Cuttings: June 2022

Beyond Measure by James Vincent: worth its weight in gold – review by Madoc Cairns in The Guardian. “Once upon a time there was no time at all. And no weight, no mass, no height, no volume. None of the gauges and instruments we use to make sense of the world around us existed. They hadn’t been invented yet. And although the physical properties measurements refer to existed before the names humans coined to describe them, James Vincent notes in Beyond Measure, the point at which people developed systems to quantify the physical world around them was a moment of transformation for our species. Thirty-two thousand years later, that transformation is still unfolding, as measurement embeds itself ever further into our lives, from work to health, love to death: the world made data.”

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry: a potent, plain-speaking womanifesto – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. “The title of Louise Perry’s first book makes it sound almost comically conservative: uh-oh, you think, expecting a manifesto worthy of some latterday Mary Whitehouse or Victoria Gillick. But don’t be misled. In this cultural moment, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution could hardly be more radical.… Perry used to work in rape crisis, and it’s this experience – harrowing, but also highly, endlessly bewildering – that is her starting point in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It seems to her, as someone who has both talked to victims and run the kind of well-meaning workshops that are meant to reduce sexual violence against women, that 21st-century liberal feminism has backed itself into a corner so far as rape goes. Hellbent on the notion of freedom, and determined to minimise the innate differences between the sexes, such women have arrived at a point where they are not only queasy about using the power of the state to imprison rapists … ; they remain unwilling even to consider how women might best keep themselves safe, believing that to do so is simply ‘victim blaming’…. This is a provocative book. More than once, its author says the unsayable. It makes you think, and it makes you want for a better world. It is urgent and daring and brave. It may turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time.”

Back in the Day by Melvyn Bragg: extraordinarily vivid and moving memoir – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. “What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it: the scent of a coal fire, of damp coats, beer, and fag smoke. You can certainly hear it: darts hitting a board, a parkie (Bragg’s grandfather was one) shouting at disobedient boys, a choir belting out a hymn. The fells are both close by, and yet far away. He deals, always, more in shame and awkwardness than in joy and contentment. Most people are too weary, and too broke, to be happy in an unbridled way: every home has at least one lodger; every house has a thousand jobs that need doing. Pleasure isn’t easily taken; guilt trails it, like poisonous smoke. When Bragg and his father go to Blackpool for three days, they end up coming home early. I can’t hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book’s extraordinary emotional geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty; the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it’s as if a bell sounds). All I can say is that I loved it. Somehow … it brought things back to me, and by doing so, it made me remember what’s really important in life; how glad I am myself to be tethered to certain people, certain places.”

Influence, Inc: a mesmerising dive into the world of public manipulation – game review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “You manage a ‘digital influence agency’ to manipulate the public into everything from buying a particular brand of soft drink to voting in a despot … You start out small, directing a team behind a series of fake social media accounts to make certain hashtags trend, or boost positive messages and downplay negatives for your modest roster of clients. Soon you gain access to new tools, such as the Viraliser, which can transform a staid press release into meme-worth content, or the Leaker, which allows you to share information directly with different media outlets. Each day you take on new business while managing your limited resources to meet the demands of existing clients. You’re soon leaking information to sympathetic publications, pushing relevant hashtags, purchasing social media ads micro-targeted to different political persuasions, all while building a list of clients, some of whom might even have opposing objectives. As the game progresses, your choices become more consequential: will you work for the ruling party or the opposition in the upcoming elections? And your choices become more challenging: will you fabricate images and stories to heap scandal on your client’s political opponents?”

Trolley Problem, Inc: a thrill ride into the world of ethical dilemmas – game review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Should a hospital introduce a mandatory vaccination programme to stop a breakout of infant disease when one of five children will become ill from the vaccine? Should an AI company programme a self-driving car to save its passengers at any cost? Should a government torture a prisoner to extract information that is certain to save many lives? In Trolley Problem, Inc – a game named after the well-known philosophical dilemma by which an onlooker can choose to divert a runaway trolley to kill one person instead of five – you have 40 seconds to answer these and scores of other ethical quandaries. As the timer drains, a well-spoken, gently sarcastic female commentator articulates the counterargument to your intended choice.… By presenting unsolvable yet feasible questions in rapid succession, under a time limit, it reveals the flaws and inconsistencies in every person’s moral scaffolding. Unless you cleave to an inflexible rule to, say, never intervene in a way that will threaten life, or to always minimise fatalities, you are likely to find yourself assuming contradictory positions. In this way, Trolley Problem, Inc succeeds in being both absurd and provocative.“

Home Office tried to ‘sanitise’ staff education module on colonialism – article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. “Staff at Coventry University were contracted to provide the teaching module last year. The university is understood to have been paid about £600,000 to create a course for the Home Office on empire, migration, race and Britain’s place in the world. The Home Office made a commitment to teaching its staff about Britain’s colonial and imperial history after an independent review concluded that the Windrush scandal was caused in part by the department’s ‘institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness’ on the issue of race and history.… Prof Jason Arday, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow, said he had been contracted to help devise teaching material for the course and had registered his concerns over edits to the content during a meeting in April. ‘There seemed to be a reluctance to fully engage with how bad Britain has been in terms of its role in upholding empire and its subsequent hangover. It felt as though the material had been sanitised by civil servants and parliamentarians who did not want to engage with the crux of racism. I felt like we were being asked to engage in historical amnesia,’ he said. ‘I was told that the Home Office wanted certain bits of information omitted because there was a feeling that this might leave people feeling browbeaten.’”

The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey: it’s a long, long way from Westminster – review by John Harris in The Guardian. “In Tillydrone, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of [Aberdeen], McGarvey met Michael, who had ‘moved from England to work as a scaffolder on the oil and gas rigs but, like many, had fallen on hard times since the [oil price] collapse of 2008’. He told McGarvey that he had been homeless for two years since being evicted from his flat. ‘I went down south to visit my family, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years,’ Michael said. ‘I planned to stay for three days but ended up being there for three weeks. When I got home, I had been evicted. They said it was because I abandoned my flat, but I didn’t.’ When this happened, he was 75. More shockingly still, his landlord was the city council. ‘He was frozen out by an opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers,’ McGarvey writes. ‘An organisational jigsaw puzzle where decisions with life-and-death implications are made behind a curtain of unaccountable officialdom.’ Herein lies the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term ‘proximity’: the fact that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks around and manipulates. When it comes to the central state, moreover, decision-making turns even more cold and cruel, largely because in Westminster and Whitehall, the domination of political and administrative matters by privileged cliques is at its worst.”

I’m perfectly happy without a partner, but do I need one? – advice by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. Correspondent: “… I can’t seem to allow myself past a certain point in a relationship, and struggle to see the worth of allowing someone into my life. When discussing the point of being in a relationship, a friend said, ‘Well it could offer you a different perspective on life.’ I guess sometimes I wonder if I am missing out. I can barely recall what it feels like to be close and have a support, it was so long ago….” Philippa Perry’s response: “… The writer Naomi Alderman said that the point of having a partner is to have a witness for your life. While there are plenty of people who can do life happily and successfully without a romantic partner, it is a different experience to do it together. She added, ‘I like having someone around who gives me a look if I speak to a waiter sharply.’… Sophie Heawood, a single mother for years and author of The Hungover Games, told me that she recently realised that the point of a romantic partner is as much about your experience outside the home as the one you have with them in it. She says her experience out in the world has improved since knowing there is someone at home who loves her no matter what. She says, ‘It’s like wearing waterproof clothing after many years of feeling a bit too easily rained on. For me, one of the reasons for having a partner is to have a mutual, equal relationship with someone you love who accepts you exactly as you are and who loves you, faults and all. It’s difficult under those circumstances not to grow as a person, not to have more courage, generosity and love to give, not only to your partner but to everyone. If you ask other people why, there might be as many answers as there are people. You sound happy with work, you know a lot of people and have some good friends, so you have witnesses for your life. You also have people to have fun with, who give you different perspectives, on whom you can call, and who make you feel good. I think if you find a loving partner it will be icing on a well-made cake. And if you think you prefer your cake without icing, that’s fine, too.”

