Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter: an appreciation

(Copied from my original post 15.2.2021 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

When I went off to uni in 1977, Cooking in a Bedsitter was one of the books I took with me, and it got a great deal more use than any of my textbooks. Although Katharine Whitehorn had written it for a different generation of young people (it was first published in 1961), the material conditions of life had not changed so very much; if your student room was in a moden block you might be lucky enough to have a shared kitchen, but if you were in an old university building or living out in digs, the best you could hope for was a single gas or electric cooking ring in your room, and no fridge. There were no take-aways other than fish and chips; pizza was still regarded as foreign food and McDonalds had yet to achieve a serious presence on the high street. Chilled ready-meals were many years in the future. So if you wanted to cook for yourself, the challenges were enormous – and it was those that Katherine Whitehorn addressed. Cooking in a Bedsitter was not a book of recipes; it was a lifestyle book, shot through with her trademark down-to-earth simplicity and straightforward common sense.

It was that punchy pragmatic tone which characterised her Observer column. Take for instance her observation (early ’60s, remember) that a woman at a party needs to hold a bag, gloves, plate, drink, serviette, fork and cigarette – AND have a hand free for shaking hands. Having identified the problem, she then worked out the answer, and a photograph of her doing it appeared on the cover of her Social Survival (1968). (Bag goes on the arm, gloves between fifth and fourth fingers, serviette between fourth and third, cigarette between third and second. Hold the plate with first finger and thumb, with the thumb holding down the wineglass and the fork resting on the plate. Your other hand is free for eating, drinking, smoking and shaking.)

In the same vein, Whitehorn’s opening chapter of Cooking in a Bedsitter defined “The problem – and some of the answers”.

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, and a pot boiling over on to your landlady’s carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which is any case is full of socks. (p. 13)

My copy of the book had one of Penguin’s great new photographic covers of the 1970s, which “allowed the title to be ‘read’ instantly from the image alone” (Baines, 2005, p. 205). In this case the image was of a cast iron bed frame, hung with cooking utensils and food items (see above). Arresting and funny, this was an illustration of the same problem: that the place where you cook is also the place where you sleep.

Whitehorn’s answers to this problem included casseroles (“far the best way of cooking a number of different things together, as one must on a gas ring” p. 16); a damp cloth (for wiping), a water jug (for adding water during cooking) and a plastic bucket (for emptying dregs); newspaper (as a work surface and wrapper for rubbish); and equipment (“it is not a question of the best possible tools, but the fewest” pp. 20-21). All these she covered in her magisterial first chapter, followed by a supremely useful “beginner’s index” of ingredients, including “how much to buy, how to prepare, standard cooking times” (p. 27). The recipes, although they occupied the remainder of the book, were in a sense secondary; fundamentally this was a book on how to approach and think about cooking – which is why its popularity endured, even as ingredient availability expanded and food tastes changed.

Here are some of Whitehorn’s best insights, which have shaped my cooking from that day to this.

• “Cooking to stay alive.” Most of the recipes in the book fall into this category, the other being “Cooking to impress”, for which there are special tips. “(1) Finish any cleaning. You can finish cooking without shame in front of your visitors, but you cannot very well sweep under their embarrassed feet. (2) Set the table – it will reassure people that they have come on the right day, and that there will be a meal eventually. (3) Get yourself looking nice. In a house you can disappear and finish dressing – in a bedsitter, no.” (p. 145) And for the cooking itself: “Never have more than one thing that needs last-minute attention.” (p. 144) Further guidance is divided according to the category of person you are trying to impress: “(1) The troglodyte in the next bedsitter. (2) Couples … who … have forgotten what it was like to cook in a bedsitter (if they ever knew), and it is your business not to remind them. (3) Your parents, or your parents’ spies… (4) Delicious little parties à deux.” (p. 147)
• “The potato-shaped space.” “Most of us have a potato-shaped space inside that must be filled at every meal, if not by potatoes, then by something equally filling – rice, bread, spaghetti, macaroni, and so on.”(p. 16)
• On drink and parties (by her husband, Gavin Lyall). “It is a bad rule to buy the cheapest of anything, and a good rule, when faced with the temptation, to buy the best of something cheaper…. The happy fact is that nobody will know you thought of giving them champagne anyway.” (p. 175)

And here, as a specimen of how all this works out in practice, is one of my most-used recipes from the “Cooking to stay alive” section: Leeks Lucullus.

3 leeks (about 1lb)
2 or 3 potatoes
1 tablespoon grated cheese
butter
top of the milk
salt, pepper

Boil leeks and potatoes together in salted water with lid on pan till tender – 15-20 mins. Pour off liquid. Mash leeks and potatoes with a fork; stir in as much butter as you can spare (at least a teaspoon), cheese, creamy milk. Eat with a piece of toast. If you have a grill, sprinkle more cheese and brown the top. This looks like pale green mashed potatoes, but tastes delicious. (25 mins.) (p. 65)

Rest in peace, Katherine Whitehorn. Thank you for teaching me how to think about cooking, how to think about life, and that it’s possible to be smart, practical and funny all at the same time.

References

Baines, Phil (2005), Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (London: Allen Lane).

Whitehorn, Katharine (1963), Cooking in a Bedsitter (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

See also Obituary of Katherine Whitehorn by Janet Watts and ‘Thank you, Katharine Whitehorn, for giving all the female reprobates a voice’ by Barbara Ellen.

When signs get personal

(Copied from my original post 4.3.2020 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

What do you think of signs like this? Do you find them cute and amusing, or do you find them annoying? Above all, do you find them effective for what they’re trying to do?

I must admit I rather like this sign, which I spotted on the luggage trolleys at Milton Keynes railway station. In one sense, the sign is redundant: if you’re looking for a luggage trolley, you don’t need a sign to tell you that you’ve found one. But I think the purpose of the sign is other than that. For one thing, it prompts someone with luggage to think of using a trolley, even if they weren’t looking for one. (We’ve all seen people struggling with wheelie suitcases who should really be using a trolley, for the benefit of other passengers if not themselves.) More important than that, though, the real purpose of the sign I think is to give a voice and identity to the station and the railway company: what discourse analysts call “subject positioning” [1]. The words on the sign are the sort of thing which might be said by someone who was considerate and helpful and attentive to your needs. The implication is that the station staff and the railway company collectively have the kind of personality which means they talk to you like that: polite, kind and helpful in a personal way. Contrast that with the sort of sign which you’re more likely to see on a luggage trolley:

Warning: trolleys MUST be returned to a designated point. Penalty for abandoned trolleys £500.

What kind of person says that? Someone who is bureaucratic and officious, and that’s the kind of personality such a sign attributes to an organisation which puts it up.

Such personal-sounding offers of help need to be carefully judged, of course. Those of my generation who used Microsoft Word 97 will remember the Office Assistant, which by default took the form of a cheery, cheeky animated paper clip, popping up unbidden at the least appropriate moments. I’m afraid the paper clip’s conversations with me generally did not go well.

Office Assistant: It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?

Me: No! Sod off!

I think the reason the Office Assistant’s appearance was so annoying is that it was intrusive: it actually interrupted what you were doing (such as writing a letter) and demanded that you respond to it before you could continue. Although the notice on the trolley hails you as a carrier of luggage – subject positioning again – this is not annoying in the same way; if you’re not part of the target audience, you simply disregard the hail and walk on, though perhaps with a pleasant lingering appreciation for the fact that HAD you needed help with your luggage it would have been available.

