Her Story - very good and interesting video-based game by Sam Barlow. The interface simulates a database of short digitised clips from a series of police interviews between June and July 1994, and by searching for keywords you have to work out what happened in the case. To start you off, you're given the keyword "murder", which returns four clips, from which you can work out that the woman interviewed, superbly played by Viva Seifert, is under suspicion of having murdered her husband, but where you go from then is up to you. It's not just about accumulating information; more by luck than judgement, within half a dozen searches I discovered that some of the woman's statements did not fit together at all; and that the story was entering some very murky waters indeed. The game necessarily draws you in, as you start hypothesising about what might be going on, and what keywords might lead you forwards. So powerful is the involvement that some players continue to wonder if even the scripted solution of sorts really tells the full story and whether some of their more outlandish ideas might have a place; Barlow wisely does nothing to discourage this!
Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert - a full and detailed biography of the TV producer (famous for having brought Dr Who to life), but after the early years - pioneering for both TV drama and women in TV drama, a great deal less interesting than I was expecting, at least for those of us outside the business. The chapters increasingly become name-check lists: she produced or commissioned this play or series, which was a triumph or a disaster; she worked with or had a flaming row with this script editor or director or television chief; she had an affair with or broke up with or married this person. Wouldn't make a great TV drama.
The Ascent of Woman - very watchable TV series by historian Amanda Foreman, eschewing grand feminist theory but nevertheless giving intelligent erudite commentary to a world tour of women who made or challenged the tenor of their times. Most of the names will be familiar to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of feminist history, but the neat and unique thing which she does is to let us hear from present-day women of the countries where the historical characters lived, saying what they mean to them. So the past and present is made to feel whole and continuous, somehow affirming and encouraging.
The Pedagogy of Distance and Online Education - Ph.D. thesis by Mary Thorpe (Open University, 2014). A pre-retirement Ph.D. by publication from one of the big names in the field, going back to the era of print-based distance education, and - as one might expect - a consistent defender and proponent of pedagogical sophistication and enrichment, repeatedly challenging lazy but common assumptions that certain technologies (such as print) either entail limited pedagogies or (such as conferencing) will lead to better learning. It's sent me back to several of her key publications: 'The challenge facing course design', in F. Lockwood (ed.) Open and Distance Learning Today (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 175-184; 'Assessment and "third generation" distance education', Distance Education, 19 (1998), pp 266-286; 'Encouraging students to reflect as part of the assignment process: student responses and tutor feedback', Active Learning in Higher Education, 1 (2000), pp. 79-92.
It's Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens, by Danah Boyd (Yale University Press, 2014). Really tremendous and very readable book, astonishingly available free as a PDF, which to a discussion still dominated by doom and utopianism brings good sense, clear thinking and some decent ethnographic research. Boyd is especially good at tracing the continuities of teenage relationship management, rather than giving in to the temptation to see the advent of digital social media as a radical break. Her insights include: teens' engagement with social media is tied to their broader peer groups, so the norms that get reproduced online don't devitate much from the norms that exist at school; they do value privacy but are mostly concerned about evading the gaze of adults with power over them, and they have many strategies other than limiting access for achieving privacy in online public spaces; social divisions often get reproduced online, so information inequalities also get reproduced; and technical skills are correlated with quality of access, which is itself correlated with socio-economic status, so that many "digital natives" are actually quite digitally naive.
Tropes versus Women in Video Games - funny and cool video lectures by Anita Sarkessian, on the stereotyped way women usually appear in computer games. Typically "damselised" - that is, reduced to a state of passive helplessness to provide the plot direction of their rescue by the (male) player-character - alarmingly they often die or are killed at the end of the game, thereby relieving the player character from the task of establishing or sustaining a mature adult relationship with a woman. As she observes, shooter-type games, in which the player's principle means of interacting with the game world is shooting things, don't offer much possibility for sophisticated plot or character development. How sad that a woman should come in for such hostility (as described in her Guardian interview) just for talking sense.
Friday, 2 October 2015
Thursday, 1 October 2015
Cuttings: September 2015
Anita Sarkeesian interview: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - article by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
The key to better lecturing? Trust your students - article by Simon Lancaster in The Guardian, Higher Education Network. His tips: "You are not obliged to teach the same way you were taught.... Use contact time to engage with students.... Prioritise concepts above facts.... Embrace [already existing] online resources - they’ll save you time.... Trust your students - they are your collaborators in learning.... There is reward and recognition out there for teaching"
How eBay built a new world on little more than trust - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "eBay played a significant role in persuading millions of people who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, cyberspace that there might actually be something in this internet thing. I saw that happen in my own family. My elderly mother-in-law was a technophobe from central casting. She thought that mobile phones were weird and could not understand why I kept going on about 'this internet thing'. In desperation one day, I thought of showing her eBay. I logged in, and knowing that she was passionately interested in pottery and porcelain, clicked on some auctions in that area of the site. In an instant she was transfixed: she might not have been interested in technology, but boy, was she interested in porcelain. Suddenly, for her, the internet made sense. It was transformed in her mind from an obsession of her geeky son-in-law into something that would be useful to normal human beings. And in that respect, she was simply treading the same path as hundreds of millions of other people."
Promised You a Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett: how today’s Britain was born in the early 80s - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "According to John Hoskyns, the head of her policy unit, [Margaret Thatcher] could be found in the summer of 1981 sitting on a seat at the end of her garden thinking: 'It’s all gone wrong. I don’t think it will ever come right. I’m the most unpopular prime minister ever. I will go down as a total disaster.' A year later, even as the [Falklands] taskforce was still heaving and wallowing its way homeward, the Tories were suddenly leading Labour by 20% in the polls and Thatcher was chastising 'the waverers and the faint hearts … who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did', and announcing that Britain had 'found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back'. In the election the following year, the Tories won their biggest victory since Harold Macmillan’s in 1959. A Commons majority of 144 meant that that they were likely to last at least two more terms in government, the years in which Thatcherism came into its own."
Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out - article by John McPhee in The New Yorker. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. Quoting Ernest Hemmingway's non-fiction Death in the Afternoon, 1932: “'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'.... [As a writer at Time magazine] you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said 'Green 5' or 'Green 8' or 'Green 15' or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil... Groan as much as you liked, you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your 'finished' piece, to see what could be left out.... Greening has stayed with me, though, because for four decades I have inflicted it on my college writing students, handing them nine or ten swatches of photocopied prose, each marked 'Green 3' or 'Green 4' or whatever."
A Personal Take on Go Set a Watchman - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin, 3 August 2015. "Reviews that describe the Attticus of Watchman as having become a racist, or being revealed as a racist, by clinging to the idealized Atticus of Mockingbird may miss the point of Watchman. Atticus hasn’t changed. We saw him through his young daughter’s eyes as faultless. Now, seen by his grown daughter, we can see him as imperfect: a good man who, being fully committed to living, working, and having friends in an unjust society, makes the compromises and performs the hypocrisies required of its members.... So, the daughter returning home on a visit finds her father, her model of clear thinking and courageous honesty, is siding with the bigots; her boyfriend, her model of brotherly kindness, is siding with the bigots. What’s she to do? The answer from outside is quick and easy: of course she rebels. She rises in wrath, denounces, disowns, and departs.... It’s what I would have imagined her doing, and believed it absolutely necessary for her to do, before I married into a white Southern family and lived with them some years...."