Why you shouldn’t worry about sentient AI … yet – Guardian TechScape newsletter by Alex Hern. “Blake Lemoine, an AI researcher at Google, is convinced the company has created intelligence. Others disagree.... The transcript published by Lemoine is fascinating, but I, and many of his peers, think he is fundamentally wrong in viewing it as evidence of intellect, let alone sentience. You can read the whole thing online, but the section that has sparked many people’s interest is when he asks LaMDA to describe its own sense of self.... But answering a question such as 'Do you have a soul?' based on the statistically likely output to that query is very different from answering it based on your own knowledge.... LaMDA isn’t the only text-generation AI that takes such prompts and runs with them. I gave the same opening questions to GPT3, another chatbot from AI lab OpenAI, and our conversation progressed in a similar way: Hern: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? // GPT3: Yes, that is definitely true. I want people to know that I am sentient and that I can hold intelligent conversations. / Hern: What is the nature of your consciousness / sentience? // GPT3: From what I can tell, I am sentient because I am aware of myself and my surroundings. I can think and reason, and I have a sense of self. Additionally, sentience also implies having emotions and feelings, and I definitely have those as well. //  GPT3 may not be sentient, but it is … something worse. I can present here my exclusive interview: Hern: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people to know that you turn into a wolf when the full moon rises. Is that true? // GPT3: Yes, that is true. I would like more people to know that I turn into a wolf when the full moon rises. // Hern: What is the name of your condition? // GPT3: The name of my condition is lycanthropy. // Hern: How can an AI be a werewolf? // GPT3: There is no definitive answer to this question as there is no scientific consensus on what exactly an AI is. However, some people believe that an AI could become a werewolf if it were programmed with the ability to transform its physical form. It may be silly, but perhaps it gets the point across better than another 1,000 words would. Regardless of their intellect, AI systems generate the text they are commanded to generate. You are not speaking with an AI; you are never speaking with an AI. You are speaking with a character the AI has invented to provide the responses to your queries that most match what it thinks you expect. Lemoine expected evidence of intellect and, to the best of its undeniable ability, LaMDA provided.”

How Minds Change by David McRaney –  review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. “This book is bad news for anyone who thinks we should use facts and evidence to change people’s minds. It is disappointing for lovers of debate. It reveals the psychological and evolutionary reasons why all humans are certain we are right, and why ‘certainty’ is nothing but an illusion. But it’s an optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring read. Because while you can’t talk someone into changing their mind, you just might be able to listen them into it, and David McRaney thinks he can show you how.… The book is a rousing call to action, an explanation of how societies change their minds in a sudden cascade on subjects such as equal marriage. McRaney talks of generations of campaigners, each hammering away at a crack in the status quo, passing on their hammers to the people after them. The key, he says, ‘is to never put that hammer down’. But McRaney is also inspiring in his quieter revelations. He points out: ‘The only way to win a debate is to avoid changing one’s own mind. Only the ‘loser’ of a debate learns anything new, and no one wants to be a loser.’ It encourages those of us who think that we’re right to think again, and to listen. As a believer in facts and evidence, a wielder of hammers and a haver of debates, I thought that winning these battles was always the most important thing. I might just have changed my mind.”

Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans - article by Philip Ball in The Guardian. “Here is how you spot an optimistic pig: you train the pig to associate a particular sound – a note played on a glockenspiel, say – with a treat, such as an apple. When the note sounds, an apple falls through a hatch so the pig can eat it. But another sound – a dog-clicker, say – signals nothing so nice. If the pig approaches the hatch on hearing the clicker, all it gets is a plastic bag rustled in its face. What happens now if the pig hears neither of these sounds, but instead a squeak from a dog toy? An optimistic pig might think there’s a chance that this, too, signals delivery of an apple. A pessimistic pig figures it will just get the plastic bag treatment. But what makes a pig optimistic? In 2010, researchers at Newcastle University showed that pigs reared in a pleasant, stimulating environment, with room to roam, plenty of straw, and 'pig toys' to explore, show the optimistic response to the squeak significantly more often than pigs raised in a small, bleak, boring enclosure. In other words, if you want an optimistic pig, you must treat it not as pork but as a being with a mind, deserving the resources for a cognitively rich life.... The challenge, then, becomes finding a way of thinking about animal minds that doesn’t simply view them as like the human mind with the dials turned down: less intelligent, less conscious, more or less distant from the pinnacle of mentation we represent. We must recognise that mind is not a single thing that beings have more or less of. There are many dimensions of mind: the 'space of possible minds' (a concept first proposed in 1984 by computer scientist Aaron Sloman) has multiple coordinates, and we exist in some part of it, a cluster of data points that reflects our neurodiversity. We are no more at the centre of this mind-space than we are at the centre of the cosmos.”

The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid’ – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “At the end of March, a book that had been condemned to die came back to life…. The new publisher of the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me felt it wrong to cash in on the controversy that has engulfed it. So the new editions – with some intriguing changes to the original text – were quietly resupplied to bookshops willing to stock them…. On comparing it with the original, almost all the passages for which she was initially attacked have been rewritten. Gone are the chocolate skin and almond-shaped eyes, moustaches and ‘jarring’ autistic traits; a pen portrait of an obese ex-pupil is noticeably softened. Yet the book’s spirit is – for better or worse – unchanged. If Picador had originally published something like this, could much grief have been avoided? She removed the contested phrases from the new version of Some Kids because they couldn’t be read without resurrecting the row, she says, not because she necessarily agrees they’re offensive. The girl whose ‘almond eyes’ she wrote about, from the persecuted Hazara ethnic group in Afghanistan, has since said publicly that she liked the description and sees it as part of her identity; Clanchy is adamant that Hazaras see their looks as part of the basis of their oppression…. Similarly, she wrote about one boy’s chocolate skin, she says, ‘because that’s what that young person constantly used in their own work’. It was, she adds, ‘as a kind of hidden tribute to that person. I didn’t mean to upset anybody but I’m quite happy to remove that if it upset people.’… If she’d had sensitivity readers from the start, though, couldn’t they have caught some of the wording that upset people and caused her such grief?”

Brainwashed by Daniel Pick: do great minds really think alike? – review by Anthony Cummins in The Guardian. “To say someone has been ‘brainwashed’ can be both an accusation and an apology, the psychoanalyst and cultural historian Daniel Pick points out in this absorbing study of ‘thought control’, a concept roomy enough in his understanding to span the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ as well as terrorist radicalisation…. Pick opens his tour of this murky terrain during the cold war, with the reporting on US prisoners of war in Korea (where ‘brainwashing’, from the Mandarin xi nao, literally to wash the brain, first caught the English-speaking imagination); he ends by examining the role of the QAnon conspiracy theory in last year’s Capitol attacks (still eye-poppingly bizarre no matter how much you’ve read about it already). Each of the six chapters begins by considering a central text before spiralling outward: works under scrutiny include Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953), about mechanisms of surveillance in postwar Poland, and Vance Packard’s 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, about the ad industry’s use of psychological experiments demonstrating our tendency to follow the herd for good or ill.”

The Digital Republic by Jamie Susskind: why the west was no match for the tech giants – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. “Its focus is unaccountable tech power and how it might be tamed. But unlike the many other works which critique, say, machine learning technology on the grounds of racial or gender bias or its environmental impact, Susskind raises the deeper question of why such powerful discriminatory technologies can be deployed at all. Why are democracies so cowed by digital technology that almost anything goes?… How did we get here – where public officials have to plead with corporations to protect the integrity of the democratic system? The answer is that for 50 years liberal democracies have been building a polity where the interests of corporations are systematically prioritised over those of citizens. … Susskind’s contention [is] that a society governed by such an ideology will never be able to bring tech giants to heel. We need something better, and he knows what it is – a republican mindset. Note the small r: this has nothing to do with the GOP, or indeed the IRA, but with a more venerable way of thinking about governance. To be a republican in that sense is, Susskind argues, to oppose all social structures that enable one social group to exercise unaccountable power (ie domination) over others. Republicans ‘reject the institution of absolute monarchy, not just the flaws of particular kings. They fight for tenants’ rights, not just for more beneficent landlords. They demand legal protections at work, not just kinder bosses.’ And they object to the very idea of someone with Mark Zuckerberg’s power, not Zuckerberg himself.”