The relevance of this for education, specifically for learning materials, is that often you want to address the learner personally and directly. This is an illusion of course, just as a TV presenter talking to you directly is an illusion because what they’re actually talking to is a television camera. [2] Nevertheless, when it’s done right, it feels natural and unremarkable, even though the writer or presenter cannot see you and knows nothing about you and what you are thinking and feeling; you only notice it when it goes wrong and the illusion is broken.

The reason authors of learning materials, like TV presenters, try to address the members of their audience individually and directly, is that it sets up a personal relationship and introduces emotional warmth into the communication. The standard for learning materials is to use the second person (“you”) and contractions (“as you’ve seen”), resembling spoken language more than written language. A common stylistic model is what Derek Rowntree many years ago called “a tutorial in print” [3]: you talk to the learner as though they were there with you, and invite responses from them. (“What would you do next in this situation?” “What do you make of this argument?”) This kind of writing has been fundamental to the learning materials of The Open University, both printed and online, since its inception in the 1970s.

This too can go wrong, of course. As with the Microsoft Office Assistant, eagerness to help can come across as patronising, if the reader or learner is fully capable of managing by themselves; there’s an OU legend of the course materials which at one point suggested to the learner that they should take a coffee break if it was all getting too much. But there are many OU students who are grateful for a supportive tone; I remember one telling me how she’d been finding a particular section of her course hard going when she was delighted to read the materials’ reassurance that this topic was difficult and probably wouldn’t make sense until later. The perfect anticipation of what she was thinking and feeling not only encouraged her but reinforced her relationship with the course, communicating to her that the personality behind it was concerned for her and her success.

The OU was set up to bring higher education to people who had missed out on it earlier in life. Such people, frequently with a poor educational background, could not be expected to be familiar with formal study and the experience of a new subject being initially difficult but becoming easier with practice. They would therefore very likely be in need of assurance that the experience of difficulty is not a reason for thinking yourself incapable or for giving up. Postgraduate students, at the OU and elsewhere, can be expected to be better able to manage their own study, and can be safely left to self-regulate and negotiate normal difficulties for themselves, to say nothing of deciding when to have their own coffee breaks.

But I would argue that, even for experienced and sophisticated learners, learning materials should still embody that personal relationship implied by direct address. It’s what distinguishes education or training from an information dump. The illusion of the materials being a personal tutor – an illusion in which the learner acquiesces, just as we acquiesce in the illusion that a TV or radio presenter is talking to us – allows learning materials to do two very important things. The first is to support motivation – the great challenge in all distance learning – by giving comfort and encouragement. The second is to support self-management, by modelling how to mentally step back from the subject, the information, to reflect on the learner’s experience of its study; by internalising this supervisory voice, the learner eventually becomes better able to evaluate and regulate their learning for themselves.

The temptation when writing learning materials is to be factual and presentational. Getting personal, addressing the reader directly – and thinking about how they would like to be addressed – is something to which writers need to give deliberate attention .

References

[1] See for example Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990), ‘Positioning: the discursive production of selves’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol 20, pp. 43-65.

[2] This point was powerfully illustrated by one of Michael Wesch’s anthropology students in the early years of YouTubeing, when she held up a mirror to her webcam to show us what she was actually talking to (in other words, not us) while making her video. (Wesch included the short video clip in his talk An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, timecode 21:38 to 22:03.)

[3] Rowntree, D. (1994), Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, London, Kogan Page, p. 14. Lockwood, F. (1992), Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, London, Kogan Page, p. 25. See also my blog post ‘Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?’

7 questions about branching scenarios

(Copied from my original post 20.11.2019 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)

While writing a branching scenario about absence management as a proof-of-concept for simulating difficult conversations, I found that I needed to answer some basic questions.

1. What is a branching scenario?

A branching scenario is a story, but one which is presented to you step by step, and in which what happens next is dependent on the choices you make – like the old “chose-you-own-adventure” gamebooks, only digital. (Related concepts: interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, adventure games.)

2. What use is a branching scenario?

In education or training, a branching scenario can enable learners to practice or test their skills. The scenario will be based on a workplace situation, like a case study but with the addition of interactivity: learners are required to go through the steps and make the decisions themselves. In this sense, a branching scenario is comparable to virtual reality, which may be useful in training where the situations are physical and the skills required are visual; but in human situations where the skills required are communicative, a text-based branching scenario will usually be more appropriate, as well as considerably cheaper to produce.

3. How can people learn from a branching scenario?

The big advantage of a branching scenario is that learners are engaged right away. A realistic practical situation, of a kind that learners might actually have to deal with, presents them with a challenge they can’t ignore. Furthermore, unlike a case study or set of process instructions, in which it’s too easy to think that the learning points are obvious, learners are forced to remember or work out what to do at each step. The relevance and the difficulty of the challenge are evident.

At its heart, a branching scenario enables learning by doing, by providing a simulated environment in which learners can practice and make errors safely. A scenario can also include feedback for the learners’ choices, ideally built into the narrative, to complete the learning cycle.

4. How do you prevent the tree becoming massive?

Say you provide three choices at the first decision point, and each of those branches leads to another three choices and so on. After three decision points there will be 27 branches, after four decision points there will be 81, and after five decision points there will be 243! How can you possibly write so many storylines?

The answer is, of course, that you don’t. You don’t need to cover every possible choice which a learner might make, just those mistakes which a learner is most likely to make in a real situation. (The need to simulate errors follows directly from active learning theory, but it nevertheless needs emphasising because of subject-matter experts usual tendency to focus solely on the correct course of action. See my blog post “What should a simulation simulate?”)

In my absence management scenario, the main mistakes which I wanted to include were: failing to prepare properly for a return-to-work interview with Pam, a frequently-absent member of staff; not holding the interview in a private meeting room; and challenging Pam on the genuineness of her sickness when there’s no conclusive evidence of her malingering.

5. How do you prevent the choices being obvious?

The problem here is the same as with multiple-choice questions: since the correct choice has to be in plain view, learners don’t need to think of it for themselves, so doesn’t this remove the challenge if all they need to do is recognise it?

The answer is that you can make the target choices less obvious by careful wording, so that recognising them as correct requires understanding of the situation and thinking through the implications of the choice. For example, in my absence management scenario, the choice which I gave learners was not between “Go to a meeting room” and “Don’t go to a meeting room” but between the dialogue lines “Come and sit down for a chat” and “We need to have a proper talk”. Because I’ve already established that you’re in an open plan office, the first option should be easily recognised as inappropriate if you’re thinking properly about the difficult conversation you’re about to have with Pam, yet the second option isn’t shouting its correctness.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are many narrative games (see for example Life is Strange 2, Heaven’s Vault, Tacoma, Tales from the Borderlands) which are successful in creating both challenge and surprise, despite being effectively based around multiple choice options. And since our aim is education and training, even an obviously wrong choice may prompt thought and hence learning. In my absence management scenario, for example, learners are repeatedly presented with the option of bottling out of doing a return-to-work interview with Pam. (The team is under pressure, deadlines are looming, and the temptation to focus on tasks at hand is strong.) This is fairly obviously incorrect, and yet its inclusion serves to make the point that determination and a conscious decision may be necessary to carry through with a difficult conversation they would rather not have.