Backdoors won’t work. Just ask the TSA. (Or the NSC.) - blog post by John Naugton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "[An article by Julian Huppert about why there shouldn't be backdoors in encryption software illustrates] how useful it is to have a mundane, everyday illustration of an important idea. ... I wasted [many years] trying to persuade lay audiences about the importance of open source software. My argument was that software that affects our lives should never be impenetrable or unalterable ‘black boxes’ — the 'freedom to tinker' was vital. This argument got precisely nowhere. And then, one day, I suddenly understood why: my audiences had never written a line of software. It was an entirely alien concept to them. So the next time I gave the talk I brought a copy of my favourite recipe book with me. Before starting, I asked who in the audience cooked or baked? Every hand went up. So then I turned to a particular recipe that had 300ml of double cream as one ingredient. 'Now', I said, 'double cream if not good for a guy like me, so I’d like to replace it with creme fraiche. But imagine that we lived in a world where, if I wanted to do that, I would have to write to the authoress to seek her permission, and perhaps to pay a fee. What would you think of that?' And of course they all said that it would be nuts. 'Well then', was the payoff line, 'now you understand why open source software is important.' "
Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal: hissy fits about apostrophes - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "As Crystal writes, scribes started to punctuate in order to make manuscripts easier to read aloud: they were signalling pauses and intonational effects. Grammarians and, later, printers adopted the marks, and tried to systematise them, as aids to semantic understanding on the page. The marks continue to serve both purposes.'This,' Crystal writes, 'is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today.' His central argument, buttressed by countless well-chosen examples and enlivened by the odd whimsical digression, is that neither a phonetic, nor a semantic, nor a grammatical account of our punctuation system is singly sufficient. Those hoping to make punctuation logically consistent are chasing a will o’ the wisp – and ignoring the aesthetics and the pragmatics of practice. But nor is it a complete free-for-all. There are discoverable rules, or at least workable generalisations, about how punctuation functions. However, they are discoverable by the study of usage rather than from old school textbooks."
Why the suffragettes still matter: 'they dared to act as the equals of men' - articles by Sarah Crompton and others in The Guardian. "As a new film Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan as a passionate campaigner for votes for women, arrives in cinemas half a century later, it is strange suddenly to realise that [the] song for Mrs Banks [in the film Mary Poppins], dreamed up on a whim, stands as one of the most famous cultural representations of the women who, in the early years of the 20th century, fought fiercely and resolutely for the vote, breaking laws that they believed were unjust and engaging in a campaign of active resistance. What’s more, the sparky wit of 'Sister Suffragette' has helped the musical, full of strong, self-motivated women, to be discussed – with some seriousness – as a feminist tract, a representation of different kinds of womanhood within the candyfloss surroundings of Cherry Tree Lane. Yet in 1964, when women were talking about liberation, and the counterculture was in full swing, it can also be seen as a slap in the face for their ideals – a throwback to the negative image of a suffragette as someone who is prepared to sacrifice everything, even her children, for her beliefs."
Way to go: the woman who invented Britain’s road signs - article by Homa Khalelli in The Guardian. "More than half a century ago, [Margaret] Calvert, along with her colleague Jock Kinneir, took on what he called 'possibly the biggest graphic design job ever' – creating a new signage system for Britain’s roads.... The pair were asked to design signs for the first motorway in the UK. Sleek, modern and made to signal 'a common language' with Europe, they were colour-coded, easy to read at speed (the 70mph limit was not yet in place), distinctive and uncluttered. Then, when the government became worried about the state of the nation’s roads – whose signs were a jumble of words, fonts and styles – the duo were asked to do the same for all national roads. Today, their triangles warning of children crossing or slippery surfaces, and circles prohibiting right turns, have become such an integral part of the national landscape it is hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. Although they may not have the glamour of other iconic British designs, it’s easy to see what designers find so impressive in the pleasing simplicity of their arrows, and the surprising loveliness of their running deer."
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
The key to better lecturing? Trust your students - article by Simon Lancaster in The Guardian, Higher Education Network. His tips: "You are not obliged to teach the same way you were taught.... Use contact time to engage with students.... Prioritise concepts above facts.... Embrace [already existing] online resources - they’ll save you time.... Trust your students - they are your collaborators in learning.... There is reward and recognition out there for teaching"
How eBay built a new world on little more than trust - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "eBay played a significant role in persuading millions of people who were ignorant of, or indifferent to, cyberspace that there might actually be something in this internet thing. I saw that happen in my own family. My elderly mother-in-law was a technophobe from central casting. She thought that mobile phones were weird and could not understand why I kept going on about 'this internet thing'. In desperation one day, I thought of showing her eBay. I logged in, and knowing that she was passionately interested in pottery and porcelain, clicked on some auctions in that area of the site. In an instant she was transfixed: she might not have been interested in technology, but boy, was she interested in porcelain. Suddenly, for her, the internet made sense. It was transformed in her mind from an obsession of her geeky son-in-law into something that would be useful to normal human beings. And in that respect, she was simply treading the same path as hundreds of millions of other people."
Promised You a Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett: how today’s Britain was born in the early 80s - review by Ian Jack in The Guardian. "According to John Hoskyns, the head of her policy unit, [Margaret Thatcher] could be found in the summer of 1981 sitting on a seat at the end of her garden thinking: 'It’s all gone wrong. I don’t think it will ever come right. I’m the most unpopular prime minister ever. I will go down as a total disaster.' A year later, even as the [Falklands] taskforce was still heaving and wallowing its way homeward, the Tories were suddenly leading Labour by 20% in the polls and Thatcher was chastising 'the waverers and the faint hearts … who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did', and announcing that Britain had 'found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back'. In the election the following year, the Tories won their biggest victory since Harold Macmillan’s in 1959. A Commons majority of 144 meant that that they were likely to last at least two more terms in government, the years in which Thatcherism came into its own."
Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out - article by John McPhee in The New Yorker. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. Quoting Ernest Hemmingway's non-fiction Death in the Afternoon, 1932: “'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'.... [As a writer at Time magazine] you came in on Day 5 and were greeted by galleys from Makeup with notes on them that said 'Green 5' or 'Green 8' or 'Green 15' or some such, telling you to condense the text by that number of lines or the piece would not fit in the magazine. You were supposed to use a green pencil... Groan as much as you liked, you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your 'finished' piece, to see what could be left out.... Greening has stayed with me, though, because for four decades I have inflicted it on my college writing students, handing them nine or ten swatches of photocopied prose, each marked 'Green 3' or 'Green 4' or whatever."
A Personal Take on Go Set a Watchman - blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin, 3 August 2015. "Reviews that describe the Attticus of Watchman as having become a racist, or being revealed as a racist, by clinging to the idealized Atticus of Mockingbird may miss the point of Watchman. Atticus hasn’t changed. We saw him through his young daughter’s eyes as faultless. Now, seen by his grown daughter, we can see him as imperfect: a good man who, being fully committed to living, working, and having friends in an unjust society, makes the compromises and performs the hypocrisies required of its members.... So, the daughter returning home on a visit finds her father, her model of clear thinking and courageous honesty, is siding with the bigots; her boyfriend, her model of brotherly kindness, is siding with the bigots. What’s she to do? The answer from outside is quick and easy: of course she rebels. She rises in wrath, denounces, disowns, and departs.... It’s what I would have imagined her doing, and believed it absolutely necessary for her to do, before I married into a white Southern family and lived with them some years...."
Backdoors won’t work. Just ask the TSA. (Or the NSC.) - blog post by John Naugton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "[An article by Julian Huppert about why there shouldn't be backdoors in encryption software illustrates] how useful it is to have a mundane, everyday illustration of an important idea. ... I wasted [many years] trying to persuade lay audiences about the importance of open source software. My argument was that software that affects our lives should never be impenetrable or unalterable ‘black boxes’ — the 'freedom to tinker' was vital. This argument got precisely nowhere. And then, one day, I suddenly understood why: my audiences had never written a line of software. It was an entirely alien concept to them. So the next time I gave the talk I brought a copy of my favourite recipe book with me. Before starting, I asked who in the audience cooked or baked? Every hand went up. So then I turned to a particular recipe that had 300ml of double cream as one ingredient. 'Now', I said, 'double cream if not good for a guy like me, so I’d like to replace it with creme fraiche. But imagine that we lived in a world where, if I wanted to do that, I would have to write to the authoress to seek her permission, and perhaps to pay a fee. What would you think of that?' And of course they all said that it would be nuts. 'Well then', was the payoff line, 'now you understand why open source software is important.' "
Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal: hissy fits about apostrophes - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "As Crystal writes, scribes started to punctuate in order to make manuscripts easier to read aloud: they were signalling pauses and intonational effects. Grammarians and, later, printers adopted the marks, and tried to systematise them, as aids to semantic understanding on the page. The marks continue to serve both purposes.'This,' Crystal writes, 'is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today.' His central argument, buttressed by countless well-chosen examples and enlivened by the odd whimsical digression, is that neither a phonetic, nor a semantic, nor a grammatical account of our punctuation system is singly sufficient. Those hoping to make punctuation logically consistent are chasing a will o’ the wisp – and ignoring the aesthetics and the pragmatics of practice. But nor is it a complete free-for-all. There are discoverable rules, or at least workable generalisations, about how punctuation functions. However, they are discoverable by the study of usage rather than from old school textbooks."
