The PKD [Philip K. Dick] Dystopia – article by Henry Farrell on Programmable Mutter website, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure.... In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s....In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them.... Factories pump out fake Americana in The Man in the High Castle (1962), mirroring the problem of living in a world that is not, in fact, the real one. Entrepreneurs build increasingly human-like androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reasoning that if they do not, then their competitors will. Figuring out what is real and what is not is not easy. Scientific tools such as the famous Voight-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie based loosely on it) do not work very well, leaving us with little more than hope in some mystical force—the I Ching, God in a spray can, a Martian water-witch—to guide us back toward the real. We live in Dick’s world—but with little hope of divine intervention or invasion.”
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem – interview with Ted Chiang by Julien Crockett, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. “Q: Why is science fiction the best vehicle for you to explore ideas? A: The ideas that most interest me just lean in a science-fictional direction. I certainly think that contemporary mimetic fiction is capable of investigating philosophical questions, but the philosophical questions that I find myself drawn to require more speculative scenarios. In fact, when philosophers pose thought experiments, the scenarios they describe often have a science-fictional feel; they need a significant departure from reality to highlight the issue they’re getting at.... Q: What role does science play in your stories? Or, asked another way, what are the different roles played by science and magic in fiction? A: Some people think of science as a body of facts, and the facts that science has collected are important to our modern way of life. But you can also think about science as a process, as a way of understanding the universe. You can write fiction that is consistent with the specific body of facts we have, or you can write fiction that reflects the scientific worldview, even if it is not consistent with that body of facts. For example, take a story where there is faster-than-light travel. Faster-than-light travel is impossible, but the story can otherwise reflect the general worldview of science: the idea that the universe is an extremely complicated machine, and through careful observation, we can deduce the principles by which this machine works and then apply what we’ve learned to develop technology based on those principles.... By contrast, magic implies a different understanding of how the universe works. Magic is hard to define.... I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t. These are two very different ways of understanding how the universe works, and fiction can engage in either one. Science needs to adhere to the scientific worldview, but fiction is not an engineering project. The author can choose whichever one is better suited to their goals.”
The Prophet-Mystic – Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation by Mirabai Starr, extracted from her article ‘Inconsolable: The Path of the Prophet-Mystic’, ONEING 12, no. 2, The Path of the Prophet (2024): 49–50. “The key to living as a prophet-mystic [that is, a prophet and a mystic] is showing up for what is, no matter how heartbreaking or laborious, how fraught with seemingly intractable conflict and how tempting it might be to meditate or pray our way out of the pain. Contemplative practices train us to befriend reality, to become intimate with all things by offering them our complete attention. In this way, the prophet and the mystic occupy the same broken-open space. The nexus is grief. The mystic has tasted the grace of direct experience of the sacred and then seemingly lost the connection. She feels the pain of separation from the divine and longs for union. The prophet has perceived the brokenness of the world and is incapable of unseeing it. He feels the pain of injustice and cannot help but protest. But the mystic cannot jump to union without spending time in the emptiness of longing. The prophet must sit in helplessness before stepping up and speaking out.”
Television’s magic moments – article by Joe Moran in The Guardian, based on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. “Those bits of television that are collectively recalled as landmark moments are often less significant than we think. The 1953 coronation did not transform us all into viewers in a single avalanche: it just gave the inevitable triumph of TV an obliging shove. Kenneth Tynan was not the first person to use the F-word on television: that was either Brendan Behan on Panorama in 1956 (although no one could understand him because he was drunk) or the man who painted the railings on Stranmillis Embankment alongside the river Lagan in Belfast, who in 1959 told Ulster TV's teatime magazine programme, Roundabout, that his job was ‘f****** boring’. The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, far from being the highwater mark of television's golden age, was not even the highest‑rated show of the 1970s, being roundly beaten by less fondly recalled programmes such as Miss World 1970 and a 1971 edition of The Benny Hill Show. The key moments in the history of our television watching are often surprising, and some of them only seem momentous in retrospect. (1) Gilbert Harding on What's My Line?... (2) The launch of Telstar... (3) The rise of daytime TV... (4) The 1990 World Cup semi-final... (5) The final of Pop Idol.”
How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell – interview by Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “AG: The political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that we’ve had artificial intelligences before in the form of markets and states. A market is just a big information-processing, decision-making device. So, in a funny way, anytime I see that something costs $4.99 and I pay it, I’m giving up a kind of autonomy to the force of the market, right? I’m not acting as I would if I had lived in a foraging culture, for example. We have these large-scale information-processing devices, and markets and states and bureaucracies are really good examples of this, where we give up individual decision-making. Legal systems are like that too. I’m not deciding whether I’m going to cross the street; the traffic light is telling me whether I should cross.… MM: This reminds me of Nick Bostrom’s paperclip apocalypse where a superintelligent AI system behaves in a psychopathic way: it’s given a goal and doesn’t care about the consequences of its actions as long as it is able to achieve that goal. Ted Chiang wrote a piece where he argued that we already have entities that act like that now: they’re called corporations and their goal is maximize shareholder value. I think that’s why Silicon Valley people often worry about what AI is going to do. Corporations maximizing shareholder value is the metaphor they’re using to think about AI systems.”
‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall – article by Shane Hickey in The Guardian. “O2 rolled out ‘AI granny’ Daisy for a short period to show what could be done with artificial intelligence to counter the scourge of scammers who have become so ubiquitous.… In one call O2 released, a scammer tries to take control of her computer after telling her it is riddled with viruses. He is kept on the line while she looks for her glasses and bumbles about trying to turn the machine on and find the Internet Explorer icon.… When [another] scammer tries to get her to download the Google Play Store, she replies: ‘Dear, did you say pastry? I’m not really on the right page.’ She then complains that her screen has gone blank, saying it has ‘gone black like the night sky.’… [The AI system] has been trained on real scam calls, said Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel. ‘It knows exactly the tactics to look out for, exactly the type of information to give to keep the scammers online and waste time,’ he said.… Over a few weeks, Daisy wasted each fraudster’s time for up to 40 minutes when they could otherwise have been scamming real people.”
‘He spent thousands’: how a bank team tries to rescue scam victims – article by Anna Tims in The Guardian. “A widowed pensioner is on the end of the phone and he’s flustered. He’s expecting his girlfriend to move in with him next month. He has never met her, but he has photos of a young blonde woman and weeks of texts pledging her devotion. On an industrial estate in Bootle on Merseyside, Clare is trying to deflate his dreams. She is a call handler on Santander’s Break the Spell team, which is part of the high street bank’s fraud prevention department. It is her job to convince the man that his girlfriend is actually a scammer who has defrauded him of his savings…. The 23 staff on the Break the Spell team deal with customers who have been so thoroughly taken in by a scam that they refuse to accept they are being defrauded. Most of them have been bamboozled into paying their savings into fake investment schemes or the pockets of criminal gangs who woo them online and promise romance. They are referred to Break the Spell by the bank’s fraud contact centre once ordinary interventions fail to persuade them that their transactions are suspect, and it is up to the team to win their trust and save them from themselves. It can take months.”
After 50 years, can’t we shut down this cult of Margaret Thatcher? Just look at the mess she made of Britain – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. “This week marks the 50th anniversary of Thatcher’s election as leader of her party. I started counting but lost track of the myriad actors who have played her, some of the greatest of our time…. The problem is that good writers and good actors will produce a human drama of depth, subtlety and intelligence in a character, if flawed, an audience must feel for.… The inevitable result is that even astute and politically savvy writers such as James Graham end up whitewashing what Thatcher and her politics actually did to Britain. This 50-year marker comes at a melancholy time when her actions are rebounding on the country with a vengeance. Polls show the policies she was most famed for are those most voters now bitterly regret. Let’s look at her legacy. The one that most upends her claims to a grocer’s daughter’s thrift is her squandering of North Sea oil proceeds that came onstream just as she arrived in No 10…. She inherited a country moving markedly towards economic equality, but her 1980s policies caused top pay and wealth to soar, while the bottom deciles fell back. Inequality has stayed at that high level ever since…. Other parties envied her popular sale of council homes to tenants at knock-down prices as a stroke of political genius to propel her property-owning democracy. Now with 2m council homes sold, many owned by landlords charging astronomical rents, home ownership in England has fallen from 71% at its peak to 65%, moving further from reach of young renters, with the country trapped in a housing crisis.… Who now would celebrate her privatisations of water, energy, Britoil and a host of public goods at well below market price? A total of £5bn in water debts was written off, with natural monopolies never constrained by weak regulators. Railways were privatised by her successor, following her creed. All this failure on an epic scale has taken decades and serial bankruptcies to acknowledge.… The poll tax that brought her down was not an aberration, but sprang from a profound belief in flat taxes, as she cut top tax rates. That idea of equal taxes she had wisely kept in check until then. Most of these things inevitably slide away from plays and films. There’s a risk they will slip from national memory… Lest we forget, the things she did are doing us immeasurable harm right now. She is not history and certainly not entertainment. She is the unfortunate lived present.”
‘All people could do was hope the nerds would fix it’: the global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on – article by Tom Faber in The Guardian. “Y2K went down in history as a millennial damp squib… To this day experts disagree over why nothing happened: did the world’s IT professionals unite to successfully avert an impending disaster? Or was it all a pointless panic and a colossal waste of money? And given that we live today in a society more reliant on complex technology than ever before, could something like this happen again?… Much of the messaging came from the government-funded groups Taskforce 2000 and Action 2000. Robin Guenier, previously chief executive of the government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, led the former and was a prominent voice warning of the dangers. At the start, he says, it was tough to get people interested… The remediation work was not sexy. Guenier called the job of scouring raw code for dates that might be problematic an ‘exceptionally boring and unglamorous undertaking’ that involved repeated rounds of testing, because changing code could cause issues elsewhere in the system. It was an enormous job.… By late 1999, most UK organisations felt their systems were prepared. But the global media had other ideas and revelled in fantasies of apocalyptic doomsday scenarios. Articles in Time Magazine and Vanity Fair painted a picture of a Y2K midnight moment, when planes would fall out of the sky, people’s savings would be wiped out in the blink of a cursor, home appliances would explode and nuclear reactors would go into meltdown. It didn’t matter that few experts expected problems of this severity. In the words of Anthony Finkelstein, then a professor of software systems engineering at University College London, for many journalists at the time, the Y2K doomsday story was ‘simply too good to check’…. That’s not to say nothing went wrong…. There were many small failures around the world, mainly due to a lack of preventive action, but most were quickly remedied: police breathalysers in Hong Kong, traffic lights in Jamaica, slot machines in Delaware. Some issues were more serious: 10,000 HSBC card machines in the UK stopped working for three days. Bedfordshire social services were unable to find anyone in their care aged older than 100. The monitoring equipment in a Japanese nuclear power plant briefly shut down, though it caused no risk to the public. Some medical equipment failed, including a few dialysis machines in Egypt and equipment to measure bone marrow in South Korea. Most seriously, 154 women in South Yorkshire and the east Midlands were given incorrect test results regarding their risk level for giving birth to a child with Down’s syndrome, because the system had calculated their ages incorrectly. This directly resulted in two pregnancies being terminated, while four babies were born with Down’s to mothers who had been incorrectly told they were at low risk.… Though these were significant issues, there was no series of cascading faults leading to infrastructural collapse as the doomsayers had warned.… Almost overnight, the tenor of media coverage changed. The bug became a punchline…. The idea that Y2K was a hoax began to take hold in both the media and public memory. People wondered if they’d been wrong to trust the experts. Some historians believe this change of perspective was a reaction to the hyperbolic warnings in the press, which had painted a far more cataclysmic picture than experts actually anticipated, coupled with the fact that some opportunists did exploit Y2K fears to turn a quick buck.… ‘People assumed it was all a big scam’ [says Martyn Thomas, who ran Y2K remediation efforts internationally for Deloitte]. ‘If you insure your house against it burning down and it doesn’t burn down, you’ve wasted your money, haven’t you?’”
