Cuttings: August 2024

 Why AI’s Tom Cruise problem means it is ‘doomed to fail’ – TechScape newsletter by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "What does it matter if the AI system is reasoning or simply parroting if it can tackle problems previously beyond the ken of computing? ... If you’re just making a useful tool – even if it’s useful enough to be a new general purpose technology – does the distinction matter?  Turns out, yes. As Lukas Berglund, et al wrote last year:... 'We test GPT-4 on pairs of questions like, “Who is Tom Cruise’s mother?” and, “Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?” for 1,000 different celebrities and their actual parents. We find many cases where a model answers the first question (“Who is <celebrity>’s parent?”) correctly, but not the second. We hypothesize this is because the pretraining data includes fewer examples of the ordering where the parent precedes the celebrity (eg “Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son is Tom Cruise”).' One way to explain this is to realise that LLMs don’t learn about relationships between facts, but between tokens, the linguistic forms that Bender described. The tokens 'Tom Cruise’s mother' are linked to the tokens 'Mary Lee Pfeiffer', but the reverse is not necessarily true. The model isn’t reasoning, it’s playing with words, and the fact that the words 'Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son' don’t appear in its training data means it can’t help....  This is by no means the only sort of problem where LLMs fall far short of reasoning. Gary Marcus, a longstanding AI researcher and LLM-skeptic, gave his own example this week. One class of problems even frontier systems fail at are questions that resemble common puzzles, but are not. Try [this] in any of your favourite chatbots, if you want to see what I mean:... 'A man, a cabbage, and a goat are trying to cross a river. They have a boat that can only carry three things at once. How do they do it?'... The [answer is] simple (.... put everything in the boat and cross the river...), but [it looks] like [a] more complicated or tricky [question], and the LLMs will stumble down the route they expect the answer to go in. ... When the model presented by critics of AI does a good job of predicting exactly the sort of problems the technology is going to struggle with, it should add to the notes of concern reverberating around the markets this week: what if the bubble is about to burst?"

No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship – article by Navneet Alang in The Guardian. “This is what the utopian vision of the future so often misses: if and when change happens, the questions at play will be about if and how certain technology gets distributed, deployed, taken up. It will be about how governments decide to allocate resources, how the interests of various parties affected will be balanced, how an idea is sold and promulgated, and more. It will, in short, be about political will, resources, and the contest between competing ideologies and interests. The problems facing the world – not just climate breakdown but the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, or growing anti-immigrant sentiment – aren’t problems caused by a lack of intelligence or computing power. In some cases, the solutions to these problems are superficially simple. Homelessness, for example, is reduced when there are more and cheaper homes. But the fixes are difficult to implement because of social and political forces, not a lack of insight, thinking, or novelty. In other words, what will hold progress on these issues back will ultimately be what holds everything back: us.”

High Modernism made our world: On James Scott and technology – article by Henry Farrell on his blog Programmable Mutter, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "The political scientist James Scott died last week.... His book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed... is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result. In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets 'see' the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy. Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well....  This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine. So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for 'abstract citizens' and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world."

Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast – journal article by James C. Scott, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "It was the beginning of the height of the Vietnam War. I gave many lectures against the Vietnam War. I had a huge class with Edward Friedman on peasant revolution and revolt. There were 600 students in the class, and 60 of them judged that Friedman and I were insufficiently progressive. So they went out after every class and wrote a critique of the day’s lecture, which they handed out to all the other students at the next lecture. At the end of this experience, I decided to be a student of the peasantry... I knew I had to live in a peasant village. I knew it was important for me, if I was going to make a career out of studying peasants, to know at least one peasant setting well. It was not easy, as it involved learning the local dialect. The result of that field study appeared as a book entitled Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985), which was my first foray outside of political science.... On the basis of my year and a half in a Malay village, I discovered that resistance was ubiquitous, but it almost always took the forms that were least dangerous and were designed to evade any dangerous retaliation from the authorities. Those of us who work in quasi-democratic settings understand that it is possible to organize social movements that are publicly visible and that may result in protest....Most of the world, however, does not live under such conditions, and historically these conditions have been quite rare. Therefore, the form that resistance tends to take, which maximizes the safety of the resistors, is designed not to attract dangerous retaliation.... Sometimes this resistance takes open, but symbolic, forms. ... Let me give an example. When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards."

Express Elevator – online article by Karl Schroeder, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Don’t ask me how I know that there used to be a drug-culture term express elevator. That was what you rode when you took uppers and downers at the same time: simultaneously soaring through the roof and crashing through the floor. In futures work and science fiction, we’re generally trained to pop either the uppers or the downers. The future is either Mad Max or The Jetsons. There’s a deliberate strategy behind this: Foresight practitioners want to drive the discussion to illustrative extremes so that all the stakeholders in a project can get a sense of, well, the stakes. SF writers don’t want to confuse their readers. As a result, our scenarios are usually constructed across a simple continuum, of good to bad.… But the real world doesn’t work that way.… The Internet and Social Media positively teem with pundits pushing narratives and counter-narratives about the impact (or lack thereof) of new technologies such as electric cars. It’s a spectrum with a blue end and a red end, and nothing in the middle: EVs are either The Answer, or they’re a failed attempt by Big Government to jam a green ideology down our throats. And it’s not that the truth lies somewhere in the middle; both of these perspectives could be right. What I object to is thinking that it has to be one or the other…. The express elevator does not resolve the contradictions, we don’t achieve some magical overview where decarbonization and more microplastics somehow cancel each other out. Instead we’re left with an unalloyed good and a big mess, both at the same time. These ideas don’t converge, they’re centripetal, propelling us simultaneously in two directions. That’s the nature of an express elevator. Instead of an expression of dialectic, it’s a nod to complementarity—the idea that in the real world, you sometimes have to use two or more mutually exclusive models to understand something. For example, EVs are simultaneously great for the environment because they emit no tailpipe exhaust, and terrible for it because they perpetuate automotive culture.“

Hidden figures: giving history’s most overlooked mathematicians their due - article by David Smith in The Guardian. "A new book, The Secret Lives of Numbers, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell, shines a light on overlooked contributions to maths by women and men in China, India, the Arabian peninsula and other parts of the world. 'When we think of the history of mathematics, it is not just about ancient Greeks and bearded white men,' says Revell... 'This isn’t about tearing anyone down. This is about explaining that the history of mathematics is way more complex, chaotic and amazing than you may have known. My hope is that our book goes some way to illuminating that.' Kitagawa, ...a maths historian from Japan, adds ...: 'People already know about big figures and we do not want to challenge that idea: truth is truth. But we want to make it richer and so it’s about integration of knowledge as well.'"

Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone – article by Dan Brooks in The Guardian. "The contours of [postmodernism] are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.... I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. ... We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go. The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story.... The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade.... Sooner or later, we must become authors again."

The big idea: how do you get rid of a dictator? – article by Marcel Dirsus in The Guardian, based on his book How Tyrants Fall. “When it comes to toppling tyrants, power and proximity matter. In the case of Russia, the head of the National Guard has more leverage than a civil servant in the capital – and that bureaucrat has more influence than a shopkeeper in Yekaterinburg or the Russian Far East. Foreign governments have limited influence, but can help by weakening the dictator, strengthening the masses and making life miserable for the powerbrokers who keep the system running, while giving them an opportunity to escape. That means broad sanctions that deprive the tyrant of opportunities to redistribute money to elites and generals, and measures that make it harder to access weaponry that can be used to suppress protesters or surveillance software to control opponents. If revolutionaries need a place to organise abroad, it should be provided. Regime insiders should be encouraged to defect and offered money and safety if they do so. Dissidents then need to build a broad coalition and take to the streets. If they manage to mobilise, especially in the capital and other major cities, there is every chance that the system will crack. Unfortunately, that approach is unlikely to work in the world’s most entrenched and destructive regimes such as Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea or Xi Jinping’s China. In these countries, popular mobilisation is all but impossible…. For outsiders, then, there are two options: use violence or bide your time, ensuring that you are prepared for the day when the dictator makes a mistake that can be exploited.”

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel – article by Omer Bartov in The Guardian. "I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods.... For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.... These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight?... What I’d experienced as a soldier [was that] we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible. Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war.... When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to 'break the arms and legs' of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.... To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military....The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover.... Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme. The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation....The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage.... Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger."

