Yesterday Origins – strong adventure game, sequel to Yesterday (see Seen and Heard Jan-Mar). Unlike this reviewer, I thought this was actually better than the original; at least the trans-historical story hung together better, and the female protagonist, basically just a love interest in the original game, here at least has a bit more to do. I rather liked her troubled relationship with John Yesterday with which the game starts, as well as the steady drip-feed of revelations in both the past (the era of the Spanish Inquisition) and the present. Nice puzzle-solving mechanic too, involving acquisition and selection of the correct ideas (represented by icons, generated by interaction with people and things) as well as objects in your inventory. I found myself caring about John and Pauline this time, which I didn’t in the previous game, despite (or maybe because) this one is even more grisly and pessimistic.
Ghostbusters Afterlife – now this is how to do a forty-years-on homage, with respect for the spirit of the original and the skill to recreate it with totally new characters, rather than depending on quotes and repetition of tropes (although there are plenty of those too). Mckenna Grace, playing geek girl Phoebe, is a revelation; her firing a proton pack from the external gunner seat of the speeding Ectomobile is one of the defining images of the film.
Horrible Histories: The Movie – tremendous, often hilarious, fun film, just like the TV series. Two really impressive things: (1) that they managed to extend what is essentially a sketch show into a full length story, set in Roman Britain and centred on Boudicca’s rebellion (including the definitive rendering of Boudicca’s song); (2) they neatly side-stepped the child-unfriendly aspects of the historical actuality, doing so with a knowing wink. (As in the happy ending finale song: “Merge our cultures, mix our past, / Maybe next time wait to be asked / Sharing's good, Sharing is fun, / Shame you had to kill everyone… / Yeah but let's not talk about that.”) Cudos too for securing Derek Jacobi to reprise his stammering role of Emperor Claudius, as a cameo (he dies, poisoned by his wife, in the first scene).
Mission Impossible – the sixties television show, now being re-shown on Legend. When the BBC first showed it in 1970, it was selective, omitting entirely the first season (in which the IMF was headed not by Jim Phelps but Dan Briggs, who wasn’t as good – for one thing, his plans didn’t always work), and then showing only the best episodes, and my own re-viewing has followed their selection, replaying the experience of my childhood. First episode: 'The Astrologer' (2:13), featuring Cinnamon (the beauteous Barbara Bain), pretending to be the titular astrologer, and a remote controlled dummy, which does just one thing, jerking his arm downwards (“that’s all he needs to do”); next 'The Mercenaries' (3:4), in which Barney and Willy extract the gold from a locked vault by drilling into it from below and melting it out. Other memorable episodes include 'The Exchange' (3:12), in which poor claustrophobic Cinnamon is captured and disturbingly terrorised, while Jim and the team liberate and extract information from one of their own side’s intelligence prisoners to exchange for her; and 'The Submarine' (4:17) in which an ex-Nazi is tricked into revealing the location of hidden Nazi funds, which he has stubbornly resisted for decades, by use of a fake submarine. These best episodes stand up really well today; the basic formula of the impossible mission, with the gradual revelation of the steps of its execution, thus preserving the mystery and surprise, is still a winner.
Astrid: Murder in Paris – classy French detective show. This is an argument for listings magazines; I’d never have spotted this, hidden away in the More4 schedules, if it hadn’t appeared in a Radio Times ‘Pick of the Day’ feature. The hook is that the principle character, Astrid, is autistic, and so we see her alternately terrified by everyday social interactions and brilliantly insightful into the clues of a case, through her ability to observe and recall detail and see patterns. The set-up pairs her, an archivist in the Criminal Records Bureau, with Raphaëlle, an inspector, and the relationship between them – Raphaëlle tenderly protective of Astrid – is one of the joys of the show.
Red Eye – high-voltage ITV-produced six-episode contemporary thriller, with Jing Lusi as the ex-Hong-Kong-Chinese Met officer escorting Richard Armitage as a prisoner on an overnight (red eye) flight to Beijing. Very compelling, and I’m just glad I was able to watch the episodes in quick succession, rather than having to wait a week, in order to keep track of the twisty, turney plot, in which revelations come fast, like summer thunderstorms, involving the secret services of the UK, the USA and China, all focused on that plane and the information which Richard Armitage may or may not, unknown to himself, be carrying. And of course I enjoyed seeing Chinese people taking a variety of leading roles in a top-quality drama.
Mirages of Winter – a replay for me of this Zen-like meditative game, like an animated Chinese ink painting, in which you follow a fisherman as winter storms, snow and ice give way to spring. Much better second time, when I had some residual memory of the solutions to the puzzles – more precisely, what you need to do to move the game on to the next scene – and so spent very little time in frustration and more time enjoying the sights and sounds, which is surely the point of the game. (See Seen and Heard, April-June 2020.)
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow – well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. I suppose it should be classed as a horror game, but I’d say it’s more creepy than the shocks and scares than that label might imply; there’s a sense of menace and dread from the start, and it builds and builds until it can build no more. What keeps one playing, even though one just knows the ending is going to be horrible, is the principal character Thomasina Bateman: a late Victorian lady archaeologist, who arrives in a small Yorkshire town to excavate the nearby burial mound of Hob’s Barrow – about which the locals seem to either deny knowledge, be vague in their information, or adversarial in their warnings to Thomasina to stay away. The voice actor for Thomasina is particularly good, giving depth and character to each line; I particularly liked the way she says “Hogwash!” – her favourite word for dismissing the folklore of the locals (fairies, witches, hobgoblins, something worse): in the early parts of the game, where she is still strong in the scientific rationalism in which she was brought up by her father, she says it with confidence and contempt; in the later parts of the game, it is undeniably defensive, as the uncanny events pressing in on her become ever more threatening. The graphics are very simple and highly pixelated; nothing realistic is needed, and actually it helps one engage with the story to know that one’s never going to see anything too gory and horrible; the horror is all in the imagination. The title screen is particularly strong and well-designed; good games designers know that the title and main menu are the things which a player is going to see again and again, and so use it to establish mood and character for each playing session. In this case, we see Thomasina in a train carriage (the only non-pixelated graphic in the game), with Hob’s Barrow visible on a hillside through the window, the purple light which in the game is associated with the supernatural shining from its door. She is writing a letter; the game events are narrated by her in the past tense, so perhaps (as one reviewer thought) it’s the story of the game she is writing. But no, that can’t be it, because she is writing her account from – no, I won’t say! (Spoiler!) Unless perhaps what this shows is her travelling back to Hob’s Barrow in her imagination as she writes. So the imagination is already being invoked from the title screen. And the title music: howling, mournful, pounding. This is a game which stays with one long after one has finished playing.
On Chesil Beach and Effie Grey – two films, seen close together and connected in my mind, although very different (the first set in the early 1960s, sensitively based on a novel by Ian McEwan, the second set in the mid-nineteenth century and based on real historical characters) because of their similar theme of a love-relationship driven onto the rocks by a disastrous wedding night as a result of the would-be lovers’ sexual ignorance and inexperience. What struck me was how this could (and probably does) all happen again today, though perhaps not a late as a wedding night; the problem would not be ignorance but mis-information, thanks to internet pornography.
Draw On Sweet Night – concert by Voces8. Wonderful to hear them in the flesh, having first seriously discovered them through their livestreamed “Live from London” concerts during Covid Lockdown, with a programme of their (and our) favourites, including Arvo Pärt’s 'The Deer’s Cry', which I felt I understood for the first time. I knew the story: how St Patrick and his companions were kept safe from those who planned to ambush them, because he prayed for protection and so they appeared to their would-be attackers as a deer and a faun. But the Voces8 introduction explained how this relates to the music: why it keeps stopping and starting again. The repeated chant “Christ with me, Christ in me” is said by a person in terror of their life, pausing every few steps to check: have they been detected? And then, rather beautifully, as their confidence grows, and they realise that they are going to make it after all, they find they are able to extend their compassion even to their aggressors: “Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me.” We may never have to live through such a situation (although these days, who can be sure), but if one does, this is the breastplate to have.
Vox Musica, 'L'Eco di Monteverdi' – a superb concert by this London-based choir, in the chapel of the Ducal Palace, Mantua, while Polymnia were giving concerts in nearby towns. Lots of Monteverdi, of course, this being the chapel in which he was Director, before he went to Venice. A great sound and sensitive singing; it was like every member of the choir was a soloist (and many actually did sing solos).
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – rewatching Season 2 of this show, which I reckon the most serious and most grown-up of the Star Trek franchises. Some episodes should have been good but weren’t (such as 'The Maquis' – why is Sisko’s betrayal by his old Starfleet Academy friend so unmoving), but a few are top notch and classics, notably 'The Alternate' (Odo suffers Oedipal problems when he re-encounters the Bajoran scientist who discovered and raised / experimented on him), 'Necessary Evil' (a burglary which leaves Quark fighting for his life leads Odo to reinvestigate a murder during the Cardassian occupation and hence to re-evaluate his relationship with Kira), and 'Whispers' (Chief O’Brien has an Invasion of the Body Snatchers experience, when everyone else on the station starts behaving oddly, so that a massive conspiracy seems the only possible explanation).