English writer’s forgotten ‘masterpiece’ predicting rise of Nazis gets new lease of life – article by Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian. “Sally Carson was not an oracle or a prophet, just a young woman from Dorset, born in 1901. Yet she foresaw a dark and violent future for Europe and gave voice to those fears in a 1934 novel…. Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war. Controversial in its day, her novel had to tread a careful path to avoid the accusation that it was alarmist about the Führer’s aims. A stage adaptation was even censored, shorn of all its ’Heil Hitlers’. The novel tells the story of a German family struggling in an uncertain economy, but looking forward to the marriage of their daughter, Alexa, to a young doctor – that is, until his Jewish background jeopardises their engagement. Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised… Reading the manuscript last year, the contemporary author Rachel Joyce described it as an ‘electrifying masterpiece’.”
I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office – article by Mark Smith in The Guardian. “I am a former diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)…. In August 2024, I resigned over the UK government’s refusal to halt arms sales to Israel amid the bombardment of Gaza.… My time at the FCDO exposed how ministers can manipulate legal frameworks to shield ‘friendly’ nations from accountability…. The UK’s legal framework is clear: arms sales must cease if there is a “clear risk” that weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law. Civil servants are bound by a strict code of impartiality, requiring us to produce neutral, evidence-based advice. Any attempt to alter or manipulate this advice for political convenience is not just unethical – it is unlawful. However, during my tenure, I witnessed senior officials under intense pressure from ministers to skew the legal assessment. Reports were repeatedly returned to me with instructions to ’rebalance’ the findings – to downplay evidence of civilian harm and emphasise diplomatic efforts, regardless of the facts. I was often summoned for verbal instructions – a tactic deliberately employed to avoid creating a written record that could be subject to freedom of information requests or legal scrutiny. In one instance, a senior official bluntly told me, ‘This looks really bad,’ before urging me to ‘Make it look less stark.’ My protests were ignored. Significant edits were made to my reports, shifting the focus away from credible evidence of war crimes to paint a misleading picture of ‘progress’ by foreign governments. This was not an isolated case – it was part of a systemic effort to suppress inconvenient truths… Rather than confronting the illegality, officials resorted to delaying tactics – extending reporting deadlines and demanding additional information that was unnecessary. This ‘wait for more evidence’ approach created a loophole, allowing arms sales to continue while the government feigned compliance. I raised my concerns repeatedly, only to be overruled.… When I raised questions with the FCDO about the legal basis for our arms sales to Israel, I was met with hostility and stonewalling. Emails went unanswered. I was warned not to put my concerns in writing. Lawyers and senior officials besieged me with defensive instructions to ‘stick to the lines’ and delete correspondence. It became clear that no one was willing to address the fundamental question: how could continued arms sales to Israel possibly be legal?… The situation in Gaza could not be more acute. The UK’s closest ally now proposes the mass expulsion of 2.1 million people from Gaza and the demolition of one of the most densely populated civilian areas on Earth – this is ethnic cleansing. I call on my former colleagues – those who still believe in the values of integrity and justice – to refuse to be complicit. Do not rubber-stamp reports that whitewash crimes against humanity. This is not self-defence – it is collective punishment. It is genocide. The time for silence is over. Do not allow ministers to trade human lives for political expediency. The time for accountability is now.”
The Big Idea: how do our brains know what’s real? – article by Adam Zeman in The Guardian, based on his book The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination. “The idea, from psychology, that prediction is integral to perception, and by evidence from neuroscience that our experience depends absolutely on the work of our sugar- and oxygen-hungry brains[, suggests that] perception is far more dependent on prior knowledge – painstakingly created internal models of the world – than we usually take it to be. The contemporary expert Anil Seth puts it nicely: ‘We tend to think of perception as occurring outside-in, but it mostly occurs inside-out.’… If perception is a kind of true hallucination, a potential problem looms: how can we distinguish what we imagine from what we perceive?… Some rules of thumb are helpful – high levels of vividness and detail, effortlessness and consistency with context suggest that we’re looking at the real world – but not always. Daydreams can be effortless and vivid; hunting for a destination in thick fog can be effortful and the resulting experience indistinct. Somehow, though, the brain weighs up the odds, and generally gets the right answer. How does it achieve this? Research in AI provides some interesting clues. In ‘generative adversarial’ models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the ‘generative’ bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the ‘adversary’ does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model. The generative model constantly ups its game to masquerade as the real McCoy; the adversary keeps honing its connoisseurship to distinguish the authentic from the fake. Something similar happens in the brain. The ‘adversary’ in the human brain, charged with reality checking, keeps watch from our huge frontal lobes: Area 10, in particular, at the tip of the frontal cortex, becomes active in tasks requiring us to decide whether items were seen or imagined. It is smaller and less active in people with psychosis than in healthy people, especially so in people with psychosis who hallucinate.”
What Republicans really mean when they blame ‘DEI’ – article by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian. “In 1981, Lee Atwater, the most influential Republican party strategist of the late 20th century, sat down for an off-the-record interview with the political scientist Alexander P Lamis.… In perhaps the most revealing, and most infamous, portion of the interview, [he] explained to Lamis how Republican politicians could mask their racism – and racist appeals to white voters – behind a series of euphemisms. ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “[N-word, N-word, N-word]”. By 1968 you can’t say “[N-word]” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.’ … Got that? No need to utter the N-word out loud as there were plenty of other “abstract” ways to say it. Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life. Don’t believe me? … When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a ‘DEI hire’ within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?… DEI is the new N-word.… In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now ‘worse than the N-word’ and has become ‘the worst slur in American history’. The term ‘DEI hire’, he explains, ‘is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.’ Plane crash? Blame DEI. Wildfires in LA? Blame DEI. Bridge collapse? Blame DEI. DEI is a racist dogwhistle. Blame Black people is the not so unsubtle message.”
Lights … camera … attraction! The 32 most romantic moments in cinema – article by staff writers in The Guardian. “The gazebo confession in The Sound of Music…. Bad timing in Casablanca…. The photograph at the end of Titanic…. Awkward listening in Before Sunrise…. A damp proposal in Pride and Prejudice…. The press conference in Roman Holiday…. A last-gasp declaration in A Matter of Life and Death…. The kiss of life in The Matrix…. The first meeting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…. The start of Up…. A healing touch in WALL-E… The poppyfield kiss in A Room with a View… Cycling in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…. Buns and lung disease in Brief Encounter.”
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: a cathartic savaging of western hypocrisy over Gaza – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. “Organised as a series of linked essays, One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming. The ugliness El Akkad describes is real and seems inescapable, too. Much of it is the unspeakable stuff nobody admits to but is clear to anyone who reads or observes: that once we’re safe, our empathy is often performative; that it’s more expedient to be against evil after it’s over; that western countries preach justice and democracy, but act to protect wealth and power. He balks at the morality of both the right, who with ‘deranged honesty’ sign missiles, and the left, whose ‘progressivism often ends at the lawn sign’. … As an Iranian who spent my first eight years dodging Saddam Hussein’s American bombs, then arrived in America to be treated like a savage, this book speaks to me. I’ve heard these arguments before, but never so articulately expressed. History always seems to start when westerners are harmed, ‘not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people.’ Like El Akkad, I despise Hamas and the authoritarian governments who use Islam to crush women, minorities and peaceful Muslims. But I can’t stomach the lie that the west is a civilised party here, after centuries of looting. El Akkad’s most compelling argument takes aim at ‘a fiction of moral convenience’, as he calls it: ‘While the terrible thing is happening – while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilisation.’ Later the children of the aggressors, with all that stolen wealth and privilege firmly in their hands, hungry now for cultural capital, can celebrate the old resistance and claim outrage and solidarity in hindsight.”
One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad: Gaza and the sound of silence – review by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian. “Its title is a distillation of a tweet he posted in October 2023, three weeks into the bombardment of Gaza. It has since been viewed over 10m times: ‘One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.’… His first book was a novel; 2017’s American War is a dystopian imagining of a future civil war in the deep south waged against a backdrop of climate disaster. It was heralded by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shape our world. In this, his first nonfiction book, his narrative voice is measured and quietly engrossing in its articulation of what he sees as almost unspeakable, certainly ethically indefensible.… He is … acutely alert to the contradictions and compromises that modern journalism often entails, in particular the insistence that ‘the journalist cannot be an activist, but must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality’. He points out that, on the contrary, ‘journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavours there is. A journalist is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege … A journalist is supposed to agitate against silence.’ Which brings us to Gaza, the nexus of his moral argument. There, given Israel’s exclusion of western journalists, the task of ‘agitating against the silence’ has been redefined by Palestinian journalists – and ordinary citizens with smartphones – who have done just that at great risk. They, alongside the few foreign medics who have managed to gain entry to the killing zone, have described the deadly attacks on hospitals, schools, suburban neighbourhoods and flimsy tents housing terrified refugees displaced from their own land…. Gaza, he concludes, has killed something in us all: the victims, the perpetrators, the western leaders who have enabled the slaughter, the cheerleaders and the helpless onlookers. It has created what he calls ‘a severance’, not just between those who speak out and those who remain silent or collude in the carnage, but with the very idea that such an ideal as ‘western values’ actually exists. Or ever truly did.”