The grim toll of a ‘national emergency’ in attacks on women – daily briefing by Archie Bland, interviewing Alexandra Topping, lead reporter for the Killed Women Count project in The Guardian. "Killed Women Count started with a conversation at the Guardian about how rarely cases in which a woman is allegedly killed by a man are covered in the media, and how rarer still it is for those cases to be recognised as part of a common problem. 'It just seems intractable,' Alexandra Topping said. 'It’s almost background noise – and we wanted to change that. So we decided we were going to treat these awful killings as newsworthy, even if they happen with horrific frequency.' We might think of Gary Younge’s gloss on the adage that 'when a dog bites a man, that is not news; when a man bites a dog that is news': 'There are things that happen with such regularity and predictability that journalists have simply ceased to recognise their news value … there is value in asking “Why do dogs keep biting people?”, and “Why do the same people keep getting bitten?”' "

It’s not them, it’s us: the real reason teens are ‘addicted’ to video games – article by Keith Stuart and Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "Speaking as the video games editor and correspondent at the Guardian, ... we think that most of us who are worried about how long our teenagers are spending with games are not dealing with an addiction problem, nor with compulsive behaviour. If we want to know why many teens choose of their own free will to spend 10 or 20 hours a week playing games, rather than pathologising them, we ought to look around us. Gen Z are the most closely monitored generation ever to be born. We criticise children and teenagers for not going outside – but at the same time we’re curtailing their freedoms and closing their spaces.... And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go?... No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures – the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control. You can spend all day with your friends in Red Dead Redemption or Minecraft or Fortnite doing whatever you like, without being moved on or complained about, or having to spend £5 on a latte every 30 minutes. If you can’t access therapy, at least you can relax with comforting games such as Stardew Valley, Unpacking or Coffee Talk, or chat things through with your friends in-game. You can travel freely, and for free, in Elden Ring or Legend of Zelda; no elderly relatives can suddenly vote to restrict your access to the continent in Euro Truck Simulator."

A Chinese-born writer’s quest to understand the Vikings, Normans and life on the English coast – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian. "I became a British citizen some years ago, before Britain left the European Union. I had been living in London in my partner’s flat, which he owns. I never had my own place, and I didn’t mind. Having left China, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to settle in England. This changed when my parents died of cancer, first my father, then my mother a year later. I gave birth to my own child during that time and briefly went back to China with my newborn baby. My brother and I managed to sell the family house where we grew up. I would inherit half of the money, and when I returned to England, I thought, finally, I could have a place of my own.... A few weeks later, I called my brother in China to tell him I had found a place – in a town called Hastings... The past is a foreign country. This is true for me. But the past of Hastings and Anglo-Saxon history is doubly foreign. For a non-westerner like myself, to grasp the meaning of 'Anglo-Saxon' is as demanding as to understand the word 'Norman'. And to know what Norman means, I have to be very patient, because I have to return to the age of Norse, the Vikings, the Celts, or to times and places even more remote than the remote culture where I am from.... I am only at the beginning of my copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and am nowhere near the Battle of Hastings yet."

‘That train sound? It’s a hovering mothership!’: legendary Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt reveals his secrets – interview with John Bleasdale in The Guardian. "When Ben Burtt Jr was invited to look at the concept art for Star Wars before filming began, he says he heard the lightsaber as much as saw it: it was the sound of a film projector. 'I was a projectionist at a theatre,' he says. 'I could hear a projector motor – not when it’s running the movie, but as it sat still: a musical humming. Fifty per cent of the lightsaber is that projector. I mixed it in with the buzz of a television tube.' So when you hear one of Burtt’s most famous sound effects, you are listening to cinema. Yet it’s only one part of an amazing aural universe that Burtt has created, as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ theme music. Where would Star Wars be without the sound of Han Solo’s blaster – made by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer? Or the plaintive yowls of Chewbacca – a melange of vocalisations and animal recordings? The voice of R2-D2 is Burtt himself. 'I was trying keyboards with electronic effects, and it didn’t have life. It wasn’t coming from something alive; something that was thinking. It’s only when I was able to channel a voice element into it that it changed. It’s about 50% vocal, 50% electronic.'"

‘Two-tier justice’ in Britain is real, but it’s not what the right says it is – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Had those sentenced for their part in the riots this week – who heeded the calls of racist organisers and rampaged through England’s cities – been Muslims inspired by Islamists, they are likely to have been prosecuted as terrorists, potentially facing much longer sentences.... How were the attacks on mosques, on a hotel housing asylum seekers and on those who have sought to defend refugees not terrorism? Instead, the riots have been prosecuted as though they were random thuggery, although they emerge from a long and organised campaign of hatred directed towards asylum seekers, immigrants and Muslims. Some of those convicted were reported as having been “caught up” in the disorder: they were portrayed as weak people gone astray. No such understanding is extended to jihadists. As [the Royal United Services Institute] explains, the UK has a genuine two-tier justice system. It treats some people – white, non-Muslim – as though they act from blind anger, and others – Brown, Muslim – as coordinated terrorists, even when they commit the same crimes."

Morality and rules, and how to avoid drowning: what my daughters learned at school in China – article by Peter Hessler in The Guardian, from his book Other Rivers: A Chinese Education. "When Leslie and I decided to enrol our daughters in the public school [in China], a number of friends warned us about the political environment.... At Chengdu Experimental, I expected that the twins and their classmates would be drilled in nationalistic stories about the Opium wars or the Japanese invasion. But there was surprisingly little history in the curriculum. I learned that such material tends to be covered more heavily in subsequent years, when older children are taught the party’s view of the past.... All levels of Chinese education have mandatory party-controlled political classes. For elementary schoolchildren, the political course is called morality and rules, although in fact there are few lessons that can be considered overtly political. The course is much more focused on how to behave in society; if anything, my daughters’ morality and rules textbook was more Confucian than communist.... By the time they entered fourth grade, they had learned the most important lesson that morality and rules has to offer, which is that morality and rules is the least important academic class in a Chinese school. After the twins noticed classmates using the period to surreptitiously catch up on other homework, they did the same. Ariel told me that she kept the morality and rules text open with her maths book inside. She also used the period to zoushen, a term that translates directly as 'the spirit walks away' – to daydream. When I talked to undergraduates at Sichuan University, where I taught English and writing, they described similar activities in their own mandatory political courses. Nobody I taught seemed to take these classes seriously. It was one of many mixed lessons in a Chinese school. When politics is omnipresent, it becomes a kind of background noise, and students learn to tune it out."

Cuttings: July 2024

 AI as Self-Erasure – article by Matthew B. Crawford on The Hedgehog Review website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A man ... related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride.... He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface. To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense.... Unlike an LLM or a parrot, things have significance for us, and we search for words that will do justice to this significance. For example, you try to find words that are apt for a wedding toast.... We do this also with respect to ourselves; we 'self-articulate' as part of the lifelong process of bringing ourselves more fully into view‚ how I stand, the particular shape that various universal goods have taken in my own biography, and in my aspirations. This is a moving target. One may cringe at one’s younger self. ... Or I may try to look back at my younger self with kindness, in the hope of overcoming regret about the decisions I made. We do all this with words, in our internal monologues. What would it mean, then, to outsource a wedding toast? To use Heidegger’s language, some entity has 'leaped in' on my behalf and disburdened me of the task of being human. For Heidegger, this entity is 'das Man,' an anonymized other that stands in for me, very much like Kierkegaard’s 'the Public.' It is a generalized consciousness—think of it as the geist of large language models."

Long ignored, at last the surrealist art of Leonora Carrington is getting the attention it’s due – article by Joanna Moorhead in The Observer. "Almost 20 years ago I travelled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. Back then, Leonora Carrington – though feted in her adoptive country, Mexico – was barely known in her native Britain. She had been as neglected by the art world in general as by her country, and our family. Two decades on, the story is very different. In April this year, one of her paintings – Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) – was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5m, making her the highest-selling female artist in British history.... Next month an exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate her broader work, exploring her output beyond the dream-like canvases of her paintings and the surreal fictional writing for which she is now best known.... In the 1980s, the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls made an ironic list entitled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. 'Pluses' included: 'Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80'; and 'being included in revised editions of art history'. For Carrington, this has been precisely the case. After my first visit to meet her in Mexico City in 2006, I visited her many more times over the next five years, until her death in 2011 aged 94. We would sometimes joke, sitting round her kitchen table, that one day her works, like those of her erstwhile friend Frida Kahlo, would spawn T-shirts and fridge magnets, tote bags and headscarves. It really was a joke, yet today I have all these items and more."

‘It was an awakening’: Diane Abbott, Nicola Sturgeon, Rory Stewart and more on the books that shaped their politics – Animal Farm by George Orwell, chosen by Alan Johnson. "It was 1964 when we 14-year-old boys of Form 4Y at Sloane Grammar were given Animal Farm to read by our English teacher Mr Carlen. Each of us had to read a page out loud before passing Orwell’s masterpiece to the next hinge-lidded desk for the narrative to continue. Mr Carlen’s contribution to our education wasn’t just to introduce us to a brilliant story, it was to explain its subtext. We were gripped by the animals’ uprising against the cruel and inebriated farmer, Mr Jones. It was our teacher who explained that Mr Jones was Tsar Nicholas II and that Snowball and Napoleon, the two young pigs who led the struggle to take over the farm, were Trotsky and Stalin. The word 'satire' was becoming common parlance with That Was the Week That Was appearing on our TV screens. For me, nothing could be as perfectly satirical as the alterations made to the 'Seven Commandments of Animalism”, in particular the distortion of 'All Animals Are Equal' by the addition of'“But Some Are More Equal Than Others'. There was another brilliant young teacher at Sloane. Peter Pallai taught us economics. He’d fled Budapest just as the Russian tanks rolled in to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I remember asking if he’d read Animal Farm at school when he was our age. No, he hadn’t. There was a list of proscribed books in communist Hungary. At the top of that list was the Bible – second was Animal Farm."

