Cuttings: September 2023

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie: nerds who loved words – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Officially, the first headquarters of the [Oxford English Dictionary] was an iron shed in a north Oxford garden, grandly designated a 'scriptorium' by the lexicographers who toiled inside it, often solemnly costumed in academic gowns and mortar boards. But from the beginning this was a crowdsourced project, and Ogilvie, tracking down leads from an address book kept by one of the earliest editors, has unearthed hundreds of anonymous volunteers on all five continents who collected recondite words or trawled unreadable books for illustrative quotations. A few of Ogilvie’s dictionary people are lurid characters: she identifies three murderers, one cannibal and several institutionalised lunatics.... Mostly, however, Ogilvie’s obsessives are harmless academics, hoarders of arcane information that passes for knowledge. She visits one Oxford household whose occupants have to sleep in the kitchen because everywhere else is stuffed with papers. Another dotty boffin perambulates in a coat whose 28 pockets store letters, books and philological offprints along with a clanking armoury of nail clippers, a knife-sharpener and a corkscrew, not to mention a scone that he carries for emergencies. Ogilvie concludes with a touching diptych in honour of two very different devotees, both proudly self-taught. In 1915, James Murray, a draper’s son who was snubbed by collegiate Oxford during his decades editing the OED, composes his own envoi. After elegiacally deciding on a definition for twilight, he puts down his pen, removes his scholar’s cap, takes to his bed with pleurisy and promptly dies, his mission complete. Then in 2006, on a return trip to her native Australia, Ogilvie meets Chris Collier, who over the course of 35 years sent the dictionary 100,000 quotations from a Brisbane tabloid, all carefully cut and pasted in what he called his office, which was a park behind a pub; he posted them to Oxford wrapped in cereal packets with a residue of crumbled cornflakes and tufts of dog hair." See also 'Porn addicts, vicars, madmen and murderers: Sarah Ogilvie on the Oxford English Dictionary’s unlikely writers', interview by Ella Creamer.   

‘Who gets remembered and why?’: the exhibition asking uneasy questions about the Atlantic slave trade – article by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "Research increasingly reveals... the extent to which Britain’s wealth was predicated on the centuries-old rapacious plunder of millions of African people. It was not confined to bank accounts and bequests. There are charged traces of slavery’s legacy throughout the land, in fine art and botanical gardens, and in stately homes and museums, such as Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam. The Black Atlantic exhibition is not an attempt, argue the curators Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery, to detoxify the art and artefacts of slavery. Rather it intends to frame the discussion of this aspect of British history in a way that invites reflection. 'We all tend to be lazy lookers,' says Avery. So, she says, Black Atlantic is concerned with 'letting go of entrenched ideas' and 'unlearning', rather than defaulting to faux anti-woke outrage. 'The exhibition isn’t one side in a culture war,' adds Richards. 'It’s the start of a conversation.'.... Featured [in the exhibition] are two contrasting, elegant 18th-century portraits, Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit and Portrait of The Hon Richard FitzWilliam (the museum’s founder). The paintings are 'effectively in dialogue', says Avery. 'We know the provenance, the whole deal' about the Richard FitzWilliam portrait but 'nothing about the other sitter … We open with this fundamental question [about privilege]: who gets remembered and why?' Richards adds a fascinating detail about Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, which was originally called Portrait of an African until curators in Exeter (from where the portrait is loaned) deleted African, 'because quite reasonably those curators didn’t know for sure where this man was born, or how he might have identified himself'."

The BBC’s Marianna Spring: ‘The more violent the rhetoric, the more important it is I expose it’ – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[The Mariana in] Conspiracyland [podcast] is [Mariana] Spring’s latest plunge into the world of Covid hoaxers and anti-vaxxers, the cranks who would once have seemed harmless (and probably have had more harmless theories, such as homeopathy is good for athlete’s foot) but are now possessed by a fiery righteousness that has completely burned through their neighbourliness. As a piece of investigative reporting, Conspiracyland is vivid and thorough. As a social snapshot, it is unsettling, full of people who seem community-centred but harbour violent fantasies about seeing their adversaries hang; people who seem soft and lefty but are enmeshed in the tropes of the far right. It is so fair-minded that at times it feels like it is taking a set of scales to a gun fight, but we will talk about that later.... Of all the online abuse directed at the BBC and its staff, 80 per cent is aimed at her; and these are what they call 'escalations', messages deemed serious enough – whether because they contain physical threats, violent language, negative sentiment or doxing – that they have been flagged for further assessment.... She can’t pick up her phone without seeing a fresh stream of abuse. 'The thing that I find difficult is how personal a lot of that hate becomes. It’s often very misogynistic. It’s very much about me, it’s not about my journalism. It’s someone saying, "You are a whore", "you are a slag," "I hope you get run over". And that is not legitimate opposition or criticism.'... 'I don’t want to sound like your mum', I start, before swerving to, 'I don’t want to sound too Guardian', but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the BBC in all this, allowing one woman to become the face of everything extremists hate about the institution and all it stands for. The BBC is brilliant and she is very well protected, she says.... Once you are talking about real-life violence, you have to admit that the thing Spring and – at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself – the mainstream media finds really hard to say is that this is not apolitical crankery: these are the narratives of the far right.... All these worldviews that start with the idea that, as Spring puts it, 'your vote doesn’t count for anything, don’t trust democracy, the government is lying', end with totalitarianism and necropolitics, the politics of who gets to live and who has to die. Just because the far left also thinks the government is lying doesn’t mean conspiracyland is a post-political territory. It is necessary to the far right in a way that it isn’t to the far left."

Ultra-processed foods: the 19 things everyone needs to know – article by Rachel Dixon in The Guardian. "... What exactly should I look for on the label? ... According to [the] journal article, Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them, food substances not used in home kitchens tend to appear at the beginning or in the middle of the ingredients list (ingredients are listed in order of weight). These include protein sources (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, mechanically separated meat); sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrates, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose); soluble or insoluble fibre; and modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oil). Additives appear at the end of the ingredients list. Cosmetic additives, used to make the final product more palatable or more appealing, include flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents.... What foods are definitely not UPF?... Category one is 'unprocessed or minimally processed food'. This includes fresh, frozen and dried fruit and vegetables; milk and plain yoghurt; fresh meat and fish; grains and legumes; fungi; eggs; flour; nuts and seeds; herbs and spices; pasta and couscous. Category two covers 'processed culinary ingredients. This includes things such as butter and vegetable oils; honey and maple syrup; and sugar, salt and vinegar. Category three is 'processed foods'. These include freshly made bread and cheese; tinned food – vegetables, fish, fruit; cured meats and smoked fish; and salted or sugared nuts and seeds. And what almost certainly is UPF? Top offenders in category four, ultra-processed foods, include fizzy drinks; packaged snacks; sweets and chocolate; ice-cream; biscuits, cakes and pastries; sausages and burgers; packaged pies and pizzas; and chicken nuggets."

To dye for: why Victorian Britain was more colourful than we think – article by Skye Sherwin in The Guardian. "Early photography’s sepias tint our impression of the 19th century. Yet a real-life encounter with an everyday 1860s gown reveals a startling truth: 'It’s electric purple and still shocking now,' curator Matthew Winterbottom enthuses. And, as the exhibition Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design will explore, its garishness was typical in the 19th century. A decade earlier, the flamboyant purple dresses made fashionable by the style leader Empress Eugénie of France were the preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet in just a few years, colours once made with expensive vegetable dyes were being industrially produced cheaply, thanks to an accidental discovery by an 18-year-old chemistry student William Henry Perkin. While attempting to synthesise quinine from aniline, a derivative of coal tar, Perkin realised the intense purples this colourless chemical produced could be used as a dye. He quickly established a factory for his new 'mauveine' as he called this early synthetic dye and chemists across Europe soon followed suit, expanding the synthetic colour palette. 'The modern world of ubiquitous colour begins at this point,' says Winterbottom. 'London’s streets and train stations are covered in brightly printed posters. People wear brightly coloured clothes. Everything from books to postage stamps becomes colourful.'”

Goldilocks picks her next book to read – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Too long. Too short. Too grown-up. Too childish. Too scary. Too gentle. Too simple. Too complex. Too depressing. Too jolly. Too many characters. Too similar to the last book I read."