‘This moment is medieval’: Jackson Katz on misogyny, the manosphere, and why men must oppose Trumpism – interview by Ammar Kalia in The Guardian. “Katz has written a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, which outlines the ways that men can and should involve themselves in the fight against gender-based violence. He believes it may be the first time a major commercial publisher has released a book about men’s violence against women that has been written by a man…. Attempting to change the culture from within became a tenet of Katz’s work with Real Men and, later, with his Mentors in Violence Prevention programme. Enlisting role models from professional sports and the military, Katz began running workshops and training programmes to encourage changes in behaviour from the top down in male-dominated organisations.… Gaining the ability and confidence to interrupt sexist behaviour from men is the main purpose of Katz’s book. Written in a conversational, largely jargon-free tone, it is intended as a practical toolkit for men to think about ways in which they can challenge difficult behaviour, with each chapter ending with a section on ‘how you can make a difference’ that outlines lines of argument and conversation…. One method that Katz has helped pioneer in his career is the bystander approach – initially employed as a tactic against school bullying, where peers are encouraged to step in and support the bullied child, rather than leaving the onus of responsibility solely on their shoulders. Katz began running workshop scenarios where men would think through their ethical obligations when faced with sexist or potentially abusive behaviour by one of their group. ‘Men would walk in with their arms folded, saying they didn’t need to be there because they weren’t abusers, so I would say: “You don’t abuse girls or women, but what are you doing to help others who are abusing them?”’ Katz says.”
Saturday, 22 March 2025
Tuesday, 18 March 2025
Cuttings: December 2024 and January 2025
How do you say “woke” in Japanese? – blog post by Hiroko Yoda. "Mostly, we render foreign words into Japanese using katakana. But 'woke' is uōku, the same as the commonly used transliteration of 'walk,' which can be confusing. Early on, many outlets did use variations of this (such as uōku bunka, 'Woke culture') with a big chunk of explanation, but it’s clunky. You might think a straight translation could work, like mezameta, 'awaken.' But this sounds like something a cult leader would exhort you to do. So that’s no good, either. More recently, some Japanese media outlets, including the Asahi, are attempting to translate the concept as 'something like ishikii takai kei.' This is modern Japanese slang for a 'highly conscious-presenting' person. Breaking it down, Ishiki is conscious or aware, and takai is high, which together feel positive. But the addition of the kei subverts things. It implies a sort of pose. So ishiki takai kei has a mocking, even condescending ring to it in Japanese. It made a certain sense, but something didn’t sit right. It made me wonder: why 'something like' ishikii takai kei? Why not exactly?... [In the first decade of the 21st century] the media described [a] bright new crop of grads as ishiki ga takai gakusei, or 'highly conscious students,' which was meant as praise: companies sought such types out, and the students adopted the phrase as a badge of honor among themselves. But then came the Lehman Shock of 2008. It triggered a global recession, Japan included.... And that led to the coining of ishiki takai kei – people who acted highly conscious, and making sure everyone around them knew it.... By 2010, the meaning of “highly conscious” flipped from its positive origins into a negative, similar to how “woke” would in English a few years later.... I don’t think ishiki takai kei is a good translation for 'woke.' 'Woke' refers to a state of mind about society. But ishiki takai kei is a statement about individuals — essentially, a style. It is far too light of a sentiment to convey the strong emotions 'woke' evokes among Americans, whether supporters or detractors. So what to do instead?... Tellingly, the Japanese Wikipedia page on the topic leaves 'woke' in English, not even bothering to use katakana. And I don’t see this as a cop-out. Quite the contrary. 'Woke' is a slippery thing, impossible to pin down without taking sides. Yet that’s exactly what ishiki takai kei does: in being condescending, it sides with the critics of 'woke.' But the job of a translation isn’t taking sides. It’s in giving readers the context to make their own decisions."
Getting The Essay Back: Two Memories – blog post by Richard Farr, referenced in John Naughton‘s Memex 1.1 blog. [Mr W., returning a student economics essay to him:] “Some knowledge is so well established that the only thing is to learn it... If I set you a question about demand elasticity, or inflation and the money supply, I’m probably trying to assess whether you have grasped, and can articulate, what is by general consensus the right answer. But I set this topic because it’s a debate between two working economists. It wears on its face the fact that there is no answer in the back of the textbook, that we are dealing with a problem not yet congealed into knowledge. … I know, and you know, that you don’t know which of them is correct. Alas, in your desperation to sound clever you have forgotten this…. You could have summarized Mishan’s case, then summarized Beckermann’s, and concluded by saying that it’s all jolly interesting. A common strategy. A safe, dull, strategy, B+ maybe, probably B-, all depending on the accuracy. Or you could have done the summary of both and then tried to outline a couple of reasons for being more persuaded by one than the other. That puts you in A/A- territory. But that’s not what you did, is it? You found both the summarising and the reasoning too much bother, so instead you postured a bit and sneered a bit and in the process didn’t even get Mishan right.…Your job is to work out how to disagree with [Beckermann] — or anyway raise doubts about what he says — without pretending you know more than you do. Combining intelligent scepticism with humility is not an easy skill to master. But you must master it. If you read widely, which I hope you will because life is better that way, you are going to encounter many clever, thoughtful, well-informed people who say apparently ridiculous things. The problem is, many of those things really are ridiculous but some of them are what you ought to abandon your existing prejudices and believe instead.” [Dr. D.’s advice on philosophy:] ”Stop coming to lectures….What you ought to be doing is reading more books, writing more about them, and trying to write more like them. If you want to get by, oh sure, keep coming to lectures, keep scribbling notes, and regurgitate. If on the other hand you want to spend your years here doing philosophy — which is supposed to be the point I believe — then stop coming to lectures, get advice on good things to read (I’ll give you a nice fat list) and get stuck into the almost impossible task of trying to write something that improves on what you’ve read.”
The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg: the dark side of Christmas – review by Sarah Bakewell in The Guardian. "Clegg approaches Christmas by a broad avenue, so we get chapters on Venice’s carnival, Saturnalia festivals in ancient Rome, the witchy shenanigans of Epiphany Eve (also known as Twelfth Night), and the wassails of January, in which good health is wished to apple trees by waving horses’ skulls at them. What all these celebrations share is a mood of maniacal excess and social exuberance. Practices include 'guising', or putting on animal disguises; 'mumming', or enacting plays; and 'knocking' – going around banging on doors, asking for treats, and even dragging out unwilling residents to join the merriment. The mayhem can spill over into violence, especially in the town of Matrei in Austria, where the Krampus-like 'Klaubauf' figures barge into houses and fight in the streets, to the extent that local authorities advise tourists to stay away and the hospital’s emergency department prepares for an influx of injured people. Even Clegg does not venture to Matrei, but the Krampus night she attends in Salzburg is only slightly less extreme. As she strolls amid the usual market scenes of fairy lights and glühwein stands, she is set upon by a Krampus who whacks her with two sticks. It’s all good festive fun – except that she still has the bruises and welts far into January.... In the 19th century, a shift took place towards more polite Christmas behaviour, especially in Victorian Britain. Santa Claus became portly and took to riding around with reindeer. The feasting became less about chaotic public drinking sessions and more about a family dinner presided over by the master of the house: it affirmed the hierarchy rather than upending it. The topsy-turvy elements of the season were transferred to other celebrations such as carnivals and pantomimes, and door-to-door knocking and treating became more associated with Halloween. In England today, the tradition of raucous Christmas home intrusions survives only in the (slightly) less scary form of doorstep carol singers."
Is it true that up to half of people have no inner monologue? I investigated – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "I have a voice in my head that won’t shut up.... Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you have an inner auditory narrator too. A lot of people do. I used to assume everyone in the world did until a tweet went viral a few years ago announcing that some people don’t.... Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has done pioneering work in this field, notes that most of us are very confused about our inner experiences.... What Hurlburt found is that when you do the beeper experiment [participants are given beepers and then told to jot down their inner experience whenever the beeper goes off], people have an inner voice roughly 25% of the time. What that means, he says, is that 'some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time'."
‘I became an optimist the night my wife died’: a science writer on loss and letting go of rationalism – article by Sumit Paul-Choudhury in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. "I was by no means happy or normal during my period of mourning, I just never doubted, even on my darkest days, that better times lay ahead – if I only worked towards them. Initially without really thinking about it, and later more deliberately, I cultivated the idea that the future would be bright. Eventually, I realised that I’d chosen to identify as an optimist. That was somewhat perplexing. As a trained scientist and a journalist, I was supposedly a hardened critical thinker, committed to solid evidence and rational argument. While I knew, and had been told, that I tended to expect the best out of life, I’d presumed that was because I actually had led a pretty charmed life. To still expect that, after the events of the previous year, felt as if I had given myself over to irrationality: the side of me that believed was winning out over the side that reasoned.... I began to investigate what form [a] pragmatic, well-reasoned version of optimism might actually take. And what I learned was that optimism, despite my earlier assumptions, isn’t necessarily the product of naivety. It isn’t an indulgence that we can only afford when times are good. It’s a resource we can tap into when the going gets tough – and then it can make the difference between life and death.... One way to make the case for optimism is to acknowledge that there are things we don’t know, that some of those unknowns are positive and that we have some ability to steer towards those positives. Optimism encourages us to seek them out. If, on the other hand, we have no expectation that our lot in life can be improved, we have no motivation to put in the thought and effort needed to improve it and those solutions go undiscovered. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism traps abound in human lives. Jobs you don’t expect to get, so you never apply; crushes whom you believe to be out of your league, so you never ask them out; games you expect to lose, so you never play. From this point of view, it’s not surprising that optimists turn out to be more successful than pessimists in almost every aspect of their lives. They tend to do better at school and at work; they have stronger relationships with family and friends; and they’re more resilient in the face of financial, mental or physical stress. It’s the stuff of cliche; 80% of success is just showing up. You miss every shot you don’t take."
The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury: keep the glass half full – review by Huw Green in The Guardian. "Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout. The risk of a book called The Bright Side is that it evokes the farcical good cheer of Eric Idle’s character at the close of The Life of Brian... [But while] Paul-Choudhury ... is serious about optimism, ... he is never glib or Pollyannaish. His book is as much a careful examination of the misuses of optimism as its uses. Here ideas are picked up, explored, and critiqued. Different perspectives are presented, and what unfolds is a convincing case that, while we might frequently feel we have grounds for pessimism, a particular form of optimism is the only morally serious choice.... The Bright Side’s wisdom is allowed to emerge slowly, as it weaves back and forth through different historical and philosophical approaches.... Paul-Choudhury’s optimism is rooted in the idea of cautiously investing because you know that things could be better, rather than recklessly assuming that they will be.... With multiple expanding international conflicts, an ongoing global climate crisis, and the advent of Trump’s second term in the White House, it is a perspective that will be sorely needed in 2025."