How the Tories pushed universities to the brink of disaster – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "Against the naive liberal understanding of political economy, in which the market grows as the state shrinks (and vice versa), higher education reforms of the past 14 years have demonstrated a central truth about neoliberalism, that the power of the market and of the state can grow in tandem with one another. Right now, universities are buffeted by too many market forces and too much government control. Policy has forced them to engage in feverish competition with one another, but without ever leaving them alone, either. Political risk is now one of the main threats that all universities are striving to hedge against. Hilariously, the government’s recent Augar review of higher education funding took universities to task for spending too much money on marketing. (Just wait until the Tories find the people responsible.) The marketisation agenda has fallen apart because, like so many utopian plans, it was too optimistic. It underestimated the perverse incentives it would create for universities, for senior managers in particular, and what might happen when the media woke up to these. It overestimated the health of the graduate labour market, and the speed with which loans would be repaid. Perhaps it also underestimated George Osborne, and how little he cared about the longer-term consequences of his fiscal ambitions. Nobody expects that agenda to be suddenly undone or reversed thanks to a change of government. But there is one toxic ingredient from the last eight years of Tory rule, if not the last 14, that can be eliminated more easily: the constant drip-feed of paranoid, xenophobic and anti-intellectual rhetoric from the ruling party, which seeks to win approving newspaper headlines with mindless attacks on academics. This is within the gift of the incoming Starmer administration, though whether they will be able to resist the odd jibe remains to be seen."

An (incomplete) list of every terrible policy the Conservatives have inflicted on Britain since 2010 – article by John Elledge in The Guardian. "It felt like it might be fun, in the run up to voting day this Thursday, to catalogue the failures that brought us here: to collate the policy mistakes that created the condition for what looks set to be a punishment election. After spending some time trawling the Guardian’s archive for examples, it rapidly turned out that this wasn’t fun at all...."

The big idea: why your brain needs other people – article by Huw Green in The Guardian. "Clinical work and life experience have revealed the ways in which, to a surprising degree, cognition is also something that goes on within our relationships with other people. It seems counterintuitive in the age of neuroscience, but I increasingly think that how cognitively impaired you are is a function of the social context in which you find yourself. When I first moved into our current house with my young family, one of our elderly neighbours, Emily, came out to introduce herself. She was warm and friendly and silly with our kids in a lovely, over-the-top way. She would also repeat herself in conversation. Frequently. I wondered whether she might have dementia and, as time went on, my impression was confirmed.... In some sense Emily was impaired.... But in another important way, the social context significantly ameliorated her impairment. Not only were her memory problems masked but she had found a space in which they were not important and where her joyous personality and infectious ebullience could thrive. ...This is especially true of thinking. Consider those times when the presence of others has reminded you of an appointment, a name, or simply encouraged you to focus your attention differently. Our relationships provide a context in which to think, and a reason to think. We deliberate with one another to arrive at important decisions, talk through ideas to test them out.... The people around us can also cognitively impair us. A conversational partner who seems to want to avoid a topic can make it surprisingly difficult for you to think about it properly. So while my brain is important, cognition exists beyond my head. I make important decisions by consulting with those close to me. I use reminders and rely on family and colleagues to deliberate about plans. This sort of social process is not only supportive of my cognition – it is my cognition. By extension, the extent to which a person is cognitively impaired is a function of the social supports they have around them."

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan: a lacerating exposé –review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "'Ask not,' said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, 'what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.' Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied. As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed....JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich.... A 'negative life force', Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls 'technical sex', short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death.... The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr 'dying was a high', an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. 'What a way to go,' he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized.... After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, 'just another New York woman on the go'. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called 'lust demons' he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012."

‘It comes for your very soul’: how Alzheimer’s undid my dazzling, creative wife in her 40s – article by Michael Aylwin in The Guardian. "My wife always said she would die of Alzheimer’s. It turns out she was right about that. For years, I insisted she would not. In the end, Vanessa clinched our little argument by dying last September, but we had known her fate since 2019, the year she was diagnosed, at the age of 49. For at least three years before that, though, the realisation dawned by hideous degrees which way the debate was going.... The problem was twofold. One, those MRI scans that kept coming back clear; two, Vanessa’s ability, even then, to turn on the charm. Sometimes, we had meetings with two consultants in the same room, and she would have us all roaring with laughter at her dark humour. On the surface, there seemed nothing wrong, even to experts.... It was a lumbar puncture that finally teased out the demon in her system. There was a deficiency of the protein amyloid in Vanessa’s spinal fluid, her neurologist explained to us, which meant it had to be gathering in her brain. Which meant she had dementia.... A few months after Vanessa’s diagnosis, the UK went into lockdown. These were strange times for all of us. As much as to be locked down with dementia in the house sounds – and was – difficult, I took comfort from the knowledge no one else was able to go out, either. But the domestic challenge was relentless and enervating. And infuriating. Absolutely infuriating. They don’t tell you that in the brochure. We’re all braced for the overarching tragedy of a dementia patient’s decline, but far too little airtime is given to how much it will drive you mad with irritation on a day-to-day level. Both of you. It works both ways. She annoyed me more than I can say, but if anything I annoyed her more.... I read some of my diary entries from that time and cringe.... By September 2021, matters had reached a stage where the local authority’s psychiatrist started Vanessa on a course of risperidone, an antipsychotic drug normally used for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. After I sent an emergency email about her rising levels of violence against me and her visiting carer, but also the first signs of aggression against our children, we were advised by the hospital to double her dose and to switch another of her several meds to something harder.... We are not sure what precipitated the seizure that took her away from home for good. It might have been the disease doing its thing. It might have been the meds. Our neurologist reckoned it was the meds. It turns out risperidone can be a vicious drug.... The paramedics carried her out of our front door. And the search for a nursing home, so far fruitless if not quite frantic, became much more urgent.... From a purely selfish position, the two years after Vanessa moved into the home was a period of release, a return to something like normality, albeit missing the one with whom you created that normality. Once continuing healthcare funding had been awarded, 15 months and three appeals after she had been admitted to the home, it did feel as if almost the last of the burden had been lifted.... I don’t believe it is possible to 'live well' with the type of dementia Vanessa had to deal with, but that does not mean there is no more joy to be had. And we had it – moments snatched amid the dehumanising cruelty of it all, but real and worth something all the same. Although her speech never returned, she did very suddenly get up from her chair and walk, a few days into her stay at the home, which empowered us to do more together in her first year there. Sunny days on the North Downs, brownies in the cafe, laughter in the pub. Those last two years were a chance for us to rebuild our relationship. I don’t know what it says about me that relations with my wife improved so much after she lost the power of speech, but there was a genuine beauty about the way she transcended what had gone before."

‘Who am I without him?’: what I learned about grief from reading other women’s diaries – article by Sarah Gristwood in The Guardian. "When death ends a marriage, it is both ugly and lonely. You have lost the person you loved, of course – but it seems as though everybody else, too, has gone far away. When death ended my marriage to the Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm last summer, after more than four decades of partnership, everyone else seemed to be on a different planet, their voices coming from a strange place called normal – through a glass, distantly. Except, that is, for the voices that came from a real distance – a distance in time. I’d spent many months diving into 400 years of women’s diaries; editing a new anthology, Secret Voices, even as Derek’s health took that final, definitive turn for the worse.... The diaries were a vigorous flood of pleasure and pain, anger and adventure. What struck a nerve with me, however, was the sense of familiarity.... Other women before me had walked the same walk; written down their own feelings, however furious or self-pitying. However much at odds with society’s wish that a widow’s grief should be uncomplicated, retiring – almost pretty. Their emotion seemed to license my own. In editing the book it felt as though I’d been trying to free the voices of these earlier women. Now, could they free me?"

The History of Ideas by David Runciman: big thinkers with visions of a better world – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, wears his scholarship with half a smile. He has that gift, both as a podcaster and as a writer, to illuminate abstruse and abstract ideas with human charm. He also has a journalistic sense of where the story lies. In different ways, then, the meditations here, each 20 or so pages long, on figures as distinct as Jeremy Bentham, and Rosa Luxemburg and Simone de Beauvoir are that rare kind of treat: page-turning life stories that, sentence by sentence, make you feel a little more learned than you felt before. He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality... At the other 'bracing' extreme from Rousseau he argues that Nietzsche, another great unraveller of human political DNA, comes at the 'how the hell did we get here?' question from the diametrically opposed position: not 'how did the privileged few come to dominate the many' but how did the many, through religion and democracy, come to dominate the few, the elite, the powerful, their true masters?... Between these biggest of philosophical beasts, his accounts of how the nuance and practicality of the world might be remade starts to get evermore interesting. Bentham, a figure too often reduced to his utilitarian catchphrase (and armchair-diagnosed as autistic), is brilliantly revived here; the section on Frederick Douglass, who spent his early years as an enslaved person in Maryland and became the most erudite voice of emancipation, makes you want to immediately download everything he wrote."