Why the suffragettes still matter: 'they dared to act as the equals of men' - articles by Sarah Crompton and others in The Guardian. "As a new film Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan as a passionate campaigner for votes for women, arrives in cinemas half a century later, it is strange suddenly to realise that [the] song for Mrs Banks [in the film Mary Poppins], dreamed up on a whim, stands as one of the most famous cultural representations of the women who, in the early years of the 20th century, fought fiercely and resolutely for the vote, breaking laws that they believed were unjust and engaging in a campaign of active resistance. What’s more, the sparky wit of 'Sister Suffragette' has helped the musical, full of strong, self-motivated women, to be discussed – with some seriousness – as a feminist tract, a representation of different kinds of womanhood within the candyfloss surroundings of Cherry Tree Lane. Yet in 1964, when women were talking about liberation, and the counterculture was in full swing, it can also be seen as a slap in the face for their ideals – a throwback to the negative image of a suffragette as someone who is prepared to sacrifice everything, even her children, for her beliefs."
Way to go: the woman who invented Britain’s road signs - article by Homa Khalelli in The Guardian. "More than half a century ago, [Margaret] Calvert, along with her colleague Jock Kinneir, took on what he called 'possibly the biggest graphic design job ever' – creating a new signage system for Britain’s roads.... The pair were asked to design signs for the first motorway in the UK. Sleek, modern and made to signal 'a common language' with Europe, they were colour-coded, easy to read at speed (the 70mph limit was not yet in place), distinctive and uncluttered. Then, when the government became worried about the state of the nation’s roads – whose signs were a jumble of words, fonts and styles – the duo were asked to do the same for all national roads. Today, their triangles warning of children crossing or slippery surfaces, and circles prohibiting right turns, have become such an integral part of the national landscape it is hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. Although they may not have the glamour of other iconic British designs, it’s easy to see what designers find so impressive in the pleasing simplicity of their arrows, and the surprising loveliness of their running deer."
Thursday, 17 September 2015
Seen and heard: August 2015
Blackwell Epiphany - final adventure game in the Blackwell sequence. A strong and fitting end, though unlike some other players I didn't cry or come close to it at the denouement. Deserving of its classic status, and a case study of what can be achieved with a relatively simple game engine and some very good writing.
David Mitchell, Thinking About It Only Makes it Worse - fun collection of essays from his Observer column, with witty and genuinely perceptive angles on politics, popular culture, and life in general.
Partners in Crime - or Tommy and Tuppence, as I think most people are calling it. Very agreeable BBC drama series featuring Agatha Christie's husband-and-wife amateur detectives, with David Walliams and Jessica Rayne presenting just the right hint of camp. Particularly nice to see the character Uncle Tony, who is something hush-hush in the secret service, played by James Fleet from The Vicar of Dibley. If running the secret service is what Hugo Horton did when he grew up, it could explain a thing or two.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.- new film. We had low expectations, given the poor reviews, but found it surprisingly acceptable. Henry Cavill wears a suit well and delivers the appropriate charm for Napoleon Solo, and though Arnie Hammer is an entirely different Illya Kuryakin from David McCallum (he's much taller for one thing, and more angry) the banter between the two of the is top class, and so is the sixties cool (Italian fashion houses, motor racing, yachts on the Mediterranean). Hugh Grant is supremely avuncular as Mr Waverley, contrasting with the oppressive parents of their own pre-U.N.C.L.E. secret services, paving the way for a franchise which I for one would be very happy to see. One of the ideas for re-booting the James Bond franchise, before Daniel Craig gave it a shot of adrenaline, was to return Bond to his historical roots, re-setting him in the Cold War of the '50s and '60s. Well, U.N.C.L.E. has got there first.
Danny and the Human Zoo - BBC TV drama by and loosely based on the early life of Lenny Henry, taking a few liberties with the biographical facts to tell what I guess was the emotional truth of his story: about what he had to do to fit in, first as a kid bullied at school (impressions – the same ones that all the impressionists did, but as he said, “in colour”) and then an aspiring young entertainer (joining the Black and White Minstrel Show), from which he had to break away from to find his own voice as a comedian and now a fine actor.
Alina Ibragimova Plays Bach – a pair of BBC promenade concerts. Some of the most sensational music ever written for the violin, stunningly played by a small woman alone on the vast stage of the Albert Hall. So intense, we could only listen to one at a time. However did she manage three in a concert, with the remaining three a few days later?
David Mitchell, Thinking About It Only Makes it Worse - fun collection of essays from his Observer column, with witty and genuinely perceptive angles on politics, popular culture, and life in general.
Partners in Crime - or Tommy and Tuppence, as I think most people are calling it. Very agreeable BBC drama series featuring Agatha Christie's husband-and-wife amateur detectives, with David Walliams and Jessica Rayne presenting just the right hint of camp. Particularly nice to see the character Uncle Tony, who is something hush-hush in the secret service, played by James Fleet from The Vicar of Dibley. If running the secret service is what Hugo Horton did when he grew up, it could explain a thing or two.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.- new film. We had low expectations, given the poor reviews, but found it surprisingly acceptable. Henry Cavill wears a suit well and delivers the appropriate charm for Napoleon Solo, and though Arnie Hammer is an entirely different Illya Kuryakin from David McCallum (he's much taller for one thing, and more angry) the banter between the two of the is top class, and so is the sixties cool (Italian fashion houses, motor racing, yachts on the Mediterranean). Hugh Grant is supremely avuncular as Mr Waverley, contrasting with the oppressive parents of their own pre-U.N.C.L.E. secret services, paving the way for a franchise which I for one would be very happy to see. One of the ideas for re-booting the James Bond franchise, before Daniel Craig gave it a shot of adrenaline, was to return Bond to his historical roots, re-setting him in the Cold War of the '50s and '60s. Well, U.N.C.L.E. has got there first.
Danny and the Human Zoo - BBC TV drama by and loosely based on the early life of Lenny Henry, taking a few liberties with the biographical facts to tell what I guess was the emotional truth of his story: about what he had to do to fit in, first as a kid bullied at school (impressions – the same ones that all the impressionists did, but as he said, “in colour”) and then an aspiring young entertainer (joining the Black and White Minstrel Show), from which he had to break away from to find his own voice as a comedian and now a fine actor.
Alina Ibragimova Plays Bach – a pair of BBC promenade concerts. Some of the most sensational music ever written for the violin, stunningly played by a small woman alone on the vast stage of the Albert Hall. So intense, we could only listen to one at a time. However did she manage three in a concert, with the remaining three a few days later?
Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Cuttings: August 2015
Shhhhhhh: an exploration of silence - review of BBC Radio 4 programme 'Shhhhhhh' by Hannah Verdier in The Guardian. "Silence isn’t something you hear much on the radio.... That dead air, the interview gone wrong, the pause of doom. So Lucy Powell’s hour-long exploration of silence, Shhhhhhh, was welcome and compelling. Powell admits to being 'enamoured and perplexed' by silence. Her fascination began when a zen master set her a kōan... Her quest continues in this thought-provoking documentary, which smoothly leaps from one theory to the next with great enthusiasm.... In the increasingly noisy world, the contrast between everyday buzz and the nearest we ever get to silence is sharp. It’s powerful: from a teenage sulk to the two minutes’ silence of remembrance. 'It is the stuff of comedy and the end of tragedy. It is as full of meaning and almost as various as speech,' concludes Powell. Happiness, sadness, peace and mortality: who would have thought silence could provoke such a broad investigation? Her passion for silence is contagious, inspiring listeners to switch off and go and find a quiet space of their own. Shhhhhhh!"