‘A whole new world opened up’: the radical project taking Israel-Palestine into schools – article by Helen Pidd and Courtney Yusuf in The Guardian. "Inside most British classrooms, it’s as if 7 October never happened. Half a million pupils studied history at GCSE or A-level last year, but just 2,000 tackled the origins of the Middle East’s most contentious war: why Israel was born, what that meant for the Palestinians, and the decades of occupation and violence that followed. It’s not that children aren’t interested. They hear about it at home, in their communities and of course on social media, where a bitter and bloody 100-year-old schism is boiled down to 15-second clips. But inside school, it’s all just too difficult. Too dangerous, even. All of which made the scene in the hall at Lancaster Royal grammar school (LRGS) this month even more remarkable as pupils from the selective Lancashire state school came together with boys from an Islamic school to explore and debate key elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict. About 50 students aged 13 to 18 took part in the session, organised by Parallel Histories, an educational charity working with more than 1,000 schools across the UK and a further 400 worldwide.... The Parallel Histories method – developed by the late LRGS history teacher Michael Davies after he took pupils on what now seems an unimaginable school trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2014 – encourages children not to shy away from competing narratives but to lay them out, side by side. They are taught to examine the source evidence and debate alternative interpretations before coming to their own view. The curriculum and all teaching materials are available on the Parallel Histories website for parents – or indeed anyone – to examine.... On the day we visited, the youngest students, from year 9, were tackling the Balfour declaration ...The year 10s were doing the 1967 six-day war ... And the year 12s were examining who was responsible for the failure of the peace process right up to the present day. Each group was split into two, with half told they would be arguing the Israeli perspective and half the Palestinian view, with each using primary sources (letters, memos, speeches, etc) to make their case. Key to Parallel Histories is that the groups then swap sides ... and are forced to counter the arguments they have just been making."
‘Talking about the Palestinian story was forbidden’: a developer’s struggle to make a game about the 1948 Nakba – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "In the city of Nablus in the West Bank, Rasheed Abueideh owns a nut roastery, where he works to provide for his family. He is also an award-winning game developer.... However, Abueideh has not been able to raise funding for his next game through conventional means. The game he envisions, Dreams on a Pillow, is about the 1948 Nakba, told through a folk tale about a mother in the Arab-Israeli war, in which more than half the Palestinian population was displaced. He tells me that his game has been rejected almost 300 times, by publishers and providers of cultural grants, for being too controversial, too much of a risk. 'Talking about the Palestinian story was always forbidden,' he says.... 'Crowdfunding was our only option, but even that would not work for me because all the major crowdfunding platforms do not recognise Palestine,' says Abueideh. The team turned to LaunchGood, a Muslim-focused platform, where it met its funding goal on 7 January. It’s enough to cover at least half the game’s development costs, and he hopes that once the game starts to take shape, it will be easier to find the rest.... The folk tale that inspired Dreams on a Pillow tells of a mother who rushes into her home to retrieve her baby before fleeing, only to realise that she has escaped with a pillow instead. In the game, she spends her days trying to make her way to Lebanon after the massacre at Tantura, and the nights dreaming of the Palestine she knew as a child. Putting the pillow down lets her move through the game’s scenarios more freely, but invites nightmares and hallucinations. Abueideh estimates that it will take two years to complete; heartbreakingly, the crowdfunding page contains an assurance that 'a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank'."
The Science of Racism by Keon West: evidence that speaks for itself – review by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. "Professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies. West’s book poses a central question: 'Is racism still enough of a feature in our society that it has detectable, significant effects on how people are treated and what their life outcomes are likely to be?' To answer this, he delivers a truckload of research – 'specifically testable, verifiable, quantitative evidence published in peer-reviewed scientific journals' – to show how racial bias affects everything from kindergarteners’ doll preferences to getting a job, a date, or decent medical treatment.... This facts-over-feelings approach is persuasive. The Science of Racism is that rare book on a difficult topic that has the potential to bridge the divide between opposing ideologically entrenched standpoints.... Some of the research he highlights is ingeniously executed. In one study, teachers were asked to watch footage of a group of preschoolers and spot challenging behaviour. There were, however, no naughty kids in the videos. The researchers were actually tracking the teachers’ eye movements. They found that the teachers spent the majority of the time watching the (perfectly well-behaved) black preschoolers, and in particular, little black boys. In West’s own research, he took real crime stories from the news but swapped the perpetrator’s names to either white, Christian-sounding names or Arab Muslim names to test participants’ reactions. Despite identical misdemeanours, West found that 'participants rated the criminals’ behaviour as both worse and more terrorist-y when they thought the criminal was Muslim'."
The Last Dance: Chinese funeral business is backdrop for arresting, life-affirming drama – review by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "[It starts] out as a prickly comedy in which wedding planner Dominic (Hong Kong standup icon Dayo Wong) switches to the funeral business,... [and] must get to grips with his new business partner: ball-breaking Taoist priest Master Man (Michael Hui), who performs the 'breaking hell’s gate' rites that liberate departing souls. The veteran is unimpressed by the commercially oriented newcomer, who is so keen on flashy gimmicks that he commissions a paper Maserati for the funeral of someone who died in a car crash. It becomes apparent, though, that Man’s traditionalism is covering up his own grief and leads to his unbending treatment of anyone in his vicinity. Growing into the job, Dominic realises that the two of them are complementary: 'Taoist priests transcend the soul of the dead. Agents transcend the soul of the living.' And just as his protagonist freshens up the departed, Chan is skilled in breathing naturalness into melodrama; not just through macabre contrast, but also by earning the twists and contrivances through patiently handling Dominic’s transition to compassionate undertaker in a string of attentively written consultations. As deftly portrayed by Wong, his obsequious grin hides an inner strength – and Hui matches him with effortless irascibility."
We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher: the pain of grief and joy of living – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "[Beecher uses the title] as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof. In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths.... Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents.... But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: 'Little losses, against the vast loss of John.' ... What it means to be alive is a thread glinting through the book, the question weightier for Beecher than it might be for someone who has not known grief intimately at such a young age. Is being fully alive best expressed in physical abandonment (through drink, sex, dancing) or punitive discipline of the body? She tries both, repeatedly returning to the shocking contrast between her own youth and the immediacy of death....Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty."
I set out to study which jobs should be done by AI and found a very human answer – article by Alison Pugh in The Guardian. "What is the value of being seen by another human being, outside of your friends and family?... The benefits of human interactions have long eluded measurement, making them easy to ignore, while the skills of connecting to others have long been presumed to be innately feminine, making them easy to devalue.... [But] all sorts of occupations – from teaching, therapy and primary care, to sales, management and the law – rely on seeing others to help students learn, patients heal, or consumers buy.... Reflective, witnessing work is so important that it deserves its own name: after five years of interviewing and observing scores of practitioners and their clients at work, I’ve come to call it 'connective labour'.... These kind of results – dignity, purpose, understanding – are profound for the individuals involved.... Of course, human beings also misrecognise each other, as judgment and bias can poison these interactions, drawing out shame in moments of considerable vulnerability. But as therapists told me, if people seek only to avoid shame – say by opting for an AI companion or counsellor – then they might never be free of it. ... For some, AI might be better than nothing, while others view AI as better than humans – yet both opt for technology to solve problems largely created by inadequate staffing and unremitting drives for efficiency, and both reflect the fact that what humans actually do for each other is not well understood. Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a 'connection criterion' to help us decide which AI to encourage – the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language – and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships."
The mind/body revolution: how the division between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illness fails us all – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian, based on Camilla Nord's The Balanced Brain, and Monty Lyman's The Immune Mind. "A conceptual division between mind and body has underpinned western culture, and medicine, for centuries. Illnesses are 'physical', or they are 'mental'. But, Nord writes, there is no 'separate category of illness, one that is confined to the mind and does not involve biological changes. This category does not exist.' Not only that, she says, but the reverse also applies: there is no purely 'physical' ailment in which your brain does not play a role.... It is one thing to understand that food poisoning might come along with misery, for instance, or anxiety with higher heart rate and perspiration, and quite another to accept the science that shows, as she puts it, that 'everything is physical and psychological'. As Monty Lyman argues in his eye-opening tour of recent advances in immunology, ... this revolution could be transformative for the millions of people for whom ... misguided dualistic approaches 'are causing … preventable and relievable harm'. Currently, 'physical' and 'mental' medical services often have different budgets and administrations. They may occupy different buildings, and may not share notes.... It can be more difficult ... to access NHS funds for someone with severe dementia whose 'body' is still healthy than for someone experiencing the opposite. People with major mental health disorders (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression) often die years earlier – up to a decade or even two earlier – than those who do not. 'People often think, "Well, that’s because they’re committing suicide,"' says Mark Edwards, a professor of neurology at King’s College London. In fact, 'they’re dying of cancer, heart disease, complications of diabetes and respiratory problems'... One way in which [thinking] is beginning to change is through an understanding of the brain as a place of predictive processing.... Many illnesses, in this model, arise from maladaptive – or even over-efficient – processing. So, for instance, an injury that the brain has had to respond to in the past makes it more sensitive to a repeat of that injury in the future. This, writes Nord, can 'cause your brain to unconsciously predict physical symptoms, and rush to defend against them. 'Sometimes these predictions might be so strong that they generate the symptoms they anticipate.' ... And prediction is, of course, the model we use to understand the functioning of the immune system: identification of a threat, followed by the dispatch of cells specifically adapted to neutralise that threat – ie, inflammation. We usually assume such threats to be 'physical' as opposed to 'mental' – bacteria, or a virus – but it is increasingly clear, says Lyman, that the immune system does not differentiate: the threat could just as easily be emotional distress, environmental challenges, childhood trauma or 'even being sedentary'. The resulting inflammation does not differentiate either."
Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – article by Edward Docx in The Guardian. "Ogres are one of the most ancient archetypes in human narrative and they have been with us since we first started telling stories.... They are everywhere present in our stories because, of course, they are part of our struggle to understand ourselves. They represent the recurring preoccupations and apprehensions of the human psyche.... Most of the time, we repress these traits in order to get along, and yet they persist – as drives and urges, as conscious and subconscious fears. In other words, ogres are not just monsters in tales but archetypal representations of the elemental aspects of our being. Indeed, if we step for a moment across one of the many footbridges between story and psychology, then we can see that ogres represent … the primal; also known as the id.... This is also the world of Trump. Trump is the nearest any modern politician comes to pure id.... It is here that he makes his powerful appeal; and it is here that he connects.... The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about 'values' – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.... When times are precipitous and the polity is bitterly contested, human beings tend to back away from 'argument' and 'ideals' and edge back towards the dependable 'truths' of the id. And the story world – where Trump broadcasts loud and clear – is so very powerful here because it darkly enchants; and because it occludes the complex world of actual issues, actual policy, actual debate, actual solutions. You don’t need a ground game when you’ve got an id-game. You don’t need leaflets about policy when you’re the latest main character in an ancient human saga all about wealth and food and sex and anger and fear and power and vengeance."
The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age – article by Chris Hayes in The Guardian, based on his book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. "The traditional model of communication [in which you gain attention then persuade people with evidence and argument] has fallen apart.... The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen. Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.... Imagine [says US writer George Saunders] being at a cocktail party... And then 'a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.' The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well: 'Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general ("We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!"), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking ("Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?"), the gossipy ("Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!"), and the trivial ("Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?").' ... It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump... Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse. There was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.... Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds ... Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by 'emails', while Trump’s featured 'Mexico' and 'immigration' among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience."
Getting The Essay Back: Two Memories – blog post by Richard Farr, referenced in John Naughton‘s Memex 1.1 blog. [Mr W., returning a student economics essay to him:] “Some knowledge is so well established that the only thing is to learn it... If I set you a question about demand elasticity, or inflation and the money supply, I’m probably trying to assess whether you have grasped, and can articulate, what is by general consensus the right answer. But I set this topic because it’s a debate between two working economists. It wears on its face the fact that there is no answer in the back of the textbook, that we are dealing with a problem not yet congealed into knowledge. … I know, and you know, that you don’t know which of them is correct. Alas, in your desperation to sound clever you have forgotten this…. You could have summarized Mishan’s case, then summarized Beckermann’s, and concluded by saying that it’s all jolly interesting. A common strategy. A safe, dull, strategy, B+ maybe, probably B-, all depending on the accuracy. Or you could have done the summary of both and then tried to outline a couple of reasons for being more persuaded by one than the other. That puts you in A/A- territory. But that’s not what you did, is it? You found both the summarising and the reasoning too much bother, so instead you postured a bit and sneered a bit and in the process didn’t even get Mishan right.…Your job is to work out how to disagree with [Beckermann] — or anyway raise doubts about what he says — without pretending you know more than you do. Combining intelligent scepticism with humility is not an easy skill to master. But you must master it. If you read widely, which I hope you will because life is better that way, you are going to encounter many clever, thoughtful, well-informed people who say apparently ridiculous things. The problem is, many of those things really are ridiculous but some of them are what you ought to abandon your existing prejudices and believe instead.” [Dr. D.’s advice on philosophy:] ”Stop coming to lectures….What you ought to be doing is reading more books, writing more about them, and trying to write more like them. If you want to get by, oh sure, keep coming to lectures, keep scribbling notes, and regurgitate. If on the other hand you want to spend your years here doing philosophy — which is supposed to be the point I believe — then stop coming to lectures, get advice on good things to read (I’ll give you a nice fat list) and get stuck into the almost impossible task of trying to write something that improves on what you’ve read.”
The Dead of Winter by Sarah Clegg: the dark side of Christmas – review by Sarah Bakewell in The Guardian. "Clegg approaches Christmas by a broad avenue, so we get chapters on Venice’s carnival, Saturnalia festivals in ancient Rome, the witchy shenanigans of Epiphany Eve (also known as Twelfth Night), and the wassails of January, in which good health is wished to apple trees by waving horses’ skulls at them. What all these celebrations share is a mood of maniacal excess and social exuberance. Practices include 'guising', or putting on animal disguises; 'mumming', or enacting plays; and 'knocking' – going around banging on doors, asking for treats, and even dragging out unwilling residents to join the merriment. The mayhem can spill over into violence, especially in the town of Matrei in Austria, where the Krampus-like 'Klaubauf' figures barge into houses and fight in the streets, to the extent that local authorities advise tourists to stay away and the hospital’s emergency department prepares for an influx of injured people. Even Clegg does not venture to Matrei, but the Krampus night she attends in Salzburg is only slightly less extreme. As she strolls amid the usual market scenes of fairy lights and glühwein stands, she is set upon by a Krampus who whacks her with two sticks. It’s all good festive fun – except that she still has the bruises and welts far into January.... In the 19th century, a shift took place towards more polite Christmas behaviour, especially in Victorian Britain. Santa Claus became portly and took to riding around with reindeer. The feasting became less about chaotic public drinking sessions and more about a family dinner presided over by the master of the house: it affirmed the hierarchy rather than upending it. The topsy-turvy elements of the season were transferred to other celebrations such as carnivals and pantomimes, and door-to-door knocking and treating became more associated with Halloween. In England today, the tradition of raucous Christmas home intrusions survives only in the (slightly) less scary form of doorstep carol singers."
Is it true that up to half of people have no inner monologue? I investigated – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "I have a voice in my head that won’t shut up.... Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you have an inner auditory narrator too. A lot of people do. I used to assume everyone in the world did until a tweet went viral a few years ago announcing that some people don’t.... Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has done pioneering work in this field, notes that most of us are very confused about our inner experiences.... What Hurlburt found is that when you do the beeper experiment [participants are given beepers and then told to jot down their inner experience whenever the beeper goes off], people have an inner voice roughly 25% of the time. What that means, he says, is that 'some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time'."
‘I became an optimist the night my wife died’: a science writer on loss and letting go of rationalism – article by Sumit Paul-Choudhury in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. "I was by no means happy or normal during my period of mourning, I just never doubted, even on my darkest days, that better times lay ahead – if I only worked towards them. Initially without really thinking about it, and later more deliberately, I cultivated the idea that the future would be bright. Eventually, I realised that I’d chosen to identify as an optimist. That was somewhat perplexing. As a trained scientist and a journalist, I was supposedly a hardened critical thinker, committed to solid evidence and rational argument. While I knew, and had been told, that I tended to expect the best out of life, I’d presumed that was because I actually had led a pretty charmed life. To still expect that, after the events of the previous year, felt as if I had given myself over to irrationality: the side of me that believed was winning out over the side that reasoned.... I began to investigate what form [a] pragmatic, well-reasoned version of optimism might actually take. And what I learned was that optimism, despite my earlier assumptions, isn’t necessarily the product of naivety. It isn’t an indulgence that we can only afford when times are good. It’s a resource we can tap into when the going gets tough – and then it can make the difference between life and death.... One way to make the case for optimism is to acknowledge that there are things we don’t know, that some of those unknowns are positive and that we have some ability to steer towards those positives. Optimism encourages us to seek them out. If, on the other hand, we have no expectation that our lot in life can be improved, we have no motivation to put in the thought and effort needed to improve it and those solutions go undiscovered. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism traps abound in human lives. Jobs you don’t expect to get, so you never apply; crushes whom you believe to be out of your league, so you never ask them out; games you expect to lose, so you never play. From this point of view, it’s not surprising that optimists turn out to be more successful than pessimists in almost every aspect of their lives. They tend to do better at school and at work; they have stronger relationships with family and friends; and they’re more resilient in the face of financial, mental or physical stress. It’s the stuff of cliche; 80% of success is just showing up. You miss every shot you don’t take."
The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury: keep the glass half full – review by Huw Green in The Guardian. "Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout. The risk of a book called The Bright Side is that it evokes the farcical good cheer of Eric Idle’s character at the close of The Life of Brian... [But while] Paul-Choudhury ... is serious about optimism, ... he is never glib or Pollyannaish. His book is as much a careful examination of the misuses of optimism as its uses. Here ideas are picked up, explored, and critiqued. Different perspectives are presented, and what unfolds is a convincing case that, while we might frequently feel we have grounds for pessimism, a particular form of optimism is the only morally serious choice.... The Bright Side’s wisdom is allowed to emerge slowly, as it weaves back and forth through different historical and philosophical approaches.... Paul-Choudhury’s optimism is rooted in the idea of cautiously investing because you know that things could be better, rather than recklessly assuming that they will be.... With multiple expanding international conflicts, an ongoing global climate crisis, and the advent of Trump’s second term in the White House, it is a perspective that will be sorely needed in 2025."
‘A whole new world opened up’: the radical project taking Israel-Palestine into schools – article by Helen Pidd and Courtney Yusuf in The Guardian. "Inside most British classrooms, it’s as if 7 October never happened. Half a million pupils studied history at GCSE or A-level last year, but just 2,000 tackled the origins of the Middle East’s most contentious war: why Israel was born, what that meant for the Palestinians, and the decades of occupation and violence that followed. It’s not that children aren’t interested. They hear about it at home, in their communities and of course on social media, where a bitter and bloody 100-year-old schism is boiled down to 15-second clips. But inside school, it’s all just too difficult. Too dangerous, even. All of which made the scene in the hall at Lancaster Royal grammar school (LRGS) this month even more remarkable as pupils from the selective Lancashire state school came together with boys from an Islamic school to explore and debate key elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict. About 50 students aged 13 to 18 took part in the session, organised by Parallel Histories, an educational charity working with more than 1,000 schools across the UK and a further 400 worldwide.... The Parallel Histories method – developed by the late LRGS history teacher Michael Davies after he took pupils on what now seems an unimaginable school trip to Israel and the West Bank in 2014 – encourages children not to shy away from competing narratives but to lay them out, side by side. They are taught to examine the source evidence and debate alternative interpretations before coming to their own view. The curriculum and all teaching materials are available on the Parallel Histories website for parents – or indeed anyone – to examine.... On the day we visited, the youngest students, from year 9, were tackling the Balfour declaration ...The year 10s were doing the 1967 six-day war ... And the year 12s were examining who was responsible for the failure of the peace process right up to the present day. Each group was split into two, with half told they would be arguing the Israeli perspective and half the Palestinian view, with each using primary sources (letters, memos, speeches, etc) to make their case. Key to Parallel Histories is that the groups then swap sides ... and are forced to counter the arguments they have just been making."
