't the Brass say this was a painless procedure?" She then discovers that her kit bag is missing. "Oh. Um. That's bad," he says. "Yes, Nozzo. That's bad," Fia replies with feeling. "How d'you expect me to find Monty without the tracker?" That was the extent of the clip, just 40 seconds long (from 13:55 to 14:35), but it sold it to me. I liked Fia's resolute but slightly stroppy attitude and her collegially affectionate relationship with Nozzo, and I wanted to see more of her and her adventures. So here she is at last in a full-length game, once again voiced by Sally Beaumont who brought her so vividly to life from a short sketchy script for the game jam.

Fia works for an organisation called ChronoZen, which sends rich clients on short trips into the past as a sort of temporal tourism. Playing as Fia, your job - with Nozzo's support - is to give them the experience they want (things they want to see, people they want to meet, even - within strict limits - things they want to change), while making sure that no harm comes to them or to the timeline. Of course, this being an adventure game, the missions are never as simple as they sound. In one, the client runs off by himself and Fia has to track him down and find out what he is trying to do, because he clearly has an agenda other than the one he declared to ChronoZen. In another, the person the client has longed to meet, because he was a role model for her, turns out to be a protection-money collector for one of New York’s gangs, so that Fia has her work cut out to prevent them both from being killed. 

It's when Fia gets killed for the first time that you find out about the Emergency Rewind Protocol: if she dies, Nozzo can rewind time by a few seconds, or a few minutes, to give her another chance. This is no pain-free re-spawning, though, as in many an RPG; each time she's revived, Fia winces with agony, and she retains full memory of how she died. Here's where the game really shows its quality: it would have been so easy to reuse the same dialogue each time, but instead Fia's rising irritation with the repeating events and her failure to escape the death loop is reflected in her dialogue options. She starts to anticipate what her antagonist will say, or comes out with something like "Let's skip ahead to the part where you hit me." Not only does this cushion the player against getting bored or irritated, her use of irony to defuse and cope with adversity is expressive of Fia's character. It doesn't prevent her from being killed again, though. ("You know, I'm really fed up with getting shot in the head.")

The puzzles which advance the story are mostly solved through dialogue choices or through use of information gathered from other characters, the environment, or the biographical database to which Fia has access. No implausibly large inventories here; once again, the dependence on conversation, setting and history works to build a rich sense of the characters and the worlds they inhabit. Even when you get stuck on a puzzle, you can have Fia ask Nozzo for advice; he effectively acts as a built-in hint system, but one that deepens immersion in the game rather than breaking it, because giving helpful advice is what his character does, and it never feels like cheating to ask him for help.

As with Wadget Eye’s previous hit Unavowed, the game is divided into chapters, each of which represents a discrete mission with its own story arc. But again as with Unavowed, there is a larger story arc, which emerges gradually over the individual chapters. There are hints about this larger story right from the beginning. Fia, like all ChronoZen agents, is insulated from chrono-shifts, changes to the timeline; when historical reality is changed, through accident or design, she remains unchanged, with memory of the previous reality, and all previous realities. This means that she avoids becoming attached to things which may suddenly disappear. She doesn't have a favourite restaurant or favourite place; they change too much. For the same reason, as we learn during the course of her missions, she doesn't follow sport and knows nothing about art. In an early scene, she tries to pick up a man at a bar, and just as the conversation is starting to go well, there;s a chrono-shift and his disappears from existence. And what does she do, with an unexpectedly free evening? She goes into work, to see if there are any late clients requiring escorting. No matter how good at her job she is, no matter how dedicated, this is shaping up to be a life of personal isolation and non-commitment.

Without being heavy or overly serious - and there are some very funny moments in this game - Old Skies packs an emotional punch, prompting thoughts about meaning and purpose and the nature of a life well-lived. The questions confronting Fia are an amplification of the questions which confront every one of us, once we become aware of the inescapable change and impermanence of things. How can one leave one's mark on the world if everything is prone to erasure from existence? What. if anything, is it worth caring about, if it can be taken away from one in an instant? Does what we do really matter?

Having played the game through to its thrilling conclusion, I'm not sure whether Fia's story has a happy ending or a sad ending. Perhaps that doesn't matter. I'm very glad to have known her and gone through it all with her. And now it's over, I'm feeling bereft and lost. So sorry, Dave, but for me the countdown starts now. I'm waiting for your next hit game!