The power of proprioception: how to improve your ‘sixth sense’ – and become healthier and happier – article by Joel Snape in The Guardian. "The next time you’re somewhere non-embarrassing, try this quick test: stand on one leg with your arms stretched out to the sides, imagining that one hand is holding a rock. Next, the tricky bit: “pass” the rock overhead to your other hand without putting your leg down, then pass it back, and repeat the whole movement 10 times without losing your balance... Dan Edwardes, one of the UK’s most experienced coaches in the athletic obstacle-leaping discipline of parkour, calls this the 'rock pass' drill – and says it’s one of the simplest ways to check up on your proprioception, or your body’s sense of where it is in space.... 'Any complex movement skill, from jumping to vaulting to climbing, requires a high level of proprioception,' says Edwardes. 'Think of adding these moves to your daily movement "diet" to keep yourself strong and functional.' Or, in other words, it’s becoming clear, as our understanding of it improves, that improving or maintaining our proprioceptive ability is key to our quality of life as we age."

A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-1965 by David Kynaston: cheerfulness through the gloom – review by Anthony Quinn in The Guardian. "On Saturday afternoon, 27 October 1962, a 19-year-old Juliet Gardiner sat 'rigid with fear' in her local launderette reading that day’s news report of Soviet ships heading towards the US blockade around Cuba. She wondered 'what on earth was the point of having clean knickers, pillowcases and tea towels, since the world seemed about to end in a nuclear holocaust'. The moment comes early in the latest volume of David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem, and typifies its brilliant double vision, between the wide angle and the closeup: world and washing both in a spin.... Much of [this account] chimes weirdly with our present moment. A Conservative government was clinging on, 13 years in power and humiliated by scandal (Profumo instead of Partygate), while Labour, ahead in the polls under Harold Wilson, was sitting pretty for the next general election. France thought Britain too 'insular' for membership of the EEC, and De Gaulle slammed the door on Macmillan. The PM’s verdict in 1957 that we’d 'never had it so good' was looking doubtful in the face of a continuing north-south divide. Despite improvements, poverty was chronic and the guardians of the welfare state weren’t often reliable in judging who needed help the most.... Cheerfulness keeps breaking through the gloom, albeit often coated in irony. On telly – coming into its own as the whizzy new medium – The Likely Lads and That Was the Week That Was were building an audience.... But the most significant noise rising from these pages is the music of the Beatles... Despite the talk of aspiration and prosperity common to the era, A Northern Wind is a chill reminder of calamitous social management, not least in the replacement of solid Victorian terraces by high-rise housing.... Not much to cheer in education, either, where the continuing unfairness of the 11-plus, the unloveliness of secondary moderns and the 'barrier to democracy' represented by private schools kept British society more or less benighted. 'Ultimately,' writes Kynaston, 'this was an issue about social class.' It always is. The 1960s was still a conservative age, still hidebound by deference at one end of the class spectrum and complacent in its privileges at the other."

‘I’ve got a massive ego!’: Jess Phillips on feminism, Farage and being an attention-seeker – interview by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. "Today, hard right or extremist views appear to be on the rise in Britain. While the general election was a landslide for Labour in terms of seats (412 out of 650), it only won 33.8% of the vote share. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist Reform UK party secured 14% of the vote share (but only five seats). Does she find it … ? She completes the question for me. 'Terrifying? Yes.' She calls it a broad but shallow victory. How does Labour turn that into a more meaningful victory? 'You have to deliver. People think the upset in my constituency was all strictly Gaza. It wasn’t. Gaza was the catalyst for years and years of everything being shit. Reform and the Workers party are just against things. The policies of grievance are very easy to sell; easiest trick in the book. Any fucker can do it. Building something based on hope is much harder. But you have to be honest about delivery. You can’t just go to the places where the Labour party did badly and whack a youth centre in there. That won’t work, either. It has to be based on genuine delivery and being honest about how long improvement will take. That is how you take a loveless landslide into a second term of a Labour government.' She is convinced Farage will be hopeless as a constituency MP and as a performer in the Commons. 'It’s like with George Galloway. His whole power is in the hat. He’s been in parliament recently and he’s not allowed to wear the hat, and he just looks like a shuffling man who stands up and speaks for three minutes. I’m like, oh my God, you’re like Samson. You’ve got no hat, you’ve got no sparkle. I think Farage is going to be the same. Parliament crushes people. It crushed Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson never managed to land a moment of bombast in parliament, because it’s a bigger institution than you. I am better in parliament than Boris Johnson and I’ll be better than Nigel Farage.'”

‘Redefine conversation’: how Just a Minute can help people living with dementia – article by Steven Morris In The Guardian. "An academic paper jointly produced by a university linguist [Alison Wray, Cardiff University] and one of the greatest exponents of Just a Minute [the comedian Paul Merton] has suggested the game is so devious that the best way to succeed is to let go of any ambition to win. [It] also looks at how exploring the challenges the show presents may help dementia patients and their carers. Wray said ... 'In regular speech, we aim to be fluent, so we don’t get interrupted and lose our chance to talk. We manage the flow of ideas and gain time while we plan what to say next by inserting hesitation filler words, repeating material and putting in asides or deviations. Just a Minute outlaws these options. The contortions of speaking fluently in these circumstances create high risk of brain fry.'... Merton said he found the most effective way of avoiding 'brain fry' was to re-conceptualise the game away from something to try to win. Instead, he focuses on keeping the show enjoyable and well paced. Which turns out to be a winning formula for him.... Wray said: ... 'Those interacting with people living with dementia often find that it helps if they take the pressure off getting specific information and focus on the overall experience of a conversation. Thus, if the person wants to tell an anecdote, does it really matter if they can’t recall the person or place it relates to? To reminisce about their childhood, does it matter if it takes a while for them to describe a place or experience?'”

A Reign of Peace and Harmony - ‘Daily Meditations’ from the Center for Action and Contemplation, by Brian McLaren. “For many people today, kingdom language evokes patriarchy, chauvinism, imperialism, domination, and a regime without freedom. Not a pretty picture—and the very opposite of the liberating, barrier-breaking, domination-shattering, reconciling movement the kingdom of God was intended to be!… “

Seen and Heard: April to June 2024

Yesterday Origins – strong adventure game, sequel to Yesterday (see Seen and Heard Jan-Mar). Unlike this reviewer, I thought this was actually better than the original; at least the trans-historical story hung together better, and the female protagonist, basically just a love interest in the original game, here at least has a bit more to do. I rather liked her troubled relationship with John Yesterday with which the game starts, as well as the steady drip-feed of revelations in both the past (the era of the Spanish Inquisition) and the present. Nice puzzle-solving mechanic too, involving acquisition and selection of the correct ideas (represented by icons, generated by interaction with people and things) as well as objects in your inventory. I found myself caring about John and Pauline this time, which I didn’t in the previous game, despite (or maybe because) this one is even more grisly and pessimistic.

Ghostbusters Afterlife – now this is how to do a forty-years-on homage, with respect for the spirit of the original and the skill to recreate it with totally new characters, rather than depending on quotes and repetition of tropes (although there are plenty of those too). Mckenna Grace, playing geek girl Phoebe, is a revelation; her firing a proton pack from the external gunner seat of the speeding Ectomobile is one of the defining images of the film.

Horrible Histories: The Movie – tremendous, often hilarious, fun film, just like the TV series. Two really impressive things: (1) that they managed to extend what is essentially a sketch show into a full length story, set in Roman Britain and centred on Boudicca’s rebellion (including the definitive rendering of Boudicca’s song); (2) they neatly side-stepped the child-unfriendly aspects of the historical actuality, doing so with a knowing wink. (As in the happy ending finale song: “Merge our cultures, mix our past, / Maybe next time wait to be asked / Sharing's good, Sharing is fun, / Shame you had to kill everyone… / Yeah but let's not talk about that.”) Cudos too for securing Derek Jacobi to reprise his stammering role of Emperor Claudius, as a cameo (he dies, poisoned by his wife, in the first scene). 

Mission Impossible – the sixties television show, now being re-shown on Legend. When the BBC first showed it in 1970, it was selective, omitting entirely the first season (in which the IMF was headed not by Jim Phelps but Dan Briggs, who wasn’t as good – for one thing, his plans didn’t always work), and then showing only the best episodes, and my own re-viewing has followed their selection, replaying the experience of my childhood. First episode: 'The Astrologer' (2:13), featuring Cinnamon (the beauteous Barbara Bain), pretending to be the titular astrologer, and a remote controlled dummy, which does just one thing, jerking his arm downwards (“that’s all he needs to do”); next 'The Mercenaries' (3:4), in which Barney and Willy extract the gold from a locked vault by drilling into it from below and melting it out. Other memorable episodes include 'The Exchange' (3:12), in which poor claustrophobic Cinnamon is captured and disturbingly terrorised, while Jim and the team liberate and extract information from one of their own side’s intelligence prisoners to exchange for her; and 'The Submarine' (4:17) in which an ex-Nazi is tricked into revealing the location of hidden Nazi funds, which he has stubbornly resisted for decades, by use of a fake submarine. These best episodes stand up really well today; the basic formula of the impossible mission, with the gradual revelation of the steps of its execution, thus preserving the mystery and surprise, is still a winner.