‘Talking about the Palestinian story was forbidden’: a developer’s struggle to make a game about the 1948 Nakba – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. "In the city of Nablus in the West Bank, Rasheed Abueideh owns a nut roastery, where he works to provide for his family. He is also an award-winning game developer.... However, Abueideh has not been able to raise funding for his next game through conventional means. The game he envisions, Dreams on a Pillow, is about the 1948 Nakba, told through a folk tale about a mother in the Arab-Israeli war, in which more than half the Palestinian population was displaced. He tells me that his game has been rejected almost 300 times, by publishers and providers of cultural grants, for being too controversial, too much of a risk. 'Talking about the Palestinian story was always forbidden,' he says.... 'Crowdfunding was our only option, but even that would not work for me because all the major crowdfunding platforms do not recognise Palestine,' says Abueideh. The team turned to LaunchGood, a Muslim-focused platform, where it met its funding goal on 7 January. It’s enough to cover at least half the game’s development costs, and he hopes that once the game starts to take shape, it will be easier to find the rest.... The folk tale that inspired Dreams on a Pillow tells of a mother who rushes into her home to retrieve her baby before fleeing, only to realise that she has escaped with a pillow instead. In the game, she spends her days trying to make her way to Lebanon after the massacre at Tantura, and the nights dreaming of the Palestine she knew as a child. Putting the pillow down lets her move through the game’s scenarios more freely, but invites nightmares and hallucinations. Abueideh estimates that it will take two years to complete; heartbreakingly, the crowdfunding page contains an assurance that 'a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank'."
The Science of Racism by Keon West: evidence that speaks for itself – review by Farrah Jarral in The Guardian. "Professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies. West’s book poses a central question: 'Is racism still enough of a feature in our society that it has detectable, significant effects on how people are treated and what their life outcomes are likely to be?' To answer this, he delivers a truckload of research – 'specifically testable, verifiable, quantitative evidence published in peer-reviewed scientific journals' – to show how racial bias affects everything from kindergarteners’ doll preferences to getting a job, a date, or decent medical treatment.... This facts-over-feelings approach is persuasive. The Science of Racism is that rare book on a difficult topic that has the potential to bridge the divide between opposing ideologically entrenched standpoints.... Some of the research he highlights is ingeniously executed. In one study, teachers were asked to watch footage of a group of preschoolers and spot challenging behaviour. There were, however, no naughty kids in the videos. The researchers were actually tracking the teachers’ eye movements. They found that the teachers spent the majority of the time watching the (perfectly well-behaved) black preschoolers, and in particular, little black boys. In West’s own research, he took real crime stories from the news but swapped the perpetrator’s names to either white, Christian-sounding names or Arab Muslim names to test participants’ reactions. Despite identical misdemeanours, West found that 'participants rated the criminals’ behaviour as both worse and more terrorist-y when they thought the criminal was Muslim'."
The Last Dance: Chinese funeral business is backdrop for arresting, life-affirming drama – review by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "[It starts] out as a prickly comedy in which wedding planner Dominic (Hong Kong standup icon Dayo Wong) switches to the funeral business,... [and] must get to grips with his new business partner: ball-breaking Taoist priest Master Man (Michael Hui), who performs the 'breaking hell’s gate' rites that liberate departing souls. The veteran is unimpressed by the commercially oriented newcomer, who is so keen on flashy gimmicks that he commissions a paper Maserati for the funeral of someone who died in a car crash. It becomes apparent, though, that Man’s traditionalism is covering up his own grief and leads to his unbending treatment of anyone in his vicinity. Growing into the job, Dominic realises that the two of them are complementary: 'Taoist priests transcend the soul of the dead. Agents transcend the soul of the living.' And just as his protagonist freshens up the departed, Chan is skilled in breathing naturalness into melodrama; not just through macabre contrast, but also by earning the twists and contrivances through patiently handling Dominic’s transition to compassionate undertaker in a string of attentively written consultations. As deftly portrayed by Wong, his obsequious grin hides an inner strength – and Hui matches him with effortless irascibility."
We All Come Home Alive by Anna Beecher: the pain of grief and joy of living – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "[Beecher uses the title] as a punchline to the book’s opening chapter, which recounts a car accident she experienced as a graduate student in the US. Here she conjures in vivid detail the violent shock of impact, the moments of silent disbelief in the immediate aftermath as she waits for understanding to catch up with physical sensation, dreading the discovery of what happened to the occupants of the other car, now spinning on its roof. In the event, no one is hurt, but Beecher pictures all too readily a parallel reality in which the crash resulted in several deaths.... Her memoir is structured around these points of shock in her own life, and for the most part the experiences she relates are recognisable, even ordinary: being bullied at school, brushes with binge drinking and bulimia, various heartbreaks, a breakdown, a parent’s illness, the loneliness of leaving family and friends to move continents.... But the cumulative toll of these ruptures is so significant because they are satellites orbiting the central tragedy of her life – the death of her elder brother from cancer at the age of 25: 'Little losses, against the vast loss of John.' ... What it means to be alive is a thread glinting through the book, the question weightier for Beecher than it might be for someone who has not known grief intimately at such a young age. Is being fully alive best expressed in physical abandonment (through drink, sex, dancing) or punitive discipline of the body? She tries both, repeatedly returning to the shocking contrast between her own youth and the immediacy of death....Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty."
I set out to study which jobs should be done by AI and found a very human answer – article by Alison Pugh in The Guardian. "What is the value of being seen by another human being, outside of your friends and family?... The benefits of human interactions have long eluded measurement, making them easy to ignore, while the skills of connecting to others have long been presumed to be innately feminine, making them easy to devalue.... [But] all sorts of occupations – from teaching, therapy and primary care, to sales, management and the law – rely on seeing others to help students learn, patients heal, or consumers buy.... Reflective, witnessing work is so important that it deserves its own name: after five years of interviewing and observing scores of practitioners and their clients at work, I’ve come to call it 'connective labour'.... These kind of results – dignity, purpose, understanding – are profound for the individuals involved.... Of course, human beings also misrecognise each other, as judgment and bias can poison these interactions, drawing out shame in moments of considerable vulnerability. But as therapists told me, if people seek only to avoid shame – say by opting for an AI companion or counsellor – then they might never be free of it. ... For some, AI might be better than nothing, while others view AI as better than humans – yet both opt for technology to solve problems largely created by inadequate staffing and unremitting drives for efficiency, and both reflect the fact that what humans actually do for each other is not well understood. Instead, we need to preserve and protect these personal interactions. We need to bolster the working conditions of connective labour practitioners so they are able to see others well. We need to impose a 'connection criterion' to help us decide which AI to encourage – the kind that creates new antibiotics, for instance, or decodes sperm whale language – and which to put the brakes on, that is, the kind that intervenes in human relationships."
The mind/body revolution: how the division between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illness fails us all – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian, based on Camilla Nord's The Balanced Brain, and Monty Lyman's The Immune Mind. "A conceptual division between mind and body has underpinned western culture, and medicine, for centuries. Illnesses are 'physical', or they are 'mental'. But, Nord writes, there is no 'separate category of illness, one that is confined to the mind and does not involve biological changes. This category does not exist.' Not only that, she says, but the reverse also applies: there is no purely 'physical' ailment in which your brain does not play a role.... It is one thing to understand that food poisoning might come along with misery, for instance, or anxiety with higher heart rate and perspiration, and quite another to accept the science that shows, as she puts it, that 'everything is physical and psychological'. As Monty Lyman argues in his eye-opening tour of recent advances in immunology, ... this revolution could be transformative for the millions of people for whom ... misguided dualistic approaches 'are causing … preventable and relievable harm'. Currently, 'physical' and 'mental' medical services often have different budgets and administrations. They may occupy different buildings, and may not share notes.... It can be more difficult ... to access NHS funds for someone with severe dementia whose 'body' is still healthy than for someone experiencing the opposite. People with major mental health disorders (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression) often die years earlier – up to a decade or even two earlier – than those who do not. 'People often think, "Well, that’s because they’re committing suicide,"' says Mark Edwards, a professor of neurology at King’s College London. In fact, 'they’re dying of cancer, heart disease, complications of diabetes and respiratory problems'... One way in which [thinking] is beginning to change is through an understanding of the brain as a place of predictive processing.... Many illnesses, in this model, arise from maladaptive – or even over-efficient – processing. So, for instance, an injury that the brain has had to respond to in the past makes it more sensitive to a repeat of that injury in the future. This, writes Nord, can 'cause your brain to unconsciously predict physical symptoms, and rush to defend against them. 'Sometimes these predictions might be so strong that they generate the symptoms they anticipate.' ... And prediction is, of course, the model we use to understand the functioning of the immune system: identification of a threat, followed by the dispatch of cells specifically adapted to neutralise that threat – ie, inflammation. We usually assume such threats to be 'physical' as opposed to 'mental' – bacteria, or a virus – but it is increasingly clear, says Lyman, that the immune system does not differentiate: the threat could just as easily be emotional distress, environmental challenges, childhood trauma or 'even being sedentary'. The resulting inflammation does not differentiate either."
Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – article by Edward Docx in The Guardian. "Ogres are one of the most ancient archetypes in human narrative and they have been with us since we first started telling stories.... They are everywhere present in our stories because, of course, they are part of our struggle to understand ourselves. They represent the recurring preoccupations and apprehensions of the human psyche.... Most of the time, we repress these traits in order to get along, and yet they persist – as drives and urges, as conscious and subconscious fears. In other words, ogres are not just monsters in tales but archetypal representations of the elemental aspects of our being. Indeed, if we step for a moment across one of the many footbridges between story and psychology, then we can see that ogres represent … the primal; also known as the id.... This is also the world of Trump. Trump is the nearest any modern politician comes to pure id.... It is here that he makes his powerful appeal; and it is here that he connects.... The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about 'values' – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.... When times are precipitous and the polity is bitterly contested, human beings tend to back away from 'argument' and 'ideals' and edge back towards the dependable 'truths' of the id. And the story world – where Trump broadcasts loud and clear – is so very powerful here because it darkly enchants; and because it occludes the complex world of actual issues, actual policy, actual debate, actual solutions. You don’t need a ground game when you’ve got an id-game. You don’t need leaflets about policy when you’re the latest main character in an ancient human saga all about wealth and food and sex and anger and fear and power and vengeance."
The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age – article by Chris Hayes in The Guardian, based on his book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. "The traditional model of communication [in which you gain attention then persuade people with evidence and argument] has fallen apart.... The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen. Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.... Imagine [says US writer George Saunders] being at a cocktail party... And then 'a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.' The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well: 'Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general ("We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!"), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking ("Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?"), the gossipy ("Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!"), and the trivial ("Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?").' ... It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump... Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse. There was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.... Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds ... Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by 'emails', while Trump’s featured 'Mexico' and 'immigration' among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience."