6. Can’t learners just try every choice until they get it right?

The whole point of a branching scenario for education or training is that learners should be learning to think differently and better, so if they’re making choices at random or systematically working their way through the choices then something is wrong with the design.

There are several ways of encouraging learners to think about their choices. The most important is to embed feedback into the scenario as far as possible, so that they can quickly get a feeling for whether a past choice was good, bad or neutral. For example, in my absence management scenario, if you remain in the open plan office and start to ask Pam about her illness and whether she has any problems with work colleagues, then the text will tell you that you wish you’d gone to a meeting room and Pam will cut the interview short. (The excellent Cathy Moore has a blog post about the importance of feedback being embedded, rather than delivered by the Voice of God.)

Another trick, which can be used to force learners to prioritise, is to impose a limit on the number of alternative choices which can be pursued. For example, in my absence management scenario, the preparation choices before the return-to-work interview are: ask a colleague for advice, look at HR guidance, check Pam’s absence record, look for her self-certification forms, or do nothing – but there’s an artificial time limit which means you can only do one of these things. (Spoiler: all are informative, but you can’t achieve the best possible ending without checking Pam’s absence record and printing it out, which enables you to confront her with just how often she’s been off sick.)

A third technique, which as well as being realistic makes systematic exploration of choices more difficult, is to have the availability of certain choices dependent on other choices made earlier. In a healthcare scenario where you’re interviewing a patient, for example, certain dialogue choices would only appear if you’ve previously read the case notes and talked to other professionals so that you know to ask about those topics.

7. How does a branching scenario end?

Many narrative games now include a number of distinct endings, and in imitation of this I planned my absence management scenario to have five: you fail to deal with Pam’s absenteeism problem, you attempt to hold a return-to-work interview but get nowhere with it, you accuse Pam of faking illness whereupon she gets angry and makes a complaint of bullying, you get her to agree to obtain doctor’s certificates for any future sickness absence, and – the best ending – you confront her with her absence record and get her commitment to improve.

If you expect or want learners to replay a scenario, then they should be enabled and motivated to do so. In my absence management scenario, I did this by finishing it with feedback on the main choices taken and suggesting that a good ending was possible. I also put in two restart links: one to restart from the beginning of the scenario and one to restart from the beginning of the conversation with Pam.

I wrote the absence management scenario as a demonstration piece, a proof-of-concept, and it’s confirmed for me that branching scenarios of this kind have great potential for education and training in communications and people-management skills. They’re not a substitute for didactic presentation or for formal assessment, but because of their potential to engage learners and to encourage them to think differently and better about practical human problems, I believe they should be part of the genre library of all producers of training materials.

Cuttings: May 2023

The Rediscovery of America: why Native history is American history – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “'Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light,' writes Ned Blackhawk, a historian at Yale University and member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone. 'Binary, rather than multiracial, visions dominate studies of the past where slavery represents America’s original sin or the antithesis of the American idea. But can we imagine an American Eden that is not cultivated by its original caretakers? Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous peoples await the telling of a continental history that includes them. It was their garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.' In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, Blackhawk attempts to tell that continental history over five centuries, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Indian self-determination. Native Americans played a foundational role in shaping America’s constitutional democracy, he contends, even as they were murdered and dispossessed of their land. Taken with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, it is a reminder of the danger of a single story when history is better understood as a multiverse of perspectives."

Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark: the revolts that reshaped Europe – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s magnificent new history of the revolutions, ... rejects the historians’ consensus that the insurrections failed, arguing that to talk of 'success' and 'failure' is to miss the point. We can, he insists, only judge uprisings by their impact... The uprisings were initially strikingly successful, bringing in their wake new parliaments, new freedoms and new constitutions. Within a year, though, the old order had begun to reassert itself, often with great ferocity, and many of the newly gained political and social freedoms were rolled back. The moral of the story, Clark writes, is that revolutionaries were unable to build sufficiently robust international solidarity that could withstand 'the threat posed by the counter-revolutionary international'. Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals. This was a period in which the meanings of both liberalism and radicalism were still being fashioned, and 1848 played an important role in helping delineate the two. Liberals were mainly bourgeois writers, thinkers and politicians who viewed themselves as trapped between 'revolution and despotism' and wished 'to trace a middle path' between the privilege and hierarchies of the traditional ruling order and what they saw as the authoritarianism and social extremism of the radicals, exemplified by the Jacobin terror unleashed during the French Revolution. Liberals, in Clark’s words, 'rejected privileges of birth' while 'affirming the privilege of wealth', demanded 'political equality without insisting on social equality', asserted 'the principle of popular sovereignty' while also 'limiting that sovereignty, lest it come to endanger liberty'. They were not democrats, because while they 'aspired to speak for the people', what they really meant by 'the people' was 'a small proportion of educated male taxpayers.' They were, at best, 'reluctant revolutionaries'."

The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder – article by James Fox in The Guardian, based on his book The World According to Colour. "In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.... The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour... For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. ... Every person’s visual system is unique and so, therefore, are their perceptions.... [Another] cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language.... People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else.... The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. Many people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, but only a hundred years ago baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue.... Colour is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a pigment of our imaginations."

Greed, eugenics and giant gambles: author Malcolm Harris on the deadly toll of Silicon Valley capitalism – interview by Lois Beckett in The Guardian. "Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between ... patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy [Silicon Valley and Chinese tech manufacturers]. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates. The book is ambitious. Its full title is Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and it examines the global spread of what Harris terms the 'Palo Alto System', a strategy to achieve fast growth and big returns for investors at any cost, with a focus on exploiting young talent and new technologies. Since the late 19th century, as Harris tells it, the Anglo settlers of California have operated on the principle of Facebook’s infamous slogan, 'move fast and break things', which has also meant moving fast and breaking people.... You originally pitched Palo Alto as part history, part memoir, but in the writing of it, you ended up taking out most of the personal stories. What are some of the memoir pieces that you cut? One of my first jobs was working at Score!, a for-profit tutoring center in Palo Alto. It was so sad. The tutoring was automated through computers, based on a behaviorist system. The employees weren’t teaching anything. You’re acting as a reinforcer, not as a teacher: checking stuff off, making sure the students stayed sitting at their desks, controlling the reinforcement system, which was about points, and pieces of plastic. It was awful for the students and pretty miserable for the employees, and it paid minimum wage."

I took anger management classes. Here’s what they get wrong about the world – article by Olivia Wilson in The Guardian. "Anger management courses focus on a participant’s triggers, offering a standardized set of guidelines for coping with situations in which they feel the rage rising. Such an approach glosses over the sources of anger – particularly those that might spring from unfair or imbalanced social dynamics – and places responsibility for anger squarely on the shoulders of the angry individual, seeking to treat the symptoms rather than addressing the disease. As essential as such techniques may be, in particular for those prone to physical aggression, I can’t help but wonder, during the 10 weeks of the course, who else might be benefiting from the 'management' of all this anger. Without exception, everyone on the course is dealing with huge stressors – that is to say, they are angry for a reason. Marriages are collapsing, jobs are on the line, money is short. As we rattle through the introductions, it strikes me that it is stress – specifically the almost unbearable demands placed on us all – rather than anger that unites us.... Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boom in anger management courses dovetails neatly with the historical moment in the early 1980s in which a new economic model began to restructure lives at work and in the home. That model of neoliberalism – favored first by the west and today’s dominant global ideology – gave rise to a new social sphere in which government support shrank and inequality grew, and competition became the key tenet of the social order. Since then, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has soared, and the workplace has become king. And nowhere is maintaining control over anger more crucial than in the workplace.... In this context, anger management begins to look like something that doesn’t have the good of the individual at heart, but instead plays an important supporting role in molding acquiescent employees and submissive citizens. This focus on individual behavioral change, to the exclusion of a more socially focused understanding of an individual’s problem, is a key concern in Bessel van der Kolk’s pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, in which Van der Kolk repeatedly laments the use of therapeutic techniques and medication aimed at controlling a person’s behavior, rather than addressing the 'undeniable social causation of much psychological suffering'."