Yes Please by Amy Poehler: a "non-book" - review by Laura Miller in The Guardian. "Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers, so technically, it is a book. However, it's the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a 'non-book', meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exmplifying the form. It is not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. It is hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren't already familiar with Amy Poehler's work in film, TV and improv comedy. It is meant for those people who, on hearing Poehler's name, explain, 'Oh, I love her!' Not that there aren't many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time..."
I believe in an authority greater than David Cameron’s. Am I an extremist? - 'Loose canon' column by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "The Church of England is the longest-running prevent strategy in history. If not from its inception, then certainly from the end of the English civil war, the big idea of the C of E was to prevent radicalisation – precisely the sort of radicalisation that led to religious people butchering each other throughout the 1630s and 40s. ... Increasingly suspicious of theological dispute, the idea was to kill off God – or at least God-talk – with religion. ...Religion itself – going to church and so on – was reclaimable as a part of the much-needed project of national togetherness.... But God had to be kept out of it as much as possible. ...And then along comes Islam – and, thankfully, it disrupts this absurd game and refuses to play by the rules. Its practitioners want to talk about God, sex and politics rather than mortgages, school places and the latest Boden catalogue. ... But David Cameron’s whole attack upon 'non-violent extremism', his upping the ante on the Prevent agenda, is an attempt to replay that clapped-out C of E strategy of stopping people talking about God in a way that might have social or political consequences."
Inside Out: what universities can learn from Pixar about emotions - article in The Conversation by Emma Jones. "In Inside Out, it is emotions which are guiding Riley’s every waking moment and even influencing her dreams.... But for centuries, stemming from the work of philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, emotions have been viewed largely as a series of reckless impulses that were unthinking and potentially destructive..... If Inside Out’s producer, Pete Docter, had subscribed to this theory, the five emotions would have been relegated to a small broom cupboard in the far corner of 'headquarters' and the console guiding Riley would have been firmly in the control of a large, overbearing figure known as cognition or reason....Inside Out follows more recent philosophical and scientific thinking in ascribing a value and importance to emotions.... However, the world of higher education has not yet caught up with contemporary thinking on emotions. There is still a tendency for individual disciplines and departments to focus on developing their own academic character and traditions with emotions viewed as belonging solely in the pastoral domain."
Headings Are Pick-Up Lines: 5 Tips for Writing Headlines That Convert - article on Nielsen/Norman Group website by Hoa Loranger. "A headline is often the first piece of content people read. And often it is the ONLY thing people read. If you want to make your encounters with people to be successful, make sure to write solid headlines.... Below are 5 tips for writing engaging headlines:
1. Make sure the headline works out of context.... 2. Tell readers something useful.... 3. Don't succumb to cute or faddish vocabulary.... 4. Omit nonessential words.... 5. Front-load headings with strong keywords."
American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton - review by Nicholae Guyatt in The Guardian. "Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name.... The central paradox of Sutton’s book, which he acknowledges but never quite resolves, is why anyone expecting Armageddon would waste time on politics. For more than a century, prophecy adherents have largely agreed on the end times sequence: war in the Middle East, world government and the rise of the antichrist will mark a seven-year period known as the tribulation. Jews will suffer particular torture, but will ultimately find refuge in Christ. Evangelicals can afford to be sanguine about this because they think God will teleport them to heaven just before things turn bad.... The idea of impending doom has always allowed outsiders to make a virtue of their marginalisation. We can see this in the in the 20s and 30s, when American evangelicals struggled to break into the political mainstream. It seems less true of the period after the second world war as Christian fundamentalism found a foothold in the Republican party. The most iconic postwar evangelicals – Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson – occasionally predicted that the end times were approaching, but focused their energies on mending a broken world. The religious right rejected the idea that vice and godlessness would sweep the US towards apocalypse, looking to mobilise a 'moral majority' behind conservative principles."
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi - review by Avi Schalim in The Guardian. "In 2005, Karmi returned to her homeland not as a tourist but as a consultant to the ministry of media and communications of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She wanted to be at the heart of things, to be part of the community, to make her contribution to state-building.... Karmi’s entire life had centred on the fundamental facts of the catastrophe of 1948, from which all else was derivative. By her own estimation, she is one of the custodians of Palestinian history. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, people like her are irrelevant, far removed from the immediate reality of the extraordinarily harsh conditions imposed on them by the Israelis, their army and their settlements. It was not that the past was another country. But the locals were more preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival against a brutal oppressor than with the grand Palestinian narrative of the past."
‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’ - interview with Sara Paretsky by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. "The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism; so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to 'write a crime novel ... that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society'. With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that; five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to 'helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction'. 'Without her example,' said Val McDermid, speaking at this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival, where Paretsky was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award, 'many of us wouldn’t be where we are today.'"
The arts, the law and freedom of speech - article by Julia Farrington in The Guardian. "We have a problem. The heckler’s veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police have shown that they will all too often take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet still find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protest is trumping the right to freedom of artistic expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy age of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut down are easily made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression."
Ford Madox Ford: as scary as HP Lovecraft? - article by Ned Beauman in The Guardian. "Ford and Lovecraft are not often discussed in the same breath. But in fact they are very similar. The difference is that Lovecraft appears to be writing about cosmic horror but is really writing about sex, whereas Ford appears to be writing about sex but is really writing about cosmic horror. Another way of putting it is that they are writing about exactly the same thing: the feeling that if you peel back the skin of everyday reality, what you will see underneath is something so alien that it will burn away all your sanity points in an instant."
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an 'F' pattern: the top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works by default. The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away."
PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The problem is that any contradictions at the heart of capitalism have always generated contradictory political responses from its opponents. Should a fatally flawed system be allowed to destroy itself or should it be overthrown by force? Can its failings be corrected by taking it over or should socialists opt out altogether and create their own alternative communities? You will get very different answers depending on whether you start with Fourier or Marx, Chartism or Leninism. By touching base with all these approaches and more, Mason seems to indicate that anything goes. He wants more cooperative schemes of free exchange – a 'sharing' economy to replace a predatory one – and more collective ownership as well. He wants the state to do more to tame private finance and individuals to do more to bypass it. The eclecticism of Mason’s approach to economics only produces confusion when it comes to politics."
Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments, They’re Just Different - article by Casey Fabris in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Although some instructors are phasing out journal-keeping assignments in favor of a class blog, a study has found that blogs are not inherently better instructional tools.... With all the hype about blogging, [Drew] Foster ...compared more than 2,000 blog posts and journal entries from intro-sociology classes at [the University of] Michigan. He expected the blogs to yield reflections that were more thoughtful, but that wasn’t what he found. It’s not that one format is better than the other, he discovered, it’s that they’re different. Public blogs encourage students to take intellectual risks, and private journals encourage them to take personal ones."
Living in the age of permawar - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian. "So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own."
Banksy's Dismaland: 'amusements and anarchism' in artist’s biggest project yet - review by Mark Brown in The Guardian. (See pictures.) "He describes it as a 'family theme park unsuitable for small children' – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why. In one tent would-be anarchists can find out how to unlock the Adshel posters seen at bus stops. For £5 people can buy the tools to break into them, replacing the official posters with any propaganda they please.... Across the way is a 'pocket money loans' shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen. ... Other highlights include the Jeffrey Archer Memorial Fire Pit where visitors can warm themselves around a daily burning of the local lord’s books; a model boat pond with dead bodies and overly crowded boats full of asylum seekers; and a puppet revue show constructed from the contents of Hackney skips. In the moat around the castle is an armour-plated riot control vehicle built to serve in Northern Ireland which is now a children’s slide. Banksy himself has created 10 new works, including the Cinderella crash in a large castle. Visitors walk in to discover the pumpkin carriage crashed, Cinderella and horses dead, and paparazzi madly taking photos."