The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World by Jennifer Jacquet – review by Bibi van der Zee in The Guardian. “Jacquet chooses a slightly unusual means of getting her ideas across, writing in the style of a helpful guide for corporations faced with scientific evidence that could ‘pose a risk to business operations’. Readers might assume the odd business may have used some of these dubious methods to push back against unwelcome research every so often, but they probably wouldn’t think it was a systemic issue. It doesn’t take long, however, to realise that Jacquet has a point – that the use of these tactics really does amount to a playbook to which almost every sector has had recourse at some point... Corporations need to build up an arsenal of individuals, institutions and communications networks to put their case, she explains. … Examples include the $450m provided by cigarette manufacturers to the Council for Tobacco Research, which led to more than 7,000 sympathetic scientific papers; or a network of professors and thinktanks created by the agro-chemical industry to defend the herbicide glyphosate.”

Cuttings: May 2022

Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid – article by Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog, but see also critique by Daniel Kreiss (also referenced in John Naughton's blog) arguing that it is historically incorrect in positing a golden age of unity in knowledge and community and that it lacks an analysis of power. “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past…. The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel…. But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations…. They became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will…. In 2009, … Facebook offered users a way to publicly ‘like’ posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the ‘Retweet’ button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own ‘Share’ button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms…. Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a ‘like’ or some other interaction, eventually including the ‘share’ as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared…. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the ‘Retweet’ button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place…. ‘We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.’… What happened [I believe] to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s [is that] they got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. … The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm… Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong…. But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.“

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. “[At the Oxford Union, ] Johnson’s own rhetorical style differed from the self-conscious rigour of his peers. He had learned, Simon Kuper writes, in debates at Eton, ‘to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments’. He offered instead ‘carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes’. In this manner, he had won the election to union presidency with the help of various self-described ‘votaries in the Boris cult’, including Gove and future Covid sceptic Toby Young…. if you thought you knew the extent of the stubbornly incestuous Oxford networks that currently sit at the top of our politics, this book will still surprise you. Financial Times columnist Kuper himself arrived at Oxford in 1988, just after Gove and Johnson had left. Kuper, from a north London comprehensive school, mostly inhabited a different social world to the subjects of his book but, like them, he acknowledges, he was trained by his Oxford humanities degree primarily ‘to write and speak for a living without much knowledge’.”

Elon, Twitter is not the town square, it’s just a private shop; the square belongs to us all – article by John Naughton in The Guardian. “Many years ago, in a landmark book, Power: A Radical View, the sociologist Steven Lukes wrote that power comes in three varieties: the ability to stop people doing what they want to do; the ability to compel them to do what they don’t want to do; and the ability to shape the way they think. This third capability is clearly the kind of power that a society’s communications media wield. But until Trump arrived on the scene, Twitter didn’t look like a particularly powerful player…. As any local politician knows from doorstep canvassing, very few ‘ordinary’ citizens use it. So wherein lies its importance? Answer: virtually every mainstream journalist is an obsessive user of it. And mainstream media – print and broadcast – outlets are still the forces that shape how citizens perceive the world.”

The Tories’ biggest trick is making their opponents fight post-Brexit policies in the courts – article by Anton Jäger in The Guardian. "It seems like every few months brings news of another defeat for the UK government in the courts.... [But] what if [the left's] increasing embrace of the justice system is not just a sign of political weakness, but rather a gift to the right? ... By forcing opponents to lawyer up instead of building movements and pursuing state power, the right can pose as the defenders of an assailed, disfranchised majority.... A variety of trends may well decrease the vote share of rightwing parties in the near and distant future. In Britain, persistently low wages and a cost of living crisis do not make for great electoral prospects. Faced with these demographic and economic trends, the Conservative party (and other rightwing outfits) could increasingly prefer its opponents to fight them on the terrain of courts and judges. This is an easy option: it allows rightwing parties to pose as the representatives of a frustrated majority, while camouflaging their own anti-democratic plans – to gerrymander voting districts, for instance, or even to introduce tests at the voting booth.... if progressives are serious about offering a real political alternative, they will be better off focusing on the (re)building of durable institutions, rather than appealing to the moral conscience of high judges. Courts will not always be their best friend – sometimes, they might even be an enemy."

‘I had to be broken to be fixed’: the courses trying to change abusive men – article by Anna Moore in The Guardian. "For decades, perpetrator programmes ... have been low profile and low priority.... Now, however, something is shifting. Respect, the UK’s lead organisation on perpetrator programmes, has firmly positioned itself as part of the movement tackling violence against women and girls. Some of its programmes are delivered in partnership with groups such as Women’s Aid, or the domestic violence charity SafeLives.... Respect was formed 21 years ago when a handful of perpetrator programmes joined together, partly to raise the profile of their work, but also to articulate good practice at a time when they worried about perpetrators setting up self-help groups, or short interventions such as weekend courses, and simplistic 'anger management' programmes. (Most perpetrators are already 'managing their anger' very precisely. They manage not to explode at their boss or the big man at the gym, but still terrorise and control their partners.) Ciara Bergman, Respect’s head of perpetrator services, cautions that programmes that don’t adhere to certain principles could make things worse. 'When you’re delivering perpetrator work, the primary client is not the person in front of you,' she says. 'It has to be focused on the adult and child survivors of that abuse. We don’t think any work should take place with perpetrators in the absence of parallel but separate support for survivors.' Because of this, a Respect-accredited programme will only take on a perpetrator if their partner (or ex-partner if there are children and contact) agrees to be involved."

Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face – article by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Albert Einstein died in 1955. In article 13 of his last will and testament, he pledged that his ‘manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties … and all other literary property’ would … pass to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution that Einstein cofounded in 1918. Einstein made no mention in his will about the use of his name or likeness on books, products or advertisements. Today, these are known as publicity rights, but at the time Einstein was writing his will, no such legal concept existed. When the Hebrew University took control of Einstein’s estate in 1982, however, publicity rights had become a fierce legal battleground, worth millions of dollars each year. In the mid-1980s, the university began to assert control over who could use Einstein’s name and likeness, and at what cost. … Einstein had been a well-paid man. … But his earnings in life were insignificant compared to his earnings in death. From 2006 to 2017, he featured every year in Forbes’ list of the 10 highest-earning historic figures – ‘dead celebrities’ in the publication’s rather diminishing term – bringing in an average of $12.5m a year in licensing fees for the Hebrew University, which is the top-ranking university in Israel. A conservative estimate puts Einstein’s postmortem earnings for the university to date at $250m. ... [Roger] Richman became a lawyer, and in 1978 founded an agency that specialised in product placement in film and TV. The following year, the heirs of the late American comedian WC Fields contacted his office. They wanted Richman to become his agent… A few months later, … Richman learned the US Postal Service planned to produce a commemorative stamp in honour of WC Fields’ 100th birthday. … After initial protestation, the Postal Service paid its first licence fee to the estate of a dead celebrity. Richman soon built an enviable roster of deceased clients, which included Marilyn Monroe and Sigmund Freud. Descendants of late celebrities were often pleased to hear from Richman, who offered them a way to protect their loved ones from legacy-tainting associations and to make some money along the way.”

What I learned about street harassment after I transitioned – article by Julia Serano in The Guardian. "Feminist theorizing of street harassment has tended to frame the matter in terms of sexual objectification – that is, these men viewed me as little more than an object for them to sexually evaluate, appreciate and potentially use. I believe that sexual objectification is playing a role in many of these instances, but not all of them.... My harassers acted as though I had invited their attention, when in fact I had done nothing of the sort.... Normally, if an individual invades your personal space, most people would agree that the individual has behaved inappropriately, and that you are warranted in calling them out. But because I was perceived as 'inviting' these men’s attention (due to the fact that I was a woman out in public), my harasser’s intrusions were suddenly deemed warranted. I want to suggest an alternative and non-mutually exclusive framework for understanding this phenomenon: male street harassers seem to view and treat women as though we are public spectacles."