Three days that proved the radical right has a hold on the Tory party – First Edition daily newsletter by Archie Bland in The Guardian. "Terms like 'populism', 'far right', 'radical right', 'extreme right', and 'fascism' get thrown around so much as to be useless at best, and actively confusing at worst. But they aren’t the same, and knowing how they differ is helpful to understanding what’s going on. Many people associate populism with the far right, but [Cas] Mudde says while that can be true, it’s also too simple: he is renowned for his argument that populism is a 'thin' ideology. (Here’s a great 2019 long read setting out the history of debate over the term.) 'It has a narrow scope,' he said. 'It sees society as divided between two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. But that can be combined with socialism, as in Venezuela, or nativism, as it is on the right.' Whether it’s populist or not, there are some consistent features across the far right: it tends to oppose immigration, fear threats to security and national identity from – among others – migrants and the left, believe in a hidden corrupt establishment, and worry that transnational bodies threaten national sovereignty. 'Within that, you have the extreme right – which is the opposite of populism, which believes in a small elite that is pure and is fundamentally opposed to democracy – and the radical right, which does believe people should elect their leaders, but has problems with aspects of liberal democracy and the rights of minorities.' When people call Tory MPs 'fascists', who would be categorised on the extreme right, that’s wrong: they do still believe in democracy. But there are many whose stated views place them firmly in the radical right category."

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

‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases – interview by John Harris in The Guardian. "As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed 'intelligence' is based on huge data sets that 'overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations'. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired.... After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time.... Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard. 'That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,' she says. 'That means you can abdicate responsibility: "It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do." Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.'”

ChatGPT versus a human editor – blog post by Harriet Power on the blog of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). "[1] How does ChatGPT fare with the CIEP’s proofreading test? This test is available here; it’s a 270-word piece of text with 20 ‘common’ errors. I pasted the text into ChatGPT with the prompt ‘Please point out the proofreading errors in this text’... ChatGPT caught 15 out of 17 errors. It did well at spotting spelling mistakes (such as ‘peaking’ rather than ‘peeking’) and repeated words (‘There had certainly had been one or two eccentric characters’). It spotted that Anne’s cup of tea had morphed into a cup of coffee three paragraphs later, which according to my programming boyfriend is an impressive catch to make. It missed a hyphen that should have been an en dash, and didn’t change ‘Jones’ geraniums’ to ‘Jones’s geraniums’, although that’s arguably just a style choice (as the test itself acknowledges). Another thing it didn’t do was query how Ann spells her name: it assumed ‘Anne’ was right (probably because it was spelled this way where it first occurs in the text).... [2] How about writing posts for the CIEP blog? ChatGPT is certainly much quicker at this than us slow and plodding humans, taking under a minute to write a post. The results are quite bland and generic, but are also pretty serviceable.... [3] I amused myself with writing some terrible fiction, then asked ChatGPT to improve it... I was impressed that ChatGPT could take my original text and rewrite it while still keeping the essential bits of the narrative, and present them in a coherent way. It’s an example of how powerful ChatGPT can potentially be when it comes to simplifying text. [4] I took a list of references, introduced a bunch of mistakes, and then asked ChatGPT to edit them so they were consistent. ChatGPT did pretty well. It made corrections like replacing ‘and’ with ‘&’, moving the year to the correct place, changing the volume and issue number from ‘18:2’ to ‘18(2)’, and deleting the word ‘pages’ before the page range. The thing that impressed me was when I gave it a reference where I’d deleted one of the author’s initials, and ChatGPT filled them in correctly. It managed to do that correctly a couple more times, so it didn’t feel like a fluke. (Though if ChatGPT is simply making educated guesses about how to fill in the blanks then this is far from infallible.) If ChatGPT could track changes (and my guess is that it will be able to do this in Microsoft’s Copilot) then I’d happily use it to help me edit references."

End Times by Peter Turchin: can we predict the collapse of societies? – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In 2011 Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut and leader of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, established a project called Seshat [which] involves scores of expert collaborators – anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – in building the world’s largest collection of data on the prosperity and demise of societies from upper Egypt to lower Manhattan.... His model attempts to weight certain factors to predict this social meltdown. Key among them are rapidly growing inequality of wealth and wages, an overproduction of potential elites – children of wealthy dynasties, graduates with advanced degrees, frustrated social commentators – and an uncontrolled growth in public debt.... The driving forces of negative trends in all societies are broadly twin-engined, he argues. One is the presence of a perverse 'wealth pump' which, after years of more equitable wealth distribution, takes from the poor and gives to the rich.... The second major destabilising factor [is] what Turchin defines as the 'overproduction of elites', in which an ever greater number of people compete over a finite and increasingly corrupt structure of privilege and power. He offers four factions between which this competition for status is perennially played out: militaristic, financial, bureaucratic and ideological. As societies decline the balanced equation of these factions falls wildly out of balance. The forces of capital seek to destroy the voices of ideology – one 'elite' arms itself against another in a series of real wars or culture wars – and things fall apart.... If he trades in apocalypse, however, his hope is to identify the means by which some societies faced with these existential threats have managed to mitigate or dodge them. He examines the ways Britain escaped revolution with the 1832 Reform Act, and how the extreme indicators after the Great Depression led to 'a prosocial faction' within America’s ruling elite, giving away a large proportion of its wealth in taxes to prevent catastrophe.... 'Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well,' Turchin writes. 'We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.' Sadly, however, that particular algorithm is still under construction."

How Choose Your Own Adventures helped me win the Booker prize – article by Shehan Karunatilaka in The Guardian. "The Choose Your Own Adventure books appealed to nerdy kids in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I grew up in the 80s; they were read by kids around the world. First in school libraries and then bookshops, where you’d find them on the shelf next to the Enid Blytons our parents would recommend. The adventures had provocative titles, intriguing cover art and the promise that you could choose from up to 33 endings." "You, the reader, addressed in the second person, make choices every few pages, to find out who killed Harlowe Thrombey, to seek the lost jewels of Nabooti, uncover the secret of the pyramids, or escape being a prisoner of the Ant People. And while some endings can be deemed happy, in most scenarios you end up dead. You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters. You fall down mineshafts, off cliffs, into wormholes, and perish in every conceivable natural catastrophe.... The unnamed 'You' in each book was originally meant to be a gender-neutral figure that could be equipped with specialist skills – such as archery in The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, or computer wizardry in Supercomputer – but largely remained a blank slate for the reader to imbue with character traits. The illustrations depicted a young, predominantly male, somewhat androgynous hero, as successive publishers bowed to the age-old wisdom that girls may read stories with boy heroes but never vice versa.... The demise of the franchise was predictable. It had occupied a cultural sweet spot in the 80s, just before the rise of role-playing gamebooks such as Dungeons and Dragons, and before our hand-held game consoles became fully immersive and interactive narrative machines. But for this writer, there remains far more than nostalgia and gruesome deaths. When attempting my last book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I was confronted with the challenge of getting a dead man to narrate an entire novel in the second person. While some claimed it to be a fool’s errand, and asked why I’d draw inspiration from a franchise written in the second person, I boldly replied, 'Why ever not?'"