Sunday, 21 July 2024
Monday, 1 July 2024
Cuttings: June 2024
Pythagoras vs conspiracy theory – LinkedIn post by Alex Edmans. Lecturer: "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." Student responses: "Fake numbers!" "That's not a fact, it's only a theorem." "That's what they want us to believe!" "How much does geometry pay you to say that?" "You're a shill for big trig!" "Don't tell me what to think!" "Illuminati symbolism." "Pythagoras recanted on his deathbed." "Ha! You trust mainstream mathematics?" "Further proof that ancient aliens created the triangles." "I'm entitled to my own opinion."
Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts is a full-blown victory for DA Alvin Bragg – article by Sam Levine in The Guardian. "The decision to convict Trump on all 34 counts is significant. Jurors could have acquitted him on some and convicted on others. But the fact that they went all-in, and relatively quickly, suggests they believed the wider story prosecutors told at trial. It is a full-throated win for Bragg and the worst possible outcome for Trump.... over the last several weeks, prosecutors transformed a complex legal case into a carefully constructed narrative that was easy for jurors to understand. They took a case that was fundamentally about boring paper crimes and turned it into one that was about something simple: lying. At every step, prosecutors were focused on keeping jurors attention on their bigger picture. Their first witness, former American Media chief executive David Pecker, led them into the jaw-droppingly seedy world of tabloid journalism, laying out how he would pay for stories and then not publish them for the benefit of friends like Trump. It established the world that Trump operated in and showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to keep bad stories from coming to light. Pecker also delivered one of the most devastating moments in the trial against Trump. After several days of revealing how he bought and killed stories on behalf of Trump, he ended his testimony by saying how much he continued to admire Trump. It was a critical moment that showed how loyal those around Trump are, and severely undercut Trump’s claim that everyone was out to get him. Prosecutors also masterfully set up Cohen’s testimony for the jury. Cohen, a former Trump fixer, was a problematic witness for the prosecution because of his prior convictions for perjury and his known penchant for lying. Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was 'obsessed' with Trump. But from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors prepared jurors to brace themselves for Cohen. Pecker and Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, corroborated much of what Cohen would later say on the stand. The fact that Cohen was merely confirming what two witnesses before him had said made him seem more credible."
The reich stuff: what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.... 'Obviously, there are massive differences,' he acknowledges. 'Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?'... Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes. 'Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements? Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?'”
The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good? – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. "In the classic case, devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander at a switch that will swerve a trolley car from the track it’s on – hurtling towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – to a side track with a single victim who’ll be killed instead. Pop culture presentations of it suggest that the issue is knowing what to do: should you flip the switch or not? But the trolley problem starts with the fact that most of us have little doubt: you should turn the trolley to the side track, taking one life to save five.... But why, then, if we are right to flip the switch, is it wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, bringing it to a halt? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use their organs to save five lives – both of which strike most of us as grossly immoral?... The twist in this tale is that Judy Thomson ultimately changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it’s right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument turns on a variant of the classic case in which you have an additional option: as well as switching the trolley to a track with a single victim, you can swerve it into yourself. Thomson’s view is that you’re not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t then turn the trolley on to someone else, sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question has force even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case we started with: the absence of an option you wouldn’t take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.... We should not flip that switch because we would not, in most cases, be willing to sacrifice ourselves"
‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour, and why she’s running as an independent – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[Faiza Shaheen] was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent.... The problematic historic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor. Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.... I don’t want to sound partisan, and no shade on all the other candidates, but it’s unusual to find a person so accomplished, internationally respected, deeply networked and knowledgable in any political party; it’s quite a lot to lose.... By Friday, some commentators were building the case that Labour was being pretty smart, actually – riding high in the polls, the party could seal its victory by picking a fight with the left, and make sure once it entered government that it had its best people. Hence the deselection of Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the sitting Brighton MP suddenly suspended, and the row over Diane Abbott."
‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? – article by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs.... For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s 'social responsibility' in backing it for 'national strategy'. A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. 'At some point you’re like, "Oh my God, how is this not the story?"’ Halverson said. 'We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.'”
Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.... Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso....'When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,' said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. 'But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.'"
I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead – article by Lucy Foulkes in The Guardian. "The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, Anxious Generation, focuses on a significant problem: rates of anxiety and other mental health problems are increasing in this generation of teenagers. He links this to the emergence of social media and a decline in exploratory play, and says that we can solve the problem by banning smartphones for under-14s and social media for under‑16s.... Except that psychological science (and life) is rarely this neat. ... I recently wrote a book about this period of life, and alongside descriptions of the latest research, I included plenty of interviews with adults looking back on their own teenage years. I was struck by how powerful and self-shaping their adolescent memories were even decades later. But I was also fascinated by how similar the struggles were across the generations, whatever age people were now.... When puberty kicks off, it’s as though a flashing red light turns on in the brain, telling adolescents to care about one thing above all else: their peers. It’s a running joke that teenagers succumb to peer pressure and are obsessed with copying their friends, but this has a clear evolutionary purpose. To survive beyond the family unit, to integrate with a new social group and find a sexual partner, it’s imperative that an adolescent spends a lot of time thinking about what their peers think about them and whether or not they fit in with their friends. In my own adolescence, as with everyone else’s, no one was smoking or getting drunk on their own – they were doing these things with, and because of, their friends.... That doesn’t make the issue of phones irrelevant today. Social media has transformed social interactions for everyone: you have more people to compare yourself with, you can edit and curate how you present yourself to the world, and you can quantify how well liked you are – or not – by your peers.... Yet it’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun."
Coming of Age by Lucy Foulkes: our formative years – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "[For] her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, ... Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.... Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group."
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: chronicle of a disaster foretold – review by Killian Fox in The Guardian. "The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph.... As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail."
‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut – article by Rich Pelley in The Guardian. "There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa? But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988[,] written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald... Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts...."
At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong: changing state – review by John Simpson in The Guardian. "As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. 'Within four years,' he told me, 'we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.' Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned.... This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou. Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong."
Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts is a full-blown victory for DA Alvin Bragg – article by Sam Levine in The Guardian. "The decision to convict Trump on all 34 counts is significant. Jurors could have acquitted him on some and convicted on others. But the fact that they went all-in, and relatively quickly, suggests they believed the wider story prosecutors told at trial. It is a full-throated win for Bragg and the worst possible outcome for Trump.... over the last several weeks, prosecutors transformed a complex legal case into a carefully constructed narrative that was easy for jurors to understand. They took a case that was fundamentally about boring paper crimes and turned it into one that was about something simple: lying. At every step, prosecutors were focused on keeping jurors attention on their bigger picture. Their first witness, former American Media chief executive David Pecker, led them into the jaw-droppingly seedy world of tabloid journalism, laying out how he would pay for stories and then not publish them for the benefit of friends like Trump. It established the world that Trump operated in and showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to keep bad stories from coming to light. Pecker also delivered one of the most devastating moments in the trial against Trump. After several days of revealing how he bought and killed stories on behalf of Trump, he ended his testimony by saying how much he continued to admire Trump. It was a critical moment that showed how loyal those around Trump are, and severely undercut Trump’s claim that everyone was out to get him. Prosecutors also masterfully set up Cohen’s testimony for the jury. Cohen, a former Trump fixer, was a problematic witness for the prosecution because of his prior convictions for perjury and his known penchant for lying. Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was 'obsessed' with Trump. But from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors prepared jurors to brace themselves for Cohen. Pecker and Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, corroborated much of what Cohen would later say on the stand. The fact that Cohen was merely confirming what two witnesses before him had said made him seem more credible."
The reich stuff: what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.... 'Obviously, there are massive differences,' he acknowledges. 'Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?'... Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes. 'Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements? Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?'”
The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good? – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. "In the classic case, devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander at a switch that will swerve a trolley car from the track it’s on – hurtling towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – to a side track with a single victim who’ll be killed instead. Pop culture presentations of it suggest that the issue is knowing what to do: should you flip the switch or not? But the trolley problem starts with the fact that most of us have little doubt: you should turn the trolley to the side track, taking one life to save five.... But why, then, if we are right to flip the switch, is it wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, bringing it to a halt? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use their organs to save five lives – both of which strike most of us as grossly immoral?... The twist in this tale is that Judy Thomson ultimately changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it’s right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument turns on a variant of the classic case in which you have an additional option: as well as switching the trolley to a track with a single victim, you can swerve it into yourself. Thomson’s view is that you’re not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t then turn the trolley on to someone else, sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question has force even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case we started with: the absence of an option you wouldn’t take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.... We should not flip that switch because we would not, in most cases, be willing to sacrifice ourselves"
‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour, and why she’s running as an independent – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[Faiza Shaheen] was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent.... The problematic historic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor. Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.... I don’t want to sound partisan, and no shade on all the other candidates, but it’s unusual to find a person so accomplished, internationally respected, deeply networked and knowledgable in any political party; it’s quite a lot to lose.... By Friday, some commentators were building the case that Labour was being pretty smart, actually – riding high in the polls, the party could seal its victory by picking a fight with the left, and make sure once it entered government that it had its best people. Hence the deselection of Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the sitting Brighton MP suddenly suspended, and the row over Diane Abbott."
‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? – article by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs.... For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s 'social responsibility' in backing it for 'national strategy'. A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. 'At some point you’re like, "Oh my God, how is this not the story?"’ Halverson said. 'We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.'”
Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.... Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso....'When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,' said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. 'But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.'"