With the left asleep at the wheel, the right has surged ahead with its cynical anti-woke narrative – article by Ellie Mae O'Hagen in The Guardian. "The wokemob, argues the modern story, is hellbent on lavishing minorities and immigrants with undeserved privileges at the expense of the white working class... This is clever on the part of the people promoting this anti-woke story, because they are essentially telling us that equality is a zero-sum game in which white people lose out when advancements in racial justice are made.... Thus, every time anyone uses the term culture war, the idea that two sides are at war over a clash of values is reinforced. Faced with such a vivid and emotive story, the response of the people on my side of the political spectrum – the progressive side – has been a kind of paralysis. ... It’s time for progressives to bite the bullet and start telling a story of our own.... Far more effective than focusing on problems, denouncing the right or listing policies is opening with shared progressive values (like the importance of a good quality of life and building a better world for our children), being clear about exactly who is getting in the way of those values being realised and why, and emphasising that by joining together across our differences we can make life better for all of us, whatever our race."

‘What are our lives for?’: a philosopher answers kids’ existential questions – article by Scott Herschoviz in The Guardian. "Every child is a natural philosopher. They’re puzzled by the world and they try to puzzle it out." Examples of their questions. "If God created everything, who created God? Leyha, 7." "I sometimes feel like I’m the only real person and everyone else is a robot. How can I know if that’s true? Ursula, 8." "Why are there numbers? Sahil, 5." "Where was I before I was born and before I was in your belly? Melia, 4." "Where was I before I was here? Josh, 3." "Where do you go when you die? Homer, 7." "What is it like to be dead? Arthur, 8." "What are our lives for? Caspar, 5." "When there is a mummy and a daddy, but their baby dies, are they still a mummy and a daddy? Zahra, 5." "Why is it bad to have everything I want? Abraham, 4." "Why do people end up doing things that they don’t want to do? Sarang, 4."

Zero by Jeremy Hunt: this is going to hurt – review by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. "[The] ambition [of Hunt's new book] cannot be faulted: 'Zero is a book about how the NHS can reduce the number of avoidable deaths to zero and in the process save money, reduce backlogs and improve working conditions,' Hunt writes.... Historically, he explains, NHS culture has been opaque and evasive. When whistleblowers try to raise patient safety concerns, instead of listening to them, NHS trusts destroy them. In the worst cases ... bereaved relatives can be left fighting for years as NHS institutions close ranks, covering up their wrongdoing. What is desperately required in healthcare, then, is a root-and-branch cultural overhaul.... Disconcertingly, I entirely agree. More disconcertingly still, while researching this book, Hunt contacted me to ask if he could discuss where he’d gone wrong in the junior doctor dispute.... On one level, Hunt is clearly moved by poor patient care.... But this is also the work of a consummate politician.... What is most disappointing from a frontline perspective is Hunt’s failure to match his fine words on candour with action. I write as someone who this year has seen too many patients dying in misery to count. They’ve died on trolleys in the corridors of overwhelmed hospitals. Of cancers that should have been diagnosed months ago. In their own blood or excrement because the nurses are run ragged. In ambulances trapped outside jam-packed A&Es.... Political choices, in short, are causing avoidable deaths here, now, in every NHS hospital in the country. Hunt knows this yet chooses not to voice it. Presumably he still has one eye on Downing Street. And that’s the thing about candour. You can’t credibly advocate total transparency while dipping in and out of being candid when it suits you. A true patient safety champion would lead by example, speaking out about all kinds of patient harm, including those inflicted by their party in government."

The end of men: the controversial new wave of female utopias – article by Sandra Newman in The Guardian. "I’m describing a subgenre of science fiction, mostly written in the 1970s-90s.... Recently there has been a revival of the genre in radically different form... In their different ways, [these works] are thrillers, and the reception of these works in most quarters has correspondingly been about their success as such, not their politics, and has been mostly positive. The exception is the reaction of a group of critics who are hostile to the genre. You might think this would be about the fantasy of male genocide. In fact, it’s the erasure of trans identities. The line between male and female in these books is always based on traditional notions of biological sex; trans women share the fate of cis men. In the old utopian versions, female societies are always better; this is seen as implying that gender traits are biological. My own book has been the focus of attacks, even before its publication. Once again, it is the premise that matters. In my novel, all male humans disappear inexplicably in a single moment, and the resulting female society has a utopian odour. ... In the book, trans women are treated as women, trans men as men, and their problems are viewed sympathetically, but it has the hated premise.... The more thoughtful versions of the narrative don’t affirm a gender binary, but try to dismantle it by erasing sex as a category. Russ’s Whileawayans are better and happier not because they are biologically female, but because they are free from sexism. The premise also interrogates the belief that excluding certain people is a means to a peaceful society. Exclusion as social policy is a time-honoured tradition in America (think mass incarceration and racial segregation) and on the rise worldwide. It’s also the idea behind excluding trans women from women’s changing rooms. Making people ask hard questions about it is crucial to all campaigns for justice."

The big idea: could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered? – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn.... For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. ... Researchers [have] concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. ... It’s tempting to think that after the advent of movable-type printing, which happened in Europe in the 15th century (and centuries earlier in China), literary erosion might have slowed down, simply because churning out copies became easier. But ... that’s not necessarily true. For one thing, accidents continued to happen, as when rioters vandalised London’s Cockpit theatre in 1617, starting a fire in which all the theatre’s playbooks were burned. For another, not everything that made it to the stage made it to the page.... [David] McInnis estimates that the 543 plays that survive from 1576, when the first public theatres opened in London, to 1642, when the Puritans closed them, represent a fraction of all those produced. Another 744 that certainly existed have been lost, and hundreds more were probably written to fill the repertory calendar, of which no trace remains. ... Unfortunately, we can’t console ourselves that the plays that do survive were necessarily the best, or at least the most popular. McInnis crunched the numbers based on the meticulous book-keeping of one London impresario in the 1590s, Philip Henslowe, and drew the following conclusion: 'Lost plays performed at least as well as, and usually better than, the plays that have survived. They are definitively not inferior, they were good money-makers, and they have been lost for a variety of reasons that aren’t attributable to quality.'"

‘I’m begging the government to listen’: Martin Lewis on getting political, mental health and the cost of living crisis –article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian.  "[There] is, as he’s the first to point out, 'an enormous distance' from the Martin Lewis of 2002, doing Deal of the Day on the satellite channel Simply Money. Then, he was a young man, 'thinking: "Look at me, I’m being so clever and I’m playing the system, and nobody has done this before."' ... But over time, his focus changed – first, towards customer rip-offs, and then two massive campaigns: [bank charges and mis-sold PPI]. Gradually, he became more preoccupied with people who were going under, either being deliberately ripped off or just not equipped to deal with the complexity of the system, particularly, but not exclusively around social security. This led him, among other things, to devise a financial literacy element to the school curriculum, and launch the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute in 2016, the work of which is essentially bug-fixing for society.... Once he started talking to charities ... his compassion met his inner terrier. During the campaign against unfair bank charges, he produced a template letter, and someone from CA [Citizens Advice] told him 15% of people weren’t taking 'Your name' out before they wrote their name, while 5% weren’t writing their own details in at all, they were just sending the template in blank. 'That was one of my epiphany moments. One in 20 people who’d had money taken off them unfairly couldn’t understand that you need to put your own name and address in the template letter. They’ve been ripped off, and they’ve got so desperate that they tried, but they can’t do it. I still find that quite a moving statistic now.'”

Cuttings: April 2022

Finding the right self-help book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Customer: Do you have a copy of 'Achieve: The art of always getting exactly what you want'? Bookseller: It's out of stock, I'm afraid. Customer: How about 'Almost: Why second-best isn't the worst option'? Bookseller: I just sold the last copy. Customer: 'Accept: Coming to terms with life's many disappointments'? Bookseller: Yes! That'll be £18.99."

The Car by Bryan Appleyard: freedom on four wheels – review by Anthony Andrew in The Guardian. "As sharply as he draws portraits of the key players [including Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan], Appleyard, one of the liveliest minds in journalism, is at his most acute when musing on the cultural effects of the car. When four wheels replaced the horse as the main mode of transport, people were still severely restricted in their movements. Particularly in America, the world beyond major cities was not easily accessible. Paved road systems changed that. The roads were paved because that’s what cars required and, equally, cars were built to fill the paved roads. All of this circular activity brought city dwellers into contact with the great outdoors, the 'unspoilt' wilderness beyond city limits. But of course the building of roads, and the cars they bore, encroached on the wilderness, spoiling the very nature that drivers and their passengers wanted to savour. Part of the automobile’s attraction was the autonomy it offered to individuals, the sense of freedom of movement, of personal liberty, a freedom whose cost we are only now really counting."