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein: a case of mistaken identity –  review by William Davies in The Guardian. "Today, things are far more complicated than [the] simple axes of left-right and liberal-authoritarian imply. The problem in the age of big tech, the climate crisis, Covid lockdowns, online influencers and collapsed trust in 'mainstream' politics and media is that everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied to and manipulated – and they’re right. Where they disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose of the manipulation. The rhetoric of critique and liberation has become ubiquitous, no longer serving to distinguish left from right, truth from falsehood. Virtually everyone now wants to unmask the elites and decode their messaging in one way or another. For leftist critics such as Naomi Klein, who made their names in a simpler pre-Trump, pre-YouTube age, this provokes an identity crisis. The premise of Doppelganger is so unlikely as to be almost absurd: Naomi Klein has spent several years being mistaken for the feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and has chosen to write a book about this.... You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left, in particular the loss of its monopoly (if it ever had one) over the language of political resistance, and how, in the process, that language has lost its grip on the world."

‘I hope I’m wrong’: the co-founder of DeepMind [Mustafa Suleyman] on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it – interview by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "He likes to think of himself as someone who confronts problems rather than rationalising them away. After he left Oxford he worked in policy for the then mayor of London Ken Livingstone, before helping NGOs arrive at a common position during the Copenhagen climate summit. It wasn’t until 2010 that he got into AI, creating DeepMind with the coding genius Demis Hassabis, the brother of a school friend, and becoming chief product officer. DeepMind’s mission was to develop artificial general intelligence, AI with human-like adaptability. Four years later it was acquired by Google for £400m, making Suleyman and his colleagues unimaginably rich.... Given ... the havoc that AI might be about to wreak, does Suleyman ever feel guilty about the part he’s played in its development? No, because he sees technological change as arising from the 'collective creative consciousness'. 'That’s not a way of disowning responsibility. It’s just an honest assessment: very rarely does an invention get held in a kind of private space for very long.' At the same time, he does believe he can nudge the sector towards greater social public-spiritedness. 'What I’ve always tried to do is attach the idea of ethics and safety to AGI. I wrote our business plan in 2010, and the front page had the mission "to build artificial general intelligence, safely and ethically for the benefit of everyone".' He reckons this early stand set the tone. 'I think it has really shaped how a lot of the other AI labs formed. OpenAI [the creator of ChatGPT] started as a nonprofit largely because of a reaction to us having set that standard.' The Coming Wave is partly an effort to continue this role of shaping and bolstering the industry’s conscience."

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman: AI, synthetic biology and a new dawn for humanity – review by John Naughton in The Observer. "The oncoming wave in his title is 'defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology', and it’s the conjunction of the two that makes it intriguing and original..... Translated into terms of technological waves, Suleyman’s evolutionary sequence looks like this: humans first used technology to operate on the physical world – the world of atoms; then they worked on bits, the units of information; and now they are working on creating new forms of biological life. Or, to put it more crudely: first we invented mechanical muscles; now we are messing with our brains; and soon we will be doing this with our biology. However you portray it, though, the reality is that we are in the process of creating monsters that we have no idea how to manage.... So what’s needed? The conventional answer is regulation, which Suleyman rightly regards as woefully inadequate for the scale of the challenge. Regulation is the last refuge of an exhausted mind: something that kind-of worked in the past, and so will hopefully work again – in an entirely transformed context. Instead, he proposes 'containment', a term with echoes of the cold war and George Kennan’s strategy for keeping Soviet power under control in the postwar era – requiring long-term, patient, firm and vigilant restriction of the adversary’s expansionist tendencies."

Too much too young: I talked to 10,000 children about pornography. Here are 10 things I learned – article by Abbey Wright in The Guardian. "1. Children as young as six are encountering pornography.... 2. For nine- to 11-year-olds, exposure to pornography is frequent.... 3. I met a 12-year-old boy who was dealing with pornography addiction.... 4. Teenagers are learning more from pornography than sex education classes.... 5. For young people exploring their sexuality, pornography can end up filling gaps in their education.... 6. Pornography is confusing the issue of consent.... 7. Pornography use doesn’t always conform to gender stereotypes.... 8. For many young people, pornography is their introduction to sex.... 9. Pornography is stopping young people from connecting in the real world.... 10. Very little is known about the effect pornography is having on young people...."

The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins: talk like a pro – review by Luca Turin in The Guardian. "Most of us are not subject to the demands made on TV news journalists such as Ros Atkins. They must, in just hours, familiarise themselves with a topic to which they have not necessarily paid attention until then. They must decide which information is reliable, vivid and important. They must then string these pearls in a logical sequence without gaps, non sequiturs or distractions. And they must deliver this information to camera convincingly, frequently in the face of unexpected glitches. Early in his career, which he chronicles disarmingly, missteps and all, the BBC’s analysis editor developed a technique to catch, sort, grade, clean, fillet, pack and deliver information. This book, The Art of Explanation, explains how he does it.... Anyone who has watched one of his three-minute backgrounders on the BBC will have gone through the same stages of delight and disbelief as I have. Who is this guy? How, in the name of all that’s holy, does he pack so much info into so little time? Why do I feel he is talking to me alone? And where do I learn to make that microscopic pause before important words, just like he does? I am sorry to report that this last question is not answered, but the others are. By the sound of it, Atkins has long been arguing that the space for facts inside people’s heads is not rent-free and must be earned second by second. Everything must either contribute to the push or be gone. He also believes, correctly, that every opportunity for communication demands our full attention and can be improved, streamlined and focused."

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."

Beasts of England by Adam Biles: Animal Farm for the post-Brexit era – review by Patrick McGuiness in The Guardian. "The past decade in world politics offers plenty of easy opportunities to invoke George Orwell. But writing a sequel to Animal Farm, a book that exemplifies Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic – that we don’t need to have read it to know it – is a riskier undertaking. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles has updated and retooled Animal Farm for today, and in this clever, resourceful and at times painful novel, the risk pays off.... Beasts of England is a state-of-the-nation farmyard novel, in which populism, sleaze, Partygate, Brexit, the refugee crisis, Covid, Johnson, Trump, Farage, the Murdoch press, targeted Facebook ads, the Daily Mail et al are allegorised in such detail that it takes on the air of a roman à clef. Biles has a lot of political and cultural dysfunction to pack in, and if there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that Beasts of England, at more than twice the length of Animal Farm, tries to cover too much of it. But the writing is lively and humorous, and the satire is only sharpened by the freshness and innocence of the characters (Martha the goose, Benjamin the donkey, Cassie the mule) who watch the darkness encroach. Biles knows that today’s post-truth world is very different from its 1940s incarnation – indeed, his ability to exploit similarities without implying false equivalences is part of what makes Beasts of England so historically and politically literate, as well as entertaining."

Julian Barnes: The sense of another ending – interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, 30 March 2013. "It is almost five years since Pat Kavanagh, the literary agent, died of a brain tumour. In that time, Julian Barnes, her husband of 30 years, has published three books: a collection of short stories, a collection of essays on the influence of other writers and a novel, The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker prize in 2011. His new book, Levels of Life, is another hybrid; part essay, part short story and part memoir, the latter of which will generate by far the most interest, as memoirs of the well known in turmoil will do. But it is a mistake to see the book as anything other than whole: an effort by Barnes, using everything he has, to look down on the landscape of loss.... Levels of Life is a hard book to describe; no summary will capture the experience of reading it – the way in which, as the slim volume progresses, something not quite central to your vision builds, so that by the end you are blindsided by a quiet devastation. The first two sections are concerned with late 19th-century France and feature Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, an awkward British cavalry soldier named Fred Burnaby, and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, the adventurer, photographer and – what links all three – enthusiastic balloonist. The book's guiding metaphor is Nadar's feat of being the first man to take an aerial photograph, from a balloon over northern Paris, and in that moment to experience a sort of existential freefall that finds its echo in the last third of the book." See also '"I didn’t think it was possible to be a novelist": Julian Barnes on literature, loss – and his late friend Martin Amis', interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian.