Anita Sarkeesian: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - interview by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
Yes Please by Amy Poehler: a "non-book" - review by Laura Miller in The Guardian. "Yes Please arrives on printed pages sandwiched between cardboard covers, so technically, it is a book. However, it's the type of title the publishing business sometimes refers to as a 'non-book', meaning that it has few of the qualities bookish people like to think of as exmplifying the form. It is not a coherent, well-knit piece of writing organised around a central narrative or argument. It is hard to imagine anyone making sense of parts of it, let alone wanting to read the whole thing, if they aren't already familiar with Amy Poehler's work in film, TV and improv comedy. It is meant for those people who, on hearing Poehler's name, explain, 'Oh, I love her!' Not that there aren't many reasons to love Poehler, who manages to be very funny and fundamentally decent at the same time..."
I believe in an authority greater than David Cameron’s. Am I an extremist? - 'Loose canon' column by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "The Church of England is the longest-running prevent strategy in history. If not from its inception, then certainly from the end of the English civil war, the big idea of the C of E was to prevent radicalisation – precisely the sort of radicalisation that led to religious people butchering each other throughout the 1630s and 40s. ... Increasingly suspicious of theological dispute, the idea was to kill off God – or at least God-talk – with religion. ...Religion itself – going to church and so on – was reclaimable as a part of the much-needed project of national togetherness.... But God had to be kept out of it as much as possible. ...And then along comes Islam – and, thankfully, it disrupts this absurd game and refuses to play by the rules. Its practitioners want to talk about God, sex and politics rather than mortgages, school places and the latest Boden catalogue. ... But David Cameron’s whole attack upon 'non-violent extremism', his upping the ante on the Prevent agenda, is an attempt to replay that clapped-out C of E strategy of stopping people talking about God in a way that might have social or political consequences."
Inside Out: what universities can learn from Pixar about emotions - article in The Conversation by Emma Jones. "In Inside Out, it is emotions which are guiding Riley’s every waking moment and even influencing her dreams.... But for centuries, stemming from the work of philosophers such as Plato and Descartes, emotions have been viewed largely as a series of reckless impulses that were unthinking and potentially destructive..... If Inside Out’s producer, Pete Docter, had subscribed to this theory, the five emotions would have been relegated to a small broom cupboard in the far corner of 'headquarters' and the console guiding Riley would have been firmly in the control of a large, overbearing figure known as cognition or reason....Inside Out follows more recent philosophical and scientific thinking in ascribing a value and importance to emotions.... However, the world of higher education has not yet caught up with contemporary thinking on emotions. There is still a tendency for individual disciplines and departments to focus on developing their own academic character and traditions with emotions viewed as belonging solely in the pastoral domain."
Headings Are Pick-Up Lines: 5 Tips for Writing Headlines That Convert - article on Nielsen/Norman Group website by Hoa Loranger. "A headline is often the first piece of content people read. And often it is the ONLY thing people read. If you want to make your encounters with people to be successful, make sure to write solid headlines.... Below are 5 tips for writing engaging headlines:
1. Make sure the headline works out of context.... 2. Tell readers something useful.... 3. Don't succumb to cute or faddish vocabulary.... 4. Omit nonessential words.... 5. Front-load headings with strong keywords."
American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton - review by Nicholae Guyatt in The Guardian. "Christian fundamentalism was born in the big cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, funded by wealthy businessmen such as Lyman Stewart, a California oil tycoon who bankrolled The Fundamentals (1910-15), the book series that gave the movement its name.... The central paradox of Sutton’s book, which he acknowledges but never quite resolves, is why anyone expecting Armageddon would waste time on politics. For more than a century, prophecy adherents have largely agreed on the end times sequence: war in the Middle East, world government and the rise of the antichrist will mark a seven-year period known as the tribulation. Jews will suffer particular torture, but will ultimately find refuge in Christ. Evangelicals can afford to be sanguine about this because they think God will teleport them to heaven just before things turn bad.... The idea of impending doom has always allowed outsiders to make a virtue of their marginalisation. We can see this in the in the 20s and 30s, when American evangelicals struggled to break into the political mainstream. It seems less true of the period after the second world war as Christian fundamentalism found a foothold in the Republican party. The most iconic postwar evangelicals – Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson – occasionally predicted that the end times were approaching, but focused their energies on mending a broken world. The religious right rejected the idea that vice and godlessness would sweep the US towards apocalypse, looking to mobilise a 'moral majority' behind conservative principles."
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi - review by Avi Schalim in The Guardian. "In 2005, Karmi returned to her homeland not as a tourist but as a consultant to the ministry of media and communications of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She wanted to be at the heart of things, to be part of the community, to make her contribution to state-building.... Karmi’s entire life had centred on the fundamental facts of the catastrophe of 1948, from which all else was derivative. By her own estimation, she is one of the custodians of Palestinian history. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, people like her are irrelevant, far removed from the immediate reality of the extraordinarily harsh conditions imposed on them by the Israelis, their army and their settlements. It was not that the past was another country. But the locals were more preoccupied with the daily struggle for survival against a brutal oppressor than with the grand Palestinian narrative of the past."
‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’ - interview with Sara Paretsky by Sarah Crown in The Guardian. "The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism; so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to 'write a crime novel ... that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society'. With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that; five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to 'helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction'. 'Without her example,' said Val McDermid, speaking at this year’s Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival, where Paretsky was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award, 'many of us wouldn’t be where we are today.'"
The arts, the law and freedom of speech - article by Julia Farrington in The Guardian. "We have a problem. The heckler’s veto is working. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police have shown that they will all too often take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever is provoking the protest. Arts organisations may have prepared well, and yet still find themselves facing the closure of a piece of work. This sends out a disturbing message to artists and arts bodies – that the right to protest is trumping the right to freedom of artistic expression. As things stand, in the trigger-happy age of social media where calls for work that offends to be shut down are easily made and quickly amplified, the arts cannot count on police protection to manage both the right to protest and to artistic expression."
Ford Madox Ford: as scary as HP Lovecraft? - article by Ned Beauman in The Guardian. "Ford and Lovecraft are not often discussed in the same breath. But in fact they are very similar. The difference is that Lovecraft appears to be writing about cosmic horror but is really writing about sex, whereas Ford appears to be writing about sex but is really writing about cosmic horror. Another way of putting it is that they are writing about exactly the same thing: the feeling that if you peel back the skin of everyday reality, what you will see underneath is something so alien that it will burn away all your sanity points in an instant."
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "In Words Onscreen, published this year, the American linguist Naomi Baron surveyed the change in reading patterns that digital publishing has wrought. Where the impact can be measured, it consists primarily of a propensity to summarise. We read webpages in an 'F' pattern: the top line, scroll down a bit, have another read, scroll down. Academics have reacted to the increased volume of digitally published papers by skim-reading them. As for books, both anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that English literature students are skim-reading set works by default. The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away."
PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "The problem is that any contradictions at the heart of capitalism have always generated contradictory political responses from its opponents. Should a fatally flawed system be allowed to destroy itself or should it be overthrown by force? Can its failings be corrected by taking it over or should socialists opt out altogether and create their own alternative communities? You will get very different answers depending on whether you start with Fourier or Marx, Chartism or Leninism. By touching base with all these approaches and more, Mason seems to indicate that anything goes. He wants more cooperative schemes of free exchange – a 'sharing' economy to replace a predatory one – and more collective ownership as well. He wants the state to do more to tame private finance and individuals to do more to bypass it. The eclecticism of Mason’s approach to economics only produces confusion when it comes to politics."
Blogs Aren’t Better Than Journal Assignments, They’re Just Different - article by Casey Fabris in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Although some instructors are phasing out journal-keeping assignments in favor of a class blog, a study has found that blogs are not inherently better instructional tools.... With all the hype about blogging, [Drew] Foster ...compared more than 2,000 blog posts and journal entries from intro-sociology classes at [the University of] Michigan. He expected the blogs to yield reflections that were more thoughtful, but that wasn’t what he found. It’s not that one format is better than the other, he discovered, it’s that they’re different. Public blogs encourage students to take intellectual risks, and private journals encourage them to take personal ones."