I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead – article by Lucy Foulkes in The Guardian. "The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, Anxious Generation, focuses on a significant problem: rates of anxiety and other mental health problems are increasing in this generation of teenagers. He links this to the emergence of social media and a decline in exploratory play, and says that we can solve the problem by banning smartphones for under-14s and social media for under‑16s.... Except that psychological science (and life) is rarely this neat. ... I recently wrote a book about this period of life, and alongside descriptions of the latest research, I included plenty of interviews with adults looking back on their own teenage years. I was struck by how powerful and self-shaping their adolescent memories were even decades later. But I was also fascinated by how similar the struggles were across the generations, whatever age people were now.... When puberty kicks off, it’s as though a flashing red light turns on in the brain, telling adolescents to care about one thing above all else: their peers. It’s a running joke that teenagers succumb to peer pressure and are obsessed with copying their friends, but this has a clear evolutionary purpose. To survive beyond the family unit, to integrate with a new social group and find a sexual partner, it’s imperative that an adolescent spends a lot of time thinking about what their peers think about them and whether or not they fit in with their friends. In my own adolescence, as with everyone else’s, no one was smoking or getting drunk on their own – they were doing these things with, and because of, their friends.... That doesn’t make the issue of phones irrelevant today. Social media has transformed social interactions for everyone: you have more people to compare yourself with, you can edit and curate how you present yourself to the world, and you can quantify how well liked you are – or not – by your peers.... Yet it’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun."
Coming of Age by Lucy Foulkes: our formative years – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "[For] her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, ... Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.... Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group."
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: chronicle of a disaster foretold – review by Killian Fox in The Guardian. "The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph.... As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail."
‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut – article by Rich Pelley in The Guardian. "There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa? But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988[,] written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald... Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts...."
At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong: changing state – review by John Simpson in The Guardian. "As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. 'Within four years,' he told me, 'we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.' Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned.... This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou. Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong."
Tuesday, 4 June 2024
Cuttings: May 2024
‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine – article by Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian. "While much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October. Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to 'transform Palestine into the land of Israel', in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel."
Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?' Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: earthly paradise – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden [of her Georgian house] to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery'. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making. She is thinking here of the uncomfortable fact that many of England’s most sublime gardens, the sort that people pay to view at the weekend, are built on a 'grotesque' moral vacuum. She singles out nearby Shrubland Hall, whose stately vistas and tumbling terraces were funded by money derived from plantations on the other side of the world. Those brutal mono-cultures of sugar, cotton and tobacco depended in turn on the labour of enslaved people traded from west Africa like one more commodity. Other land crimes that Laing wants us to consider lie closer to home. She explains that many of England’s large estates would never have progressed beyond a modest manor house with a useful kitchen garden were it not for the enclosure movement of the 18th century. By a series of parliamentary acts, the peasantry was deprived of its ancient right to graze animals and collect kindling on the commons. In effect it had been turned into an agricultural proletariat, obliged to depend on a wage from the Big House.... In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
The Searchers by Andy Beckett: the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn – review by Jason Cowley in The Guardian. "This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.... But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn."
‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism.... every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating. There are plenty of hypotheses about why people believe these stories, but only one good way of answering the question. Talking to them.... The most disturbing episode in the BBC radio series Marianna in Conspiracyland featured Totnes artist Jason Liosatos.... He sounded like a monster. But when his name came up among friends, I was told, 'The weird thing is, he’s also a really nice bloke, always helping people and giving his money away, a pillar of the community.' The apparent opposite of the basement-dwelling misanthrope I had pictured. I was intrigued. How could someone walk both paths? How could they be prosocial and kind, yet spread the most antisocial and cruel falsehoods? He seemed the obvious person to talk to if I wanted to learn why and how these fictions spread.... I asked Liosatos about the scandals I mentioned at the start of this article: Post Office, Windrush, VIP lane, Cambridge Analytica, Panama and Pandora Papers. In every case, he told me he didn’t know enough about them. 'It seems to me,' I told him, 'that you focus on the things that aren’t true, and not on the things that are true.'... He seemed so dismayed and outraged that I began to wonder whether I was persecuting him.... in her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, 'but often get the feelings right'. I would add a couple of thoughts. I see conspiracy fictions as a form of reassurance. This might sound odd: they purport to reveal 'the terrifying truth'. But look at what they’re actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are unfounded.... Conspiracy fictions also tell us we don’t have to act. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely Other – rather than a system in which we’re deeply embedded, which demands a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. They free us from civic responsibility. This may be why those who take an interest in conspiracy fictions are so seldom interested in genuine conspiracies."
So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch – article by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe 'Imperial Measurement', a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative. If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA.... It is a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh. But enter the business and trade secretary and aspiring Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who took it upon herself to endorse this IEA 'research'. She told an audience of financial services bosses at a conference in London: 'It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.' [According to her,] it was 'free markets and liberal institutions' that drove the Industrial Revolution and economic growth thereafter. [However], while they were certainly part of a cocktail of reasons for Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence, they were only part. Take innovation, and the correctly celebrated inventions – James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny of 1764/5, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, introduced in 1778/9 – that together made it possible to harness the delicate but tough Barbadense cotton and manufacture it at scale.... As Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write in their brilliant Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, it was no accident that this all began a few miles from Europe’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Or that fine Barbadense cotton flourished in Britain’s slave plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. Or that much of the finance for investing in these expensive, but highly profitable, innovative machines came from Liverpool merchants whose own fortunes originated in transatlantic trade."
The Guardian view on YA literature: an adventure for teenagers, a comfort blanket for adults – editorial in The Guardian. "Research released last week, which suggested that 74% of YA readers were over 18 years old – and that 28% were over 28 – is worthy of attention. The report puts the continuing appeal of YA down to reading for comfort, as a defence against the stresses and strains of 'emerging adulthood', among a generation that is taking longer to reach 'adult' life. Nearly a third of the readers were aged between 18 and 22, thus falling well within the new parameters of adolescence suggested by advances in brain science. Another third were aged 23 to 34, so benefited from the boom years of child and YA fiction, when the unparalleled success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series inevitably distorted the picture.... Older readers may not only be reading YA novels for different reasons to younger ones, such as solace rather than exploring their identity, but also may be embracing a significantly different body of literature. Nostalgia can buttress older titles against the caprices of the market. What is undeniably true is that books discovered in adolescence often stay with readers, becoming part of their emotional and intellectual scaffolding. The important thing at any age is not so much what you read, however, as having access to all the benefits of being a reader."
May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans: fake news rules… and that’s a fact – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "May Contain Lies is a wonderful litany of the myriad ways in which we can be deceived, and deceive ourselves, including sometimes well-known academic researchers as they try to stand up their theory. There are no sacred cows for Edmans. Whether it’s the authors of 2009’s famous The Spirit Level, which purported to show that inequality drives bad health outcomes, or the 1994 business book Built to Last, which influenced a generation with its apparent proof that visionary companies outlast their non-visionary peers, Edmans is unsparing.... Edmans is no less hard on himself. He tells the story of how he repeated for some years in his business school lectures the great Malcolm Gladwell statement that perfection requires 10,000 hours of practise. Then he inspected the data behind the statement and found that almost nothing did.... Given that we are increasingly engulfed by a sea of misinformation and bad public policy informed by self-deception, Edmans’s message could hardly be more timely. He urges us to follow Aristotle’s maxim: it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it. His advice is to stay open to the notion that you may be wrong, because you find the truth by testing your ideas against those who think differently."
The Last Caravaggio: a gripping and murderously dark finale – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Hunnish king is possessed by rage, his face fiery red, as furious as the lion on his bronze breastplate. He’s just shot the arrow at point blank rage. Ursula looks down, her face calm, at the shaft buried in her chest. There are no armies, no mounds of corpses as in earlier depictions. Instead, Caravaggio does what his contemporary Shakespeare did with Holinshed and Cinthio to create Macbeth and Othello: he extracts the human juice from the clattering narrative. This is a great drama played out in the depths of night – and the National Gallery stages it that way. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula hangs in a stark space with a handful of supporting documents and one other painting. It’s hypnotic. London theatre may be pricey but here’s a dumbfounding drama of rage, violence, death and maybe guilt, regret and acceptance – and you can see it for free.... The only person who’s fully lit is Ursula. Yet the light on her is pale and eerie. Although it comes from a single source, the light seems to have changed by the time it reaches her. The Hun leader is in a red glow as if lit by a campfire. But Ursula is in white moonlight, as she enters death – and heaven. For all this, the Hun chief is the painting’s emotional centre. His face, at first just savage, is full of contorted emotions. As Ursula stands there, still alive with his arrow in her, he sees the dreadful irreversibility of what he has done.... I’ve seen blockbusters that bored me stiff. This exhibition, dedicated to just one masterpiece, held me transfixed, just like Ursula."
The culture warriors have come for the National Trust. This is how we take them on, and win – article by Celia Richardson in The Guardian. "Too often, charities, public bodies and universities are becoming proxies in other people’s fights, and targets in other people’s schemes. It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it, and you can surprise people and grab headlines.... In 2021, a private company was set up to run paid-for campaigns to get its own often 'anti-woke' candidates on to the National Trust’s governing council. Parts of the media have been relentless in publishing a steady stream of stories about alleged problems with the trust. ... False stories are damaging. The public needs to be able to believe what they read about the institutions that serve them. The National Trust deals with sensitive, symbolic issues and must be open to public scrutiny, if only so we can be held to account when we make genuine errors, as will happen with all institutions.... So how does an institution deal with all this? We’ve had to be open and direct about what’s behind untrue stories wherever possible. We’ve answered all media questions, and consistently sought corrections.... Most importantly, we have listened. Just because you’re being unfairly treated by some, it doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, or is part of a conspiracy.... Sometimes we are wrong and change our approach; sometimes we need to respectfully disagree. Our director general is fierce in her insistence that everyone will be heard, and everyone must be served by the broader societal benefit that the charity delivers. In a previous role she was a cultural leader in Belfast, seeing first-hand the dangers of polarisation around culture and identity.... Independent research has shown that as attacks on the National Trust have increased, so has public trust in it. ... In a diverse country facing big challenges, it’s crucial that all generations and all communities can take part. The power and riches held in UK institutions belong to everyone, so public involvement is worth fighting for."