‘Big Bird’s hands were on my shoulders!’: the psychology professor who teamed up with Sesame Street – article by Hollie Richardson in The Guardian. "Big Bird is having a rotten day. There is a frown on his beak; his head is hanging down. He had been so excited to roller-skate around Sesame Street, but the rain ruined his plans. 'I don’t like this feeling. I want it to go away,' he says, before naively suggesting that the solution is to wish for the rain to stop. Luckily, he has a great new friend to help him deal with this feeling – Dr Laurie Santos, the professor behind Yale’s happiness course, the most popular course in the college’s history. She is also the host of the Happiness Lab podcast that Big Bird has joined her on 'Big feelings like disappointment don’t go away quickly,' she tells him. 'But there are things we can do … ' It’s not the first time the happiness expert has called on Sesame Street’s furry puppets for help. Earlier this year, Elmo joined her on her podcast to launch a new collaboration between The Happiness Lab and Sesame Workshop... In the new three-part miniseries, she also speaks to Abby Cadabby about gratitude and Grover about self-talk. This isn’t just for the benefit of the children, though – it has been made with adults and their little ones in mind."

Susie Dent: ‘English has always evolved by mistake’ – interview by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "Perhaps the world’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent is certainly one of the most positive people on British TV. For 31 years the queen of dictionary corner on Channel 4’s Countdown, she puts just as much energy into her books... This autumn, Dent will publish two new books full of linguistic jewels. The first, Interesting Stories About Curious Words: From Stealing Thunder to Red Herrings, is a book for adults about the weird stories behind some of our most common words and phrases. ... The next is Roots of Happiness: 100 Words for Joy and Hope, a book for children with beautiful illustrations by Harriet Hobday, which she calls 'the happiest thing I’ve ever written'. Dent is on a mission to revive English’s 'lost positives' – words such as 'feckful', 'couth', 'ruly' and 'full of gorm'. In modern English, they survive only in their negative forms, but once, we aspired to be ruthful (full of compassion) or ept.... So, what three joyous words would she use to describe herself?
... The first one she comes up with, because she thought of it when she woke up this morning, is 'elf-locked'. 'It looks back to the supposition that mischievous elves would come out at night and play havoc with your hair.' The second, a rediscovered positive, is 'feckful' – because 'I’d like to think I have some effect'. For the third word, she eventually decides on 'respairing'. Respair is the opposite of despair; it only has one record in the dictionary, and it means to recover from despair. 'But I think it also means hoping for better days around the corner. Having fresh hope and optimism.'"

‘The Iliad may be ancient – but it’s not far away’: Emily Wilson on Homer’s blood-soaked epic – interview by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Classicist Emily Wilson never expected her translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which was published in 2017, to be such a hit.... [She] has a theory about why readers found it so captivating. 'A lot of it’s just that I managed to find a language that was able to speak to different kinds of people'... But then came the Iliad. She always knew she would tackle it, right after the Odyssey....The two poems are very different. 'There’s a lightness and playfulness and magic about the Odyssey that I wanted to get across in the translation,' she says. 'And of course, the Iliad has tons of magic to it: it has a huge sense of the divine. And yet, there’s also a deep sense of pain and darkness and constraint. I don’t want to make you laugh very much. I think you should be crying a lot more than you should be laughing.'... The poem contains multitudes: three finely drawn worlds, of the Greeks, the Trojans and the gods; a whole range of competing and complementary architectures; exquisite variation of tone. And perhaps its most striking aspect is the way in which worlds beyond the battlefield are evoked through its imagery: armies are like floods or wildfires or flies swarming round a milk pail; gods fly with the speed of imagination or of hawks; humans are as short-lived as leaves. The poem clangs and clatters, and it’s so gleaming in its visual effects that reading it can feel like staring into a midday Mediterranean sun. Through it all pulses death, death that at every moment renders life more intense."

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson: a bravura feat – review by Edith Hall in The Guardian. "There were nearly 50 English-language versions [of The Iliad] in the 19th century, at least 30 in the 20th, and a dozen or more already in the 21st.... Do we really need another? If it is this one by Emily Wilson, then we certainly do.... Wilson, who has published acclaimed translations of the dramatists Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, is a scholar of classical Greek at University of Pennsylvania, and it shows....She has so deeply assimilated the aural effects made by Homeric enjambment, alliteration and assonance that they seem to come to her writing spontaneously: when the Trojan ally, soothsayer Merops, forbids his sons to enlist in the army defending Troy, 'They disobeyed, because their destinies / of death and darkness carried them to Troy'. She revels in the similes, especially those evoking the natural world: Athena leaps down from the sky 'like a shearwater with outstretched wings / and shrill, clear cry'.... There are appealing features that distinguish her version from others. She is especially sensitive to the subtle individuation of characters when they are given direct speech (which constitutes a quarter of the poem). We can hear Agamemnon’s narcissism and negativity, Nestor’s senescent garrulity, Thersites’ demagogic snarls, Hecuba’s near-derangement after multiple bereavements and Andromache’s intelligence and despair....There is a bravura self-confidence in Wilson’s choices. In the first two lines of the poem, Achilles’ wrath, which sent so many heroes to their deaths, is called oulomenēn. This long, vowelly, mouth-filling participle is usually translated by a much slighter English word such as 'direful', 'ruinous' or 'destructive' Wilson’s choice of 'cataclysmic' proclaims her independence from tradition and the acuity of her ear.... Often a rarer word breathes new life into an old image, such as 'canister' for 'bucket'. I enjoyed the fresh, contemporary feel of the dialogue, especially army banter: 'delusional behaviour', 'I am done with listening to you'; 'master strategist'."

Exclusive revelations from Sauron the Dark Lords forthcoming memoir – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "I made mistakes, but I still believe that I delivered positive change for Middle Earth. A cabal of anti-growth left-wing wizards undermined my premiership. The hobbits never gave my Shire modernisation policies a fair chance. Losing my ring of power was very difficult, but I do not rule out a return to politics." (See 'Liz Truss to "share lessons" of her time in government in new book'.)

Cuttings: August 2023

The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution? – article by David Runciman in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. “Being a banker is a career; working for a bank is a job; devising a banking product is a task; closing a deal is an action.… New technology has changed the relationship between careers, jobs and tasks. Performing tasks is what machines are good at. The better they get at it, the more work becomes task-oriented. In many ways, talking about the prospect of machines taking people’s jobs is a misnomer, because once machines do the work these are no longer jobs. Machines don’t require job security, any more than they require the other appurtenances of modern employment regimes: holidays, healthcare, positive feedback, redundancy pay. Jobs are what humans do.“

‘Esther, the singing dog won’t sing!’ Rantzen and team on the joy of That’s Life! – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "A young BBC trainee was sent, in the late 1970s, to film an Edinburgh dog that was reputed to sing along to his master’s bagpipes. 'But,' he recalls, 'the film crew set up, the guy in a kilt started playing, and the dog didn’t sing at all. It just sat there.' The fledging director was Adam Curtis... Back then, he was a junior in the Talented Pets section of That’s Life!, ... a show that was first broadcast 50 years ago this spring and had 15-20 million viewers. Curtis worried the silent canine meant the end of his career. 'I rang Esther [Rantzen] and said, "He’s not singing!" And Esther said, "Darling" – it was always in that theatrical way – "Darling, that’s brilliant! Just keep filming!" So I took various shots of a dog sitting silently next to a man playing the bagpipes incredibly loudly in his front room. I took the footage back and Esther – she always did the editing – turned it into a three-minute film of a dog doing nothing while this guy piped away with increasing desperation. And it was incredibly funny.' In between amusing animals, though, Curtis could find himself working on 'stories about housing estates collapsing because councils had taken bribes to build on brownfield sites'. This mix of reporting and chortling was central from the start. 'I had been brought up to believe,' says Rantzen, 'that mixing comedy and tragedy was a great British tradition. Hence the Porter scene in Macbeth. Taxi drivers used to ask, "Is your show meant to be funny or serious?" And I said, "Yes."’... 'We started with high-street vox pops,' Rantzen explains. 'Then the first consumer item was also light-hearted, to seduce viewers into watching. Next we put a "half-hard" consumer item ...which led into the centre of the show where we put our most serious reports. The transition out of the most serious – and we did life-and-death issues, so they could be very serious – was usually done via recaps by the reporters, bringing past stories up to date. The last recap was a fun one, so we could finish with talented pets or a live piece of nonsense that meant we could end on laughter. Ruthlessly, I also used to start the show with a pre-title clip of the funniest item from the previous week, to remind viewers of what they missed if they failed to watch us. Serve them right.'"