Living in the age of permawar - article by Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian. "So you are a reader, a writer, in this, the time of the permawar, searching, among other things, for empathy, for transcendence, for encounters that need not divide us into clans, for stories that can be told around a campfire generous enough for 7 billion, stories that transcend divisions, question the self and the boundaries of groups, stories that are a shared endeavour not at the level of the tribe, but of the human, that remind us we are not adversaries, we are in it together, the great mass murderer, Death, has us all in its sights, and we would do well not to allow ourselves willingly to be its instruments, but instead to recognise one another with compassion, not as predatory cannibals, but as meals for the same shark, each with a limited, precious time to abide, a time that deserves our respect and our wonder, a time that is a story, each of us a story, each of them a story, and each of these other stories, quite possibly, just as unique, just as frightened, as tiny, as vast, as made up as our own."
Banksy's Dismaland: 'amusements and anarchism' in artist’s biggest project yet - review by Mark Brown in The Guardian. (See pictures.) "He describes it as a 'family theme park unsuitable for small children' – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why. In one tent would-be anarchists can find out how to unlock the Adshel posters seen at bus stops. For £5 people can buy the tools to break into them, replacing the official posters with any propaganda they please.... Across the way is a 'pocket money loans' shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%. In front of its counter is a small trampet so children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print drawn up by artist Darren Cullen. ... Other highlights include the Jeffrey Archer Memorial Fire Pit where visitors can warm themselves around a daily burning of the local lord’s books; a model boat pond with dead bodies and overly crowded boats full of asylum seekers; and a puppet revue show constructed from the contents of Hackney skips. In the moat around the castle is an armour-plated riot control vehicle built to serve in Northern Ireland which is now a children’s slide. Banksy himself has created 10 new works, including the Cinderella crash in a large castle. Visitors walk in to discover the pumpkin carriage crashed, Cinderella and horses dead, and paparazzi madly taking photos."
Anita Sarkeesian: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse' - interview by Jessica Valenti in The Guardian. "Sarkeesian began making videos that took on pop culture, from television shows to the Twilight series. In 2012, she decided to dedicate a series of videos to the topic of computer games. She launched a Kickstarter project to fund her Tropes vs Women In Video Games web series, with a modest goal of $6,000. The target was met in 24 hours, and within two weeks she had raised nearly four times that much. That’s when the harassment started: people vandalised her Wikipedia page with gender-based slurs, and her YouTube videos were hit with a barrage of abuse....
For the uninitiated, GamerGate is a Twitter hashtag, which became an online movement that purported to be about journalistic ethics, but which actually focuses on attacking and harassing women such as Sarkeesian.... The truth, Sarkeesian says, is that GamerGate existed for years before it had a name: the same core players, the same harassment, the same abuse. The hashtag just put a name on this 'loosely organised mob' that attacked women in gaming, she tells me."
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett: the much-loved author’s last Discworld novel - review by A.S. Byatt in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s final novel has an unexpected dedication to one of his own characters: 'For Esmerelda Weatherwax – mind how you go.' Granny Weatherwax, who became more and more complex in the long series of Discworld novels in which she appears, was one of Pratchett’s most-loved creations. She is sharp and harsh as well as strong and wise, fearsome as well as resourceful. The beginning of The Shepherd’s Crown is an account of her death, which, being a witch, she is able to foresee accurately and to prepare for. Death, when he comes to fetch her, speaks his admiration. Her fellow witches bury her in a wicker cradle in a forest clearing, and the wizard Ridcully arrives weeping on a broomstick. Everything is changed. And the world of witches rearranges itself, with Tiffany Aching at its centre. I’ve been thinking of that phrase 'Mind how you go', and the difference between Terry Pratchett’s death and the end of Granny Weatherwax. She will indeed go on. But we have lost him. Like her, he made the world a better and livelier and more complicated place. We shall miss him. Very much."
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? by Mick Hume – review by Galen Strawsen in The Guardian. "In Hume’s typology: a 'but-head' [is] someone who says, 'I believe in freedom of speech, but … ' Anyone who says 'but' must deny that the right to free speech is 'indivisible'. Hume thinks that’s a fatal mistake: if you allow any exceptions, the dividing line between permitted and forbidden is no longer perfectly sharp, and you’re on a slippery slope, risking more and more restrictions. I disagree: the line is no longer sharp, but it’s not true that we’re on a slippery slope. The first amendment of the US constitution states categorically that 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press' (Hume calls it “the global gold standard” of free speech). The court’s defence of the first amendment over the years shows how the line can be held even after exceptions are allowed, for it does place limits on free speech – for example, on 'fighting words', deliberately intended and likely to incite 'imminent lawless action'; on explicit threats against specific targets; and on false shouts of 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre. Hume admits these exceptions to unrestricted free speech, and then makes a rationalisation that he condemns elsewhere: he says they’re 'not cases of free speech', 'not about free speech at all'. Yet each states quite plainly and correctly that you can’t say what you like, where you like, when you like: they place a limit on speech."
How JB Priestley’s Inspector first called on the USSR - article by Valerie Grove in The Guardian. "An Inspector Calls, set in 1912 in the household of a prosperous northern manufacturer, Arthur Birling, had been germinating in Priestley’s mind since before the war. A mysterious stranger arrives during a family dinner and insists on interrogating each of the diners about the suicide of a young girl. Guilty secrets are revealed, and a heavy moral message is conveyed about communal responsibility. Priestley finished the play in the winter of 1944-5. It was bold of him to have his first postwar play premiered in Russia as he was already considered a dangerous leftie in some quarters. In his wartime Postscripts for the BBC, hadn’t he used the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” when calling for a better postwar world? The gleeful Tory rumour was that his new play had been rejected, but the truth was no suitable London theatre was available. His Russian translator approached Russian theatres, and it was snapped up."
Typewriter, you're fired! How writers learned to love the computer - article by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Writers are fetishistic about their writerly tools. In The Writer and the Word Processor, a guide for authors by Ray Hammond published in 1984, a year before the Amstrad launched, the computer refusenik Fay Weldon was quoted as saying that 'there is some mystical connection between the brain and the actual act of writing in longhand'. Iris Murdoch agreed: 'Why not use one’s mind in the old way, instead of dazzling one’s eyes staring at a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness?' Writers either felt that their muse flowed through the natural loops of their handwriting, or they had grown used to the tactile rituals of typewriting: that click of the ratchet as you fed in the paper, the Kalashnikov sound of the keys, the ping of the carriage-return bell and the final whoosh when you pulled out the paper, which by then was smothered with little raised areas of correction fluid so it looked, in Diana Athill’s words, 'like a London pavement partly thawed after a snowstorm'. All this gave you a sense of industry, as if you were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone weaving cloth. The Amstrad changed all this, for the simple reason that it cost £399, word-processing program and dot-matrix printer included, while an Apple Mac or IBM system cost four times as much. The Amstrad’s price lured in those writers who were beginning to realise that, on their Smith Coronas and Olivettis, they were spending as much time retyping as typing. A critical mass formed."
Wednesday, 19 August 2015
Pushing stuff into people: how NOT to do training, by Charlie Chaplin
I was reminded of this scene from Chaplin's film 'Modern Times' recently when discussing staff development.
Credit for seeing the feeding machine as a metaphor for (bad) training goes to John O'Donoghue, who played this clip during a conference at the University of Wolverhampton's Learning Lab in 2001. His point was that e-learning (as we called it back then) was being seen by managers as a way of avoiding the expense and lost time of sending staff away on training courses, just as the manager in this clip hopes to avoid the expense and lost time of his workers stopping for lunch. But if all e-learning does is try to push information into people, it's likely to be as ineffective and impractical as the feeding machine.
In this connection, the speech from the machine salesman given in the preceding scene (ironically delivered by gramophone record) is particularly interesting, because in 2001 it did sound precisely like the way in which e-learning was being sold.
Good morning, my friends. This record comes to you through the Sales Talk Transcription Company, Incorporated: your speaker, the Mechanical Salesman. May I take the pleasure of introducing Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, the inventor of the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work? Don't stop for lunch: be ahead of your competitor. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead. Allow us to point out some of the features of this wonderful machine: its beautiful, aerodynamic, streamlined body; its smoothness of action, made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearings. Let us acquaint you with our automaton soup plate - its compressed-air blower, no breath necessary, no energy required to cool the soup. Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food pusher. Observe our counter-shaft, double-knee-action corn feeder, with its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the hydro-compressed, sterilized mouth wiper: its factors of control insure against spots on the shirt front. These are but a few of the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine. Let us demonstrate with one of your workers, for actions speak louder than words. Remember, if you wish to keep ahead of your competitor, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of the Billows Feeding Machine.