Why is Britain’s mental health so incredibly poor? It’s because our society is spiralling backwards – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan). Mental wellbeing has plummeted in the UK further than in any comparable nation.... why has it happened? The Global Mind Project blames smartphones and ultra-processed food. They doubtless play a role, but they’re hardly peculiar to the UK. I think part of the reason is the sense that life here is, visibly and obviously, spiralling backwards.... The five giant evils identified in 1942 by William Beveridge, who helped design the welfare state, have returned with a vengeance. He called them 'want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness'. His paternalistic language translates today into poverty, morbidity, educational exclusion, wretched housing and crumbling infrastructure, and bad employment or an inability to work. As they come thundering back, the five evil giants have brought some friends to the party: environmental chaos, extreme political dysfunction and misrule, impunity for the powerful and performative cruelty towards the powerless, and state-sponsored culture wars to distract us from the rest of the horror show. There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism."
Jon Ronson: ‘A society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen’ – interview by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "None of his works has resonated quite so powerfully with audiences as the podcast Things Fell Apart... it traces the origins of a number of conflagrations in the so-called culture wars, but it ingeniously sews together these disparate events and disagreements, tying them all to the early days of lockdown, so that listeners don’t so much hear about, as be transported into, a complex world of outrageous claims and counter-claims.... The eight episodes are characterised by compelling interviews with culture warriors, conspiracy theorists and their targets, which were notable for their curiosity, restraint and understanding. Given that some of the people Ronson speaks to seem to have lost all contact with objective reality, his questioning comes across as an impressive feat of empathy and toleration.... 'I think it comes with maturity and realising your own biases and stupidities,' he says. 'I’m not very confrontational and sometimes you do need to be if someone is behaving in a way that is hurting people or doing something dangerous, like spreading medical misinformation. But in general, when does confrontation work?' One reason his technique is so effective is that the interviews are contextualised with Ronson’s reassuring, though often wry, factual commentary, which sounds like the fruit of deep research – unlike, it must be said, the vast majority of podcasts. How long did he spend on it? 'The series took me 10 months,' he says."
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a seriously fun sci-fi romcom – review by Ella Risbridger in The Guardian. "For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end.... Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, [is] a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about. Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in deference to character and plot. Billed as 'speculative fiction', it is perhaps more cheering to think of it as 50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom. The Ministry of Time is chiefly a love story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in 1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government hellbent on testing the limits of time travel."
The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley: ‘It was just so much fun’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "A time-travel romance cum sci-fi comedy set in near-future London, the novel fizzes with smart observations about the absurdity of modern life, while taking on the legacy of imperialism and the environmental emergency.... This time three years ago, [Bradley] had just started at Penguin but had yet to meet her colleagues because of lockdown. She took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. Cyber-stalking him later she was struck by a description of him as 'a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers'.... Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, 'quite a community, it turns out'. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in instalments for them: 'a nerdy literary parlour game' imagining what it might be like to have your favourite explorer – Gore – move in with you.... While the title might be a mashup of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, the guiding spirit behind the book is Bradley’s best-loved writer, Terry Pratchett.... Along with Gore, she chose four other 'expatriates from history' to be part of the British government’s 'experiment': a lieutenant from the battle of Naseby; a beautiful, foul-mouthed lesbian from the great plague of London; an unhappy aristocrat from the French Revolution; and a soldier from the first world war. Each of them is appointed a 'bridge', a contemporary character who helps them 'assimilate' to life in modern Britain. Gore’s bridge is a young British-Cambodian woman."
That yearning feeling: why we need nostalgia – article by Agnes Arnold-Forster in The Guardian, relating to her book Nostalgia: The History of a Dangerous Emotion. "Nostalgia was first coined as a term and used as a diagnosis in 1688, by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness.... Today, psychologists believe nostalgia is a near-universal, fundamentally positive emotion – a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits. It can boost self-esteem, increase meaning in life, foster a sense of social connectedness, encourage people to seek help and support for their problems, improve mental health and attenuate loneliness, boredom, stress or anxiety.... Its reputation as an influence on politics and society is not so honeyed. Populist movements worldwide are repeatedly criticised for their use and abuse of nostalgia. The images these movements paint of the past are condemned for being overly white and overly male. It’s also seen as the preserve of those who are retrograde, conservative and sentimental.... This tendency is as widespread as it is strange. Not least because nostalgia is a feature of leftwing political life, just as it is of conservatism and populism – think of the NHS, for example. It is also strange because, if you take present-day psychology seriously, everyone is nostalgic, pretty much all the time."
‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? – article by Francis Beckett in The Guardian. "In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.... But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime... The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons.... [And] he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR ... and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington... And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.... What possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game? Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system.... Was it because, as he once said, 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war. Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it. I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me.... Did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that."
The big idea: the simple trick that can sabotage your critical thinking – article by Amanda Montell in The Guardian; see her book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. "Since the moment I learned about the concept of the 'thought-terminating cliche' I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the phrase describes a catchy platitude aimed at shutting down or bypassing independent thinking and questioning;... expressions such as 'It is what it is', 'Boys will be boys', 'Everything happens for a reason' and 'Don’t overthink it' are familiar examples.... Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the 'illusory truth effect' – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times.... There’s really no way to prevent or combat it, says [decision scientist Tobia] Spampatti, as 'even raising awareness of this risk does not lower its effectiveness'. To compete in the marketplace of thought-terminating cliches, then, our best bet might be to take what we know about illusory truth and harness it to spread accurate information.... It doesn’t only have to be shameless disinformers who exploit the power of repetition, rhyme, pleasing graphics and funny memes. 'Remember, it’s OK to repeat true information,' says Fazio. 'People need reminders of what’s true,' such as the fact that vaccines are safe and climate change is driven by our actions."
Catland by Kathryn Hughes: paws for thought – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "'Catland', as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other 'Catland', the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth. For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.... This is a darting, hobby-horsical, hugely interesting book with the feel of a passion project rather than a sobersides work of history. But its ease and authority come from how Hughes as a historian is completely at home in the era under discussion, offering feline sideways glances at class, economics, urbanisation, eugenics, gender politics and much else besides."
‘Although she was dead, I felt as if she was my friend’: what it’s like to perform the last rites for an organ donor – article by Ronald W. Dworkin in The Guardian. "The patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation.... When told of my upcoming case [as an anaesthetist], I had mixed feelings. On one hand, being in perfect health, unaccustomed to suffering and therefore easily disconcerted by the thought of death, I was horrified.... Yet on the other, the case also aroused in me a feeling of relief. Simply put, there was no risk of malpractice, as my patient was already dead.... After we moved her from the gurney to the operating table, the doctors and nurses, so used to taking care of living patients, stared at one another stupidly, as if not knowing why they had come together or why they were standing around the table. For a brief moment, each one of us perhaps had the same supernatural vision, how for the past six hours, after being declared brain dead, this woman had lain under the measureless power of death. Six hours she had been officially dead. Now she had re-entered the world of the living. I would support her blood pressure and pulse. I would make her blood bright red with oxygen. Indeed, she might even wake up and look at us, I fantasised. Ghoulish thinking, yet I do not write about this case to be ghoulish.... My purpose is more practical. Today, artificial intelligence looms over medical practice. Although unlikely to replace doctors completely, AI makes some medical activities especially ripe targets for takeover, including the harvesting of organs from brain-dead donors.... Yet this impersonal, nonhuman method of organ retrieval may discourage people from becoming organ donors, or from letting dead relatives become so, thereby exacerbating the current organ shortage. People will see pictures of organ retrieval being carried on by inanimate machinery in a room completely abandoned by human beings. Bodies will be brought in and sent out, while the invisible, sleepless work of the machines goes on. 'Please, tell me this is not my end,' people will fret privately. And they will resist consenting to organ donation."
What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh: making sense of senseless violence – review by Tom Sperlinger in The Guardian. "Shehadeh’s short book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, is a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. It is divided into two chapters. The first asks simply, 'How did we get here?', reflecting on key events since 1948, while the second analyses the last six months. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer and winner of the Orwell prize for political writing, traces the factors influencing an Israeli society that ... accepts the devastation of Gaza: the failure of the Oslo accords; the hardening of an occupation of the Palestinian territories that is by all the evidence 'permanent'; increasing fractures in Israeli society, for which a common Palestinian enemy can be a balm; and the growing dominance of extreme rightwing elements in Israel.... Nonetheless, Shehadeh admits he was shocked by the recent war. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, declared at the start: 'There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed' and Netanyahu boasted he would 'turn Gaza into a deserted island'. Shehadeh reflects: 'I reasoned that political leaders usually speak with such bravado … Yet as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty.'... Yet Shehadeh continues to reflect on a question that he asks about Elor Azaria [the Israeli army medic who shot a wounded Palestinian in the head]: 'Who would help this young soldier regain his humanity?' His searching analysis offers insights for readers coming new to the situation and others who wish to face it afresh.... 'What if this war should end, not by a ceasefire or a truce, as in other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict?'”
Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?' Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: earthly paradise – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden [of her Georgian house] to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery'. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making. She is thinking here of the uncomfortable fact that many of England’s most sublime gardens, the sort that people pay to view at the weekend, are built on a 'grotesque' moral vacuum. She singles out nearby Shrubland Hall, whose stately vistas and tumbling terraces were funded by money derived from plantations on the other side of the world. Those brutal mono-cultures of sugar, cotton and tobacco depended in turn on the labour of enslaved people traded from west Africa like one more commodity. Other land crimes that Laing wants us to consider lie closer to home. She explains that many of England’s large estates would never have progressed beyond a modest manor house with a useful kitchen garden were it not for the enclosure movement of the 18th century. By a series of parliamentary acts, the peasantry was deprived of its ancient right to graze animals and collect kindling on the commons. In effect it had been turned into an agricultural proletariat, obliged to depend on a wage from the Big House.... In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
The Searchers by Andy Beckett: the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn – review by Jason Cowley in The Guardian. "This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.... But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn."
‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism.... every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating. There are plenty of hypotheses about why people believe these stories, but only one good way of answering the question. Talking to them.... The most disturbing episode in the BBC radio series Marianna in Conspiracyland featured Totnes artist Jason Liosatos.... He sounded like a monster. But when his name came up among friends, I was told, 'The weird thing is, he’s also a really nice bloke, always helping people and giving his money away, a pillar of the community.' The apparent opposite of the basement-dwelling misanthrope I had pictured. I was intrigued. How could someone walk both paths? How could they be prosocial and kind, yet spread the most antisocial and cruel falsehoods? He seemed the obvious person to talk to if I wanted to learn why and how these fictions spread.... I asked Liosatos about the scandals I mentioned at the start of this article: Post Office, Windrush, VIP lane, Cambridge Analytica, Panama and Pandora Papers. In every case, he told me he didn’t know enough about them. 'It seems to me,' I told him, 'that you focus on the things that aren’t true, and not on the things that are true.'... He seemed so dismayed and outraged that I began to wonder whether I was persecuting him.... in her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, 'but often get the feelings right'. I would add a couple of thoughts. I see conspiracy fictions as a form of reassurance. This might sound odd: they purport to reveal 'the terrifying truth'. But look at what they’re actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are unfounded.... Conspiracy fictions also tell us we don’t have to act. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely Other – rather than a system in which we’re deeply embedded, which demands a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. They free us from civic responsibility. This may be why those who take an interest in conspiracy fictions are so seldom interested in genuine conspiracies."
So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch – article by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe 'Imperial Measurement', a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative. If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA.... It is a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh. But enter the business and trade secretary and aspiring Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who took it upon herself to endorse this IEA 'research'. She told an audience of financial services bosses at a conference in London: 'It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.' [According to her,] it was 'free markets and liberal institutions' that drove the Industrial Revolution and economic growth thereafter. [However], while they were certainly part of a cocktail of reasons for Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence, they were only part. Take innovation, and the correctly celebrated inventions – James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny of 1764/5, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, introduced in 1778/9 – that together made it possible to harness the delicate but tough Barbadense cotton and manufacture it at scale.... As Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write in their brilliant Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, it was no accident that this all began a few miles from Europe’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Or that fine Barbadense cotton flourished in Britain’s slave plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. Or that much of the finance for investing in these expensive, but highly profitable, innovative machines came from Liverpool merchants whose own fortunes originated in transatlantic trade."
The Guardian view on YA literature: an adventure for teenagers, a comfort blanket for adults – editorial in The Guardian. "Research released last week, which suggested that 74% of YA readers were over 18 years old – and that 28% were over 28 – is worthy of attention. The report puts the continuing appeal of YA down to reading for comfort, as a defence against the stresses and strains of 'emerging adulthood', among a generation that is taking longer to reach 'adult' life. Nearly a third of the readers were aged between 18 and 22, thus falling well within the new parameters of adolescence suggested by advances in brain science. Another third were aged 23 to 34, so benefited from the boom years of child and YA fiction, when the unparalleled success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series inevitably distorted the picture.... Older readers may not only be reading YA novels for different reasons to younger ones, such as solace rather than exploring their identity, but also may be embracing a significantly different body of literature. Nostalgia can buttress older titles against the caprices of the market. What is undeniably true is that books discovered in adolescence often stay with readers, becoming part of their emotional and intellectual scaffolding. The important thing at any age is not so much what you read, however, as having access to all the benefits of being a reader."
May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans: fake news rules… and that’s a fact – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "May Contain Lies is a wonderful litany of the myriad ways in which we can be deceived, and deceive ourselves, including sometimes well-known academic researchers as they try to stand up their theory. There are no sacred cows for Edmans. Whether it’s the authors of 2009’s famous The Spirit Level, which purported to show that inequality drives bad health outcomes, or the 1994 business book Built to Last, which influenced a generation with its apparent proof that visionary companies outlast their non-visionary peers, Edmans is unsparing.... Edmans is no less hard on himself. He tells the story of how he repeated for some years in his business school lectures the great Malcolm Gladwell statement that perfection requires 10,000 hours of practise. Then he inspected the data behind the statement and found that almost nothing did.... Given that we are increasingly engulfed by a sea of misinformation and bad public policy informed by self-deception, Edmans’s message could hardly be more timely. He urges us to follow Aristotle’s maxim: it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it. His advice is to stay open to the notion that you may be wrong, because you find the truth by testing your ideas against those who think differently."
The Last Caravaggio: a gripping and murderously dark finale – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Hunnish king is possessed by rage, his face fiery red, as furious as the lion on his bronze breastplate. He’s just shot the arrow at point blank rage. Ursula looks down, her face calm, at the shaft buried in her chest. There are no armies, no mounds of corpses as in earlier depictions. Instead, Caravaggio does what his contemporary Shakespeare did with Holinshed and Cinthio to create Macbeth and Othello: he extracts the human juice from the clattering narrative. This is a great drama played out in the depths of night – and the National Gallery stages it that way. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula hangs in a stark space with a handful of supporting documents and one other painting. It’s hypnotic. London theatre may be pricey but here’s a dumbfounding drama of rage, violence, death and maybe guilt, regret and acceptance – and you can see it for free.... The only person who’s fully lit is Ursula. Yet the light on her is pale and eerie. Although it comes from a single source, the light seems to have changed by the time it reaches her. The Hun leader is in a red glow as if lit by a campfire. But Ursula is in white moonlight, as she enters death – and heaven. For all this, the Hun chief is the painting’s emotional centre. His face, at first just savage, is full of contorted emotions. As Ursula stands there, still alive with his arrow in her, he sees the dreadful irreversibility of what he has done.... I’ve seen blockbusters that bored me stiff. This exhibition, dedicated to just one masterpiece, held me transfixed, just like Ursula."
The culture warriors have come for the National Trust. This is how we take them on, and win – article by Celia Richardson in The Guardian. "Too often, charities, public bodies and universities are becoming proxies in other people’s fights, and targets in other people’s schemes. It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it, and you can surprise people and grab headlines.... In 2021, a private company was set up to run paid-for campaigns to get its own often 'anti-woke' candidates on to the National Trust’s governing council. Parts of the media have been relentless in publishing a steady stream of stories about alleged problems with the trust. ... False stories are damaging. The public needs to be able to believe what they read about the institutions that serve them. The National Trust deals with sensitive, symbolic issues and must be open to public scrutiny, if only so we can be held to account when we make genuine errors, as will happen with all institutions.... So how does an institution deal with all this? We’ve had to be open and direct about what’s behind untrue stories wherever possible. We’ve answered all media questions, and consistently sought corrections.... Most importantly, we have listened. Just because you’re being unfairly treated by some, it doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, or is part of a conspiracy.... Sometimes we are wrong and change our approach; sometimes we need to respectfully disagree. Our director general is fierce in her insistence that everyone will be heard, and everyone must be served by the broader societal benefit that the charity delivers. In a previous role she was a cultural leader in Belfast, seeing first-hand the dangers of polarisation around culture and identity.... Independent research has shown that as attacks on the National Trust have increased, so has public trust in it. ... In a diverse country facing big challenges, it’s crucial that all generations and all communities can take part. The power and riches held in UK institutions belong to everyone, so public involvement is worth fighting for."
Why is Britain’s mental health so incredibly poor? It’s because our society is spiralling backwards – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan). Mental wellbeing has plummeted in the UK further than in any comparable nation.... why has it happened? The Global Mind Project blames smartphones and ultra-processed food. They doubtless play a role, but they’re hardly peculiar to the UK. I think part of the reason is the sense that life here is, visibly and obviously, spiralling backwards.... The five giant evils identified in 1942 by William Beveridge, who helped design the welfare state, have returned with a vengeance. He called them 'want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness'. His paternalistic language translates today into poverty, morbidity, educational exclusion, wretched housing and crumbling infrastructure, and bad employment or an inability to work. As they come thundering back, the five evil giants have brought some friends to the party: environmental chaos, extreme political dysfunction and misrule, impunity for the powerful and performative cruelty towards the powerless, and state-sponsored culture wars to distract us from the rest of the horror show. There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism."