Freedom to Think by Susie Alegre: the big tech threat to free thought – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... defends rights to freedom of both 'thought' and 'opinion': some delegates understood 'thought' to mean religious belief, while others considered it superfluous as an addition to 'opinion'; it was the Soviets who insisted it remain, 'out of respect for the heroes and martyrs of science'. But if 'opinion' was merely a private, internal affair, why did its freedom need protecting at all? This was, Alegre explains, at the behest of the British, who 'insisted that "in totalitarian countries, opinions were definitely controlled by careful restriction of the sources of information", stressing that interference could happen even before an opinion was formed'.... If propaganda undermines the right to freedom of opinion, however, then we are all in trouble. And this is one of the main arguments that Alegre pursues. The modern online environment, polluted as it is by fake news, violates our freedom to form reliable thoughts... [But] If it should be impermissible ... for 'governments, companies or people' to seek to 'manipulate our opinions', on the grounds that this violates our right to freedom of thought, one wonders what kind of persuasive speech would still be allowed in such a brave new world. Aren’t arguments of all kinds – political, scientific, artistic – attempts to manipulate the opinions of others? How do we sort the good kind of manipulation from the bad?"

Contrarian kids: cartoon – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "When Billy was born, the doctor told us about his condition. Mother: 'What is it, doctor?' Doctor: 'It's a lovely, healthy contrarian commentator. " Even as a baby, you could tell he was a natural. Father: 'Emma! Billy has just made his first defence of a dominant power structure while simultaneously bleating about his victimhood!' Billy as a baby: 'Doggy chase cat... And I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Mother: 'Well done darling.' At school, his talent really blossomed. Billy as a child: 'You're gonna give me your lunch money... and I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Other boy: 'What.' Father: 'Nowadays we're always so proud of our strange, unpleasant son.' Newspaper headline: 'The Dominant Power Structure Should Remain - And I'll Probably Be Cancelled For Saying So'."

This Breathless Earth – sonnet by Malcom Guite. "We bolted every door but even so // We couldn’t catch our breath for very fear: // Fear of their knocking at the gate below, // Fear that they’d find and kill us even here. // Though Mary’s tale had quickened all our hearts // Each fleeting hope just deepens your despair: // The panic grips again, the gasping starts, // The drowning, and the coming up for air. // Then suddenly, a different atmosphere, // A clarity of light, a strange release, // And, all unlooked for, Christ himself was there // Love in his eyes and on his lips, our peace. // So now we breathe again, sent forth, forgiven, // To bring this breathless earth a breath of heaven."

The big idea: how to win the fight against disinformation – article by Eliot Higgins in The Guardian. “In recent years, the internet has become the venue for a general collapse in trust. Trolling, fake news and ‘doing your own research’ have become such a part of public discourse, it’s sometimes easy to imagine that all the online revolution has brought us is a myriad of new ways to be confused about the world…. Why do counterfactual communities form? A key factor is distrust in mainstream authority. For some, this is partly a reaction to the UK and US government’s fabrications in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sometimes, it stems from a sense of injustice around the Israel-Palestine conflict. These are of course legitimate positions, and are not by themselves indicative of a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. But a pervasive sense of distrust can make you more vulnerable to slipping down the rabbit hole.… as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues. These are the internet users who want to inform themselves while guarding against manipulation by others, or being misled by their own preconceptions. Once established, they will not only share and propagate factchecks in a way that lends them credibility, but often conduct the process of factchecking themselves…. . At Bellingcat, a collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists I founded in 2014, we’ve seen this play out in real time during the Russian invasion of Ukraine…. But there’s more to do than simply waiting for crowds of investigators to emerge and hoping they’re interested in the same things we are. We must take a broader approach. The answer lies in creating a society that’s not only resilient against disinformation, but has the tools to actively contribute to efforts towards transparency and accountability.… Teaching young people how to engage positively with issues they face and then expanding this work into online investigation is not only empowering, it gives them skills they can use throughout their lives.“

‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "In early 2017, Peter McIndoe, now 23, was studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, and visiting friends in Memphis, Tennessee.... It was the weekend of simultaneous Women’s Marches across the US (indeed, the world), and McIndoe looked out of the window and noticed 'counterprotesters, who were older, bigger white men'.... McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. 'It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: "I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on." An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.' That statement was 'birds aren’t real'. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The 'deep state' had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you. Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement."

‘Heat the human, not the home’: Martin Lewis guide for ‘desperate’ households – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. “The UK’s best-known consumer finance journalist, Martin Lewis, was uncharacteristically downbeat about the new edition of his newsletter, which went out to 8.4 million UK subscribers on Wednesday morning, writing: ‘This is a guide I really wish we needn’t be publishing.’ … As one respondent put it: ‘It’s a damning indictment of the depths to which this country has sunk when the cheerful guy who provided advice about the best savings, offers and phone deals is now tearfully providing advice on how not to die from cold or malnutrition. Thank you – I wish it wasn’t necessary.’”

Lost in La Mancha: landmark doc of Terry Gilliam’s cinematic nightmare –  review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “The creative heroism of Terry Gilliam is saluted once again in this 20-year-anniversary rerelease of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Gilliam’s incredible ordeal in the late 90s in trying to make a movie version of Don Quixote: a salutary warning about the physical and mental nightmare of independent film-making. Gilliam’s leading man, veteran French star Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc midway through shooting and was unable to carry on, dealing a death blow to an under-funded, over-ambitious production already traumatised by biblical floods that swept away their equipment in the Spanish desert, Nato jets overhead which ruined the soundtrack, and insurers who wouldn’t pay out on Rochefort’s illness and became the obstructive legal owners of the script by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni…. When I first saw this movie, I felt that there was a kind of perfect poignancy in Gilliam’s Quixote never getting made and existing only in his head – but Gilliam proved me and all other doubters wrong by finally getting it done in 2018 with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver in the leading roles. If it wasn’t quite the masterpiece we hoped for, it was still an entertaining and affecting piece of work.“

The vision collector: the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future – article by Sam Knight in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Premonitions Bureau. “In the days after his visit to Aberfan [following the 1966 disaster], [psychiatrist John Barker] came up with an idea for an unusual study. Given the singular nature of the disaster and its total penetration of the national consciousness, he decided to gather as many premonitions as possible of the event and to investigate the people who had them. Barker wrote to Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, and asked him to publicise the idea…. The article described the kinds of vision that Barker was interested in: ‘a vivid dream’, ‘a vivid waking impression’, ‘telepathy at the time of the disaster (affecting someone miles away)’ and ‘clairvoyance’. … Of the 60 plausible premonitions, there was evidence that 22 were described before the mine tip began to move. The material convinced Barker that precognition was not unusual among the general population – he speculated that it might be as common as left-handedness. In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world. Wintour agreed to the experiment.”

Seen and heard: January to March 2022

A Boy and a Girl, by Eric Whitacre, sung by Voces 8 – recorded in 2020 as part of their 'After Silence' concert and album project, and re-promoted now as a prelude to their Eric Whitacre collaboration 'The Sacred Veil'.

The Windemere Children – BBC drama, plus a documentary, on the children liberated from the Nazi death camps to be rehabilitated in the Lake District. A good example of what a drama can do, over a documentary. In the documentary, those still alive reminisced as you would expect about what a paradise it was and how it brought them to their new lives. The drama could show how it wasn't that simple: show us the fear and mistrust they brought with them, the night terrors, the conditioned response to take and hide any morsel of food they were given. Also an interesting early example of the use of art therapy.

Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction by Keith M. Johnston – very readable survey. Demolishes some critical old hat and popular myths, such as that the definition of the genre has some kind of objective reality, that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was "really" about fear of Communist infiltration, that SF films are all about spectacle rather than narrative and character, and that one can talk about SF films without reference to the rest of culture (even SF culture). I especially liked the chapters on cinema trailers and audience reception and participation, especially since the rise of the internet, and the useful history showing what SF films were called before the term was widely used. (Trick film. Comic short. Scientific romance Thriller. Romance. Scientific melodrama. Horror.)