I really don’t know where I want to end up. How do I figure out what I want to do? – advice column by Eleanor Gordon Smith in The Guardian. "How do I figure out what I want? I feel like I am good at achieving goals that I care about, but I’m hopeless at deciding what goals to pursue...." "'Figuring out what you want' can get easily confused with two other questions that suck up your time and deplete your energy while dangling the possibility of getting it right just out of reach. The first is: 'What shouldI want?' Figuring out what you should want (not what you do want) is a miserable experience, because there are too many plausible responses....The second question we can accidentally embark on in the guise of asking what we want is: 'How can I have an ideal life?' When we ask that, we start to stress over all the possible ways we could improve things. Improvement is in principle never-ending, so the stress of trying to achieve it is also never-ending.... The question of what you want is separate to both. It’s about asking when you feel most like yourself. When do you feel at ease; like you have both feet firmly planted on the floor? When do you feel like the best of you is showing up in your interactions? When are you proud of yourself in that deep, lamp-in-the-soul type way?"

Coming soon! Classic novels improved by artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Android of Green Gables, Montgomery. A Suitable Bot, Seth. Portrait of the Automaton as a Young Machine, Joyce. Tech of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy. My Family and Other Algorithms, Durrell."

‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’: Why wasn’t Lucy Letby stopped as months of murder went by? – article by Josh Halliday in The Observer. "Dr Stephen Brearey recalls the [meeting at which] he first connected Lucy Letby to a series of unusual baby deaths on the neonatal unit where they worked. It was in a meeting with the hospital’s head of nursing and two other colleagues on Thursday, 2 July 2015. 'It can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy,' he told them. More than eight years later, 33-year-old 'nice Lucy' faces the rest of her life in prison after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six in crimes without parallel in modern Britain. Through exclusive interviews, the uncovering of internal confidential documents, and months of reporting from Manchester crown court, the Observer can today tell the full story of how concerns were raised about Letby for months before she was eventually removed from frontline care in July 2016...."

‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline – article by James Ball in The Guardian. "The 'wellness-to-woo pipeline' – or even 'wellness-to-fascism pipeline' – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories. It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. ... Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the 'incel' (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the 'secrets' of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to. What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But ... the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place. 'Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,' [says Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]. 'But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.' Women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to suffer from auto-immune disorders, chronic pain and chronic fatigue – and such patients often hit a point at which their doctors tell them there is nothing they can do. The conditions are under-researched and the treatments are often brutal. Is it any surprise that trust in conventional medicine and big pharma is shaken? And is it any surprise that people look for something to fill that void?... Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. 'New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,' he says.... Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them."

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder: inside a troubled marriage – review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian.  "Eileen [O'Shaughnessy] was ill-served by Orwell’s own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man’s wife. It’s clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental – that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold. What I object to is her process of correction. ... Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps. Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. ... Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? ... For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren’t how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong." See also Anna Funder, 'Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story'. 

Top 10 female spies in fiction – article by Kim Sherwood in The Guardian. "In [my] Double Or Nothing, the first novel in a series commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of 007, Bond has vanished and time is running out. A new ensemble cast of double O agents must work against the clock to find Bond and save the world from climate catastrophe. ... [Johanna] Harwood trains as a trauma surgeon before a life-altering event brings her to Moneypenny’s attention, now head of the double O section (in the world’s most overdue promotion). Harwood becomes 003. I hope to empower women to see themselves as the hero, while reflecting the diversity of real espionage. In a genre outwardly dominated by male writers and heroes, I sought out female spies in fiction to inspire me. Here are my Top 10..." 1. Sheila Matthews in While Still We Live, Helen MacInnes (1944)... 2. Stella in The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen (1948)... 3. Gala Brand in Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)... 4. Elsa in The Hothouse By the East River, Muriel Spark (1973)... 5. Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré (1983)... 6. Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow: The Name of the Rose by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (2011)... 7. Laura Last in A Quiet Life, Natasha Walter (2016)... 8. Juliet Armstrong in Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018)... 9. Who Is Vera Kelly? Rosalie Knecht (2018)... 10. Marie Mitchel in American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)

The Fraud by Zadie Smith: a trial and no errors – review by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Guardian. "Early on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations. ... In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, Hilary St Ives, though he’d never once visited the island. Mrs Touchet can trace back the gist of his knowledge about Jamaica to a propaganda booklet of the 1820s, when much of England could delude themselves into thinking that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was tantamount to the freedom of enslaved populations in British colonies. Ainsworth ignored the regular reports of tragic rebellions and vengeful colonial reprisals coming out of the Caribbean in the decades since to paint a prelapsarian portrait of 'long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa-trees'. ... Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.... In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as 'the English Victor Hugo', and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years.... At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of 'stolen truth': the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, the Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being 'high-born men' in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel. Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were 'two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined', joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s 'secret word': slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port."

AI prompt engineering: learn how not to ask a chatbot a silly question – article by Callum Baines in The Observer. "What is prompt engineering? ... Throw a question from the top of your head at ChatGPT and it may provide a satisfying answer, or not. Prompt engineering involves considering the idiosyncrasies of an AI model to construct inputs that it will clearly understand. This tends to produce outputs that are more consistently useful, interesting and appropriate to what you have in mind. Formulate the prompt well and the response may even surpass expectations.... So how do I do it? There are several popular prompting techniques. Employing personas is a common trick. Tell the system to act as a lawyer, personal tutor, drill sergeant or whatever else, and it will create outputs imitating their tone and voice. Or, as a reverse exercise, instruct it to complete a task with a specific audience in mind – a five-year-old, a team of expert biochemists, an office Christmas party – and you’ll get a result tailored for that demographic.... Chain-of-thought prompting, meanwhile, is more appropriate for problem-solving. Asking the model to 'think step by step' will encourage it to partition its output into bite-size chunks, which often makes for more comprehensive results.... What should I avoid? Vague language. Without additional information, AI models cannot infer your tastes, ideas or the vision of the product that’s in your head. Don’t skimp on specifics or context and don’t assume that if something is missing, the model will correctly fill in the blank."

What happens when AI reads a book – blog post by Etan Mollick, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Every author knows, and dreads, what most people want AI to do with books – summarize them. They want to distill down pages of thoughtful prose, carefully considered language, and specific phrases into a few pithy points. So, can AI do this? [After testing this on his own short book on entrepreneurship, the answer is] Yes. And surprisingly well. Further, it has enough 'sense' of context that you can ask for expansions – tell me the examples and research the book gives to support each point. And it does that, too.... What about the style and patterns of writing? Are there any phrases or verbal tics that repeat throughout the book?... Can it work as an editor? As an editor, offer both several broad suggestions, and several specific ones, about how the book could be made more accessible and like a pop science bestseller and also: create a better transition between chapters 2 and 3. give me the original and your changes, and why you made them.... Given that the AI has an impressive ability to understand text, one use case for this knowledge is to help teachers who often assign books to classes. Given the entire text of the book, can AI help an instructor create more meaningful learning as a result? I think the answer is yes. ... You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will make 5 quiz questions on the book suitable for college students. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an 'all of the above option.' At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer.... The AI did much better at a wide range of other educational tasks based around the book: write a case study in the style of a Harvard Business School case that would require students to use the lessons of the book and provide the instructor’s guide to the case resulted in an interesting in-class exercise that I could see using.... I was particularly interested in its ability to apply knowledge from the book in novel contexts and ways: Explain the main themes of the book to me at four different levels: first grader, 8th grader, college student, PhD student resulted in good summaries.... I also tried explain how the book might be useful to dairy farmer in Wisconsin, a ninja living in ancient Japan, an experienced venture capitalist, and Glormtok an orcish barbarian from the fantasy steppes (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This resulted in lessons that actually encapsulated what the book was about."

Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time – article by Frances Ryan in The Guardian. "Should someone off work with Parkinson’s be allowed a television? Does a supermarket assistant deserve a hobby? YouGov put a range of expenses to the public to ask at what income level they believed each should be attainable. The results are eye-opening. The survey shows that 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills, while 74% think they should have the means to eat a balanced diet – in effect, meaning that around a quarter of the public believe that people on out-of-work benefits shouldn’t be able to have electricity or a full complement of vitamins. Things get particularly interesting when respondents were asked about 'non-essentials'. Only 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for all, while 55% think everyone should be able to afford a television.... Such attitudes are grim, but hardly new. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in 1932: 'The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.' And yet it feels as if minds have hardened in recent years. The cost of living crisis has seen disposable income inequality in Britain rise, with the poorest fifth of the population enduring the biggest fall as they’re forced to spend more to cover the basics.Meanwhile, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours."

Cuttings: July 2023

AI: what is to be done? – newsletter from Katherine Viner, The Guardian Editor-in-Chief. "For months we have been grappling with [this question]. A working group of our journalists and digital experts has been considering how the Guardian responds to the risks and opportunities of the AI era. Recently, we set out our thoughts in a statement of principles. Broadly, there are three. First, any use of genAI must have human oversight. The Guardian will remain a champion of journalism by people, about people, for people. Gen AI tools will only be used when there is a clear and obvious case for them, and only with the express permission of a senior editor. We will be open with our readers when we do this. Second, any use of genAI will focus on situations where it can improve the quality, not the quantity, of our work, for example helping interrogate vast datasets containing important revealing insights, or assisting our commercial teams in certain business processes. Third, to avoid exploiting the intellectual property of creators, a guiding principle for the Guardian will be the degree to which genAI systems have considered copyright permissioning and fair reward. Like other technologies before it, generative artificial intelligence will create risks and challenges, but this isn’t a reason to reject it out of hand. Nor can we ignore the impact it will have on society. We want to work with engineers who seek to design and build these technologies in a responsible and cautious way."

Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’ – article by Hannah Devlin in The Guardian. "The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with 'iron palaces', including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station. Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: 'This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.'”

The Guardian view on Blaise Pascal: a thinker for our times – editorial in The Guardian. "Amid rising concern over the future impact of artificial intelligence, and fears of digital overload, Pascal’s passions and preoccupations speak to our times as well as his. In his youth, the mathematical prodigy from the Auvergne was a tech bro avant la lettre, before later becoming a supreme analyst of the human condition. Pascal was responsible for innovations that paved the way for some of the possibilities of AI. In his 20s, at the request of a gambling acquaintance who couldn’t break a losing run at dice, he undertook groundbreaking studies in probability theory. Before that, he invented the world’s first mechanical calculator – the snazzily named Pascaline. But mastery of tech didn’t assuage a sense of angst. Pascal’s 'arithmetical machine', as he puts it in the Pensées, 'produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals'. But human reason was something altogether more splendid and problematic, because it was bound up with a soul, a mortal body and a will. Unlike both animals and machines, humans were condemned to worry about the meaning of life. But as finite beings, seeing through a glass darkly, they were hopelessly ill-equipped to find a satisfactory explanation.... Pascal berated the tendency of his contemporaries to park the problem by seeking distraction in sport, sex and other ways to pass the time. 'All of humanity’s problems,' he wrote, 'stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'”

Tom Cruise, anti-imperialism and zero body-fat: Bruce Lee’s legacy 50 years after his death – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Lee is one of those rare stars who is bigger than his movies. Despite leaving a slim body of work – just four complete films – he practically spawned a whole genre, and wrote the book for Hollywood action to this day. Lee runs through the DNA of global culture: video games, hip-hop and mixed martial arts, not to mention the general rise of the super-fit, zero-body-fat masculine physical ideal. The fact that he died young, in perplexingly banal circumstances (a reaction to a painkiller) only burnishes his myth. Lee also built a unique persona – intense, disciplined, physical yet cerebral – light years away from western stereotypes of Asian masculinity that were very much in play when he first came to Hollywood in the mid-1960s.... Despite training a roster of celebrity students in the martial arts ..., Lee realised the US was not ready to accept an Asian leading man. The final insult came with the 1970s TV series Kung Fu. Lee’s involvement in developing the show, which followed a Shaolin monk in the old west, is contested. Either way, he auditioned for the lead role, only to be passed over in favour of David Carradine, who had neither Chinese ancestry nor any knowledge of martial arts.... The success of [his Hong Kong] films caught Hollywood’s attention at last, but, even with his classic Enter The Dragon (released a month after his death), Lee wasn’t trusted to carry the movie alone, so Jim Kelly and John Saxon were cast alongside him. The 70s kung fu craze fed into everything from comic books (Marvel’s Stan Lee once described Lee as 'a superhero without a costume') to pop music. By that time, Lee had also reinvigorated the Hong Kong film industry, which has sent a flow of actors westwards ever since: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung and, of course, Michelle Yeoh."

Should we confront the toxic legacy of blackface … or just forget it? – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As we try to show in [the television documentary] David Harewood on Blackface, the transatlantic history of blackface minstrelsy can broadly be divided into two chapters. The first ended and the second began one day in the spring of 1896, when the French camera operator and projectionist Charles Moisson took a walk down Rupert Street in Soho [and] stumbled across a group of blackface minstrels. The short film Moisson produced is called Nègres dansant dans la rue. Filmed more than 60 years after the first minstrel shows had arrived in London, it captures a group of white men in blackface performing a dance routine in front of a small crowd. By 1896, three generations of British men had applied burnt cork to their faces and made their living through racial impersonation – presenting audiences with what was by then a highly ritualised image of African Americans – a people about whom they knew little and who lived in a nation they had never visited. I’ve watched Moisson’s film dozens of times, and what captivates me most are the young boys lined up on Rupert Street: they are as captivated by the unfamiliar sight of a movie camera as by the far more familiar image of street performers in blackface. Those boys will have been in their late 50s and 60s by the time the Windrush arrived in that same city half a century later. In their formative years, this is the image of black people that was presented to them.... Making a documentary about a forgotten aspect of a forgotten history is always challenging. What has made the production of this documentary so difficult – and led to me to keep changing the scripts and tweaking the final version – is the issue of language. Minstrelsy was one of the delivery systems through which stereotypes and racial slurs were transmitted from the US into British English.... Is it possible to reveal how horrific minstrelsy was without discussing such language? Would removing those terms play into the hands of those who seek to minimise the history of race and racism? Can the warnings we make throughout the documentary be enough to protect those who – for entirely understandable reasons – would rather avoid hearing those words and seeing those images? Are there some subjects that are better left entombed in the archives?"

The Visionaries review – seers who were shaped by the shadow of war – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The Visionaries is about four contemporaries [Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand] working independently of one another. They had little in common but the fact that they were women and were writing and thinking as what Auden called the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s gave way to the horrors of the second world war – each finding very different ways of responding in their writings to a world turned upside down by the Holocaust and Hiroshima.... In 1939, as 5 million troops faced one another in western Europe, [Weil] wrote the profoundly timely essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, arguing war petrifies souls into a blindness to the consequences of one’s own actions... 'To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.' Simone de Beauvoir ... only met the other Simone once, but [when they did] inevitably they clashed. Weil announced the only thing that mattered in the world was a revolution to feed the world’s starving. 'I retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. "It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry", she snapped. Our relations ended right there.' And yet the story that Eilenberger threads through the book is of De Beauvoir emerging from the influence of her lover and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre to find, not just her own polymorphous sexuality, but a philosophy not trapped in the intellectual prison of the solitary ego, as his was.... The example of Hannah Arendt, on the run throughout this decade from fascist murderers first to Paris then Lisbon and eventually New York, is particularly salutary in this context: from early on her writing was profoundly engaged with geopolitical realities in a manner as yet beyond Sartre. Her developing thinking, Eilenberger relates, led Arendt to doubt universal declarations of human rights. There’s nothing that would make one more sceptical about France’s human rights tradition than seeing fellow Jews delivered by gendarmes to Nazi killers.... A few streets away in New York, ... Ayn Rand was developing philosophy very different from Arendt’s generous humanism. Personally, I find it ridiculous that Eilenberger gives this sophomoric pseudo-Nietzschean space in a book devoted mostly to much more subtle women. Her endless blethering in the imperative mood like Jordan Peterson on a bad day, about will, selfishness, the worthlessness of altruism and the moral foundation of capitalism, is very hard to take. And yet, I suppose, it is important to realise that Rand, though the feeblest of the thinkers here, was the most successful... Former British cabinet minister Sajid Javid, he of the 'Tory power stance', is a fan." See also review by Caroline Moorehead: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger review – four women who changed the world 

Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story – article by Anna Funder in The Guardian, derived from her book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. "The newlyweds were living in a tiny cottage in Wallington, 30 miles from London, with no electricity, one tap and an outdoor privy. According to some of [his biographers], he’s 'the happiest he’s ever been….'... Orwell’s 'combination of elements and circumstances' are, apparently, happy accidents rather than a situation tailor-made for him by Eileen. These conditions appear to exist without a creator, because the passive voice has made her disappear. For mysterious reasons the biographers don’t directly attribute to Eileen, his writing suddenly got much better.... Eileen had taken the word “obey” out of her marriage vows: the first radical act of the editing genius – she wrote 'emendations' on his drafts, and they worked very closely together on Animal Farm – that would define her marriage. But Eileen was there, working, dealing with his correspondence, organising their social lives, doing all the shopping (involving a bus ride to a village three miles away) and much of the cleaning (there is, intermittently, a 'char'), tackling the occasional flood, the cesspit, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors. And managing her impulses towards murder or separation when George doesn’t want his work interrupted by life. (He 'complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven,' Eileen wrote to Norah.)... As I came to recognise the methods of omission, they fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice. Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved, by the passports being 'in order'. Every time I saw [in the biographies of Orwell] 'it was arranged that' or 'nobody was hurt' I became sensitised – who arranged it? Who might have been hurt? I didn’t want to take Orwell, or his work, down in any way. I worried he might risk being 'cancelled' by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already – by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all – work, man and wife – in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. I was fortunate to obtain permission to use the six letters from Eileen to Norah, and from them I created a counterfiction, to exist alongside the fiction of omission in the biographies."

Seen and heard: April to June 2023

The Importance of Being Eton by Nick Fraser. Curious book, part reminiscences of the author’s time at Eton, part interviews with other Old Etonians and past and present staff, but despite his occasional attempts at analysis I’m not sure what it all adds up to. Surprisingly, one theme which emerges is that of failure: “I realise that I must… accomplish an ancient Eton ritual, by undermining, not necessarily with fatal results, my own promise. In order to truly succeed, it now seems to me that I need to fail.” And again: “Clearly, I must begin to fail at what I did - even if only as a compensation for all that Eton success. I could do what I wanted so long as I allowed myself to spoil whatever I was doing.” I think it’s really his attempt to work out the place of Eton in his life and the effect of having gone there, so only intermittently interesting to the rest of us.

Bournville by Jonathan Coe. Another topical (though also historical) novel from Coe, well-rooted in English place – this one in the eponymous village suburb of Birmingham where the Cadburys built their chocolate factory – with Coe’s wonderfully compassionate writing being kind even to unlikeable characters. Beautiful and satisfying to read.

Barnaby Smith: Bach. Tremendous solo concert (supported by Illyria Consort) from the male alto and director of Voces8, presenting the same programme as his new album.

Magpie Murders (not THE Magpie Murders, the difference is important). Really sparkling detective show, adapted for the BBC by Anthony Horowitz from his own novel. The clever concept is that there are TWO murder mysteries: one in the present, where a publishing editor (played to perfection by the wonderful Lesley Manville) investigates the suspicious death of her best-selling author; the other is the story of his latest novel, set in the 1950s, of which the last chapter is missing from the manuscript. Beautifully, the editor and the fictional detective often traverse the same landscape, then start to appear in the same shot, then – in the editor’s imagination – start to have conversations as they try to solve their respective mysteries. A class act.

A Grief Observed. C S Lewis’s very fine reflective account of his thoughts and feelings after the death of his wife. Of course everyone’s experience is different, but it’s always comforting to know that other people have gone through something comparable and to be reassured that the peculiar turns one's mind takes are in fact normal.

Hidden Figures. Interesting film, bringing to light the unfamiliar story of black women in the US space programme during the 1960s. Teams of black women mathematicians worked as computers - this being when a computer was a person, not a machine; in fact, it’s during the period covered by the film that one of IBM’s machines is installed, and the women, realising that it is going to make them redundant, retrain themselves as coders. A powerful civil rights story too; Kevin Costner’s character has been criticised as being a “white saviour”, which is valid, but the film does also show the women powerfully and forcefully making their grievances known, and movement towards equality usually requires action from the (white) people in power.

The Red Turtle. Beautiful and powerful wordless animated film. A shipwrecked sailor’s efforts to escape from his island on a raft are repeatedly frustrated by a mysterious red turtle, which in anger he flips onto its back on the beach so that it dies in the sun. The dead turtle, however metamorphoses into a woman, who becomes his wife and mother of their child for the rest of his life on the island.

The Shape of Water. Striking fantasy film by Guillermo del Toro, with something of the feel of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Sally Hawkins is a cleaner in a research laboratory which holds an aquatic humanoid alien. Developing a relationship with him, she determines to set the alien free before he is destroyed by the scientists’ experiments.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Lovely film about a journalist writing a profile piece on the (real) legendary Mr Rogers, whose television programme Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood was part of childhood of several generations of Americans – something like Blue Peter in the UK, maybe, only more so because Mr Rogers dealt in what we would now call emotional intelligence, how to recognise and manage feelings. The journalist goes in full of cynicism, and to his discomfort discovers that Mr Rogers is just as nice as he seems to be, in the process doing some work on his own wounded inner child. Tom Hanks, as Mr Rogers, is of course excellent, and so is Matthew Rhys as the journalist, especially in the bits where you can see that he wants to cry but is determinedly not doing so. The film is based on a real journalist’s article ‘Can you say … hero?’ for Esquire magazine.

The Uncertain: Light at the End. Adventure game, sequel to The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day. An okay game, with a decent review: you guide a small group of humans scavangeing to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world in which robots have taken over. But the characters are stereotypes and the dialogue is stilted, and I couldn’t really care about any of them, even the principal. If there are more sequels (the story clearly sets up for a long sequence), I won’t be playing them.

Blue Steel. An early (1980) film from director Kathryn Bigelow, with Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop, being stalked by a man who becomes obsessed with her after seeing her gun down an armed robber. Curtis is great, and nice to see Ron Silver in a different role (knowing him first as Bruno Gianelli in The West Wing). But I found it very intense and had to watch it in two instalments. I was also irritated that they never settled on what Ron Silver’s psychiatric condition was. They seemed to be setting him up as a psychopath: he was charming, which psychopaths often are, and his day job was a city trader, the kind of job at which psychopaths excel. But then they gave him schizophrenic voices too and a kind of religious mania as well. Too much, guys, pick a psychopathology and stick to it.

Bridge to Terabithia. Not the film I was expecting from the publicity summaries: children discover a magical fantastic world. It sounded like sub-Narnia. In fact, the film is thoroughly rooted in this world: a misfit boy (loner, artistic, bullied at school) has his life transformed by friendship with a misfit girl (literary, imaginative, rebellious), and yes they invent the world of Terabithia together but it’s an overlay onto the real world. It’s not a fantasy story any more than Swallows and Amazons, in which the children role-play their Lake District sailing and camping as adventures on the high seas and in unexplored territories. Also unexpected is that at the end the girl dies in an accident, so it’s also about the boy coming to terms with loss. Apparently the book on which this film was based is well-known and well-loved in the USA, inspired by the actual death of a child friend of the author’s young son; in a nice real life twist, the grown-up son, now a screenwriter, co-authored the screenplay of the film. Courageous of him to revisit it all again, one more time.

Steeltown Murders. Interesting BBC dramatisation of the real life investigation and re-investigation of the murders of three young women around Port Talbot. The narrative swings between the two time frames: one immediately after the bodies were discovered in 1973, and the other in 2002 when DNA technology raised the possibility of at last identifying the killer. By cop drama standards, the pace is slow and it seems unreasonable that the story can be dragged out for three episodes. But that's the point, I think: this is street level, shoe leather policing, where the investigation depends on pains-taking interviewing and collating of hundreds of potential witnesses, suspects and people of interest, every step of the way dependent on consent and goodwill on the part of the community.