Jon Ronson: ‘A society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen’ – interview by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "None of his works has resonated quite so powerfully with audiences as the podcast Things Fell Apart... it traces the origins of a number of conflagrations in the so-called culture wars, but it ingeniously sews together these disparate events and disagreements, tying them all to the early days of lockdown, so that listeners don’t so much hear about, as be transported into, a complex world of outrageous claims and counter-claims.... The eight episodes are characterised by compelling interviews with culture warriors, conspiracy theorists and their targets, which were notable for their curiosity, restraint and understanding. Given that some of the people Ronson speaks to seem to have lost all contact with objective reality, his questioning comes across as an impressive feat of empathy and toleration.... 'I think it comes with maturity and realising your own biases and stupidities,' he says. 'I’m not very confrontational and sometimes you do need to be if someone is behaving in a way that is hurting people or doing something dangerous, like spreading medical misinformation. But in general, when does confrontation work?' One reason his technique is so effective is that the interviews are contextualised with Ronson’s reassuring, though often wry, factual commentary, which sounds like the fruit of deep research – unlike, it must be said, the vast majority of podcasts. How long did he spend on it? 'The series took me 10 months,' he says."
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a seriously fun sci-fi romcom – review by Ella Risbridger in The Guardian. "For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end.... Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, [is] a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about. Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in deference to character and plot. Billed as 'speculative fiction', it is perhaps more cheering to think of it as 50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom. The Ministry of Time is chiefly a love story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in 1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government hellbent on testing the limits of time travel."
The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley: ‘It was just so much fun’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "A time-travel romance cum sci-fi comedy set in near-future London, the novel fizzes with smart observations about the absurdity of modern life, while taking on the legacy of imperialism and the environmental emergency.... This time three years ago, [Bradley] had just started at Penguin but had yet to meet her colleagues because of lockdown. She took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. Cyber-stalking him later she was struck by a description of him as 'a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers'.... Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, 'quite a community, it turns out'. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in instalments for them: 'a nerdy literary parlour game' imagining what it might be like to have your favourite explorer – Gore – move in with you.... While the title might be a mashup of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, the guiding spirit behind the book is Bradley’s best-loved writer, Terry Pratchett.... Along with Gore, she chose four other 'expatriates from history' to be part of the British government’s 'experiment': a lieutenant from the battle of Naseby; a beautiful, foul-mouthed lesbian from the great plague of London; an unhappy aristocrat from the French Revolution; and a soldier from the first world war. Each of them is appointed a 'bridge', a contemporary character who helps them 'assimilate' to life in modern Britain. Gore’s bridge is a young British-Cambodian woman."
That yearning feeling: why we need nostalgia – article by Agnes Arnold-Forster in The Guardian, relating to her book Nostalgia: The History of a Dangerous Emotion. "Nostalgia was first coined as a term and used as a diagnosis in 1688, by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness.... Today, psychologists believe nostalgia is a near-universal, fundamentally positive emotion – a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits. It can boost self-esteem, increase meaning in life, foster a sense of social connectedness, encourage people to seek help and support for their problems, improve mental health and attenuate loneliness, boredom, stress or anxiety.... Its reputation as an influence on politics and society is not so honeyed. Populist movements worldwide are repeatedly criticised for their use and abuse of nostalgia. The images these movements paint of the past are condemned for being overly white and overly male. It’s also seen as the preserve of those who are retrograde, conservative and sentimental.... This tendency is as widespread as it is strange. Not least because nostalgia is a feature of leftwing political life, just as it is of conservatism and populism – think of the NHS, for example. It is also strange because, if you take present-day psychology seriously, everyone is nostalgic, pretty much all the time."
‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? – article by Francis Beckett in The Guardian. "In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.... But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime... The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons.... [And] he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR ... and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington... And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.... What possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game? Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system.... Was it because, as he once said, 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war. Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it. I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me.... Did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that."
The big idea: the simple trick that can sabotage your critical thinking – article by Amanda Montell in The Guardian; see her book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. "Since the moment I learned about the concept of the 'thought-terminating cliche' I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the phrase describes a catchy platitude aimed at shutting down or bypassing independent thinking and questioning;... expressions such as 'It is what it is', 'Boys will be boys', 'Everything happens for a reason' and 'Don’t overthink it' are familiar examples.... Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the 'illusory truth effect' – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times.... There’s really no way to prevent or combat it, says [decision scientist Tobia] Spampatti, as 'even raising awareness of this risk does not lower its effectiveness'. To compete in the marketplace of thought-terminating cliches, then, our best bet might be to take what we know about illusory truth and harness it to spread accurate information.... It doesn’t only have to be shameless disinformers who exploit the power of repetition, rhyme, pleasing graphics and funny memes. 'Remember, it’s OK to repeat true information,' says Fazio. 'People need reminders of what’s true,' such as the fact that vaccines are safe and climate change is driven by our actions."
Catland by Kathryn Hughes: paws for thought – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "'Catland', as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other 'Catland', the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth. For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.... This is a darting, hobby-horsical, hugely interesting book with the feel of a passion project rather than a sobersides work of history. But its ease and authority come from how Hughes as a historian is completely at home in the era under discussion, offering feline sideways glances at class, economics, urbanisation, eugenics, gender politics and much else besides."
‘Although she was dead, I felt as if she was my friend’: what it’s like to perform the last rites for an organ donor – article by Ronald W. Dworkin in The Guardian. "The patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation.... When told of my upcoming case [as an anaesthetist], I had mixed feelings. On one hand, being in perfect health, unaccustomed to suffering and therefore easily disconcerted by the thought of death, I was horrified.... Yet on the other, the case also aroused in me a feeling of relief. Simply put, there was no risk of malpractice, as my patient was already dead.... After we moved her from the gurney to the operating table, the doctors and nurses, so used to taking care of living patients, stared at one another stupidly, as if not knowing why they had come together or why they were standing around the table. For a brief moment, each one of us perhaps had the same supernatural vision, how for the past six hours, after being declared brain dead, this woman had lain under the measureless power of death. Six hours she had been officially dead. Now she had re-entered the world of the living. I would support her blood pressure and pulse. I would make her blood bright red with oxygen. Indeed, she might even wake up and look at us, I fantasised. Ghoulish thinking, yet I do not write about this case to be ghoulish.... My purpose is more practical. Today, artificial intelligence looms over medical practice. Although unlikely to replace doctors completely, AI makes some medical activities especially ripe targets for takeover, including the harvesting of organs from brain-dead donors.... Yet this impersonal, nonhuman method of organ retrieval may discourage people from becoming organ donors, or from letting dead relatives become so, thereby exacerbating the current organ shortage. People will see pictures of organ retrieval being carried on by inanimate machinery in a room completely abandoned by human beings. Bodies will be brought in and sent out, while the invisible, sleepless work of the machines goes on. 'Please, tell me this is not my end,' people will fret privately. And they will resist consenting to organ donation."
What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh: making sense of senseless violence – review by Tom Sperlinger in The Guardian. "Shehadeh’s short book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, is a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. It is divided into two chapters. The first asks simply, 'How did we get here?', reflecting on key events since 1948, while the second analyses the last six months. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer and winner of the Orwell prize for political writing, traces the factors influencing an Israeli society that ... accepts the devastation of Gaza: the failure of the Oslo accords; the hardening of an occupation of the Palestinian territories that is by all the evidence 'permanent'; increasing fractures in Israeli society, for which a common Palestinian enemy can be a balm; and the growing dominance of extreme rightwing elements in Israel.... Nonetheless, Shehadeh admits he was shocked by the recent war. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, declared at the start: 'There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed' and Netanyahu boasted he would 'turn Gaza into a deserted island'. Shehadeh reflects: 'I reasoned that political leaders usually speak with such bravado … Yet as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty.'... Yet Shehadeh continues to reflect on a question that he asks about Elor Azaria [the Israeli army medic who shot a wounded Palestinian in the head]: 'Who would help this young soldier regain his humanity?' His searching analysis offers insights for readers coming new to the situation and others who wish to face it afresh.... 'What if this war should end, not by a ceasefire or a truce, as in other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict?'”
Sunday, 5 May 2024
Cuttings: April 2024
The State of the Culture 2024 – blog post by Ted Gioia, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture. And it won’t help the arts. In fact, it won’t help society at all.… The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity…. This is more than just the hot trend of 2024. It can last forever—because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics. Our brain rewards these brief bursts of distraction. The neurochemical dopamine is released, and this makes us feel good—so we want to repeat the stimulus…. So you need to ditch that simple model of art versus entertainment. And even ‘distraction’ is just a stepping stone toward the real goal nowadays—which is addiction.… The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.“
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ – article by Alex Blasdel in The Guardian. "Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One. In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a 'hot zone' for consciousness became dramatically alive.... Areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.... 'The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,' Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible."
Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? – article from 2015 by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, [David] Chalmers said [in a conference paper in 1994]. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it?... Chalmers’s 'zombie' thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.... Imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this ... is what philosophers mean by a 'zombie'.... And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature... Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with... Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness.... Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named 'fictoplasm'; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying."
Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?" Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."