Buy Old Skies for PC on GOG or on Steam.

Sunday, 4 May 2025

Cuttings: April 2025

Social media is awash with ‘heteropessimism’. Do young women really think so poorly of men? – article by Rachel Connolly in The Guardian. "As a millennial woman with a phone, I have felt bombarded by social media content expressing [heteropessimist] sentiment for a while, and it seems to be reaching a crescendo. In a recent thoughtful piece for the New York Times, Marie Solis analysed the growing popularity of heteropessimist declarations from relatively young women since 2019, when the term was coined, through to a fresh spike coinciding with Trump’s second election win. 'In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps,' she wrote, along with female celebrities declaring vows of celibacy or identifying as 'self-partnered' (the state of being happy and fulfilled alone)... I have found the strident 'boysober' and 'self-partnered' iterations of this trend cheering. The shrugging passivity of heteropessimism always struck me as mystifying. What do women, in the 2020s, need relationships with men for?... In the absence of a mass movement of women actually doing this, though, I’m not convinced that heterosexual relationships really are so irredeemably unsatisfying. Online communication is inherently performative. It is not a metric of how people truly feel, but more what they think they will be rewarded for saying. Heteropessimism mirrors other forms of progressive discourse over the past decade, which have placed a high premium on declaring self-awareness about participating in oppressive systems – capitalism, say – and describing their problematic elements without necessarily doing anything about them."

My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois? – article by Daniel Lavelle in The Guardian. "I have been obsessed with and confused by social class all my life. Both of my grandparents grew up in Liverpool in the 1930s in traditionally working-class households. They were clever and conscientious and managed to earn scholarships to university, eventually becoming teachers. My parents have university degrees and own property; one of them is now a judge. To most people, all these things place me squarely and categorically in the middle class. But I was in special educational schools from the age of nine, spent part of my childhood in care, left education altogether at 14 and collected the dole until getting my first job in a cotton mill. All these things make me a dyed-in-the-wool prole. And yet I have two degrees, I have written two books and I freelance for the Guardian – you can’t get more insufferably bourgeois than that. At the same time, I am pushing 40 and living with my mum because I can’t afford to rent anything larger than a broom cupboard, so I feel as though I am in class limbo – fitting in with everyone and no one at the same time.... In 2011, the BBC ... teamed up with the sociologist Prof Mike Savage and a group of his colleagues at the London School of Economics to try to bring the idea of class into the 21st century [proposing] seven classes: the elite, the established middle class, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, the traditional working class, emergent service workers and the precariat. I fed the BBC’s online survey my details, including salary, housing situation and interests. My result: precariat. The lowest on the totem pole. Then I did the test again. This time, I fessed up to going to the gym, listening to classical music and enjoying the theatre, as well as playing video games and watching football. I experienced rapid social mobility, ending up as an emergent service worker – and even more confused. Looking back, my confusion and sense of being in limbo arose from ignorance and misunderstanding. My view of a working-class person was someone who wore overalls and worked with their hands; I saw the middle classes as home‑owning office workers in business attire. Academia confuses the issue even more with its obsession with stratification. But [film maker Ken Loach] has helped me clear some of the fog in my mind. Our society is like a commuter train. There are a few very well-off people in the front, with their own seats, tables and ample legroom; everyone else is stuffed into the carriages behind them. Some passengers are lucky enough to get a seat, but most are on their feet and cramped together, attempting to disappear from the agony via headphones and screens, trying to remember why they put themselves through this every day. Every year, the standard carriages get more and more crammed. Meanwhile, first class has fewer passengers and is roomier than ever. At what point do the rest of us get fed up with playing sardines and take up the rest of the train? I don’t know, but noticing your fellow passengers would be a good start. Then we may realise that we are all in this together."

Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Already, Trump has waged war on everything that builds prosperity and wellbeing: democracy, healthy ecosystems, education, healthcare, science, the arts. Yet, amid the wreckage, and despite some slippage, his approval ratings still hold between 43 and 48%: far higher than those of many other leaders. Why? I believe part of the answer lies in a fundamental aspect of our humanity: the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded. This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics. Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it. Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right, who see it all too well.... Why might this be? There are various, related explanations: feelings of marginalisation, status anxiety and social threat, insecurity triggering an authoritarian reflex and a loss of trust in other social groups. At the root of some of these explanations, I feel, is something deeply embedded in the human psyche: if you can’t get even, get mean."