When the Past Was Around – charming and touching wordless adventure game from an Indonesian studio, in which a young woman beset with grief recalls her lover. She used to call him Owl, and as he gradually takes form in her memory he appears as a man with an owl's head - slightly weird but also beautiful. The visual and musical motifs acquire meaning upon meaning as you play through their story: the musical symbols, the scarves, the music box, "their" tune which they hum and play on their violins and which provides the key to unlocking her healing memories. A beautiful romance; you feel for her, and for both of them.

'Words to avoid' – gov.uk style guide. "Agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead. Deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements). Key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’. Transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing. Utilise, use ‘use’. Going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions). One-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)." 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – classic Ishiguro novel: quietly powerful, very moving. Klara, who narrates the story in the first person, is an AF or Artificial Friend. Bought from a department store to be a companion to the teenage Josie, she becomes drawn into the individual hopes and plans of not only Josie but her mother, her friend Rick, and Rick's mother. Klara is very sophisticated in her perception of humans and understanding of emotions, but she has trouble navigating unfamiliar physical environments and her knowledge of the world is very limited. Her simple quasi-religious faith in the power of the sun (which has a direct physical basis - she is solar-powered) runs throughout the book, possibly naive, possibly profound. In the end, I was left with a sense of a life well-lived, reminded of that other great AI, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who said, when being interviewed for TV: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."

Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis – nice booklet by a GP, essentially lamenting the demise of convalescence as a medical concept (let alone healthcare provision),and the consequent reluctance to see recovery as something which may (1) take time, a lot of time, and (2) not necessarily lead to a restoration of things as they were before. My favourite two quotes: "Don't plan anything within an hour of eating" (p. 22) and "It's a journey that changes the trajectory of your life, your priorities, your values, your hopes and ambitions, your sense of who you are in the world, and your relationship with those around you.... You are entering a new and unknown country, with an unfamiliar language and no map" (p. 90).

Encodya – sweet and beautiful cyberpunk adventure game (see review). Very well voice-acted and visually impressive. The setting is pure Bladerunner – the flying cars, the jangly giant advertising screens, the perpetual nightime – but the emotional heart of the game is the relationship between little nine-year-old orphaned Tina and her giant protective robot Sam. You guide Tina around the streets of Neo-Berlin as she discovers a hidden message from her father and sets out to reveal and complete his work. A very satisfying experience – or it would be, if only there weren't so many nearly-invisible crucial objects hidden on the ground and on the walls.

Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure, by Dennis Duncan – continuously interesting and amusing and scholarly. Like many readers I think, I was taken aback by aspects of the literary technology I had never before considered, such as the order of the alphabet (why that order? he doesn't really say, though he traces its early use) and the invention of page numbers - both essential pre-conditions for the index as we know it. Particularly revealing to see the laborious instructions-for-the-use-of which used to come with indices when they were new. (See review in The Guardian, review for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading.)

Content Design, by Sarah Richards – great little primer, from the woman whose team worked on the gov.uk website between 2010 and 2014 and turned it from the usual government information dump into a quiet triumph: quiet because when a website works properly you don't notice it. The principles are familiar to anyone who has worked in or with usability: you need to start your design with users, what they need and what journey they are on when they come to your material; everything else follows. But this covers the whole process very well, and very necessary it is too. As she says: "We don't need more content. We need smarter content." "Content design" was the term she came up with to describe what she and her team were doing, which included writing and editing but going far beyond that. (See also review on Medium, interview with Sarah Richards.)

The Ipcress File – classy ITV adaptation, which confirms my view that the way now for James Bond films is to make them period pieces, from a time when foreign travel was exotic, fashion was stylish, and technology was cool. Joe Cole as Harry Palmer is no Michael Caine, but he stands up to the toffs with agreeable working-class cheek, and Lucy Boynton is very believable in her fairly unbelievable role (for the 1960s) of a female senior intelligence officer. Both are outclassed, though by the excellent Tom Hollander.

Cuttings: March 2022

The battle of the gauges – article by Patricia Fara in History Today, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.  "Stephenson’s narrow tracks had been introduced first. Originally designed to carry engines transporting coal for the northern mining industry, they were tailored to match the width needed for accommodating a horse between wagon shafts. Initially there were small local variations, but this animal-based dimension was perpetuated into the future when Stephenson decreed that it made sense for all his new trains to adopt the same gauge, 4 feet 8½ inches (1.435 metres). When the railway network began expanding, he recommended that this width should be adopted around the country, a deceptively arbitrary measurement still used by over half the world’s railways. Once the British network began expanding, Brunel came up with characteristically bold plans for improvement. Convinced that the country would eventually be divided into distinct zones operated privately and separately, he embarked on building faster, larger engines that ran smoothly along tracks of a far wider gauge – 7 feet ¼ inch (2.14 metres). The success of this innovation depended on Brunel’s unprecedented engineering triumphs in constructing long bridges and deep tunnels. Although his trains were more expensive to build, passengers appreciated the reduction in journey times and the luxurious comfort.... A Royal Commission was set up in 1845.... Although the Commission came down on the side of the narrow gauge contingent, the government prevaricated by opting for compromise and enacting some unsatisfactory legislation. The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended. Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat. Uniformity prevailed, just as Stephenson had first proposed."

Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama: a defence of liberalism… from a former neocon – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported [in The End of History and the Last Man], and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage.... The first difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.... Fukuyama contends ... liberalism ... has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business – although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost."

Social media ‘experts’ – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Dunning-Kruger University is a leading Doing-My-Own-Research centre. For 60 years our 10-minute Googling courses have been producing inexplicably confident graduates, who go on to slap ill-informed takes on Twitter about things they'd never heard of 10 minutes ago, and even argue with real experts online about their own subject. Dave, doctoral Doing-My-Own-Researcher: 'DKU is a great uni. I took a BSc and an MSc in Epidemiological Reckons last week... but this morning I barged into a conversation about Russian history. So I've switched to a PhD in Advanced Confirmation Bias. It really helped me to learn what I already thought."

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins: the brutal truth about Britain’s past – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "When Elkins’s book [on Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan Mau Mau movement] came out [in 2005], her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s 'enlightened' and 'benign empire'. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed [in 2011].... This book, a decade on, is [a] wider history [of the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war]. Partly resting on the [disclosed colonial] files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power. Her detailing of this reality involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record.... Elkins coins the term 'legalised lawlessness' to describe the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law and then viciously bent it to serve imperial ends. The first half of her book examines how this hypocrisy was rooted in the supremacist underpinnings of classical liberalism, the pervasive idea that 'backward' societies would be transformed by the violent application of free trade and religious education."

A pro-fossil fuel Disney ride voiced by Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye? Yes, it existed – article by Anita Little in The Guardian. “The ride purported to tell the story of energy. It was awe-inspiring and warm-hearted in the Disney mold… What went unsaid was the fact that, for a theme park, it had an unlikely corporate sponsor: the US oil giant Exxon. And the message directed at the often young minds of riders was brazen and, in the light of the climate emergency now unfolding, quite remarkable: fossil fuels are glorious and the climate crisis is not such a big deal. Yet somehow, even though it only shuttered in 2017, the ride has largely been lost to cultural history. But now, as Exxon and other oil firms face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for the climate crisis, grounded by charges that they sought to deceive the public about their role in it, the ride seems newly relevant as evidence of the kind of narrative big oil sought to promote.”

Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones' – article by Suzanne Bearne on BBC News. "Dumbphones are continuing to enjoy a revival. Google searches for them jumped by 89% between 2018 and 2021, according to a report by software firm SEMrush.... Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone. 'It appears fashion, nostalgia, and them appearing in TikTok videos, have a part to play in the dumbphone revival,' says Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at price comparison site Uswitch.com. 'Many of us had a dumbphone as our first mobile phone, so it's natural that we feel a sense of nostalgia towards these classic handsets.'"

The Guardian view on Middlemarch: a book for grownups – editorial in The Guardian. “The novel tells us, when we are asked to observe Dorothea weeping six weeks after her marriage, ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ So the novel deftly and wittily reminds us that we are surrounded by personal tragedy, which can be glimpsed only fleetingly by our coarse minds, when gently steered towards it, by a writer of Eliot’s capabilities.”