Astrid: Murder in Paris – classy French detective show. This is an argument for listings magazines; I’d never have spotted this, hidden away in the More4 schedules, if it hadn’t appeared in a Radio Times ‘Pick of the Day’ feature. The hook is that the principle character, Astrid, is autistic, and so we see her alternately terrified by everyday social interactions and brilliantly insightful into the clues of a case, through her ability to observe and recall detail and see patterns. The set-up pairs her, an archivist in the Criminal Records Bureau, with Raphaëlle, an inspector, and the relationship between them – Raphaëlle tenderly protective of Astrid – is one of the joys of the show.

Red Eye – high-voltage ITV-produced six-episode contemporary thriller, with Jing Lusi as the ex-Hong-Kong-Chinese Met officer escorting Richard Armitage as a prisoner on an overnight (red eye) flight to Beijing. Very compelling, and I’m just glad I was able to watch the episodes in quick succession, rather than having to wait a week, in order to keep track of the twisty, turney plot, in which revelations come fast, like summer thunderstorms, involving the secret services of the UK, the USA and China, all focused on that plane and the information which Richard Armitage may or may not, unknown to himself, be carrying. And of course I enjoyed seeing Chinese people taking a variety of leading roles in a top-quality drama.

Mirages of Winter – a replay for me of this Zen-like meditative game, like an animated Chinese ink painting, in which you follow a fisherman as winter storms, snow and ice give way to spring. Much better second time, when I had some residual memory of the solutions to the puzzles – more precisely, what you need to do to move the game on to the next scene – and so spent very little time in frustration and more time enjoying the sights and sounds, which is surely the point of the game. (See Seen and Heard, April-June 2020.) 

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow – well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. I suppose it should be classed as a horror game, but I’d say it’s more creepy than the shocks and scares than that label might imply; there’s a sense of menace and dread from the start, and it builds and builds until it can build no more. What keeps one playing, even though one just knows the ending is going to be horrible, is the principal character Thomasina Bateman: a late Victorian lady archaeologist, who arrives in a small Yorkshire town to excavate the nearby burial mound of Hob’s Barrow – about which the locals seem to either deny knowledge, be vague in their information, or adversarial in their warnings to Thomasina to stay away. The voice actor for Thomasina is particularly good, giving depth and character to each line; I particularly liked the way she says “Hogwash!” – her favourite word for dismissing the folklore of the locals (fairies, witches, hobgoblins, something worse): in the early parts of the game, where she is still strong in the scientific rationalism in which she was brought up by her father, she says it with confidence and contempt; in the later parts of the game, it is undeniably defensive, as the uncanny events pressing in on her become ever more threatening. The graphics are very simple and highly pixelated; nothing realistic is needed, and actually it helps one engage with the story to know that one’s never going to see anything too gory and horrible; the horror is all in the imagination. The title screen is particularly strong and well-designed; good games designers know that the title and main menu are the things which a player is going to see again and again, and so use it to establish mood and character for each playing session. In this case, we see Thomasina in a train carriage (the only non-pixelated graphic in the game), with Hob’s Barrow visible on a hillside through the window, the purple light which in the game is associated with the supernatural shining from its door. She is writing a letter; the game events are narrated by her in the past tense, so perhaps (as one reviewer thought) it’s the story of the game she is writing. But no, that can’t be it, because she is writing her account from – no, I won’t say! (Spoiler!) Unless perhaps what this shows is her travelling back to Hob’s Barrow in her imagination as she writes. So the imagination is already being invoked from the title screen. And the title music: howling, mournful, pounding. This is a game which stays with one long after one has finished playing.

On Chesil Beach and Effie Grey – two films, seen close together and connected in my mind, although very different (the first set in the early 1960s, sensitively based on a novel by Ian McEwan, the second set in the mid-nineteenth century and based on real historical characters) because of their similar theme of a love-relationship driven onto the rocks by a disastrous wedding night as a result of the would-be lovers’ sexual ignorance and inexperience. What struck me was how this could (and probably does) all happen again today, though perhaps not a late as a wedding night; the problem would not be ignorance but mis-information, thanks to internet pornography.

Draw On Sweet Night – concert by Voces8. Wonderful to hear them in the flesh, having first seriously discovered them through their livestreamed “Live from London” concerts during Covid Lockdown, with a programme of their (and our) favourites, including Arvo Pärt’s 'The Deer’s Cry', which I felt I understood for the first time. I knew the story: how St Patrick and his companions were kept safe from those who planned to ambush them, because he prayed for protection and so they appeared to their would-be attackers as a deer and a faun. But the Voces8 introduction explained how this relates to the music: why it keeps stopping and starting again. The repeated chant “Christ with me, Christ in me” is said by a person in terror of their life, pausing every few steps to check: have they been detected? And then, rather beautifully, as their confidence grows, and they realise that they are going to make it after all, they find they are able to extend their compassion even to their aggressors: “Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me.” We may never have to live through such a situation (although these days, who can be sure), but if one does, this is the breastplate to have.

Vox Musica, 'L'Eco di Monteverdi' – a superb concert by this London-based choir, in the chapel of the Ducal Palace, Mantua, while Polymnia were giving concerts in nearby towns. Lots of Monteverdi, of course, this being the chapel in which he was Director, before he went to Venice. A great sound and sensitive singing; it was like every member of the choir was a soloist (and many actually did sing solos).

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – rewatching Season 2 of this show, which I reckon the most serious and most grown-up of the Star Trek franchises. Some episodes should have been good but weren’t (such as 'The Maquis' – why is Sisko’s betrayal by his old Starfleet Academy friend so unmoving), but a few are top notch and classics, notably 'The Alternate' (Odo suffers Oedipal problems when he re-encounters the Bajoran scientist who discovered and raised / experimented on him), 'Necessary Evil' (a burglary which leaves Quark fighting for his life leads Odo to reinvestigate a murder during the Cardassian occupation and hence to re-evaluate his relationship with Kira), and 'Whispers' (Chief O’Brien has an Invasion of the Body Snatchers experience, when everyone else on the station starts behaving oddly, so that a massive conspiracy seems the only possible explanation).

Cuttings: June 2024

Pythagoras vs conspiracy theory – LinkedIn post by Alex Edmans. Lecturer: "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." Student responses: "Fake numbers!" "That's not a fact, it's only a theorem." "That's what they want us to believe!" "How much does geometry pay you to say that?" "You're a shill for big trig!" "Don't tell me what to think!" "Illuminati symbolism." "Pythagoras recanted on his deathbed." "Ha! You trust mainstream mathematics?" "Further proof that ancient aliens created the triangles." "I'm entitled to my own opinion."

Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts is a full-blown victory for DA Alvin Bragg – article by Sam Levine in The Guardian. "The decision to convict Trump on all 34 counts is significant. Jurors could have acquitted him on some and convicted on others. But the fact that they went all-in, and relatively quickly, suggests they believed the wider story prosecutors told at trial. It is a full-throated win for Bragg and the worst possible outcome for Trump.... over the last several weeks, prosecutors transformed a complex legal case into a carefully constructed narrative that was easy for jurors to understand. They took a case that was fundamentally about boring paper crimes and turned it into one that was about something simple: lying. At every step, prosecutors were focused on keeping jurors attention on their bigger picture. Their first witness, former American Media chief executive David Pecker, led them into the jaw-droppingly seedy world of tabloid journalism, laying out how he would pay for stories and then not publish them for the benefit of friends like Trump. It established the world that Trump operated in and showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to keep bad stories from coming to light. Pecker also delivered one of the most devastating moments in the trial against Trump. After several days of revealing how he bought and killed stories on behalf of Trump, he ended his testimony by saying how much he continued to admire Trump. It was a critical moment that showed how loyal those around Trump are, and severely undercut Trump’s claim that everyone was out to get him. Prosecutors also masterfully set up Cohen’s testimony for the jury. Cohen, a former Trump fixer, was a problematic witness for the prosecution because of his prior convictions for perjury and his known penchant for lying. Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was 'obsessed' with Trump. But from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors prepared jurors to brace themselves for Cohen. Pecker and Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, corroborated much of what Cohen would later say on the stand. The fact that Cohen was merely confirming what two witnesses before him had said made him seem more credible."

The reich stuff: what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.... 'Obviously, there are massive differences,' he acknowledges. 'Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?'... Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes. 'Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements? Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?'”