Does Counter-Terrorism Work? by Richard English: a thoughtful and authoritative analysis – review by Ian Cobain in The Guardian. "Richard English, the author of Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, is a professor of political history at Queen’s University Belfast, and has dedicated decades to the analysis of terrorism and to governments’ efforts to overcome it. Given that the choices made in counter-terrorism policy impact directly upon each of us every day, it is a vitally important area of study.... English believes that post-9/11 counter-terrorism was far too short-termist, that the histories of Afghanistan and Iraq were 'substantially ignored in a disgraceful fashion' and that the US became overly impressed with its own early military successes in both countries.... He cautions that very few counter-terrorism campaigns will ever achieve complete strategic success. Unconvinced by those who claim bullishly that the Provisional IRA was 'defeated', he argues persuasively that the republican movement’s sustainable campaign of violence was suspended only because its pragmatic leaders decided that they might more likely achieve their objective – a united Ireland – by peaceful means. Equally, he is sceptical of those among his fellow academics who argue that counter-terrorism operations will inevitably promote terrorism.... English judges that if any counter-terrorism campaign is to achieve even partial strategic victory, it must be conducted in a patient, well-resourced manner, with clear objectives. Given that terrorists often seek to provoke outrage and overreaction, the public should be encouraged to be realistic about the limits to what can be accomplished. He also concludes that to avoid failure, counter-terrorist efforts must be integrated into broader political initiatives: 'We should not mistake the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues that are at stake.'”
Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff: four women who wrote the Renaissance – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, famously asserted that any hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare would have had her literary gifts thwarted from the outset, thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in the Elizabethan age, not to mention the burdens of motherhood and domestic drudgery. In the last few decades, the field of feminist literary and historical studies has vastly expanded, holding up to the light those female writers who, despite Woolf’s dismissal, did exist and create in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Ramie Targoff... sets out to examine the life and work of four of the most prominent in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. One is the prolific diarist Anne Clifford, who ... in Targoff’s account ... emerges as determined and independent minded, her writing offering a vivid account of her personal battle to assert her rights after she was disinherited from her father’s estate. Targoff’s other three subjects are equally fascinating. There’s Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and later Countess of Pembroke, whose translations of the Psalms were praised by her male contemporaries, including John Donne; Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian (possibly Jewish) immigrant musician, whose name may be more familiar since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 hit play Emilia brought her to a new audience; and Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who went on to become the author of the first published play by a woman in English, despite having 11 children. These women and their writings are not unknown, but to see their individual and occasionally interwoven stories set out side by side is to understand with greater clarity that, while Woolf was not wrong about the obstacles faced by female writers, she was mistaken about the quality and reception of their work."
Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘I’d love Helen to still be here, telling me off’ – interview by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. "Helen died at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, north London, last May. Palin says the final couple of weeks, with their three children there, too, could not have been happier. 'Just before she died, when she knew she was going to die, were actually some of the best times we’ve had. I was prepared for it. Helen had taken the decision that she wasn’t going to carry on having dialysis. She was amazingly well looked after, and all the family were there. And that was the payoff for all those years, those 60 years.' He talks so tenderly about Helen and the end of her life. Then he comes to an abrupt stop, as if clicked out of hypnosis. 'Sorry, I’m waffling,' he says. No you’re not, I say. I ask what he means by the payoff. 'Well, because we’d spent so long together, we knew each other pretty well.' He pauses. Even he knows this is an understatement too far. 'Very, very well. It didn’t all have to be stated why we’d like this or that. We didn’t have to say a lot. It was just there. So knowing that she had two weeks to live, somehow everything that had been part of our relationship made it much easier to deal with her departure.'”
‘Children are being used as a football’: Hilary Cass on her review of gender identity services – interview by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2019, leading consultant paediatrician Hilary Cass agreed to conduct a review of international research into puberty blockers for NHS England.... The work has ...placed her at the vortex of a debate she describes as toxic, politicised and ideological.... The scope of her review is huge; she has set out to review all the available evidence on which gender medicine has been based globally, as well as trying to answer the puzzling question of why the numbers of children seeking referrals to gender clinics in the UK and in other developed countries began an exponential rise in around 2014, and why so many more girls began seeking treatment.... 'The toxicity of the debate has been so great that people have become afraid to work in this area.' Medical professionals experienced a sense of fear 'of being called transphobic if you take a more cautious approach', she said. Others were worried that they might be accused of conducting 'conversion therapy if, again, they take a cautious or exploratory approach'.... The consequence of this rising nervousness among clinicians over the past 15 years has been that many children exploring their gender (which Cass describes as 'a normal process' in adolescence, not necessarily requiring any NHS input) have been prematurely diverted towards chronically oversubscribed specialist clinics, and left sitting on waiting lists for years, without any support. 'There are many more young people now who question their gender; what’s really important is they have a space to be able to talk to somebody about that and to work that through.'... Cass believes that for a minority of young people medical transition will be the right option, but she is clear that there is no solid evidence basis justifying the use of hormones for children and adolescents. Her earlier research has led to a decision by NHS England to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children and the new research recommends 'extreme caution' before prescribing masculinising and feminising hormones to under-18s. 'We’ve got it locked into this focus on medical interventions. And certainly some of the young adults said to us, they wish they’d known when they were younger, that there were more ways of being trans than just a binary medical transition,' she said."
‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine – article by Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian. "While much has changeda in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October. Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to 'transform Palestine into the land of Israel', in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel."
An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi: an insider’s take – review by Simukai Chigudu in The Guardian. "There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent’s landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa’s historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book.... This, her first book, emerged from a nine-part documentary series for BBC World News.... She recounts the epic ruling lineages and dynastic rivalries of north Africa, centuries before the birth of Christ; the fraught expansion and syncretic incorporation of the Abrahamic faiths into the social fabric of the horn of Africa; the rise of the west African kingdoms that powered the global economy when Europe was reeling from the Black Death in the late middle ages; the underappreciated accomplishments of African world-building as memorialised in the majestic stone ruins of southern Africa’s hinterlands. She pays assiduous attention to gender throughout, often pointing out the overlooked ways women have shaped the world around them. She slips into the present tense when discussing the imprint of slavery and colonialism on Africa’s development and on contemporary debates about how we reckon with the past."
Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton: breathing new life into old texts – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "For the past 25 years [Carol Atherton] has taught both GCSE and A-level in state secondary schools in Lincolnshire. Now, in a dozen carefully prepared 'reading lessons', she demonstrates how a generous and attentive teacher is able to wrestle meaning and relevance from old warhorses such as An Inspector Calls and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.... Throughout Reading Lessons, Atherton weaves incidents from her own young life to explain why a career in teaching remains, for her, the highest good. From a northern working-class family, she got into Oxford and did PhD research on the development of English literature as an academic subject. All of which might make her seem overqualified for her present position. That, at least, is how it seems to her pupils who, heads full of which jobs pay best, ask wonderingly: 'Miss, why are you just a teacher?' The question is entirely reasonable coming from a generation that has been told that education is a purely transactional business. Atherton’s broader response is simply that nothing is more valuable than teaching a subject that encourages young minds to push beyond the confines created by the algorithms of social media, which is where her pupils live when they are not underlining bits of text in coloured Biro. Unlike any Stem subject,'doing English' requires young readers to enter imaginatively into the lives of others. And that, for 'Miss', remains the greatest transferable skill of all."
How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English – Techscape newsletter by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated.... Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant.... And sometimes, the tells are idiosyncratic. In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word 'delve' in responses... A brief explanation of how things work...[A Large Language Model (LLM)] is raw. It is tricky to wrangle into a useful form, hard to prevent going off the rails and requires genuine skill to use well. Turning it into a chatbot requires an extra step, ... reinforcement learning with human feedback: RLHF.... An army of human testers are given access to the raw LLM, and instructed to put it through its paces: asking questions, giving instructions and providing feedback. Sometimes, that feedback is as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down, but sometimes it’s more advanced, even amounting to writing a model response for the next step of training to learn from.... I said 'delve' was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where 'delve' is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, 'delve' is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African. And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a 'bot' is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?"
Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey: apocalypse now – review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Why do we obsess about the end of the world as we know it? The answer may seem obvious: it’s happening... Yet, as Dorian Lynskey argues in his clever and voluminous new book, there’s more to it than that.... this outlook is not new at all. There may in fact be a basic psychological explanation for why humans have always been fascinated by the end of days. Everyone knows that they are going to die. But we also all like to think that our particular span on Earth is somehow special. Perhaps speculating about the end of the world is a way of connecting those two things, of creating a grand narrative that aligns what are otherwise two random, unconnected plots. After all, by placing ourselves at the end of the biggest story of all, we simultaneously place ourselves at its centre: Après moi, le déluge. For centuries, religions had a monopoly on this subject: the end of the world would come about through divine intervention, rather than by human or natural actions. [but] Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares."
As an immigrant I’m undervalued, and my wife has no sympathy – advice column by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. "I went to a lecture recently in Mexico given by the psychotherapist Guy Pierre Tur and, referring to Donna Hicks’s work on dignity, he said: 'When I hear a foreign accent, I hear effort; where I see difference, there is courage; where I see discrimination there is resilience; where I see denied dignity, I see strength and survival.'”
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ – article by Alex Blasdel in The Guardian. "Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One. In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a 'hot zone' for consciousness became dramatically alive.... Areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.... 'The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,' Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible."
Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? – article from 2015 by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, [David] Chalmers said [in a conference paper in 1994]. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it?... Chalmers’s 'zombie' thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.... Imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this ... is what philosophers mean by a 'zombie'.... And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature... Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with... Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness.... Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named 'fictoplasm'; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying."
Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?" Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."