The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? – article by Sam Freedman in The Guardian. "One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on learning his legendary Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their worldview. But that hasn’t stopped Musk... The barges used by SpaceX to land their booster rockets are all named after spaceships from the Culture books. Musk’s entire career stems from trying to replicate sci-fi novels. His desire to colonise Mars was sparked by the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov (another staunch leftwinger).... Musk isn’t alone in his enthusiasms. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed his company and sunk $100bn in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a word that first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash... If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem.... The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were growing up, was Cyberpunk... As historian Richard Hofstadter noted in his famous 1964 essay, the 'paranoid style' has been a feature of rightwing American politics for a long time – but The Matrix has given it a new vocabulary and imagery. The red pill Neo takes, choosing to escape his simulation and see reality, was repurposed by the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, an associate of JD Vance, as the guiding metaphor for the 'alt-right'. That the transgender Wachowski sisters, who directed the film, had in mind a metaphor for their own oppression is bitterly ironic.... Thiel often names companies he backs after Lord of the Rings artefacts.... Palantir, is a global data analytics and software company, a major supplier to the NHS and a defence contractor for numerous governments. It’s named after the powerful seeing stone used by both Saruman and Sauron in their attempts to control the world. Thiel is clearly a Lord of the Rings obsessive – the problem is, it’s not entirely clear which side he wanted to win."

‘Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!’: how video game adaptations became prestige TV – article by Duncan Barrett in The Guardian. "The Last of Us, [now starting its second season, is] a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the [recent] wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre. According to executive producer Carolyn Strauss, .... showrunner Craig Mazin pitched it to her as a story about love: 'He said to me: "This is a show about the good and the bad of what love compels you to do.'... For Mazin, the bold narrative choices of the original games were a large part of their appeal thanks largely to the instincts of creative director Neil Druckmann, with whom he shares a credit on the series.... 'We had lunch and I talked about how much I loved the game and what I thought it was really about, underneath the hood of zombies and fungus and fighting,' he says. 'He’s very protective of it, as well he should be. And at that time, video game adaptations didn’t have a good track record.' That’s putting it mildly. In the past, efforts to drag game characters kicking and screaming into the real world have resulted in some serious stinkers.... But it turns out even the ropiest adaptations have their defenders. 'Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!' laughs Gabriel Luna, who plays Joel’s brother Tommy in the series. 'It’s a good movie!'... [However,] the wacky adventures of Bob Hoskins’ New York plumber are a world away from The Last of Us. Season one received near universal praise, scooping up dozens of awards. The source material certainly helps. Take, for example, The Last of Us Part II which the latest season of the HBO adaptation is based on. For me, one of the most powerful moments playing it came when I, as Ellie, was exploring Joel’s house and I found a photograph of his dead daughter, Sarah, on a chest of drawers. The level of 'interaction' is limited to picking up the photo and taking a closer look, just as it might be in real life, and it has no real bearing on the action of the game. But a tiny moment like that can be unbearably powerful. 'You’re going through a series of sequences that the game designers have very carefully crafted to give you a particular experience,' says [Peter Howell, lecturer in computer games design at the University of Portsmouth]. 'Exactly as a director would do in a TV series.'"

It’s not too late to stop Trump and the tech broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now – article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving 'broligarchy' – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics.... What happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I’ve been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it’s also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it’s why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves. What I can’t stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on.... We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week’s talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don’t know where I’d be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that’s falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess."

Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry: the battle to reform English spelling – review by Matthew Cantor in The Guardian. "The idea of the ghoti [pronounced 'fish'] is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries.... In his amusing and enlightening new book, Gabe Henry traces the history of these efforts, beginning with a 12th-century monk named Orrmin, continuing through the beginnings of American English and the movement’s 19th-century heyday, finally arriving at textspeak. English is a mess, Henry explains, thanks to its complicated parentage, which involves the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. William Caxton, England’s first printer, also deserves some of the blame: his standardisation of spellings in 1476 meant he 'froze our orthography during a time of linguistic flux. Our spellings today are therefore anchored to a pronunciation spoken sometime between Chaucer and Shakespeare, back when we voiced the S in aisle, the G in gnarl, and the K in knife.' Spelling reformers had their work cut out for them, then.... Not everyone failed: Noah Webster’s American dictionary successfully excised letters he thought were extraneous, such as the 'u's in 'colour' and 'honour'... Texting has, of course, made simplifications such as U for 'you' and 'thru' for 'through' more common. Some complain about this as further evidence of the 'deterioration' of language; I have at times been one of them. But Henry’s book gave me a new perspective, cheering for the simplification crowd."