The Hobbit: An unexpected journey. Well. I remember when it first came out asking my sister, who'd seen it, what she thought of it, and she replied: "It's long." And I thought then that if that was the best thing she could say, I wouldn't bother to see it. And I now rather wished I'd not bothered to watch it on television. There’s nothing actually bad about it; it just feels long, and most of the additions to increase the tie-in with The Lord of the Rings (whose events it precedes) weaken the story rather than strengthening it. The best thing, also the best thing in The Lord of the Rings films, was Gollum / Smeagol, who in his obsessive insanity is truly piteous and pitiable and not simply monstrous. I kept on till the end out of curiosity to see where in the story they finished the episode, but I’m definitely not spending my time on the second and third instalments.

Soul. Now here’s a proper film, of the quality we expect from Pixar: unexpectedly profound, being not only about jazz but about life and what it means to be alive. The principal character Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is an aspiring jazz musician, who enters a limbo state after a nearly fatal accident, in which he rebels against his fate, being convinced that jazz is his purpose in life, because his accident happened as he was just about to get his big break. In the limbo state, he’s called on to mentor an as-yet-unborn soul (Soul 22, voiced by Tina Fey) who sees no point in embarking on life; he helps her find her “spark” which means she is ready for life. And so is Joe: he thought jazz was his purpose, but perhaps it’s really his spark; he’s been like a fish swimming around, looking for the ocean, unaware that he’s already in it. That’s a great deal better than the self-actualisation just-be-yourself pap which is all so many films, for adults as well as children, have to offer. And the music is pretty good too.

Torchlight (see review). My current guilty pleasure: an action RPG with cartoon-simple but elegant graphics and a reassuringly easy ride on the Normal level of difficulty. The amount and variety of weaponry and armour available is breath-taking. I'm playing as a Vanquisher (specialist in ranged weapons), presently at Level 21, equipped with hardened plate tunic, the Indigo Plate Sash of the Winds (which provides protection against ice and a 15% change of reflecting 50% of missile damage), gorgon boots and the Fury of the Hunted gloves. She also wears the Shadow Guise, because athough I've found helmets which offer a better armour class I rather like the way this one steals health points from every hit. Until recently, she fought with the Brighteye's Sonic pistol in one hand and an Icy Brand wand in the other, but I've changed her over to a two-handed crossbow called the Arcuballista of the Bear, which despite being slow can usually dispatch weaker enemies in a single shot – very handy in the boss battle she's just survived, where I had her pick off the minions one by one to avoid being overwhelmed before she took on the big boss itself.

The Gallows Pole. Strange but compelling BBC drama, telling the story (based on real events, apparently) of a Yorkshire village community in the late 18th century, on the edge of destitution because of industrialising cloth production, which a returning prodigal determines to save by using his big city skills to strike illegal gold sovereigns from the clippings of real ones. The characters, especially the principals David and Grace, are very vivid, helped by director Shane Meadow’s encouragement of colloquial (though not obviously anachronistic) dialogue, and it’s a real insight into the class and economic conflict of the times.

Breathing Room. Rather lovely sculpture by Anna Berry: a twisting corridor composed of paper cones, of which the walls flex gently in and out as though you are inside a room that is breathing. From outside, you can see the mechanism which drives it: a large set of cogs and levers, made from recycled bike parts. The effect of being inside is calming and soothing, especially on a hot day, and encourages staying still to listen to the room breathe. It reminded me of Doctor Who (which in my book is a good thing), 'The Claws of Axos' from the Jon Pertwee era, which featured a spacecraft which was actually alive; the humanoid aliens inside it turned out to be part of the same single organism. In travelling to see the installation in Docklands, I learned the important lesson NOT to trust Apple Maps, which confidently placed me in the wrong location and guided me in the wrong direction.

Digital Storytelling. Exhibition at the British Library, featuring some notable recent games / stories, including 80 Days, Zombies! Run!, Breathe, Clockwork Watch, Astrologastor and Seed. Nice video interviews with the authors / designers with a few artefacts and playable extracts, but nothing which couldn’t have been displayed just as effectively and conveniently on a website. (The Guardian reviewer was also a bit sceptical.) But perhaps there is some added value in seeing the material in an exhibition space, in a prestigious institution.

Double Indemnity. Classic Billy Wilder film, with Barbara Stanwyck as a great femme fatale, a very good performance by Fred MacMurray, of whom I’d never heard, as the leading man, and tremendous presence from Edward G. Robinson in the third role. Great storytelling, with not a screen second wasted.

Cuttings: June 2023

Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. “Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough.”

Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism: On Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” – article by Jonathan Kirschner in Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is an essential read for its articulation of the perilous crossroads at which the future of enlightened liberal civilization now stands. Wolf argues persuasively that, for all their visible flaws and imperfections, competitive market capitalism and liberal democracy are the best bad systems available for organizing human societies. And each requires the other to thrive—‘[b]ut this marriage between those complementary opposites […] is always fragile.’ Capitalism has been allowed to run amok, and it has elicited a backlash that threatens democracy…. Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. … Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy. … When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.”

The policy paradox: the more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen – blog post by Sam Freedman, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This struck me with renewed force when reading a recent review of the health system by Patricia Hewitt, the former New Labour health minister. Hewitt argues for a greater focus on preventative health. … Despite everyone agreeing with the policy – including the person who was health secretary in 2015 and is Chancellor now – funding has been cut rather than increased. … As I tell the eager young think-tankers I meet, there’s no point writing another report making the case. The blockage needs to be identified and removed. In my experience there are three core categories of barrier that prevent the obvious ideas happening: spending rules; misdiagnosis; and fear of the electorate. Spending rules. … The Treasury’s objective in a spending review is to hit a target number that is driven by an arbitrary fiscal rule. To do this they have to overcome various obstacles including promises to protect highly politically sensitive budgets like hospitals and schools. One trick to achieve this is to move money into unprotected budgets. They did this with public health during the coalition years, removing the money from the NHS and giving it to local authorities instead. Once it was in was in the local government budget it could be cut while keeping promises to protect NHS spending. … Misdiagnosis…. Vocational education is a classic example… The misdiagnosis here is the belief that academic qualifications are more valued either for reasons of cultural snobbery, or because vocational qualifications are poor quality. But it is simply a function of labour markets…. The belief that ‘esteem’ is something that governments can provide means politicians keep pulling at the wrong policy levers…. Fear of the electorate. … An obvious example is council tax revaluation. … The bit that no can defend is that, in England, properties have never been revalued since the tax was introduced in 1991…. Why will it be different this time? … It's taken me a long time to realise it but ideas are overrated in policy. The real skill is figuring out how to make the ideas we already have happen.”

‘Red Team Blues’ and the As-You-Know-Bob problem – review of Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow by Henry Farrell on his Crooked Timer blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The ‘As-You-Know-Bob’ problem of bad science fiction [is that of] indigestible lumps of technical explanation of detail in the guise of purported dialogue. ‘As you know, Bob, the neutron flux problem eases after we pass the hyperluminal barrier. That’s how we were able to escape the Wixilit fleet.’ The problem is not only that this kind of stuff is painfully dull to read, but that it does not make narrative or logical sense. If both parties know how something works, why is one telling the other about it?… Red Team Blues… takes on … the technical workings of cryptocurrency. The book’s protagonist is an accountant in his mid-sixties. These are not promising sounding premises for a fun book that you might want to buy, and read. [But] you do want to read it, and I say this as someone who (a) has read more about accounting standards than he ever wanted to, and (b) has regularly had the ‘oh f***, here we go’ feeling when someone mentions the word ‘blockchain’ at a conference. Red Team Blues shows you how to solve the Bob problem for a wildly unpromising topic. And it not simply entertains readers, but explains things to them that they absolutely ought to know about – the evil crap that the complexities of the modern financial system enable…. Making it so that all this information about complicated and boring seeming details doesn’t seem complicated or boring at all – that requires technical skill. You don’t notice this artistry as a reader, which is the point unless you’re watching closely to try to figure out how the magic trick works, so that you can one day perhaps replicate it yourself. There are important lessons here for academics who want to push out their ideas to a popular audience.”