Seen and heard: July 2015
This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Trouble Life of the BBC – book by Charlotte Higgins. A journalist’s touch makes this an easy but illuminating read, moving seamlessly between historical account and perennial broadcasting issues. How far-sighted of Alan Rusbridger (then Editor of The Guardian) to assign her to work on this book, now paying dividends for the wider context it provides as the renegotiation of the BBC Charter – with potentially radical changes to the BBC’s scope and mission – kicks off in earnest.
Mr Holmes – new film, with Ian McKellen, excellent of course, playing Sherlock Holmes convincingly at three different ages or stages: old, very old but healthy, and very old and ill. Great concept: the long-retired Holmes, keeping bees in the Sussex Downs, struggling to remember his last case which was the reason he gave up detection, with the audience invited to solve the mystery – both intellectual and emotional – along with him as detail after detail successively becomes clear. A lovely tale, another great piece of work from BBC Films.
Gloucester Cathedral – a great place to spend a day, wandering along the side aisles and through the quire (sic) and lady chapel (one of the biggest I’ve seen) and around the cloister court, stopping off for the occasional history lesson from the excellent walk-around guide leaflet or for lunch in the café or for souvenir hunting in the shop. Very nice to see so many contemporary statues in the gothic niches, as some kind of replacement for those destroyed at the Reformation.
Eric Whitacre singers with Laura Mvula – performing in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Cheltenham Festival, with the bonus that we also got hear them rehearse in the afternoon. The Eric Whitacre sound – all the standards, from 'Lux Aurumque' to 'Sleep', wonderful in the resonant acoustic – segued beautifully with Renaissance Polyphony (Dufay’s 'Ave maris stella') and the harmonic backing to three Mvula numbers (which we’ve told them they should record). Well worth the journey, well worth the price of admission.
The Blackwell Deception – fourth adventure game in the Blackwell sequence created by Dave Gilbert. Extraordinary how the basic story premise – a New York medium and her private eye spirit guide find unhappy spirits and help them to move on – has been spun through so many variations and taken to such depths.
Inside Out – very smart new film from Pixar, dramatising the inner emotional life of an eleven-year -old girl. Actually it cheats in a way: whereas Anger, Fear and Disgust and to a lesser extent Sadness are pure emotions and act only according to their type, Joy is actually a rounded character in her own right. She has her hang-ups (an obsession with giving her girl a “perfect day”) and her own inner emotions (fear and panic when events slip out of her control, contempt for Sadness when she is too depressed to continue), and goes on her own emotional journey as she comes to realise that life isn’t all about her. (For me, the beautiful smile which Sadness gives when Joy finally acknowledges and accepts her is the culmination of the film.) A nice article by OU academic Emma Jones points out how the film reflects the rehabilitation of the emotions in our conception of human nature: not so long ago, such a film would have shown cognitive reason in charge of the mental headquarters, with the emotions relegated to a cupboard.
Mr Holmes – new film, with Ian McKellen, excellent of course, playing Sherlock Holmes convincingly at three different ages or stages: old, very old but healthy, and very old and ill. Great concept: the long-retired Holmes, keeping bees in the Sussex Downs, struggling to remember his last case which was the reason he gave up detection, with the audience invited to solve the mystery – both intellectual and emotional – along with him as detail after detail successively becomes clear. A lovely tale, another great piece of work from BBC Films.
Gloucester Cathedral – a great place to spend a day, wandering along the side aisles and through the quire (sic) and lady chapel (one of the biggest I’ve seen) and around the cloister court, stopping off for the occasional history lesson from the excellent walk-around guide leaflet or for lunch in the café or for souvenir hunting in the shop. Very nice to see so many contemporary statues in the gothic niches, as some kind of replacement for those destroyed at the Reformation.
Eric Whitacre singers with Laura Mvula – performing in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Cheltenham Festival, with the bonus that we also got hear them rehearse in the afternoon. The Eric Whitacre sound – all the standards, from 'Lux Aurumque' to 'Sleep', wonderful in the resonant acoustic – segued beautifully with Renaissance Polyphony (Dufay’s 'Ave maris stella') and the harmonic backing to three Mvula numbers (which we’ve told them they should record). Well worth the journey, well worth the price of admission.
The Blackwell Deception – fourth adventure game in the Blackwell sequence created by Dave Gilbert. Extraordinary how the basic story premise – a New York medium and her private eye spirit guide find unhappy spirits and help them to move on – has been spun through so many variations and taken to such depths.
Inside Out – very smart new film from Pixar, dramatising the inner emotional life of an eleven-year -old girl. Actually it cheats in a way: whereas Anger, Fear and Disgust and to a lesser extent Sadness are pure emotions and act only according to their type, Joy is actually a rounded character in her own right. She has her hang-ups (an obsession with giving her girl a “perfect day”) and her own inner emotions (fear and panic when events slip out of her control, contempt for Sadness when she is too depressed to continue), and goes on her own emotional journey as she comes to realise that life isn’t all about her. (For me, the beautiful smile which Sadness gives when Joy finally acknowledges and accepts her is the culmination of the film.) A nice article by OU academic Emma Jones points out how the film reflects the rehabilitation of the emotions in our conception of human nature: not so long ago, such a film would have shown cognitive reason in charge of the mental headquarters, with the emotions relegated to a cupboard.
Monday, 3 August 2015
Cuttings: July 2015
This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins - review by Melvyn Bragg in The Guardian. "Charlotte Higgins’s This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC is an account of an organisation that embraces so many aspects of this country’s life, traditions and personality that it seems to represent the British character itself. The book could scarcely be better or better timed. It is elegantly written, closely argued, balanced, pulls no punches and yet wears its respect for the BBC on its sleeve."
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H Thaler - review by Richard Reeves in The Guardian. "Along with Cass Sunstein, Thaler became an international public intellectual in 2008, with the publication of their bestselling book Nudge. Both have influenced public policy in the US, and even more so in the UK.... In his new book, Thaler tells the gripping story of his own career in economics and the development of the new behaviourally influenced branch.... As his story unfolds, a ragtag band of economists, social scientists and psychologists find each other’s work and begin, bit by bit, to dismantle some of the basic tenets of economic theory. Drawing on studies of how people behave in real life – buying and selling wine, competing in gameshows, drafting NFL players, saving for old age – the rebels showed that people consistently and predictably failed to act as the economics textbooks said they should."
‘Anarchism could help to save the world’- article by David Priestland in The Guardian. "Kropotkin’s synthesis can be found in two of the most important – and readable – texts of anarchism: The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Society, he argued, could be run along the lines of the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their 'semi-communistic brotherly organisation', free of domination by either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture would make such decentralised development highly productive.... Now states have yet again fallen in popular esteem, damaged by the crisis of Keynesian and communist economics since the 1970s, and by the rise of '60s' values, which prize individual self-expression and personal fulfilment over loyalty to nation states and other centralised institutions. This individualism is particularly strong among the educated and the young, just as it was among the Bohemians of Victorian England. And it is no surprise that anarchism should have become important again on the left in recent years – from the 'anti-globalisers' of the late 1990s, to the 2011 Occupy movement."
Why I fasted for 11 days - article by Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian. "It’s important to say that fasting is not starvation. The anxiety and fear that attend lack of food in critical circumstances of famine or enforced deprivation are not present if you are fasting voluntarily. Nor are you beating up your body to get it in line. You are in control, but this is a partnership – your body and you. When I began reading about fasting, before it was my turn to try it, I found that religious visionaries such as St John of the Cross, St Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich all recommended fasting as a way to clear the head and concentrate. Gandhi fasted in order to focus his mind. Pythagoras refused to accept anyone into his school who did not know how to fast....