‘Social mobility is a fairytale’: Faiza Shaheen on fighting for Labour and hating Oxford – interview by Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. "Know Your Place [is] a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that 'anyone can make it with hard work' results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. 'Social mobility is a fairytale,' Shaheen concludes. 'In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.' She is, of course, one of these shining examples herself. She grew up in a working-class, low-income household. Her family moved often, and in one place she had to share a bed with her sister to keep warm in a room in which there were snail trails on the floor in the morning.... Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement.... On her experience of studying PPE at Oxford – the degree of prime ministers – she is unequivocal. 'I hated Oxford with a passion,' she says. 'I don’t think I was able to articulate that I was a socialist until I went there.' In her book, she writes: 'I can tell you that in my experience, many of the people who studied PPE are among the worst, most arrogant and entitled people around. I would go as far as saying that reading PPE at Oxford should be seen as a red flag.' What Oxford did give her was a class education. 'I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,' she says. 'It was atrocious.' ... Know Your Place offers a bleak assessment of inequality, but Shaheen believes change is possible if we reconsider what we are valuing. 'I don’t think aspiration should be limited to this idea of going to Oxford and getting a high-paying job,' she replies. 'The whole idea needs flipping.' She wants to bin the idea of 'the top'. The final section of the book lists the ways in which she believes the system can be changed. These range from valuing collective social impact over economic wealth, and a solidarity tax to pay for the policies she will fight for if she wins in the next general election. 'The book is called Know Your Place,' she says, 'but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: "We are not going to be put in our place any more."’"

Cuttings: April 2023

Helen’s big rules of writing – Substack newsletter by Helen Lewis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Notice what you notice. …You are a human being encountering the world, and if you find something interesting, the chances are, so will other people. If you find your brow furrowing, don’t be afraid to ask the question that just popped into your head…. Details are everything. … One of the most beautiful things about reporting—going out in the world—is that humans are surrounded by a penumbra of information. Their hair, their clothes, their voice, their volume, their vocabulary, their cultural references. On the page, those details do so much heavy lifting for you…. Don’t be braver on the page. What I mean by this is—if you plan to make a spicy observation about someone in your copy, make it to their face. Give them a chance to respond, first of all, and not to feel misled by your approach.… Don’t save people from themselves (too much). … If you are talking to an adult and they tell you something that makes you uncomfortable …resist the urge to tidy that away. Instead, repeat it back to them and see if they panic horribly because they said it to a journalist, or in fact if they wanted you to know… Observe the interview rule of three. … Come away from an interview and immediately write down the three most interesting takeaways from it. Particularly for projects where you are interviewing many people over many months, it will really help to flick through these little summaries of your interviews before sitting down to write…. One Notebook To Rule Them All. … I now use one per project, and I can’t tell you how helpful it is to instantly identify the repository of all my notes on a topic. I also use them as bullet journals, stopping every month or so to write myself a diary entry on how the project is going, what concerns I have, what I’m missing etc…. Log your process.…These days, for any longread or other long project, I am fastidious about noting down who I’ve requested to interview, when, and if they replied or declined. I can’t tell what a relief this is when your factchecker or editor asks if you requested comment and you can instantly answer without searching your inbox…. Email like everyone’s watching. Particularly when dealing with political or sensitive requests, don’t write anything in your emails to sources and official bodies that you wouldn’t be happy to have published. Know your limits. It’s very, very hard to write for more than four concentrated hours a day. Plan accordingly. The rest of your working time can be reserved for answering emails, conducting interviews, reading research materials.… Know the difference between plot and story. … If you ever wonder if a scene or quote belongs in a piece, ask: does it serve the story? Or is it just … an interesting thing that happened? Sing the theme tune. … Often, really great films/novels/longreads will have a theme as well. My go-to example of this is Amadeus, where the plot/story concerns the rise of idiot savant Mozart and the fall of the earnest plodder Salieri. But the theme is envy. There are a million ways to tell the story of Mozart, but Peter Schaffer deliberately decided to tell it through someone else, to make it a reflection on how it feels to be ordinary in the presence of greatness…. Park downhill. At the end of every day, finish your writing by stopping halfway through a thought—maybe even halfway through a sentence. That way, there is a small task to complete the next day, helping you navigate the hardest movement in a writer’s life: sitting down at your desk.”

[Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra] – Twitter post by Ethan Mollick referenced in Helen Lewis’s substack newsletter. “[The Star Trek:The Next Generation episode ‘Darmok’, features the Tamarians who communicate entirely by reference to history and myth (see ref below).] I asked Bing [AI] to do the same for English using American history. It gave remarkably subtle & interesting results…. ‘Parks, her seat unchanged.’... ‘Kennedy and Khrushchev at Cuba.’… ‘Nixon and Woodward at Watergate.’…” See also https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the-walls-fell/372107/

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans – article by Henry Farrell in Boston Review, referenced in John Naughton Memex 1.1 blog. “Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. … What he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work…: ‘The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”’”

AI Chatbots Don’t Care About Your Social Norms – article by Jacob Browning and Yann Lecun in Noema, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In human conversation, there are countless ways to say the wrong thing: We can say something inappropriate, dishonest, confusing, irrelevant, offensive or just plain stupid. We can even say the right thing but be faulted for saying it with the wrong tone or emphasis. Our whole lives are spent navigating innumerable conversational landmines in our dealings with other people. Not saying the wrong thing isn’t just an important part of a conversation; it is often more important than the conversation itself. Sometimes, keeping our mouths shut may be the only right course of action. Given how few ways there are to say the right thing, and how many different ways there are to say something wrong, it is shocking that humans don’t make more mistakes than they do. How do we navigate this perilous landscape of not saying the wrong thing, and why aren’t chatbots navigating it as effectively?… The problem [with chatbots] is that they don’t care. They don’t have any intrinsic goals they want to accomplish through conversation and aren’t motivated by what others think or how they are reacting. They don’t feel bad about lying and they gain nothing by being honest. They are shameless in a way even the worst people aren’t — even Donald Trump cares enough about his reputation to at least claim he’s truthful.”

The data delusion – article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. … The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, ‘Mysteries,’ ‘Facts,’ ‘Numbers,’ and ‘Data.’ Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer used to be crammed full of folders with names like ‘Why Stars Exist’ and ‘When Life Begins,’ but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, ‘Facts,’ which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. ‘Numbers,’ second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked ‘Data’ holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open. In ‘How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms’ (Norton), the Columbia professors Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones open two of these four drawers, ‘Numbers’ and ‘Data.’ … The book … is an adaptation of a course they began teaching in 2017, a history of data science. It begins in the late eighteenth century with the entry of the word ‘statistics’ into the English language.”

ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding – article by Chris Moran, Head of Editorial Innvotion in The Guardian. “Last month one of our journalists received an interesting email. A researcher had come across mention of a Guardian article, written by the journalist on a specific subject from a few years before. But the piece was proving elusive on our website and in search.... The reporter couldn’t remember writing the specific piece, but the headline certainly sounded like something they would have written.... They asked colleagues to go back through our systems to track it down. [However, ] they could find no trace of its existence. Why? Because it had never been written. Luckily the researcher had told us that they had carried out their research using ChatGPT. In response to being asked about articles on this subject, the AI had simply made some up. Its fluency, and the vast training data it is built on, meant that the existence of the invented piece even seemed believable to the person who absolutely hadn’t written it.... Two days ago our archives team was contacted by a student asking about another missing article from a named journalist. There was again no trace of the article in our systems. The source? ChatGPT.... The question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can [generative AI] technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from misinformation, polarisation and bad actors. This is the question we are currently grappling with at the Guardian. And it’s why we haven’t yet announced a new format or product built on generative AI. Instead, we’ve created a working group and small engineering team to focus on learning about the technology, considering the public policy and IP questions around it, listening to academics and practitioners, talking to other organisations, consulting and training our staff, and exploring safely and responsibly how the technology performs when applied to journalistic use.”

‘I spent years studying death, but it didn’t prepare me for grief’: archaeologist Sarah Tarlow on losing her husband – article by Sarah Tarlow in The Guardian, extracted from her book The Archaeology of Loss. “My whole adult life, I have made a study of death. I am a professor of archaeology, specialising in mortuary and commemorative practices. I have written dozens of papers and several books about death – and how the relationship between the living and the dead changed between the late medieval period and the 20th century.... Today, even those who are knowledgable and experienced in death often deny that it is coming. ... Many of my generation do not [know what to expect].... As archaeologists, our knowledge of the past is always incomplete, patched together out of material that is never enough, not quite the right thing and usually the wrong shape. My personal memories are not so different. Already I have forgotten things. I am surprised sometimes by a photograph or a comment, and I think, 'Oh, yes. That’s right. We did do that.' Trying to remember is like boxing smoke.... It has taken me time to remember that there was not just the anger and frustration of those last months, but that there was also love. I must remember how exciting it felt at the start, and the solid ordinariness of it through the years of young children, through the Christmases and the summer holidays and the cups of tea in bed. There were moments of passion, of tenderness, of anger and regret, but mostly there were just days, months, years tumbling past, in a long, commonplace ordinary.”

If Labour is to succeed it needs not just new policies, but a whole new philosophy – article by Daniel Chandler in The Guardian. “After four general election defeats and nearly 15 years in opposition, the Labour party seems likely to form the next government.... And yet Starmer has struggled to set out a vision that could bring [his] currently rather disparate policy ideas into a coherent whole. It’s easy to put this down to his personality, more technocrat than visionary, but it also reflects the dearth of systematic thinking about the philosophical foundations for progressive politics in recent decades.... Whereas Margaret Thatcher drew on thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, where could Starmer look for inspiration? For many on the left, the answers lie with Marx and the socialist tradition. There is much of value here, and over the past decade it has been self-described socialists who have been the primary source of creativity within progressive politics. ... But the ideas Labour needs are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the great liberal philosopher John Rawls. ... At the heart of Rawls’s theory is a strikingly simple idea – that society should be fair. He argued that if we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organise it if we didn’t know what our position would be – rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight. ... First, if we really didn’t know who we would be, we would want to protect our 'basic liberties', including personal freedoms such as freedom of speech, religion and sexuality, but also the political freedoms we need to play a genuinely equal part in collective decision-making. Second, in addition to ensuring 'fair equality of opportunity', we would want to organise our economy so that the least well off are better off than under any alternative system (Rawls called this the 'difference principle'). From this perspective, higher pay for some can be justified as an incentive to work, study or innovate, but only if this ultimately ends up benefiting those who have less – not just by a little, but as much as possible.”

How to future-proof your novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “I'm your future self. I've come back to warn you that the book you're writing will be a failure.” “Wait! I'm from the far future. The book was rediscovered and is now revered as a classic.” “I'm from further into the future. The book is now considered so offensive that I've been sent back to stop you writing it.” “I'm from unimaginably far into the future and we don't allow censorship. Now, everybody go home and leave this man to finish writing his awful book.”

Among Others: Friendships and Encounters by Michael Frayn: heartfelt pen portraits – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. “There is a generation of writers who were schooled by the war and the more egalitarian freedoms of its aftermath, and who borrowed intellectual and moral authority from both. A great capacity for friendship helped, and the porosity of an establishment that for the first time allowed state-educated – mostly grammar school – boys and girls a more equal voice with the fee-paying class. Michael Frayn, now 89, was – and is – a shining star in that firmament. This book, a collection of short essays on some of the other fixed points in his constellation, becomes a thoughtful and often moving portrait of a disappearing world in which a generous kind of bookish rigour and worldly wit created fleeting incandescence at the heart of British cultural life…. The brightness of some of these young things is sharpened in Frayn’s memory by the close knowledge of alternative narrative arcs. There are among the success stories inevitably several tragic notes.… As the book progresses, that sense of the precariousness of fate, of roads not taken, takes over.”

The big idea: can writing make you healthier? – article by David Robson in The Guardian. “Professor James Pennebaker and his graduate student Sandra Beall were the first to demonstrate [the beneficial effects of expressive writing] in the 1980s. They asked a series of students to write a short essay for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. Some of the participants were encouraged to write about ‘the most traumatic or upsetting experience’ of their lives, exploring their ‘deepest thoughts and feelings’ about the episode. Others were asked to write about trivialities, such as descriptions of their dorm rooms or the shoes they were wearing…. Over the following six months, [students in the first group] paid around half as many visits to the student health centre as the participants in the control group…. Why is writing so cathartic? … One possibility is that externalising our thoughts gives us more head space to think about other things. We now know that simply writing a to-do list can release people’s cognitive resources for other activities, as it reduces the amount of information they are juggling in their minds. This eases stress and, done before bedtime, it can even improve sleep. Expressive writing could perform a similar function in clearing our mental workspace of the sources of negative rumination, freeing up working memory to devote to the things that matter…. Equally importantly, writing our worries down can create a sense of ‘psychological distance’, which allows us to take a more philosophical attitude to our problems. If we have been contemplating hurt caused by others, for instance, we might find it easier to see their viewpoint, or we recognise a valuable lesson we’ve learned, which could help us to function better in the future.”

Seen and Heard: January to March 2023

The Years by Annie Ernaux – well-reviewed and Nobel Prize-winning French autobiographical novel in translation. The thing which attracted me to this reminiscence of the years 1941 to 2006 is that it’s written not in the first person singular (I) but the first person plural (we) or third person (she) - presumably some of these at least are translations of the French on, which sounds less pretentious than the English equivalent (one). Supposedly this makes it more general, the story of her generation, but I didn’t buy it. When she says “We couldn't wait to take Confirmation,” I think, what, everyone? Everyone in France of that age? It came over to me not as socialised but as uncritically ego-centric. A big disappointment, though the details of French life across the years are interesting enough.