Interrobang? – review of Florence Hazrat, An Admirable Point: A History of the Exclamation Mark, by Kieran Setiya on the Under the Net website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Punctuation is said to originate almost 5000 years after the invention of the written word, with the Mesha Stele in 840 BCE, a stone inscribed for King Mesha of Moab in present-day Jordan. The text of the stone features full stops or periods between each word and vertical strokes to mark the ends of sections. Six hundred and forty years later, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots to indicate the amount of breath one would need to complete a given stretch of text when reading aloud, a mid-level dot marking a short passage or komma, a dot at the bottom marking a longer passage or kolon, and for very long pauses, a dot near the top of the line. Skip ahead eight hundred years, to the 7th century CE, and the Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville invents the comma, colon, and full stop, adapting Aristophanes’ pauses as grammatical markers. The modern system of punctuation was completed between 1400 and 1600 and has remained static since then: a technology not subject to improvement. There is no Moore’s Law for punctuation marks. A sorry consequence of this is that the list of books devoted to individual signs cannot go on forever, commas giving way to comforting ellipsis. Instead, we face a full stop. There are fourteen books to write and some have been written already: Semicolon by Cecelia Watson, F***ing Apostrophes by Simon Griffin, and now An Admirable Point, a history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat.”

The backlash: how slavery research came under fire – article by Samira Shackle in The Guardian. “When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as 'a "woke activist" with an agenda'. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about 'fanatical' scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.... In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.... [Then] Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery... As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the Royal African Company, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty.... But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people 'carry the taint of original sin' and that it was motivated by an 'agenda' to 'implicate' the college in slavery. What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.”

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’ – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. “[The protagonist of Kuang's new thriller, Yellowface,] who describes herself as a boring 'brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward from Philly', is viciously jealous of fellow writer Athena Liu, a 'beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of colour'... After Athena suddenly dies, June discovers a manuscript she had been working on, about the 95,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps who supported Britain in the first world war. It’s intimidatingly good. When June polishes it up and passes it off as her own, the book shoots her to literary stardom. Reviewers then debate June’s right to tell the story, echoing familiar conversations on whether authors should write about characters and histories outside their own race or lived experiences.... Kuang’s view, however, is clearer. 'I really do not like this framework,' she says. Concerns about 'who has permission to tell these stories, or who has the right, or who is qualified' seem like 'the wrong questions to ask'. 'We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,' she continues.... For her, more interesting is how authors approach these stories: 'Are they engaging critically with tropes and stereotypes that already exist in the genre? Or are they just replicating them? What is their relationship to the people who are being represented?' And, 'most importantly, does the work do something interesting? Is it good?'”

‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China – article by Rafqa Touma in The Guardian. “Under a photo of processed cheese, ham and crackers packed neatly in plastic, a Weibo user writes that to eat this for lunch is to 'learn what it feels like to be dead'. The post is part of a trend among Chinese social media users who are recreating 'báirén fàn' or 'white people food' to better understand – or poke fun at – western packed lunches made up of plain ingredients such as raw vegetables and sliced meats. The social media platforms Weibo and Xiaohongshu have been inundated with photos and reviews of cold sandwiches, raw carrots and canned tuna. Many are from Chinese international students surprised by the simple lunches eaten by their peers overseas.... Marcelo Wang explains that the fascination with these meals comes from that fact that many Chinese people are used to cooking with a lot of different ingredients. But to some Chinese netizens, this kind of food is the 'lunch of suffering', as put by blogger Shanyoule, who bought a pack of string beans and a tomato to see what it was like to eat them raw: 'It’s so lawless and outrageous.'”

Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links – article by Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. “An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city. Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.... By asking questions about how Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the university’s collections, the museum said it has made new discoveries about Cambridge’s own connection to colonialism.... The exhibition, which opens in September, is the first in a series of planned shows and interventions at the Fitzwilliam Museum between 2023 and 2026.”

Overambitious beach reads – cartoon by Tom Gaud in The Guardian. “It's a sunny day at the beach and the litguards have spotted somebody who has got into difficulties... [Wife:] 'Please help! He's just reading the same page over and over!' [Litguard:] 'We see this a lot: people make overambitious book choices at home, then get overwhelmed on holiday.... I've given him a sedative and a soothing mystery novel. if you keep him away from challenging multigenerational epics, he should be fine.' [Wife:] 'Thank you!'”

Self-Made by Tara Isabella Burton: selfie society – review by Rachel Aspden in The Guardian. “What do a 41-minute sex tape featuring a little-known personal stylist and a sombre self-portrait in oils by the Renaissance polymath Albrecht Dürer have in common? According to a compelling new study of the ways in which we see ourselves and attempt to shape how we’re seen by others, they are both masterpieces not just of self-promotion, but self-creation. Kim Kardashian, Superstar – as the tape became known – and Dürer’s Self-Portrait at 28 are controversial statements of their subjects’ fame worthiness and magnetism; both were successfully parlayed into real-life celebrity and riches. The eye-opening comparison is typical of Self-Made, US cultural critic Tara Isabella Burton’s fun, insightful romp through an identity parade of geniuses, dandies, charlatans, moguls and film stars. It’s a journey that culminates in the billions of us with smartphone cameras and social media accounts. Burton is a scholar of religion in its broadest sense. Her previous book, Strange Rites, unpacked the ways in which people stubbornly continue to create meaning, ritual and faith in supposedly ever more secular western societies. Self-Made picks up that thread, identifying a key imaginative shift during the Renaissance as the foundation of our 21st-century world of selfies and brand collabs. As belief in God as the arbiter of destiny began to wane, faith in humans’ ability to shape their own selves and therefore their lives grew. (In Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the artist appears face-on in a pose usually reserved for depictions of Jesus.) Self-Made is strong on the weirdly mystical dimensions of celebrity: the notion that there are innate qualities that can be nurtured but not learned or taught.”

The Diary of Virginia Woolf: a book for the ages – review by Hermione Lee in The Guardian. “Woolf’s first surviving diary entry was made in 1897, when she was nearly 15; her last was on 24 March 1941, four days before her death. She kept these 42 years’ worth of writings in unlined notebooks with soft covers which she bound in coloured papers.... How many different uses she puts her diary to! It is a record of her world, and if you want to know the details, written up at speed in the heat of the moment, of the general strike, or the abdication crisis, or the civilian experience of the second world war, this is the place to go. It is a writer’s exercise book, where she works at finding an 'elastic' form which will make something of 'this loose, drifting material of life': 'It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales.' It is an essential form of therapy, where dangerous feelings – anger over a row with Leonard about money, terror at the onset of depression, pain in illness, social embarrassment, apprehension of being laughed at when her books are coming out – can be laid to rest. This is where she 'composes' herself: 'To soothe these whirlpools, I write here.' It is a reader’s notebook, where she records her literary responses and judgments and often tells herself 'what a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!' It is an intimate account of her own writing process, like the joyous moment in her bath when she suddenly invents Three Guineas – 'Lord how exciting!' – or the evolution of To the Lighthouse, from the first thought: 'to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in – life, death, etc'. It is a memory book, which, very importantly for her, brings back her past and compulsively revisits key dates like her mother’s death when she was 13, or her marriage to Leonard, or the moves to different houses. It is a book about mortality, knowing that death is coming and making the most of what is now and here.... She wrings all the juice from life: love, pleasure, affection and enjoyment run all through. She wants to live for the moment. 'If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L & say stay this moment.'”

There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with ‘diversity training’ – article by Arun Kundnani in The Guardian, based on his book What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism. “The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes. Its founders, such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, were interested in understanding the rise of nazism in the 1930s.... To remove this danger, they called on the liberal establishment to persuade the masses, especially the poor and uneducated, that racist opinions have no legitimate basis. This approach remains at the core of liberal antiracism today, from the enthusiasm for diversity training ... to the hope that better representation in Hollywood films will educate us out of our biases.... The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups.... The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued in 1956 that we should abandon the habit 'of regarding racism as a disposition of the mind, a psychological flaw'. Rather, 'military and economic oppression most frequently precedes, makes possible and legitimates' racist beliefs. And this 'systematic oppression of a people' can continue even if a majority of citizens do not have racist biases, unconsciously held or otherwise. Radical antiracists argue that the only way to fight this oppression is to build autonomous organisations with the power to dismantle existing social systems and build new ones. To them, racism is closely connected to capitalism. This is partly because racism weakens class struggle by dividing white workers from most of the world’s working people. More fundamentally, race provides a means by which capitalism can more intensively exploit certain categories of worker – the enslaved, the indentured, colonised peasantries, migrant workers – as well as justify discarding peoples deemed superfluous to the economy.”