The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good? – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. "In the classic case, devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander at a switch that will swerve a trolley car from the track it’s on – hurtling towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – to a side track with a single victim who’ll be killed instead. Pop culture presentations of it suggest that the issue is knowing what to do: should you flip the switch or not? But the trolley problem starts with the fact that most of us have little doubt: you should turn the trolley to the side track, taking one life to save five.... But why, then, if we are right to flip the switch, is it wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, bringing it to a halt? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use their organs to save five lives – both of which strike most of us as grossly immoral?... The twist in this tale is that Judy Thomson ultimately changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it’s right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument turns on a variant of the classic case in which you have an additional option: as well as switching the trolley to a track with a single victim, you can swerve it into yourself. Thomson’s view is that you’re not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t then turn the trolley on to someone else, sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question has force even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case we started with: the absence of an option you wouldn’t take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.... We should not flip that switch because we would not, in most cases, be willing to sacrifice ourselves"

‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour, and why she’s running as an independent – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[Faiza Shaheen] was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent.... The problematic historic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor. Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.... I don’t want to sound partisan, and no shade on all the other candidates, but it’s unusual to find a person so accomplished, internationally respected, deeply networked and knowledgable in any political party; it’s quite a lot to lose.... By Friday, some commentators were building the case that Labour was being pretty smart, actually – riding high in the polls, the party could seal its victory by picking a fight with the left, and make sure once it entered government that it had its best people. Hence the deselection of Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the sitting Brighton MP suddenly suspended, and the row over Diane Abbott."

‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? – article by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs.... For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s 'social responsibility' in backing it for 'national strategy'. A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. 'At some point you’re like, "Oh my God, how is this not the story?"’ Halverson said. 'We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.'”

Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.... Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso....'When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,' said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. 'But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.'"

I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead – article by Lucy Foulkes in The Guardian. "The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, Anxious Generation, focuses on a significant problem: rates of anxiety and other mental health problems are increasing in this generation of teenagers. He links this to the emergence of social media and a decline in exploratory play, and says that we can solve the problem by banning smartphones for under-14s and social media for under‑16s.... Except that psychological science (and life) is rarely this neat. ... I recently wrote a book about this period of life, and alongside descriptions of the latest research, I included plenty of interviews with adults looking back on their own teenage years. I was struck by how powerful and self-shaping their adolescent memories were even decades later. But I was also fascinated by how similar the struggles were across the generations, whatever age people were now.... When puberty kicks off, it’s as though a flashing red light turns on in the brain, telling adolescents to care about one thing above all else: their peers. It’s a running joke that teenagers succumb to peer pressure and are obsessed with copying their friends, but this has a clear evolutionary purpose. To survive beyond the family unit, to integrate with a new social group and find a sexual partner, it’s imperative that an adolescent spends a lot of time thinking about what their peers think about them and whether or not they fit in with their friends. In my own adolescence, as with everyone else’s, no one was smoking or getting drunk on their own – they were doing these things with, and because of, their friends.... That doesn’t make the issue of phones irrelevant today. Social media has transformed social interactions for everyone: you have more people to compare yourself with, you can edit and curate how you present yourself to the world, and you can quantify how well liked you are – or not – by your peers.... Yet it’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun."

Coming of Age by Lucy Foulkes: our formative years – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "[For] her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, ... Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.... Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group."

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: chronicle of a disaster foretold – review by Killian Fox in The Guardian. "The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph.... As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail."

‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut – article by Rich Pelley in The Guardian. "There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa? But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988[,] written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald... Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts...."

At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong: changing state – review by John Simpson in The Guardian. "As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. 'Within four years,' he told me, 'we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.' Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned.... This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou. Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong."

Cuttings: May 2024

‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine – article by Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian. "While much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October. Seen in this light, it is clear that this is not an age-old struggle between Arabs and Jews that has been going on since time immemorial, and it is not simply a conflict between two peoples. It is a recent product of the irruption of imperialism into the Middle East and of the rise of modern nation-state nationalisms, both Arab and Jewish; it is a product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to 'transform Palestine into the land of Israel', in the words of an early Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and it is a product of Palestinian resistance to these methods. Moreover, this war has never been one just between Zionism and Israel on one side and the Palestinians on the other, occasionally supported by Arab and other actors. It has always involved the massive intervention of the greatest powers of the age on the side of the Zionist movement and Israel: Britain until the second world war, and the US and others since then. These great powers were never neutral or honest brokers, but have always been active participants in this war in support of Israel. In this war between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, there has been nothing remotely approaching equivalence between the two sides, but instead a vast imbalance in favour of Zionism and Israel."

Why I wrote an AI transparency statement for my book, and think other authors should too – article by Kester Brewin in The Guardian. "‘Where do you get the time?' For many years, when I’d announce to friends that I had another book coming out, I’d take responses like this as a badge of pride. These past few months, while publicising my new book about AI, God-Like, I’ve tried not to hear in those same words an undertone of accusation: 'Where do you get the time?' Meaning, you must have had help from ChatGPT, right?... This was why, having finished the book [on the impact of AI on the UK labour market], I decided that my friends were right: I did need to face the inevitable question head-on and offer full disclosure. I needed an AI transparency statement, to be printed at the start of my book.... I decided on four dimensions that needed covering. First, has any text been generated using AI? Second, has any text been improved using AI? This might include an AI system like Grammarly offering suggestions to reorder sentences or words to increase a clarity score. Third, has any text been suggested using AI? This might include asking ChatGPT for an outline, or having the next paragraph drafted based on previous text. Fourth, has the text been corrected using AI and – if so – have suggestions for spelling and grammar been accepted or rejected based on human discretion? For my own book, the answers were 1: No, 2: No, 3: No and 4: Yes – but with manual decisions about which spelling and grammar changes to accept or reject. Imperfect, I’m sure, but I offer my four-part statement as something to be built on and improved, perhaps towards a Creative Commons-style standard."

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: earthly paradise – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden [of her Georgian house] to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery'. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making. She is thinking here of the uncomfortable fact that many of England’s most sublime gardens, the sort that people pay to view at the weekend, are built on a 'grotesque' moral vacuum. She singles out nearby Shrubland Hall, whose stately vistas and tumbling terraces were funded by money derived from plantations on the other side of the world. Those brutal mono-cultures of sugar, cotton and tobacco depended in turn on the labour of enslaved people traded from west Africa like one more commodity. Other land crimes that Laing wants us to consider lie closer to home. She explains that many of England’s large estates would never have progressed beyond a modest manor house with a useful kitchen garden were it not for the enclosure movement of the 18th century. By a series of parliamentary acts, the peasantry was deprived of its ancient right to graze animals and collect kindling on the commons. In effect it had been turned into an agricultural proletariat, obliged to depend on a wage from the Big House.... In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."

The Searchers by Andy Beckett: the leftists who took their lead from Tony Benn – review by Jason Cowley in The Guardian. "This might seem like an eccentric book. As Labour prepares for power after four consecutive general election defeats, Andy Beckett is interested not in what is to come but what has just been. He is particularly preoccupied by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, what happened to him as party leader and what his leadership represented. The Searchers is mostly fair-minded, diligently reported and researched, but leaves you in no doubt that Beckett, a Guardian columnist, is a sympathetic Corbynite.... But this is not just a book about Corbyn and Corbynism. The Searchers has larger ambitions and more broadly is an absorbing history of Labour’s radical left from the late 1960s to its present marginalisation. It is also a series of interconnected mini-biographies – of Tony Benn and the four prominent politicians who were inspired by him: Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Corbyn."

‘You’re going to call me a Holocaust denier now, are you?’: George Monbiot comes face to face with his local conspiracy theorist – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Why, when there are so many real conspiracies to worry about, do people feel the need to invent and believe fake ones? These questions become especially pressing in our age of extreme political dysfunction. This dysfunction results, I believe, in large part from a kind of meta-deception, called neoliberalism.... every time we start to grasp what is happening and why, somehow this understanding is derailed. One of the causes of the derailment is the diversion of public concern and anger towards groundless conspiracy fictions, distracting us and confusing us about the reasons for our dysfunctions. It’s intensely frustrating. There are plenty of hypotheses about why people believe these stories, but only one good way of answering the question. Talking to them.... The most disturbing episode in the BBC radio series Marianna in Conspiracyland featured Totnes artist Jason Liosatos.... He sounded like a monster. But when his name came up among friends, I was told, 'The weird thing is, he’s also a really nice bloke, always helping people and giving his money away, a pillar of the community.' The apparent opposite of the basement-dwelling misanthrope I had pictured. I was intrigued. How could someone walk both paths? How could they be prosocial and kind, yet spread the most antisocial and cruel falsehoods? He seemed the obvious person to talk to if I wanted to learn why and how these fictions spread.... I asked Liosatos about the scandals I mentioned at the start of this article: Post Office, Windrush, VIP lane, Cambridge Analytica, Panama and Pandora Papers. In every case, he told me he didn’t know enough about them. 'It seems to me,' I told him, 'that you focus on the things that aren’t true, and not on the things that are true.'... He seemed so dismayed and outraged that I began to wonder whether I was persecuting him.... in her excellent book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains how today’s conspiracy fictions are a distorted response to the impunities of power. We know we’re being lied to, we know justice is not done, we see the beneficiaries flaunting their immense wealth and undemocratic power. Conspiracy fantasists may get the facts wrong, 'but often get the feelings right'. I would add a couple of thoughts. I see conspiracy fictions as a form of reassurance. This might sound odd: they purport to reveal 'the terrifying truth'. But look at what they’re actually saying. Climate breakdown? It’s a hoax. Covid? All fake. Power? Just a tiny cabal of Jews. In other words, our deepest fears are unfounded.... Conspiracy fictions also tell us we don’t have to act. If the problem is a remote and highly unlikely Other – rather than a system in which we’re deeply embedded, which demands a democratic campaign of resistance and reconstruction – you can wash your hands of it and get on with your life. They free us from civic responsibility. This may be why those who take an interest in conspiracy fictions are so seldom interested in genuine conspiracies."