No, you’re not fine just the way you are: time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Moral Ambition. "Whether you’ve got your whole career ahead of you or are looking to make a change, it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options. Category I jobs: Not that ambitious, not that idealistic. Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads or managing colleagues who don’t need managing.... There’s also a class of not-so-useful jobs. A class of influencers and marketeers, lobbyists and managers, consultants and corporate lawyers – all people who could go on strike and the world would be just fine... For some in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s an escape hatch: becoming financially independent. Countless self-help books lay out how to get rich with minimal effort, so you can get out as soon as possible, then kick back and relax.... Category II jobs: Ambitious, but not all that idealistic. ... These people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, a fat salary, a corner office or other perks.... Take consultants. These talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today. If you’re among the top in your field, you can afford to go skiing regularly or buy that beach house you always dreamed of. But is that really all you want out of life?... Category III jobs: Idealistic, but not all that ambitious.... You see it in young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and preferably part-time. Sometimes it seems 'ambition' has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good.... In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is defined by what you don’t do. Don’t fly. Don’t eat meat. Don’t have kids. And don’t even think about using a plastic straw.... The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action. But here’s the thing: awareness alone won’t help a soul. It’s at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal. Category IV jobs: Idealistic and ambitious. ... Let me introduce one of my personal heroes, the British author and activist Thomas Clarkson.... In 1787, Clarkson became one of the 12 founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Ten of the others were entrepreneurs. Go through their archives today and you’ll find to-do lists, action plans. While the French abolitionist movement was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was run by merchants and businessmen.... I’ve spent years researching the Clarksons of our time: activists and entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, engineers and innovators, all bursting with moral ambition. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They don’t just think, 'Someone should do something about that' but take action themselves.... So ask yourself the question: what’s the 'great honour and glory' of your life? What do you hope one day to look back on? 'A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,' writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'but about being worthy of respect.' Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good."

A year of hate: what I learned when I went undercover with the far right – article by Harry Shukman in The Guardian, adapted from his Year of the Rat: Undercover in the British Far Right. "Hope Not Hate focuses on monitoring, researching and campaigning against the far right. I contacted their research team in late 2022 to discuss working together. ... I was already spending time undercover in extremist circles. This was a chance to do it more safely, with more guidance.... Going undercover is an extreme strategy, and people may wonder if it was justified.... Leaders in the far right conceal their true nature to present a more acceptable version to potential voters, donors and sometimes their own members. One prominent eugenicist who works in Westminster admitted this tactic after I’d befriended him. 'Everyone puts on the mask,' he said. Only by spending prolonged periods of time with them, winning their trust and being deemed safe is it possible to see those moments when that mask slips and the truth peeks out from underneath. If the far right are using subterfuge to gain ground in politics, then it makes sense to turn their tactics back on them. All this matters right now. The far right is edging towards the mainstream....The Scandza Forum is one of the biggest intellectual far-right gatherings in Europe. [Its conference in Tallinn, Estonia] began with a lecture by a racist Danish academic called Helmuth Nyborg, [according to whom] immigrants of low intelligence are coming to Europe and having lots of babies, threatening intelligent, low-fertility Europeans.... By the end of the Tallinn conference, I realised that ...the race science movement is not composed of fringe weirdos. It is well funded, sophisticated and influential. The penny began to drop while the conference guests were drunkenly milling around after dinner. I heard an English accent and ... introduced myself [to] Matthew Frost, a former private school teacher. Frost described the operation he was running. It’s called Aporia, he said, an online magazine that publishes stories about 'HBD'. HBD stands for human biodiversity, the concept that races, sexes and socioeconomic classes can be ranked by traits like intelligence. Advocates of HBD believe that differences between these groups are principally caused by genetic factors rather than environmental ones. HBD, another term for race science, underpins eugenics, the idea that desirable traits can and should be bred.... Incredibly, Frost said he had received a large amount of money from an American investor, someone who made his fortune in the tech world. He wouldn’t tell me who. It would take months to find out."