His Dark Materials, series 3 – The mighty story winds its way to its sad conclusion in the BBC adaptation. The visual realisation is as stunning as ever – they even managed to make sense of the roller-skating elephants – but Daphne Keen as Lyra, who was an excellent child actor in the first two series, as an adult is only good. But as before, the show is taken into the stratosphere by the wonderful performance of Ruth Wilson as Marissa Coulter, whose wordless reactions to the puerile war preparations of her sometime lover Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) justifies the price of admission on its own.

'Spearhead from space', 'Terror of the autons' – Doctor Who four-episode stories from 1970 and 1971, being the openers of the first and second seasons of Jon Pertwee’s tenure: for my money the best of all the classic Doctors except the first. Stylish and in colour (showing off nicely his scarlet-lined cape), aristocratic (possibly even posh), full of action (featuring stuntmen from fight-arrangement-company Havoc), and decidedly scary, with plastic mannequins coming to life, killer plastic daffodils, and a man-eating inflatable plastic chair. And The Master, played as never-subsequently-equalled by the wonderfully satanic Roger Delgado. These episodes have aged very well, the only sour note being Pertwee’s frequent calling women “my dear” – and that was more of an issue with Katy Manning’s sweet-but-dim Jo Grant; nobody patronised the wonderful Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John), who was a fellow scientist and The Doctor’s colleague rather than his assistant, but who alas only lasted a single season. See also the fanfilm 'Dr Who Review, Part 4, the Jon Pertwee era'.

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez – well-reviewed, and great fun to read, as one would expect from such a good TV historian, though a possibly misleading subtitle: it’s not a systematic history but rather a series of case studies of individual women, exploring what each tells us about the possible places for women in the medieval world. In my opinion, these are best when she is on her home territory of archaeology, as with the Birka warrior, rather than when she is doing history of ideas (my former territory), as with Hildegaard of Bingen, when some of the shortcoming are more evident to me. (So this woman wrote this stuff, but what significance did that stuff have in the context of the time?) There’s also an excellent Introduction on the history of views of medieval women, taking in the impact of the Reformation, Victorian “great man” history and Pre-Raphaelite painting, which starts with a highly plausible reconstruction of the likely intentions of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who died after collision with the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby.

Embracelet – well-reviewed and award-nominated, beautiful and moving adventure game, from the maker of Milkmaid of the Milky Way. What’s unusual is that relationship-building is to the fore, as you take 17-year-old Norwegian Jesper to the island of Slepp in pursuit of his grandfather’s dying wish: that he returns a magical bracelet to its rightful owner. While on Slepp, he makes friends with cousins Karoline and Hermod – intimacy being built through skilfully-written dialogue choices. I found myself falling in love with Karoline, even as Jesper did under my playing, despite the low-polygon graphics with which everything is rendered and absence of voice acting. Interestingly, it’s also possible to fall in love with Hermod, or to decide that you’re not ready for a relationship. When the game was over, I missed Slepp and its beautiful soundtrack, though surely Norwegian islands can’t really be as warm and sunny all year round.

Tryin' Times – song by Roberta Flack, performed at the 2022 Cheltenham Jazz Festival by Adi Oasis (starts at 16:30). A key feature of the song is the lilting bassline, a steady pulsing repeated figure, and the unique thing about this performance is that Oasis is BOTH playing the electric bass, maintaining the rock steady pulse, AND singing the wild and free vocals. Massively impressive isolation, which somehow gives this song an almost spiritual level: it’s what you have to do, balance both elements in your life. (Note: this needs to be heard on a system with good bass response, otherwise it's just ordinary.)

Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear – another great Masie Dobbs detective novel; here she’s tracking down what happened to two people who served in the Great War, her investigation complicated by the discovery that both were involved in secret intelligence work, and that one was keeping a secret of his own (homosexuality). Oh yes, and somebody’s trying to kill her.

Babel by R F Kuang – well-reviewed thrilling, powerful, thought-provoking novel, set in an alternative early 19th century, in which four young people (two boys, Chinese and Indian, and two girls, Creole and white British) are recruited to the prestigious Babel Institute at the University of Oxford, housed in (of course) a large tower located just behind the Radcliffe Camera. The premise is that Britain’s industrial power is dependent on a kind of linguistic magic – word pairs in different languages, engraved on silver bars – which provides technical enhancements: engines are more efficient, structures are stronger, weapons are deadlier. The young people have effectively been co-opted to the furtherance of the British Empire, which creates personal conflict for at least three of them, especially the Chinese principal character, when they are sent to Canton in the lead up to what will become the first Opium War. Unsettling questions, especially for those of us who are intellectuals and racially non-white: whose interests does our work really serve? Have we too been co-opted?

The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day – decently-reviewed, interesting but thin and awkward-to-operate adventure game, set in a world in which humans have apparently destroyed themselves through war, with the robots they created continuing to keep some kind of society going. The playable character, a robot designated RT-217NP (Artie for short), is quite fun, especially in his wry and uncomprehending comments at the relics of human technology, but the story is very short and frustratingly ends just he encounters a living human – one of the survivors being rounded up and killed by the robot bosses. Well, there's a sequel. I will see where that leads.

Ice Cold in Alex – old (1958) Second World War film, watched when I was isolating having tested positive for Covid. Great performances, and I was struck by how little (if any) music is used; the same film made today would use music frequently in every scene of tension to point up the emotion. Also the ending makes an interesting statement about Britishness: here, the willingness of the British characters to break the rules and save the life of a nominal enemy (a German) because of the relationship they have forged with him through shared hardship and reciprocal saving of lives. I think the majority of a cinema audience today would find that incomprehensible. "What? He's an enemy. Why are you protecting him?" But the film uncompromisingly stands up for what we used to call decency, which includes doing the right thing even if it's against the rules and it's to your disadvantage. I'm afraid it's quite gone out of fashion.

The Godfather – another old (1972) film watched during my Covid isolation. Definitely deserves its classic status, and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in particular are superb and convincing.

Cuttings: March 2023

The Moral Economy of Tech: Remarks at the SASE Panel – conference talk from 2016 by Maciej Ceglowski, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. … Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale. Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing. Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life…. We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support. Democratic societies sometimes adopt terrible policies. … My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country…. What we've done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.”

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed – article by Alexander Hanff in The A Register, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: ‘Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.’ … The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering. The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn: ‘Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.’”

Roald Dahl's books further reworked by cautious publishers – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Employee-Owned Organic Kale Factory. The Witches The Strong, Confident Women Who Did Things Their Own Way. George's Marvellous Medicine George's Many Years of Safely Studying Medicine. The BFG The BRG (Boundary-Respecting Giant). James and the Giant Peach Normal-Sized Peaches Equitably Distributed Across the Entire Community.” (See article 'Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive' by Hayden Vernon.)

‘Keir Starmer just ordered an alpaca airstrike!’ The game that holds up a dystopian mirror to the UK
– article by Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the [Daily Mail] printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as 'queen painting' and 'kiss door'. ... For Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration. 'It reminded me of a map from a video game,' he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. ... So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the 'big society'.”

The Patriarchs by Angela Saini: the roots of male domination – review by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian. “Science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable.... Simone de Beauvoir spent the introduction and the first eight chapters of The Second Sex discussing how sex and gender had been constructed through science and history, demolishing notions of essentialism. Saini builds on De Beauvoir’s approach, again viewing the question from a scientific and a historical perspective. Nearly 75 years on, there is plenty more to say. While elite male power might seem universal, it’s not.... Even within patriarchal societies, patriarchy isn’t consistent. It manifests in different forms, which change over time. It’s logical, and worth noting in the current climate, that many of the societies where women enjoyed more power and greater equality were also more relaxed about gender identity: either recognising multiple or mutable genders, or differentiating little between masculine and feminine roles, or both. The strict division of people at birth into two distinct sexes – supposedly on the basis of biology, but with the intent to determine their social and cultural roles – is a hallmark of patriarchy.... De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had 'dethroned' women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point. 'The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.'” See interview of Angela Saini by Katy Guest, 'Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy'. 