Does Counter-Terrorism Work? by Richard English: a thoughtful and authoritative analysis – review by Ian Cobain in The Guardian. "Richard English, the author of Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, is a professor of political history at Queen’s University Belfast, and has dedicated decades to the analysis of terrorism and to governments’ efforts to overcome it. Given that the choices made in counter-terrorism policy impact directly upon each of us every day, it is a vitally important area of study.... English believes that post-9/11 counter-terrorism was far too short-termist, that the histories of Afghanistan and Iraq were 'substantially ignored in a disgraceful fashion' and that the US became overly impressed with its own early military successes in both countries.... He cautions that very few counter-terrorism campaigns will ever achieve complete strategic success. Unconvinced by those who claim bullishly that the Provisional IRA was 'defeated', he argues persuasively that the republican movement’s sustainable campaign of violence was suspended only because its pragmatic leaders decided that they might more likely achieve their objective – a united Ireland – by peaceful means. Equally, he is sceptical of those among his fellow academics who argue that counter-terrorism operations will inevitably promote terrorism.... English judges that if any counter-terrorism campaign is to achieve even partial strategic victory, it must be conducted in a patient, well-resourced manner, with clear objectives. Given that terrorists often seek to provoke outrage and overreaction, the public should be encouraged to be realistic about the limits to what can be accomplished. He also concludes that to avoid failure, counter-terrorist efforts must be integrated into broader political initiatives: 'We should not mistake the terrorist symptom for the more profound issues that are at stake.'”
Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff: four women who wrote the Renaissance – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, famously asserted that any hypothetical sister of William Shakespeare would have had her literary gifts thwarted from the outset, thanks to the restrictions on women’s education in the Elizabethan age, not to mention the burdens of motherhood and domestic drudgery. In the last few decades, the field of feminist literary and historical studies has vastly expanded, holding up to the light those female writers who, despite Woolf’s dismissal, did exist and create in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Ramie Targoff... sets out to examine the life and work of four of the most prominent in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. One is the prolific diarist Anne Clifford, who ... in Targoff’s account ... emerges as determined and independent minded, her writing offering a vivid account of her personal battle to assert her rights after she was disinherited from her father’s estate. Targoff’s other three subjects are equally fascinating. There’s Mary Sidney, sister of the poet Sir Philip and later Countess of Pembroke, whose translations of the Psalms were praised by her male contemporaries, including John Donne; Aemilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian (possibly Jewish) immigrant musician, whose name may be more familiar since Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s 2018 hit play Emilia brought her to a new audience; and Elizabeth Cary, a child prodigy who went on to become the author of the first published play by a woman in English, despite having 11 children. These women and their writings are not unknown, but to see their individual and occasionally interwoven stories set out side by side is to understand with greater clarity that, while Woolf was not wrong about the obstacles faced by female writers, she was mistaken about the quality and reception of their work."
Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘I’d love Helen to still be here, telling me off’ – interview by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. "Helen died at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, north London, last May. Palin says the final couple of weeks, with their three children there, too, could not have been happier. 'Just before she died, when she knew she was going to die, were actually some of the best times we’ve had. I was prepared for it. Helen had taken the decision that she wasn’t going to carry on having dialysis. She was amazingly well looked after, and all the family were there. And that was the payoff for all those years, those 60 years.' He talks so tenderly about Helen and the end of her life. Then he comes to an abrupt stop, as if clicked out of hypnosis. 'Sorry, I’m waffling,' he says. No you’re not, I say. I ask what he means by the payoff. 'Well, because we’d spent so long together, we knew each other pretty well.' He pauses. Even he knows this is an understatement too far. 'Very, very well. It didn’t all have to be stated why we’d like this or that. We didn’t have to say a lot. It was just there. So knowing that she had two weeks to live, somehow everything that had been part of our relationship made it much easier to deal with her departure.'”
‘Children are being used as a football’: Hilary Cass on her review of gender identity services – interview by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. "In the autumn of 2019, leading consultant paediatrician Hilary Cass agreed to conduct a review of international research into puberty blockers for NHS England.... The work has ...placed her at the vortex of a debate she describes as toxic, politicised and ideological.... The scope of her review is huge; she has set out to review all the available evidence on which gender medicine has been based globally, as well as trying to answer the puzzling question of why the numbers of children seeking referrals to gender clinics in the UK and in other developed countries began an exponential rise in around 2014, and why so many more girls began seeking treatment.... 'The toxicity of the debate has been so great that people have become afraid to work in this area.' Medical professionals experienced a sense of fear 'of being called transphobic if you take a more cautious approach', she said. Others were worried that they might be accused of conducting 'conversion therapy if, again, they take a cautious or exploratory approach'.... The consequence of this rising nervousness among clinicians over the past 15 years has been that many children exploring their gender (which Cass describes as 'a normal process' in adolescence, not necessarily requiring any NHS input) have been prematurely diverted towards chronically oversubscribed specialist clinics, and left sitting on waiting lists for years, without any support. 'There are many more young people now who question their gender; what’s really important is they have a space to be able to talk to somebody about that and to work that through.'... Cass believes that for a minority of young people medical transition will be the right option, but she is clear that there is no solid evidence basis justifying the use of hormones for children and adolescents. Her earlier research has led to a decision by NHS England to stop prescribing puberty blockers to children and the new research recommends 'extreme caution' before prescribing masculinising and feminising hormones to under-18s. 'We’ve got it locked into this focus on medical interventions. And certainly some of the young adults said to us, they wish they’d known when they were younger, that there were more ways of being trans than just a binary medical transition,' she said."
‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine – article by Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian. "While much has changeda in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October. Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to 'transform Palestine into the land of Israel', in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel."
An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi: an insider’s take – review by Simukai Chigudu in The Guardian. "There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent’s landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa’s historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book.... This, her first book, emerged from a nine-part documentary series for BBC World News.... She recounts the epic ruling lineages and dynastic rivalries of north Africa, centuries before the birth of Christ; the fraught expansion and syncretic incorporation of the Abrahamic faiths into the social fabric of the horn of Africa; the rise of the west African kingdoms that powered the global economy when Europe was reeling from the Black Death in the late middle ages; the underappreciated accomplishments of African world-building as memorialised in the majestic stone ruins of southern Africa’s hinterlands. She pays assiduous attention to gender throughout, often pointing out the overlooked ways women have shaped the world around them. She slips into the present tense when discussing the imprint of slavery and colonialism on Africa’s development and on contemporary debates about how we reckon with the past."
Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton: breathing new life into old texts – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "For the past 25 years [Carol Atherton] has taught both GCSE and A-level in state secondary schools in Lincolnshire. Now, in a dozen carefully prepared 'reading lessons', she demonstrates how a generous and attentive teacher is able to wrestle meaning and relevance from old warhorses such as An Inspector Calls and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.... Throughout Reading Lessons, Atherton weaves incidents from her own young life to explain why a career in teaching remains, for her, the highest good. From a northern working-class family, she got into Oxford and did PhD research on the development of English literature as an academic subject. All of which might make her seem overqualified for her present position. That, at least, is how it seems to her pupils who, heads full of which jobs pay best, ask wonderingly: 'Miss, why are you just a teacher?' The question is entirely reasonable coming from a generation that has been told that education is a purely transactional business. Atherton’s broader response is simply that nothing is more valuable than teaching a subject that encourages young minds to push beyond the confines created by the algorithms of social media, which is where her pupils live when they are not underlining bits of text in coloured Biro. Unlike any Stem subject,'doing English' requires young readers to enter imaginatively into the lives of others. And that, for 'Miss', remains the greatest transferable skill of all."
How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English – Techscape newsletter by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated.... Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant.... And sometimes, the tells are idiosyncratic. In late March, AI influencer Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, highlighted one: ChatGPT’s tendency to use the word 'delve' in responses... A brief explanation of how things work...[A Large Language Model (LLM)] is raw. It is tricky to wrangle into a useful form, hard to prevent going off the rails and requires genuine skill to use well. Turning it into a chatbot requires an extra step, ... reinforcement learning with human feedback: RLHF.... An army of human testers are given access to the raw LLM, and instructed to put it through its paces: asking questions, giving instructions and providing feedback. Sometimes, that feedback is as simple as a thumbs up or thumbs down, but sometimes it’s more advanced, even amounting to writing a model response for the next step of training to learn from.... I said 'delve' was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where 'delve' is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, 'delve' is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African. And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a 'bot' is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?"
Everything Must Go by Dorian Lynskey: apocalypse now – review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Why do we obsess about the end of the world as we know it? The answer may seem obvious: it’s happening... Yet, as Dorian Lynskey argues in his clever and voluminous new book, there’s more to it than that.... this outlook is not new at all. There may in fact be a basic psychological explanation for why humans have always been fascinated by the end of days. Everyone knows that they are going to die. But we also all like to think that our particular span on Earth is somehow special. Perhaps speculating about the end of the world is a way of connecting those two things, of creating a grand narrative that aligns what are otherwise two random, unconnected plots. After all, by placing ourselves at the end of the biggest story of all, we simultaneously place ourselves at its centre: Après moi, le déluge. For centuries, religions had a monopoly on this subject: the end of the world would come about through divine intervention, rather than by human or natural actions. [but] Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares."
As an immigrant I’m undervalued, and my wife has no sympathy – advice column by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. "I went to a lecture recently in Mexico given by the psychotherapist Guy Pierre Tur and, referring to Donna Hicks’s work on dignity, he said: 'When I hear a foreign accent, I hear effort; where I see difference, there is courage; where I see discrimination there is resilience; where I see denied dignity, I see strength and survival.'”
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