Where to start with Terry Pratchett – article by Marc Burrows in The Guardian. The entry point. "Most of Pratchett’s books work as entry points. He always wrote with new readers in mind, offering a gentle handhold into his world. But a good choice would be Feet of Clay – a proper police procedural with a great mystery and thoughtful reflections on prejudice, class and the very nature of personhood. And it’s funny, but that’s a given when it comes to Pratchett." The one that will cheer you up. "Witches Abroad, a 1991 Discworld novel about three witches on an epic quest to make sure a poor servant girl doesn’t marry a prince. On the way there are parodies of The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and Hans Christian Andersen stories. Pratchett writes older women beautifully: Nanny Ogg might be one of the finest comic sidekicks in literature." The masterpiece. "Pratchett’s 2002 book Night Watch was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, and rightly so. It’s his angriest and most profound novel – a kind of mashup of Les Misérables and The Terminator via the Peterloo massacre and the battle of Cable Street. It’s about justice, trauma, and how doing the right thing is exhausting, relentless work." The one you'll learn from. "In the author’s 1998 novel, Carpe Jugulum, a family of vampires invade the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, allowing Pratchett to have endless fun with the tropes of gothic fiction. There’s a much darker core to this one, though. It’s a story about who we are and about right and wrong." The one that will make you laugh out loud. "A slightly obscure pick, but I loved the 1999 spin-off Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. The recipes themselves are largely irrelevant. The real gold is Nanny’s etiquette advice; this is some of the best comic character writing Pratchett ever did." The one that deserves more attention. "The Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind; Johnny and the Dead; and Johnny and the Bomb.... Often overshadowed by Discworld, these young adult books are smart, warm, and full of big ideas handled lightly." The one that will make you cry. "The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry’s final novel, published just months after his death in 2015. It’s his farewell to Discworld and its characters. There’s a death scene I still struggle to read. It’s graceful, brave and completely unshowy."

Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future – article by Quinn Slobodian in The Guardian. "One thing that Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley partners share is an obsession with IQ. Being a 'low-IQ individual' is a standard insult in the president’s repertoire, and being 'high-IQ' is an equally standard form of praise for those on the tech right.... It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright. One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy .... From the early 2000s to the present, he has been a consistent advocate for the importance of IQ as a measure of human worth. In the late 2000s, as an exponent of what came to be called the Dark Enlightenment, or 'neo-reaction', he suggested IQ tests could be used to disqualify voters in post-apartheid South Africa.... IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor ... who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were 'lower IQ' compared with those in the Democratic party.... All of this would have remained a quirky symptom of San Francisco Bay Area chatboards were it not for the recent alliance between the world of the tech right and the governing party in Washington DC. The idea that intelligence is hardwired and resistant to early intervention or improvement through state programmes – that IQ is meaningful and real – brings us closer to what Murray and Herrnstein were advocating for in The Bell Curve in the 1990s, what they called 'living with inequality'. Yet here’s the rub. That same coalition has bet the future of the US economy on breakthrough developments in artificial intelligence. To date, generative AI is primarily a means of automating away many of the very white-collar jobs that had previously been the heart of the knowledge economy. ... The argument in favour of paying attention to IQ was that, unfair or not, it was a ticket on to the escalator of upward mobility and meritocracy associated with jobs in finance, tech, advertising and even public service or higher education. If those jobs are whittled down to a nub, then on its own terms, the point of caring about IQ vanishes as well."

Old Skies – review by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu on Adventure Game Hotspot. "100%. Old Skies takes the well-worn concept of time travel and shoots it back through history to make it fresh again. It’s a beautiful, wonderfully written and acted tale both epic and personal, with enough time-bending conundrums to keep even the most jaded adventure gamer guessing. Pros. Epic centuries-spanning story that feels both grandiose and deeply personal. Superb cast of characters brought to life with phenomenal voice acting. Stunning art direction and attention to detail in every era visited. Ingenious puzzle design revolving around your death(s) and collecting information rather than relying on typical item-based brain teasers. Beautiful musical score masterfully captures the feel of each historical period. Cons. No way to rewind your own reality (yet) to play it again for the first time."