So what happens when we stop eating? The body first uses up the glycogen stores in the liver. That might take 12 hours, or 24 hours. Afterwards, the body will have to use proteins (muscles) or lipids (fats) to produce the energy (glucose) it needs.... This is where the process gets exciting. Imagine your house is freezing and you have to burn the furniture to keep warm. First you burn the rubbish, stuff you have been hoarding for years and don’t really need. The body does the same. Sick cells, old cells, decomposed tissues, are burned away. This is the ultimate spring clean. It allows the body to eliminate toxins and metabolic waste at the same time as turning them into heat and energy. And you can live off this rubbish for days. Next, the body will go for its fat reserves. Most of us have plenty of fat for the body to get busy on – and belly fat is an easy target. As one doctor at the clinic told me: 'You haven’t stopped eating – only you are eating from the inside for now.' But the process of ketosis is more than the body eating itself. While fasting, the body goes into repair mode."
The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment - article by Maria Konnokova in The New Yorker, referenced in MindHacks blog, 'Context is the New Black'. "The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.... Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison’s 'warden' was also a researcher.) Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the 'superintendent' and 'warden' overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are.... Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment.... In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether [the wording of the recruitment advertisement] may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase 'prison life.' They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism."... [So] while it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors."
How business schools lost the moral plot - post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the drivers of inequality ... is the colossal increase in the remuneration of senior executives in major public companies. Since much of this increase is accounted for by the switch from mere salary to salary-plus-stock-options, it has incentivised executives to prioritise share price at the expense of almost everything else. But who taught these executives the techniques needed to boost share prices? Answer: the business schools which gave them their MBAs. But in looking at modern business schools, it’s clear that they are very different from their first predecessors like the Sloan School in MIT.... So what happened to turn an MBA from a sensible preparation for a professional career as an executive into a sausage machine for shareholder-value-maximisation? It might be worth looking to From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana for some answers...." Extract from the book's blurb: "Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits."
The end of capitalism has begun - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian, based on his book Postcapitalism. "With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.... The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.... If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide."
How can we fix unconscious racism? - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian, Headquarters blog. "Xaio and colleagues at Zheijiang Normal University in China repeated a common measure of implicit racial bias: the ‘angry=outgroup’ test. Here photos of faces were morphed so that it was ambiguous whether they were Chinese or African. Each face was presented twice, once looking angry and once looking happy, and respondents asked to decide what race the face was. As in previous tests, Chinese adults and children tended to say that the happy faces were Chinese and the angry faces were African. This is the same pattern as for white American children and adults who tend to say that happy faces are white and angry faces are black. The researchers then introduced a very quick intervention. Four, 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to discriminate between 5 African faces and had to remember what number went with each face before they could proceed to the next step. This task forced children to focus on the individual differences between the faces. When the angry=outgroup test was repeated, the bias had disappeared. Children were just as likely to say that the angry faces were Chinese as African. This simple intervention seems to have disrupted what was previously considered a very deep rooted and difficult to change bias."
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics by Richard H Thaler - review by Richard Reeves in The Guardian. "Along with Cass Sunstein, Thaler became an international public intellectual in 2008, with the publication of their bestselling book Nudge. Both have influenced public policy in the US, and even more so in the UK.... In his new book, Thaler tells the gripping story of his own career in economics and the development of the new behaviourally influenced branch.... As his story unfolds, a ragtag band of economists, social scientists and psychologists find each other’s work and begin, bit by bit, to dismantle some of the basic tenets of economic theory. Drawing on studies of how people behave in real life – buying and selling wine, competing in gameshows, drafting NFL players, saving for old age – the rebels showed that people consistently and predictably failed to act as the economics textbooks said they should."
‘Anarchism could help to save the world’- article by David Priestland in The Guardian. "Kropotkin’s synthesis can be found in two of the most important – and readable – texts of anarchism: The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899). Society, he argued, could be run along the lines of the peasant communities he saw in Siberia, with their 'semi-communistic brotherly organisation', free of domination by either the state or the market. And this, he insisted, was not mere nostalgia or utopianism, for new technology and modern agriculture would make such decentralised development highly productive.... Now states have yet again fallen in popular esteem, damaged by the crisis of Keynesian and communist economics since the 1970s, and by the rise of '60s' values, which prize individual self-expression and personal fulfilment over loyalty to nation states and other centralised institutions. This individualism is particularly strong among the educated and the young, just as it was among the Bohemians of Victorian England. And it is no surprise that anarchism should have become important again on the left in recent years – from the 'anti-globalisers' of the late 1990s, to the 2011 Occupy movement."
Why I fasted for 11 days - article by Jeanette Winterson in The Guardian. "It’s important to say that fasting is not starvation. The anxiety and fear that attend lack of food in critical circumstances of famine or enforced deprivation are not present if you are fasting voluntarily. Nor are you beating up your body to get it in line. You are in control, but this is a partnership – your body and you. When I began reading about fasting, before it was my turn to try it, I found that religious visionaries such as St John of the Cross, St Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich all recommended fasting as a way to clear the head and concentrate. Gandhi fasted in order to focus his mind. Pythagoras refused to accept anyone into his school who did not know how to fast....
So what happens when we stop eating? The body first uses up the glycogen stores in the liver. That might take 12 hours, or 24 hours. Afterwards, the body will have to use proteins (muscles) or lipids (fats) to produce the energy (glucose) it needs.... This is where the process gets exciting. Imagine your house is freezing and you have to burn the furniture to keep warm. First you burn the rubbish, stuff you have been hoarding for years and don’t really need. The body does the same. Sick cells, old cells, decomposed tissues, are burned away. This is the ultimate spring clean. It allows the body to eliminate toxins and metabolic waste at the same time as turning them into heat and energy. And you can live off this rubbish for days. Next, the body will go for its fat reserves. Most of us have plenty of fat for the body to get busy on – and belly fat is an easy target. As one doctor at the clinic told me: 'You haven’t stopped eating – only you are eating from the inside for now.' But the process of ketosis is more than the body eating itself. While fasting, the body goes into repair mode."
The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment - article by Maria Konnokova in The New Yorker, referenced in MindHacks blog, 'Context is the New Black'. "The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.... Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison’s 'warden' was also a researcher.) Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the 'superintendent' and 'warden' overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are.... Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment.... In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether [the wording of the recruitment advertisement] may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase 'prison life.' They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism."... [So] while it’s true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it’s also the case that their environment was designed to encourage—and, in some cases, to require—those behaviors."
How business schools lost the moral plot - post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the drivers of inequality ... is the colossal increase in the remuneration of senior executives in major public companies. Since much of this increase is accounted for by the switch from mere salary to salary-plus-stock-options, it has incentivised executives to prioritise share price at the expense of almost everything else. But who taught these executives the techniques needed to boost share prices? Answer: the business schools which gave them their MBAs. But in looking at modern business schools, it’s clear that they are very different from their first predecessors like the Sloan School in MIT.... So what happened to turn an MBA from a sensible preparation for a professional career as an executive into a sausage machine for shareholder-value-maximisation? It might be worth looking to From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana for some answers...." Extract from the book's blurb: "Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits."
The end of capitalism has begun - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian, based on his book Postcapitalism. "With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.... The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.... If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide."
How can we fix unconscious racism? - article by Nathalia Gjersoe in The Guardian, Headquarters blog. "Xaio and colleagues at Zheijiang Normal University in China repeated a common measure of implicit racial bias: the ‘angry=outgroup’ test. Here photos of faces were morphed so that it was ambiguous whether they were Chinese or African. Each face was presented twice, once looking angry and once looking happy, and respondents asked to decide what race the face was. As in previous tests, Chinese adults and children tended to say that the happy faces were Chinese and the angry faces were African. This is the same pattern as for white American children and adults who tend to say that happy faces are white and angry faces are black. The researchers then introduced a very quick intervention. Four, 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to discriminate between 5 African faces and had to remember what number went with each face before they could proceed to the next step. This task forced children to focus on the individual differences between the faces. When the angry=outgroup test was repeated, the bias had disappeared. Children were just as likely to say that the angry faces were Chinese as African. This simple intervention seems to have disrupted what was previously considered a very deep rooted and difficult to change bias."
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