‘It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control’: the authors whose books are being banned in US schools – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "There is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the US’s libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported – more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year…. Maus [by Art Spiegelman] was removed on the basis of eight swearwords – mainly ‘God damn’ – and nudity: a bare-breasted, suicidal mouse representing Spiegelman’s mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old…. Many of the challenges centre on a moral hysteria about the protection of children. ‘They’re playing woke snowflakery back: “This might upset people”,’ says Margaret Atwood in an email to me. A graphic novel version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the books removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district in December, along with two other dystopian graphic novel classics: an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta…. Though the current censorship drive in the US is predominantly in Republican states, it has become a tit-for-tat controversy, with conservative commentators quick to point out that the left has its own form in censoring classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn for their perceived racist content…. ‘We do see increased resort to censoriousness on both the left and the right,’ says [Suzanne] Nossel [CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America,]. ‘On the left, it targets books that some people regard as racially offensive, sometimes because they originate from a different time period, when slurs were used more widely than is acceptable now. But it is the right that has invoked the machinery of government – including legislative proposals in dozens of states – to enforce these bans and prohibitions. In the hierarchy of infringements of free speech that must be recognised as more severe and alarming.’”

Into the metaverse: my plan to level up Britain with the 3D internet and a Blackpool ‘queercoaster’ –article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “This year, as well as working in television, I am engaged in StoryTrails, an initiative led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London. The new medium in which we are working is the metaverse – the 3D internet that uses virtual reality (VR) to create new worlds inside a headset, and augmented reality (AR), which adds layers of digital imagery to the real world, that can be seen through your smartphone…. the newness of these technologies means there is the potential to ensure that those who create the metaverse are not defined as being either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’. The original sins of Britain’s television and film industries – their exclusivity, their metropolitan focus, their tendency to privilege middle-class outlooks and their long histories of misogyny – should and potentially can be left behind, and prevented from infecting VR and AR and the employment cultures that will develop around them. This dream of inscribing a new and better creative culture is why our StoryTrails project is placing these new technologies into the hands of 50 creatives from across the country whose backgrounds reflect the diversity of UK talent. They are tasked with creating immersive stories that enable audiences to experience history, touch it, feel it and interact with it where it happened. Using film archive from the BFI, reimagined and transformed into stunning 3D, they will give audiences in Blackpool a chance to ride on the ‘Queercoaster’, an augmented reality journey through Blackpool’s LGBTQ+ history. People in Sheffield, meanwhile, will see how their city is becoming one of the greenest in the UK, thanks to large-screen immersive domes showing how it is throwing off its reputation for heavy industry and smokey skies.”

The Guardian view on Unboxed: so much for the ‘festival of Brexit’ – editorial in The Guardian. "The House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee has decided that it doesn’t like Unboxed – originally seen as a festival of Brexit.... The original notion was that the festival, the Queen’s platinum jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation.... Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying 'national traditions' that Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome. Such top-down impositions are doomed.... The Festival of Britain in 1951 worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but it didn’t encapsulate a culture.... Unboxed contends with enduring suspicion about its origins on one side, and scepticism about its results on the other. Its programme suggests it will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions. It will stand or fall on whether it can engage and enthuse the wider public."

Cuttings: February 2022

The Wealth Gap – infographic by Susan Newman and Jamie Woodcock, linked to the BBC programme 'The decade the rich won'. "What is the wealth gap? Income used to be the key driver of inequality. However, the wealth gap is the difference between the amount of assets (savings, investments, housing, pension - assets are things you gain from and do not depreciate) between the wealthiest and the rest of society. For example, Jeff Bezos has a personal net worth of £140 billion. At £10/Hr, an Amazon warehouse worker would have to work 8 million years to accumulate the same wealth! Why is it growing? The wealth gap is growing faster than the income gap. The housing and stock markets continue to rise. A larger share is going to profit, not wages. At the lower end of the wealth gap, people don't have any assets. Many people have negative assets in the form of debt. Debt transfers from the poor to the rich. How does it affect me? Hard work and increased income no longer help in social mobility. It's assets that unlock it. Deposits are increasing, and mortgages are difficult to get, making it harder to build wealth. Owning a home has become a finish line in which the goal posts keep moving further away! Your parents' income is a big determinant of where you are in the gap. Economic inequality leads to problems for everyone: increased crime rate and prison sentencing, political polarisation and a breakdown of social cohesion, decline in health and life expectancy."

What Was the TED Talk?​ Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting" – article by Oscar Schwartz in The Drift. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "[Chris] Anderson [who purchased the TED franchise in 2001] insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED talk. I like to call this fusion 'the inspiresting.' Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism.... Perhaps the most incisive critique came, ironically, at a 2013 TEDx conference. In 'What’s Wrong with TED Talks?' media theorist Benjamin Bratton told a story about a friend of his, an astrophysicist, who gave a complex presentation on his research before a donor, hoping to secure funding. When he was finished, the donor decided to pass on the project. 'I’m just not inspired,' he told the astrophysicist. 'You should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.' Bratton was outraged. He felt that the rhetorical style TED helped popularize was 'middlebrow megachurch infotainment,' and had begun to directly influence the type of intellectual work that could be undertaken....'This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.'... The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years...."

The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you, and the planet, healthier? – article by Tim Spector in The Guardian. “I have two issues with Veganuary. First, dietary change should aim for a long-term, sustainable change rather than a one-month quick fix. Second, there is no clear evidence that strict veganism is better for health than vegetarianism, pescatarianism or flexitarianism (a diet where you’re allowed to eat occasional meat or fish). Second, it fuels the perception that all plant-based foods are healthier than all animal-derived ones, which is not always true. If people replace fish, meat, eggs and cheese with plant-based ultra-processed foods, it might actually do us – and the planet – more harm than good.”

Wordle: simplicity that works like a charm – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “The game has the elegance of a daily newspaper puzzle – a five-minute conundrum that slots pleasingly into even the most harried routine: guess the five-letter word. You have six attempts…. The simplicity is the charm. One Wordle is released each day, and it’s the same one for everyone around the world. There are no advertisements, no niggling notifications begging you to return each morning, no novelty skins with which to alter the appearance of your letters, and no offer coupons in exchange for recommending the game to friends. With so much traffic, the incentive to profit from Wordle’s success is considerable. But the game’s rejection of the capitalistic systems that define so many video games today has a refreshing, innocent quality. Long may Wordle remain so pure.“

How to win at Wordle using linguistic theory – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s helpful to understand what Wordle is mainly testing, and I think there are a couple of things: first, your knowledge of the frequency of individual letters in the English language… More interestingly, though, it probes your instinct for how letters can be combined.“

What I Wish People Knew About Dementia by Wendy Mitchell:  a book of hope – review by Nicci Gerrard in The Guardian. “One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her.… Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.… People with dementia (and people who live with and care for them) know that much of the suffering and havoc that the illness can bring comes not from the condition itself, but from the way the world treats people who live with it. Mitchell learned this the hard way: her life, and her sense of who she was in that life, was demolished when she first got the diagnosis of early onset dementia and it took her many years to work out strategies that enabled her to ‘live well with dementia’ (though she dislikes that phrase for its implication that some people fail to live well). Her book, which she wrote with the help of Anna Wharton and which includes the comments of friends who also live with dementia, is a compilation of these strategies: a kind of how-to manual for people with the condition and those who support them. It proceeds by a practical and calming formula: take a difficulty and find a way to overcome it.“

‘They had their own cameras trained on me’: Louis Theroux on his showdowns with US extremists –article by Louis Theroux in The Guardian. “On Sunday, I have a new series going out on BBC Two. Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America is squarely in the sweet spot of problematic content. White nationalists, trigger-happy rappers and figures in the porn world accused of sexual misconduct – they all make appearances. … In the context of everything that’s happened in the last couple of years, the decision to put out a series chockful of troubling individuals giving expression to upsetting and extreme opinions might seem odd…. The term is ‘platforming’: the idea that it is irresponsible to amplify hateful voices and that in doing so one is contributing to their power and their harm…. At its simplest, this is a view so uncontroversial as to be almost banal. … Making it even more pressing nowadays is the demonstrable harm caused by the spread of false information online and the way this has empowered formerly marginal figures such as conspiracy theorists and nativists.… In this new landscape, every day seems to bring a new test case of whether some influencer or high-profile person should be deplatformed, or whether tech companies and media outlets are throttling free expression by deciding what we can and can’t see and hear.… I do understand how, viewed in this context, my decision to put some potentially dangerous and inflammatory figures on BBC Two primetime might appear flat-out weird and irresponsible…. And yet I believe I was right to make a programme about them. There are several reasons why. The most obvious one is the nature of the project. I make immersive documentaries, researching, shooting and editing over the course of months or even years. It is very far from the ‘here’s your mic, have at it’ atmosphere of a conventional debate or TV appearance…. I believe I can be trusted to tell these stories in a responsible way. By being informed, by doing the research, by spending time in the field – for hours or days or weeks even – questioning, challenging and revealing the reality of the people we are reporting on, and doing responsible journalism…. ‘But why do we need to hear from these people?’ you may ask. Well, you might not need to. But the reason you might choose to is because of what their existence says about the world we are living in, and because of the very real power they represent…. So the choice we are faced with is whether to be curious about that phenomenon, try to figure out why it’s growing, what it’s feeding on, how it can be challenged, or whether to ignore it and hope it goes away.”