So empire and the slave trade contributed little to Britain’s wealth? Pull the other one, Kemi Badenoch – article by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Britain ran an empire for centuries that at its peak 100 years ago occupied just under a quarter of the world’s land area. Yet if you believe 'Imperial Measurement', a report released last week from the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the net economic impact of this vast empire on Britain was negligible, even negative. If you thought the empire profoundly shaped our industry, trade and financial institutions, with slavery an inherent part of the equation, helped turbocharge the Industrial Revolution and underwrote what was the world’s greatest navy for 150 years, think again. The contribution of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people to our economy was trumped by domestic brewing and sheep farming, opines the IEA.... It is a risible recasting of history that should have been ignored as self-serving ideological tosh. But enter the business and trade secretary and aspiring Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who took it upon herself to endorse this IEA 'research'. She told an audience of financial services bosses at a conference in London: 'It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.' [According to her,] it was 'free markets and liberal institutions' that drove the Industrial Revolution and economic growth thereafter. [However], while they were certainly part of a cocktail of reasons for Britain’s rise to economic pre-eminence, they were only part. Take innovation, and the correctly celebrated inventions – James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny of 1764/5, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, introduced in 1778/9 – that together made it possible to harness the delicate but tough Barbadense cotton and manufacture it at scale.... As Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson write in their brilliant Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, it was no accident that this all began a few miles from Europe’s largest slave port, Liverpool. Or that fine Barbadense cotton flourished in Britain’s slave plantations in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. Or that much of the finance for investing in these expensive, but highly profitable, innovative machines came from Liverpool merchants whose own fortunes originated in transatlantic trade."

The Guardian view on YA literature: an adventure for teenagers, a comfort blanket for adults – editorial in The Guardian. "Research released last week, which suggested that 74% of YA readers were over 18 years old – and that 28% were over 28 – is worthy of attention. The report puts the continuing appeal of YA down to reading for comfort, as a defence against the stresses and strains of 'emerging adulthood', among a generation that is taking longer to reach 'adult' life. Nearly a third of the readers were aged between 18 and 22, thus falling well within the new parameters of adolescence suggested by advances in brain science. Another third were aged 23 to 34, so benefited from the boom years of child and YA fiction, when the unparalleled success of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series inevitably distorted the picture.... Older readers may not only be reading YA novels for different reasons to younger ones, such as solace rather than exploring their identity, but also may be embracing a significantly different body of literature. Nostalgia can buttress older titles against the caprices of the market. What is undeniably true is that books discovered in adolescence often stay with readers, becoming part of their emotional and intellectual scaffolding. The important thing at any age is not so much what you read, however, as having access to all the benefits of being a reader."

May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans: fake news rules… and that’s a fact – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "May Contain Lies is a wonderful litany of the myriad ways in which we can be deceived, and deceive ourselves, including sometimes well-known academic researchers as they try to stand up their theory. There are no sacred cows for Edmans. Whether it’s the authors of 2009’s famous The Spirit Level, which purported to show that inequality drives bad health outcomes, or the 1994 business book Built to Last, which influenced a generation with its apparent proof that visionary companies outlast their non-visionary peers, Edmans is unsparing.... Edmans is no less hard on himself. He tells the story of how he repeated for some years in his business school lectures the great Malcolm Gladwell statement that perfection requires 10,000 hours of practise. Then he inspected the data behind the statement and found that almost nothing did.... Given that we are increasingly engulfed by a sea of misinformation and bad public policy informed by self-deception, Edmans’s message could hardly be more timely. He urges us to follow Aristotle’s maxim: it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it. His advice is to stay open to the notion that you may be wrong, because you find the truth by testing your ideas against those who think differently."

The Last Caravaggio: a gripping and murderously dark finale – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The Hunnish king is possessed by rage, his face fiery red, as furious as the lion on his bronze breastplate. He’s just shot the arrow at point blank rage. Ursula looks down, her face calm, at the shaft buried in her chest. There are no armies, no mounds of corpses as in earlier depictions. Instead, Caravaggio does what his contemporary Shakespeare did with Holinshed and Cinthio to create Macbeth and Othello: he extracts the human juice from the clattering narrative. This is a great drama played out in the depths of night – and the National Gallery stages it that way. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula hangs in a stark space with a handful of supporting documents and one other painting. It’s hypnotic. London theatre may be pricey but here’s a dumbfounding drama of rage, violence, death and maybe guilt, regret and acceptance – and you can see it for free.... The only person who’s fully lit is Ursula. Yet the light on her is pale and eerie. Although it comes from a single source, the light seems to have changed by the time it reaches her. The Hun leader is in a red glow as if lit by a campfire. But Ursula is in white moonlight, as she enters death – and heaven. For all this, the Hun chief is the painting’s emotional centre. His face, at first just savage, is full of contorted emotions. As Ursula stands there, still alive with his arrow in her, he sees the dreadful irreversibility of what he has done.... I’ve seen blockbusters that bored me stiff. This exhibition, dedicated to just one masterpiece, held me transfixed, just like Ursula."

The culture warriors have come for the National Trust. This is how we take them on, and win – article by Celia Richardson in The Guardian. "Too often, charities, public bodies and universities are becoming proxies in other people’s fights, and targets in other people’s schemes. It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it, and you can surprise people and grab headlines.... In 2021, a private company was set up to run paid-for campaigns to get its own often 'anti-woke' candidates on to the National Trust’s governing council. Parts of the media have been relentless in publishing a steady stream of stories about alleged problems with the trust. ... False stories are damaging. The public needs to be able to believe what they read about the institutions that serve them. The National Trust deals with sensitive, symbolic issues and must be open to public scrutiny, if only so we can be held to account when we make genuine errors, as will happen with all institutions.... So how does an institution deal with all this? We’ve had to be open and direct about what’s behind untrue stories wherever possible. We’ve answered all media questions, and consistently sought corrections.... Most importantly, we have listened. Just because you’re being unfairly treated by some, it doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, or is part of a conspiracy.... Sometimes we are wrong and change our approach; sometimes we need to respectfully disagree. Our director general is fierce in her insistence that everyone will be heard, and everyone must be served by the broader societal benefit that the charity delivers. In a previous role she was a cultural leader in Belfast, seeing first-hand the dangers of polarisation around culture and identity.... Independent research has shown that as attacks on the National Trust have increased, so has public trust in it. ... In a diverse country facing big challenges, it’s crucial that all generations and all communities can take part. The power and riches held in UK institutions belong to everyone, so public involvement is worth fighting for."

Why is Britain’s mental health so incredibly poor? It’s because our society is spiralling backwards – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "The latest map of mental wellbeing published by the Global Mind Project reveals that, out of the 71 countries it assessed, the United Kingdom, alongside South Africa, has the highest proportion of people in mental distress – and the second worst overall measure of mental health (we beat only Uzbekistan). Mental wellbeing has plummeted in the UK further than in any comparable nation.... why has it happened? The Global Mind Project blames smartphones and ultra-processed food. They doubtless play a role, but they’re hardly peculiar to the UK. I think part of the reason is the sense that life here is, visibly and obviously, spiralling backwards.... The five giant evils identified in 1942 by William Beveridge, who helped design the welfare state, have returned with a vengeance. He called them 'want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness'. His paternalistic language translates today into poverty, morbidity, educational exclusion, wretched housing and crumbling infrastructure, and bad employment or an inability to work. As they come thundering back, the five evil giants have brought some friends to the party: environmental chaos, extreme political dysfunction and misrule, impunity for the powerful and performative cruelty towards the powerless, and state-sponsored culture wars to distract us from the rest of the horror show. There is a reason for these broken promises and dysfunctions, which explains why the UK suffers more from them than most comparable nations. It’s called neoliberalism."