You are not a parrot – article by Elizabeth Weil in Intelligencer, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Emily M. Bender ... is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. ... In 2020 [she published a paper] with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller ... to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. The setup is this[.] Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: 'I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.' The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud.... 'We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.' In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.”

Dormant volcanoes and working monorails: the grand designs of Ken Adam, master of the Bond-villain lair - article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "As the creative mind behind seven James Bond films across the 60s and 70s, and numerous other movies, from Dr Strangelove to Addams Family Values, Adam dreamed up the look of nuclear submarine bases, mountain laboratories, hi-tech space stations, glamorous Las Vegas penthouses, and missile launchers hidden inside volcanoes. In doing so, he built some of the most memorable and influential spaces, not only in the history of cinema but also in the history of architecture, real or imagined. Today, his influence can be felt whenever you walk into a soaring office atrium, take a vertiginous escalator ride into a cavernous subway station, or even get shuttled through a tunnel between airport terminals. He was the master of a style he termed 'heightened reality', taking everyday spaces and giving them a theatrical, supercharged glamour.”

Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.”

Weight Watchers wins when our diets fail: it won’t change society’s broken thinking around food –article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. “It's no surprise that shares in Weight Watchers International surged more than 70% earlier this month after its acquisition of Sequence, a US telehealth service linking patients with doctors who can prescribe semaglutide medications, which suppress appetite and are being used for weight loss. I’d argue that Weight Watchers is not so much in the weight-loss business. It is in the money-churning business. Repeat customers and subscription customers fuel business. Studies have shown that 97% of dieters regain everything they have lost within three years – the ideal backdrop for Weight Watchers and big diet companies, who see their customers returning again and again. There will be a stream of repeat customers as long as we have a culture of inducing in people a feeling that they risk being that hated state, 'fat'; a feeling that starts anywhere up from being tiny.”

Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin: A playful tribute to a remarkable spirit - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "In this sampler of the great SF author’s writings on gender and feminism, the space crone is an older woman taken onboard an alien spaceship as an ambassador for our planet: 'only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition - the essential quality of which is Change - can fairly represent humanity'. This 1976 essay on facing up to the menopause - again a hot topic today - kicks off a selection of fiction and essays spanning four decades in which Le Guin is always wry, witty and radically open to changing her mind. The book includes her notable 70s essay 'Is Gender Necessary?', looking back on her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.... A decade later she overhauled the piece; elsewhere, considering female writers, she explains how long it took her to realise that 'internalised ideology' had shaped her assumptions about language and gender and driven her decision to write outside the canon, in fantasy and YA. A bravura piece from the 90s that begins 'I am a man' - even though 'my first name ends in a, and I own three bras' - effortlessly dismantles the myth of male universality along with the generic 'he' pronoun. Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have 'let themselves be silenced' by eschewing the 'mother tongue' of conversation and story for the 'father tongue' of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the 'dead end' of Ulysses. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker.”

Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri: the Kafkaesque ordeal faced by refugees – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court. When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a ‘code’ that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. ‘As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,’ she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to ‘bullshit gracefully’ in order to build trust with her clients. Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. ‘The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.’”

The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle: the lives and loves of George Eliot – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation of 'the double life', meaning not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going ... and instead takes a more soulful look at what 'the marriage question' meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.... In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch, Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but also with the 'imagined otherwise' of ghostly roads not taken and lives unlived.... In her introduction ... , Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot’s own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. As Carlisle shows, philosophy in the abstract meant little to Eliot. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it – she was the first English translator of texts by Feuerbach and Spinoza – but until that theory came clothed in warm and breathing flesh, it remained inert. The question of marriage mattered to George Eliot not as a rhetorical device or a question of law or custom, but as a series of lived possibilities that needed to be tested and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle of renewal and self-healing.”

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life: one from the heart – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man…. ‘When I studied philosophy at university,’ writes Carlisle, ‘most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.’ They feared, she suspects, that marriage in general and kids in particular would hamper the serious business of philosophy. But that lack of experience, Carlisle implies, has made philosophy as dry-balled and fruitless as Rev Casaubon. ‘Its habitual modes of rationalism and empiricism will not do,’ writes Carlisle of philosophy near the end. ‘Marriage resists these lines of enquiry not because we have failed to think clearly or to gather sufficient evidence but because of the complexity and aliveness of the human heart.’ Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.”

Time to Think by Hannah Barnes: inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The book traces [the] evolution [of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)] from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.… Only 5% of Gids patients in the 1990s reported growing up to be trans (most identified as gay in adulthood). But, by contrast, a 2016 study of Gids patients on blockers found virtually all medically transitioned once adults. Were the drugs unwittingly influencing outcomes? Or might a greater proportion of the 1990s children have transitioned if they had grown up in a more tolerant era? Without a contemporary control group of children denied blockers, it was impossible to be certain. The book revolves around bigger unanswered questions about what it means to be trans. Are some people just born trans, in which case making them jump through psychiatric hoops to prove it could be cruelly pathologising? Or are some children’s identities still fluid, which might favour keeping options open and exploring any underlying issues? Barnes contacted almost 60 former Gids clinicians, and, of those willing to be interviewed, most leaned to the latter position; they tend to argue that trans children certainly exist, but probably in smaller numbers than those referred, and that the clinic became overreliant on blockers at the expense of more difficult, lengthy exploration of what exactly was going on. These doctors, too, wanted more time to think.”

The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti: somewhere towards the end – review by Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. “In Hold On, a gentle rallying cry, she urges the writing of poems ‘raw as sandpaper’ – something hers never have been – and urges: ‘Fine-tune your ear to subtext.’ Never afraid to speak out, subtext was second nature to Satyamurti. Her greatest quality as a poet is discretion.” “Hold on. Hold on to the real news, / to what you know is of good report. / Hold on to what you know of fakery / nail a lie when you hear one, / spot bluster on the public highway. // Fine-tune your ear to subtext, / manipulation and duplicity. / Ask yourself who benefits, / whose hopes are cruelly raised, / who dares get away with what. // Don’t be afraid to make a poem / raw as sandpaper. And even though / a million protests, twice as many feet, / couldn’t stop a war, get out there / with your small voice, your light tread.”

2022 [China] newsletter – by Dan Wang, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest…. Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. … Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed… Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.”

Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’ – interview by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. “A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: ‘At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?’ And what’s that, for you? ‘I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,’ she says. ‘If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?’ The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how ‘the capacity to do violence’ gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took…. And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking… There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting.”

Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language – article by Rachel Hall in The Guardian. “Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.… Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.…The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that ‘they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children’. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: ‘They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.’”

Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery – article by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.
The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders. It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.”

How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today – article by Katharine Viner (editor) in The Guardian. “I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.… The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery. Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. … We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? …Why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”

Slavery and The Guardian: The ties that bind us – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.… It marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance. It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them…. I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it.… None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.”