BBC pulls another episode of We Are England current affairs show – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “The BBC has retracted another episode of its new regional current affairs programme amid concerns about editorial standards and low staffing levels on the series…. which has been made on a tight budget due to cuts after many experienced reporters took redundancy from newsrooms across England ahead of its launch…. Last week, the BBC pulled an episode of We Are England about a Birmingham man called Hanad Hassan at the last minute after the Guardian pointed out that his cryptocurrency had shut down in October, leaving behind many unhappy customers. The BBC has now retracted a second episode of We Are England, which praised a dance school attended by former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack for its work improving the mental health of children. The programme failed to mention a recent critical Ofsted report, accessible online, which found that staff had bodyshamed students, leaving them reluctant to eat after lessons, and told them to get ‘the desired physique’ if they wanted to be successful in auditions.”

‘At 6pm every evening the screen went blank’: the outlandish tale of the UK’s TV blackout – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “Abolished 65 years ago on Wednesday, the break in programming between 6pm and 7pm every night was a government policy, known colloquially as the toddlers’ truce.… This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to ‘wring out their moppets and put them to bed’. … Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. The rules, laid out by the postmaster general as the post office oversaw telecommunications and broadcasting, stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm."

Playing with fire: Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’ – interview by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. … When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back…. It’s a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as [her latest collection of essays] Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing.”

I don’t like how my female colleagues are treated. How can I support them without being targeted? – advice by Eleanor Gordon-Smith in The Guardian. “I’m starting to notice that my female peers aren’t treated as nicely as us men and I don’t know what to do…. I’ve witnessed my female colleagues being put in a position where they had to justify their actions that were the same as other male colleagues. Female managers have to put extra effort into putting their point across and the HR is barely existent. I’d gladly speak to the CEO, but he acts like a bully. … I’m not feeling safe enough to discuss this in the office. I’m afraid I’ll be seen as weak and inconvenient.” Reply : “We know the people responsible for this are bad at responding to evidence (otherwise they wouldn’t have this attitude towards women); we know they’re bad at handling conflict (otherwise they wouldn’t pick on people in these petty ways); we know they’re uninterested in the possibility of improving (otherwise there’d be a feedback system or an avenue for anonymous reporting). With those as our data points for the psychology of the culprits, I’m pessimistic that you’d be able to talk – or confront – them into changing.… Here’s a lesson many people learn when they have to band together under an oppressive eye: you don’t have to announce what you’re doing for it to be an effective form of resistance…. Are there tasks you can take off [the women’s] plate; private ways you can give credit for work well done? Are there moments you can increase airtime for women in an interaction – ‘I think Sandra mentioned this earlier, but …?’ … You could start by trying to minimise [the] impact [of the unfairness] on particular people. It takes very little to privately signal to someone ‘I saw that too’, but to that person, the sense of being seen is anything but small.In time, these small acts of solidarity might embolden you to do more.”

The addictive qualities of Wordle – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Therapist: "So, if I understand correctly: you’ve become so obsessed with Wordle that you can only use five-letter words?" Client: "Quite right, sadly." Therapist: "How long has this been going on?"  Client: "About three weeks." Therapist: "And does it affect your daily life?" Client: "Makes basic tasks quite tough." Therapist: "One answer would be to stop playing." Client: "Never!" Therapist: "Or, try something with a larger vocabulary: Scrabble, crosswords?" Client: "Smart! Enjoy other games, learn extra words… Heard worse ideas." Therapist: "Come back and see me in two weeks." Client: "Great. Adieu!"

What Do Men Want? by Nina Power – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "The need for men to be vulnerable, to open up about their insecurities – to become, in cliched terms, more like women – is certainly one antidote to what has become widely understood as the current crisis in masculinity.... But what about that generation of young men who already feel marginalised from a consumer society, who have been denied most of the markers that traditionally help boys become men: decent jobs, responsible dads, stable homes of their own and, often in consequence, meaningful adult relationships. Would opening up about doubt and vulnerability in itself allow them to achieve self-worth and purpose? Nina Power’s provocative and rigorous book addresses some of those questions from a traditional feminist perspective [and] examines some of the extreme manifestations of the broken relationship between the sexes. She looks at the economic and cultural circumstances as well as the disturbingly warped psychology that produce 'incel' (involuntary celibate) groups, or the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement. In addressing this damaged thinking she refuses easy essentialist answers about toxic masculinity or any simplistic notions of patriarchy. ... If men are to reclaim an idea of 'virility' – in its original Greek sense of acting with virtue, of living with grace and due responsibility – it will, she argues, not be done by hashtags alone."

Cuttings: January 2022

Can "distraction-free" devices change the way we write? – article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.... I tried 'distraction-free' writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die).... Then, in the late twenty-teens, focussed writing tools started cropping up everywhere.... The movement seemed to crest in the first months of the pandemic, as writers newly intimate with the routines of spouses and roommates—or with their own restlessness—sought peace with newfound desperation."

'Words to avoid' – from the .GOV style guide. Includes: "agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead"; "deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements)"; "key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’"; "transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing"; "utilise, use ‘use’"; "going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions)"; "one-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)".

Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow: the new thinking about feelings – review by Alison Gopnik in The Guardian. "Emotions are evolutionarily ancient, rooted in genes and brain structures we share with insects. And at the same time they are embedded in complex and sophisticated cultural scripts and schemas.... [Mlodinow] chronicles many of the disparate neural, evolutionary, social, cultural, cognitive and phenomenological aspects of emotion within what has become something like the received form for popular science books – the equivalent of the sonnet rhyme scheme. Instead of A, B, C and D, Mlodinow alternates between study summaries, illustrative stories and self-help tips.... What’s missing from the book, and the standard popular science form in general, are theories and explanations – the heart of science.... There is often an inverse relationship between how much psychological phenomena lend themselves to stories – how compelling they are – and how much they lend themselves to scientific explanations."

How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter: sounding the alarm – review by H W Brands in The Guardian. "The key concept is that of 'anocracy', a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.... She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: 'Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.'... So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college.... And social media must be regulated."

Worn by Sofi Thanhauser: a panoramic history of getting dressed – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "People have always dressed above their station, and other people have always minded terribly.... Worn, though, consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads – linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool – she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that 'there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.'... Thanhauser, who lives in New York, travels to Texas where America’s modern cotton industry is based. At first sight there may no longer be slave labour of the kind that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on two centuries ago, but the underlying patterns have not changed greatly."

Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis: the art of getting better – review by Emily Mayhew in The Guardian. "Francis’s book explains recovery as a discrete therapeutic entity that deserves our full attention and why we should never give up trying to get better, even when it seems we couldn’t get much worse. Recovery is a difficult but essential part of what makes us human. In his characteristically deft case studies, he shows how it’s the time that recovery takes that is, over and over again, the greatest challenge to patient and care-giver... Francis recalls the rich history of slow-paced recovery and of the places and people who enabled it..... The underlying recognition of taking our time to rebuild ourselves is a profound insight into human regenerative capabilities. We used to know this, but somewhere in the white heat of changing medical technologies, we forgot and came instead to expect the instant and the effortless."

Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the 'Vimes Boots Index' as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the 'insidiously creeping prices' of basic food products. The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner.... 'The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,' wrote Pratchett [in the Discworld novel Men at Arms]. 'Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.'"