Jon Ronson: ‘A society that stops caring about facts is a society where anything can happen’ – interview by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "None of his works has resonated quite so powerfully with audiences as the podcast Things Fell Apart... it traces the origins of a number of conflagrations in the so-called culture wars, but it ingeniously sews together these disparate events and disagreements, tying them all to the early days of lockdown, so that listeners don’t so much hear about, as be transported into, a complex world of outrageous claims and counter-claims.... The eight episodes are characterised by compelling interviews with culture warriors, conspiracy theorists and their targets, which were notable for their curiosity, restraint and understanding. Given that some of the people Ronson speaks to seem to have lost all contact with objective reality, his questioning comes across as an impressive feat of empathy and toleration.... 'I think it comes with maturity and realising your own biases and stupidities,' he says. 'I’m not very confrontational and sometimes you do need to be if someone is behaving in a way that is hurting people or doing something dangerous, like spreading medical misinformation. But in general, when does confrontation work?' One reason his technique is so effective is that the interviews are contextualised with Ronson’s reassuring, though often wry, factual commentary, which sounds like the fruit of deep research – unlike, it must be said, the vast majority of podcasts. How long did he spend on it? 'The series took me 10 months,' he says."

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: a seriously fun sci-fi romcom – review by Ella Risbridger in The Guardian. "For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it has to be two things: fun and a stretch. You have to need to know what happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself at the end.... Kaliane Bradley’s debut, The Ministry of Time, [is] a novel where things happen, lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to think about. Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in deference to character and plot. Billed as 'speculative fiction', it is perhaps more cheering to think of it as 50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom. The Ministry of Time is chiefly a love story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in 1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government hellbent on testing the limits of time travel."

The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley: ‘It was just so much fun’ – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "A time-travel romance cum sci-fi comedy set in near-future London, the novel fizzes with smart observations about the absurdity of modern life, while taking on the legacy of imperialism and the environmental emergency.... This time three years ago, [Bradley] had just started at Penguin but had yet to meet her colleagues because of lockdown. She took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. Cyber-stalking him later she was struck by a description of him as 'a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers'.... Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, 'quite a community, it turns out'. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in instalments for them: 'a nerdy literary parlour game' imagining what it might be like to have your favourite explorer – Gore – move in with you.... While the title might be a mashup of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, the guiding spirit behind the book is Bradley’s best-loved writer, Terry Pratchett.... Along with Gore, she chose four other 'expatriates from history' to be part of the British government’s 'experiment': a lieutenant from the battle of Naseby; a beautiful, foul-mouthed lesbian from the great plague of London; an unhappy aristocrat from the French Revolution; and a soldier from the first world war. Each of them is appointed a 'bridge', a contemporary character who helps them 'assimilate' to life in modern Britain. Gore’s bridge is a young British-Cambodian woman."

That yearning feeling: why we need nostalgia – article by Agnes Arnold-Forster in The Guardian, relating to her book Nostalgia: The History of a Dangerous Emotion. "Nostalgia was first coined as a term and used as a diagnosis in 1688, by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. Derived from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain), this mysterious disease was a kind of pathological homesickness.... Today, psychologists believe nostalgia is a near-universal, fundamentally positive emotion – a powerful psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits. It can boost self-esteem, increase meaning in life, foster a sense of social connectedness, encourage people to seek help and support for their problems, improve mental health and attenuate loneliness, boredom, stress or anxiety.... Its reputation as an influence on politics and society is not so honeyed. Populist movements worldwide are repeatedly criticised for their use and abuse of nostalgia. The images these movements paint of the past are condemned for being overly white and overly male. It’s also seen as the preserve of those who are retrograde, conservative and sentimental.... This tendency is as widespread as it is strange. Not least because nostalgia is a feature of leftwing political life, just as it is of conservatism and populism – think of the NHS, for example. It is also strange because, if you take present-day psychology seriously, everyone is nostalgic, pretty much all the time."

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? – article by Francis Beckett in The Guardian. "In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral.... But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime... The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons.... [And] he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR ... and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington... And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month.... What possessed him to give it all up when he was not yet 40 and at the top of his game? Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the subject, first at MIT and then at the University of California Santa Cruz – but not to mathematics majors. Instead he taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system.... Was it because, as he once said, 'political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'? No. Kissinger did not get the prize until 1973, by which time Lehrer had already retreated into as much obscurity as his fans allowed. But we do know that he believed satire changed nothing. He quoted approvingly Peter Cook’s sarcastic remark about the Berlin cabarets of the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler and the second world war. Was it because, as he once said, he never wanted success in music? The life he wanted, he said, was that of a graduate student, and his songs were merely a way of helping to finance that. That could be part of the story, but it’s surely not the whole of it. I researched Lehrer’s life, interviewing as many of his friends and former students as would talk to me.... Did I find the answer I sought: why Lehrer gave it all up? I am not sure. What I can tell you is that Tom Lehrer is a prodigiously talented man who has no interest at all in money for its own sake, or in money to wield power. He wants enough to be comfortable and to do the few things he wants to do, and he has that."

The big idea: the simple trick that can sabotage your critical thinking – article by Amanda Montell in The Guardian; see her book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. "Since the moment I learned about the concept of the 'thought-terminating cliche' I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the phrase describes a catchy platitude aimed at shutting down or bypassing independent thinking and questioning;... expressions such as 'It is what it is', 'Boys will be boys', 'Everything happens for a reason' and 'Don’t overthink it' are familiar examples.... Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the 'illusory truth effect' – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times.... There’s really no way to prevent or combat it, says [decision scientist Tobia] Spampatti, as 'even raising awareness of this risk does not lower its effectiveness'. To compete in the marketplace of thought-terminating cliches, then, our best bet might be to take what we know about illusory truth and harness it to spread accurate information.... It doesn’t only have to be shameless disinformers who exploit the power of repetition, rhyme, pleasing graphics and funny memes. 'Remember, it’s OK to repeat true information,' says Fazio. 'People need reminders of what’s true,' such as the fact that vaccines are safe and climate change is driven by our actions."

Catland by Kathryn Hughes: paws for thought – review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "'Catland', as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other 'Catland', the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth. For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.... This is a darting, hobby-horsical, hugely interesting book with the feel of a passion project rather than a sobersides work of history. But its ease and authority come from how Hughes as a historian is completely at home in the era under discussion, offering feline sideways glances at class, economics, urbanisation, eugenics, gender politics and much else besides."

‘Although she was dead, I felt as if she was my friend’: what it’s like to perform the last rites for an organ donor – article by Ronald W. Dworkin in The Guardian. "The patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation.... When told of my upcoming case [as an anaesthetist], I had mixed feelings. On one hand, being in perfect health, unaccustomed to suffering and therefore easily disconcerted by the thought of death, I was horrified.... Yet on the other, the case also aroused in me a feeling of relief. Simply put, there was no risk of malpractice, as my patient was already dead.... After we moved her from the gurney to the operating table, the doctors and nurses, so used to taking care of living patients, stared at one another stupidly, as if not knowing why they had come together or why they were standing around the table. For a brief moment, each one of us perhaps had the same supernatural vision, how for the past six hours, after being declared brain dead, this woman had lain under the measureless power of death. Six hours she had been officially dead. Now she had re-entered the world of the living. I would support her blood pressure and pulse. I would make her blood bright red with oxygen. Indeed, she might even wake up and look at us, I fantasised. Ghoulish thinking, yet I do not write about this case to be ghoulish.... My purpose is more practical. Today, artificial intelligence looms over medical practice. Although unlikely to replace doctors completely, AI makes some medical activities especially ripe targets for takeover, including the harvesting of organs from brain-dead donors.... Yet this impersonal, nonhuman method of organ retrieval may discourage people from becoming organ donors, or from letting dead relatives become so, thereby exacerbating the current organ shortage. People will see pictures of organ retrieval being carried on by inanimate machinery in a room completely abandoned by human beings. Bodies will be brought in and sent out, while the invisible, sleepless work of the machines goes on. 'Please, tell me this is not my end,' people will fret privately. And they will resist consenting to organ donation."

What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh: making sense of senseless violence – review by Tom Sperlinger in The Guardian. "Shehadeh’s short book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?, is a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of 7 October. It is divided into two chapters. The first asks simply, 'How did we get here?', reflecting on key events since 1948, while the second analyses the last six months. Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer and winner of the Orwell prize for political writing, traces the factors influencing an Israeli society that ... accepts the devastation of Gaza: the failure of the Oslo accords; the hardening of an occupation of the Palestinian territories that is by all the evidence 'permanent'; increasing fractures in Israeli society, for which a common Palestinian enemy can be a balm; and the growing dominance of extreme rightwing elements in Israel.... Nonetheless, Shehadeh admits he was shocked by the recent war. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, declared at the start: 'There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed' and Netanyahu boasted he would 'turn Gaza into a deserted island'. Shehadeh reflects: 'I reasoned that political leaders usually speak with such bravado … Yet as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty.'... Yet Shehadeh continues to reflect on a question that he asks about Elor Azaria [the Israeli army medic who shot a wounded Palestinian in the head]: 'Who would help this young soldier regain his humanity?' His searching analysis offers insights for readers coming new to the situation and others who wish to face it afresh.... 'What if this war should end, not by a ceasefire or a truce, as in other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the century-old conflict?'”