Friday, 3 January 2025
Seen and heard: July to December 2024
Douglas is Cancelled – brilliantly-written (by Steven Moffat) and played (by Hugh Boneville and Karen Gillan principally) four-part drama, which starts as satirical comedy, a bit like W1A because of its TV news show setting, but then changes character episode by episode, until it ends in a very dark place, though the comedy is never entirely absent. Episode 3 in particular is very, very painful to watch, being the one where you find out for the first time what the whole story is about. The dialogue is brilliant; words which seem innocuous when first uttered change their meaning (or have their true meaning revealed?) when repeated or quoted by others. And your sympathies for the characters shift to and fro. (Well, except for a couple of them, maybe, who are quite clearly arseholes from the start.) A courageous piece of work.
Three Thousand Years of Longing – touching fantasy film, with Tilda Swinton as a Professor of Narratology who frees a djinn (Idris Elba) from a bottle and is therefore granted the customary three wishes. Knowing all the stories about trickster djinns, who bring people to destruction through their wishes, she is at first reluctant to play along, but as the djinn tries to prove his honesty by telling her the stories of how he previously came to be imprisoned and the wishes he granted, she begins to become closer to him. Philosophical as well as touching, forcing one to confront the question: what does one really want? And is one prepared to endure the shadow side of one’s deepest wish coming true?
Pan’s Labyrinth – visually striking and emotionally powerful film, set during the Spanish civil war. It centres on a young girl, trying to cope after the death of her father and her mother's re-marriage to a commander in the fascist army. Materially they are secure, but the girl is unhappy and a fantasy world of spirits, both fair and foul, becomes real to her. The interesting thing about the story is that the fantasy world proves to be no escape but just as frightening and dangerous as the real world, which itself – as the commander becomes increasingly deranged and brutal in his pursuit of the partisans – comes to seem no less fantastic that the fantasy world. You want the story to have a happy ending for the girl, but of course it doesn't; that really would have been unrealistic.
'AI Meets Classic Art' – Instagram post by 'latentcosmonaut' Juan Perdón, which animates some famous paintings in funny and very plausible ways. This is a beautiful and benign use of AI video generation, but raises the possibility of the same techniques being used for deception. (Referenced in a LinkedIn post by Donald Clark.)
Present Laughter – super National Theatre production of Noel Coward’s play, shown in my local cinema under the NT Live scheme. The main attraction was Andrew Scott in the lead role of a sybaritic, flamboyant actor at the height of his success (now, who can Coward have been thinking of!) whose life and career threatens to unravel through the collision of present and past lovers of both genders (some characters were gender-swopped for this production, the result seeming very natural). Scott did not disappoint, with a high-energy performance, which must have been exhausting because he was on stage almost the whole time. Nice to be reminded of how good live theatre can be, because MK Theatre doesn’t do it much any more, only musicals.
Doctor Who, the David Tennant era – because seeing him again in the Christmas specials last year reminded me of just how good he was: for my money, better than any of the other nu-Whos, except perhaps Peter Capaldi. Somehow at the time I gave. up on him – perhaps after a duff episode or two – so it’s been a joy to discover some of the cracking stories from his second season, especially the beautifully crafted and place-and-time-situated ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ (1930s New York, both rich and poor) and ‘Human Nature’ (a minor public school in 1913, on the brink of war). ‘Human Nature’ is especially poignant; it’s the one where the Doctor has to go into hiding by disguising himself as a human and completely forgets being a Time Lord, and when he learns about the Doctor he doesn’t want to be him. He has a good life as a schoolteacher, the prospect of a fulfilling marriage to the school’s matron; why would he want to become this lonely, unhappy alien? And as well as those great stories, there is the masterpiece that is ‘Blink’: in most people’s judgement the most frightening episode of Doctor Who ever, despite nothing horrible actually happening and the Doctor himself barely appearing (which is made into a feature, not a problem).
Alien Resurrection – surprisingly good instalment in the Alien franchise, which I avoided at the time because of the decidedly dodgy Alien 3, and I couldn’t see how Ripley could possibly come back in a plausible way. But back she is, and Sigournay Weaver is excellent and her performance sustains the film through all the fights and action sequences.
Grey Matter – replaying this adventure game was an interesting experience. I enjoyed it very much the first time, but second time around the surprises and shocks of the storyline naturally didn’t have the same impact and the clunkiness of the gameplay irritated me more and more. (Many objects can’t be picked up until a plot development gives you a reason for needing them - which is realistic but unkind to the player and not what one expects from a game these days. Also, despite having played it before, I repeatedly found myself stumped for what to do to advance the story.)
'Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary' – exhibition at Petworth Gallery. Well worth the long journey (and overnight stay) to see this nicely curated selection from the pioneer surrealist, now touted as “the next Freda Khalo” – meaning a woman artist who only become really famous (and valuable in sales terms) after her death. What attracted me was the strong dreamlike imagery in her paintings and sculptures: lots of animals, and people turning into animals, and animals turning into other animals – all very Jungian (whereas Dali, say, is more Freudian). In the last room of the exhibition, there’s a video interview in which she rejects her interviewer’s attempts to interpret her works and insists instead that you should just sit with them and let them work on you. Thus chastened, I returned to the start and went through the exhibition again, properly and slowly. Someone to keep an eye on.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – surprisingly good film version of the third book in C.S. Lewis's Narnia sequence, which I’d avoided previously because I didn’t think that much of the first film (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my least favourite of the books too). But this turned out to be really good, with credit especially to the boy who plays the horrible Eustace, who is one of Lewis’s recurring characterisation of the sceptic: the person who refuses to accept the reality of what is happening to them and insists on behaving as though they were still in the usual materialistic world. (In Eustace’s case, this takes the form of his repeatedly demanding to see the British Consul.) His character reformation (through being turned into a dragon – forcing him to confront his own greedy and selfish nature) is a bit accelerated, but his final farewell to Reepicheep the talking mouse is very moving. He actually breaks down and cries (how unusual is that to be acceptable in a boy?) when Reepicheep calls him a true friend – because he’s thinking, as we’re all thinking, of just how nasty and (to use the ironically appropriate contemporary word) beastly he was to the mouse at the start.
Ticket to Earth – very good strategy / puzzle game, just right for playing in short bursts. (See review.) The puzzle sequences are played on a grid, with certain rules determining how you can move and attack your opponents and enhance your powers (there’s a role-playing element), and a difficulty level which steadily increases at just the right rate. But importantly these puzzle sequences are embedded within a story which is told through cut scenes and still-frame dialogues. The story wouldn’t be up to much on its own, but it gives emotional involvement to the puzzles and an escalating sense of urgency and the stakes involved.
Julia by Sandra Newman – clever, involving and richly visualised re-telling of George Orwell’s 1984 from Julia’s point of view. We get to see the women’s dormitory, their sexual exploitation by senior male party members, the black market in essential supplies, and the Thought Police’s manipulation of Julia to entrap Winston Smith. (In this version, she is acting under instructions rom O’Brien from the start of their relationship – her later torture in the Ministry of Love notwithstanding.) Excellently written and a great concept: an alternative version which doesn’t invalidate the original but sets another perspective against it, thus opening out our view of this dystopian world.
Never Let Me Go – very good adaptation for the stage of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, which I've still not read but the excellent film version (with Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield) made me think the (eventual) emotional impact would work well on stage, and so it proved. Some very good acting and stagecraft kept the shifts between the same characters at different time periods distinct, although I wish actors wouldn't use that highly mannered totally unrealistic way of talking when they're pretending to be small children. A strong lead in Nell Barlow. Now I really must read the original novel...
Sally Face – very creepy and (mostly) very powerful adventure game. The graphics are simple and cartoony, there’s no voice acting and the interface is about as basic as it can be, and yet despite that – perhaps because of that – the suspense and horror come through all the more clearly. Only the final episode of the five is weak; it feels like the story had already reached its climax and the ending isn’t of the same quality; perhaps the developers were rushing or they’d used all of their good ideas by that point. It reminded me a lot of Cognition: another excellent shocking horrifically gory adventure game, whose final episode was also sub-par.
A House Through Time series 5 – every series of David Olusoga’s House Through Time is wonderful, but this is special: taking two houses (or rather, blocks of flats), one in London and one in Berlin, and following their inhabitants through the 1930s and then the Second World War. Nazi party members, Jews and Africans, a cinema owner, an “enemy alien”, pilots and soldiers and spies and saboteurs: the entire history of the period is here, in the lives of extraordinary ordinary people. Wonderful television.
Trüberbrook – visually impressive but flawed adventure game. The stop-motion models shot against actual sets looked great, but I failed to be interested in the fate of any the characters, and the storyline jerks all over the place. From a promising start, in the titular tiny German town of Trüberbrook, with a hint of uncanny things going on (a doctor obsessed with testing whether people are aliens, a neolithic burial site with indications of rituals, a theoretical physicist’s draft paper stolen by a disappearing figure), the plot then introduces a portal to another dimension and the gameplay degenerates into a long fetch-quest. I played it to the end (making liberal use of a walkthrough) but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Underground Blossom – like all the Rusty Lake games, a beautifully made series of escape rooms, set on an underground railway in which each station represents stages of a person’s life. Surprisingly emotionally engaging, through the characters’ appeals to you, the player, to help them, or to taunt you when they frustrate your aims. A good little game.
Curlew River by Benjamin Britten – powerful and moving filmed performance of this chamber opera in its 60th anniversary year, with Ian Bostridge quite heart-rending as The Madwoman and the strong stage presence of Willard White as The Abbott holding it all together.
Prim – decent point-and-click adventure game, which I helped to Crowdfund. Nice premise: teenage girl discovers that her absent father is actually Death himself, who of course has no idea how to be a father to her; the business of the game concerns her efforts to bring a friend back to life. What really makes the game is the voice-acting, especially that of Prim herself as a stroppy teenager, and the graphics, which are all in mock gothic shades of grey. Some of the puzzles are pretty hard, though, and the story didn't have quite enough forward momentum to carry me through happily.
Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar – this is always for me a highlight in the run-up to Christmas; I buy one for my niece and my grandson, as well as one for myself. This year the setting was Paris, with cafés, boutiques, patisseries and boulangiers, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and your very own Paris apartment with a Christmas tree you can decorate and multiple games and puzzles appearing over the season, any of which could be a paid-for app in its own right. Lots of new things to do every day: a winning formula, which Jacquie Lawson has by now got down pat.
Conclave by Robert Harris – great and masterly novel. It’s now also a film, but I’m very glad to have read the book first, because no matter how good the acting (and with Ralph Finnes and Stanley Tucci the indications are excellent) the film can’t possibly reproduce the subtlety and above all the interiority of the book: the internal thoughts and (of course) prayers of the poor cardinal who has to run the conclave process to choose a new pope, and has somehow to investigate rumours of scandal surrounding the leading candidates while in isolation from the outside world. What I find most impressive is the detail, which I feared at first would be confusing, but it’s like background: you can look at just as much or as little of it as you like. If you do choose to look at it then it’s all authentic and plausible (as Catholic friends of mine have reported), but if you choose to let it slide past you then you miss nothing critical. That’s beautifully kind writing for the reader.
Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear – another good novel in the series featuring the detective Masie Dobbs, which I used to read with my wife in the last few months of her life. In this, the Great War continues to cast its long shadow over people's lives, as Masie investigates the apparently accidental death of a painter, whose emotionally honest depictions of the War ruffled feathers amongst the great and powerful.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe – a novel of now, or the very recent past, given that the key events are set during the ultra-short premiership of Liz Truss in 2022. I do like Coe's writing, which is both intelligent and compassionate, even when it's about people, such as here the libertarian extreme right, whom views he despises. It's also clever, spanning at least three genres, and also very funny (I laughed at loud at one joke about a boomerang which came back). Coe is a couple of years younger than me, so it was also interesting to see his view of Cambridge in the 1980s and the right-wing salons which supported the politics of Thatcher and Reagan. (There were left-wing salons then as well, of course, though those are not his concern; they probably had about as much influence on politics as the SDP.)
Three Thousand Years of Longing – touching fantasy film, with Tilda Swinton as a Professor of Narratology who frees a djinn (Idris Elba) from a bottle and is therefore granted the customary three wishes. Knowing all the stories about trickster djinns, who bring people to destruction through their wishes, she is at first reluctant to play along, but as the djinn tries to prove his honesty by telling her the stories of how he previously came to be imprisoned and the wishes he granted, she begins to become closer to him. Philosophical as well as touching, forcing one to confront the question: what does one really want? And is one prepared to endure the shadow side of one’s deepest wish coming true?
Pan’s Labyrinth – visually striking and emotionally powerful film, set during the Spanish civil war. It centres on a young girl, trying to cope after the death of her father and her mother's re-marriage to a commander in the fascist army. Materially they are secure, but the girl is unhappy and a fantasy world of spirits, both fair and foul, becomes real to her. The interesting thing about the story is that the fantasy world proves to be no escape but just as frightening and dangerous as the real world, which itself – as the commander becomes increasingly deranged and brutal in his pursuit of the partisans – comes to seem no less fantastic that the fantasy world. You want the story to have a happy ending for the girl, but of course it doesn't; that really would have been unrealistic.
'AI Meets Classic Art' – Instagram post by 'latentcosmonaut' Juan Perdón, which animates some famous paintings in funny and very plausible ways. This is a beautiful and benign use of AI video generation, but raises the possibility of the same techniques being used for deception. (Referenced in a LinkedIn post by Donald Clark.)
Present Laughter – super National Theatre production of Noel Coward’s play, shown in my local cinema under the NT Live scheme. The main attraction was Andrew Scott in the lead role of a sybaritic, flamboyant actor at the height of his success (now, who can Coward have been thinking of!) whose life and career threatens to unravel through the collision of present and past lovers of both genders (some characters were gender-swopped for this production, the result seeming very natural). Scott did not disappoint, with a high-energy performance, which must have been exhausting because he was on stage almost the whole time. Nice to be reminded of how good live theatre can be, because MK Theatre doesn’t do it much any more, only musicals.
Doctor Who, the David Tennant era – because seeing him again in the Christmas specials last year reminded me of just how good he was: for my money, better than any of the other nu-Whos, except perhaps Peter Capaldi. Somehow at the time I gave. up on him – perhaps after a duff episode or two – so it’s been a joy to discover some of the cracking stories from his second season, especially the beautifully crafted and place-and-time-situated ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ (1930s New York, both rich and poor) and ‘Human Nature’ (a minor public school in 1913, on the brink of war). ‘Human Nature’ is especially poignant; it’s the one where the Doctor has to go into hiding by disguising himself as a human and completely forgets being a Time Lord, and when he learns about the Doctor he doesn’t want to be him. He has a good life as a schoolteacher, the prospect of a fulfilling marriage to the school’s matron; why would he want to become this lonely, unhappy alien? And as well as those great stories, there is the masterpiece that is ‘Blink’: in most people’s judgement the most frightening episode of Doctor Who ever, despite nothing horrible actually happening and the Doctor himself barely appearing (which is made into a feature, not a problem).
Alien Resurrection – surprisingly good instalment in the Alien franchise, which I avoided at the time because of the decidedly dodgy Alien 3, and I couldn’t see how Ripley could possibly come back in a plausible way. But back she is, and Sigournay Weaver is excellent and her performance sustains the film through all the fights and action sequences.
Grey Matter – replaying this adventure game was an interesting experience. I enjoyed it very much the first time, but second time around the surprises and shocks of the storyline naturally didn’t have the same impact and the clunkiness of the gameplay irritated me more and more. (Many objects can’t be picked up until a plot development gives you a reason for needing them - which is realistic but unkind to the player and not what one expects from a game these days. Also, despite having played it before, I repeatedly found myself stumped for what to do to advance the story.)
'Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary' – exhibition at Petworth Gallery. Well worth the long journey (and overnight stay) to see this nicely curated selection from the pioneer surrealist, now touted as “the next Freda Khalo” – meaning a woman artist who only become really famous (and valuable in sales terms) after her death. What attracted me was the strong dreamlike imagery in her paintings and sculptures: lots of animals, and people turning into animals, and animals turning into other animals – all very Jungian (whereas Dali, say, is more Freudian). In the last room of the exhibition, there’s a video interview in which she rejects her interviewer’s attempts to interpret her works and insists instead that you should just sit with them and let them work on you. Thus chastened, I returned to the start and went through the exhibition again, properly and slowly. Someone to keep an eye on.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – surprisingly good film version of the third book in C.S. Lewis's Narnia sequence, which I’d avoided previously because I didn’t think that much of the first film (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my least favourite of the books too). But this turned out to be really good, with credit especially to the boy who plays the horrible Eustace, who is one of Lewis’s recurring characterisation of the sceptic: the person who refuses to accept the reality of what is happening to them and insists on behaving as though they were still in the usual materialistic world. (In Eustace’s case, this takes the form of his repeatedly demanding to see the British Consul.) His character reformation (through being turned into a dragon – forcing him to confront his own greedy and selfish nature) is a bit accelerated, but his final farewell to Reepicheep the talking mouse is very moving. He actually breaks down and cries (how unusual is that to be acceptable in a boy?) when Reepicheep calls him a true friend – because he’s thinking, as we’re all thinking, of just how nasty and (to use the ironically appropriate contemporary word) beastly he was to the mouse at the start.
Ticket to Earth – very good strategy / puzzle game, just right for playing in short bursts. (See review.) The puzzle sequences are played on a grid, with certain rules determining how you can move and attack your opponents and enhance your powers (there’s a role-playing element), and a difficulty level which steadily increases at just the right rate. But importantly these puzzle sequences are embedded within a story which is told through cut scenes and still-frame dialogues. The story wouldn’t be up to much on its own, but it gives emotional involvement to the puzzles and an escalating sense of urgency and the stakes involved.
Julia by Sandra Newman – clever, involving and richly visualised re-telling of George Orwell’s 1984 from Julia’s point of view. We get to see the women’s dormitory, their sexual exploitation by senior male party members, the black market in essential supplies, and the Thought Police’s manipulation of Julia to entrap Winston Smith. (In this version, she is acting under instructions rom O’Brien from the start of their relationship – her later torture in the Ministry of Love notwithstanding.) Excellently written and a great concept: an alternative version which doesn’t invalidate the original but sets another perspective against it, thus opening out our view of this dystopian world.
Never Let Me Go – very good adaptation for the stage of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, which I've still not read but the excellent film version (with Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield) made me think the (eventual) emotional impact would work well on stage, and so it proved. Some very good acting and stagecraft kept the shifts between the same characters at different time periods distinct, although I wish actors wouldn't use that highly mannered totally unrealistic way of talking when they're pretending to be small children. A strong lead in Nell Barlow. Now I really must read the original novel...
Sally Face – very creepy and (mostly) very powerful adventure game. The graphics are simple and cartoony, there’s no voice acting and the interface is about as basic as it can be, and yet despite that – perhaps because of that – the suspense and horror come through all the more clearly. Only the final episode of the five is weak; it feels like the story had already reached its climax and the ending isn’t of the same quality; perhaps the developers were rushing or they’d used all of their good ideas by that point. It reminded me a lot of Cognition: another excellent shocking horrifically gory adventure game, whose final episode was also sub-par.
A House Through Time series 5 – every series of David Olusoga’s House Through Time is wonderful, but this is special: taking two houses (or rather, blocks of flats), one in London and one in Berlin, and following their inhabitants through the 1930s and then the Second World War. Nazi party members, Jews and Africans, a cinema owner, an “enemy alien”, pilots and soldiers and spies and saboteurs: the entire history of the period is here, in the lives of extraordinary ordinary people. Wonderful television.
Trüberbrook – visually impressive but flawed adventure game. The stop-motion models shot against actual sets looked great, but I failed to be interested in the fate of any the characters, and the storyline jerks all over the place. From a promising start, in the titular tiny German town of Trüberbrook, with a hint of uncanny things going on (a doctor obsessed with testing whether people are aliens, a neolithic burial site with indications of rituals, a theoretical physicist’s draft paper stolen by a disappearing figure), the plot then introduces a portal to another dimension and the gameplay degenerates into a long fetch-quest. I played it to the end (making liberal use of a walkthrough) but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Underground Blossom – like all the Rusty Lake games, a beautifully made series of escape rooms, set on an underground railway in which each station represents stages of a person’s life. Surprisingly emotionally engaging, through the characters’ appeals to you, the player, to help them, or to taunt you when they frustrate your aims. A good little game.
Curlew River by Benjamin Britten – powerful and moving filmed performance of this chamber opera in its 60th anniversary year, with Ian Bostridge quite heart-rending as The Madwoman and the strong stage presence of Willard White as The Abbott holding it all together.
Prim – decent point-and-click adventure game, which I helped to Crowdfund. Nice premise: teenage girl discovers that her absent father is actually Death himself, who of course has no idea how to be a father to her; the business of the game concerns her efforts to bring a friend back to life. What really makes the game is the voice-acting, especially that of Prim herself as a stroppy teenager, and the graphics, which are all in mock gothic shades of grey. Some of the puzzles are pretty hard, though, and the story didn't have quite enough forward momentum to carry me through happily.
Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar – this is always for me a highlight in the run-up to Christmas; I buy one for my niece and my grandson, as well as one for myself. This year the setting was Paris, with cafés, boutiques, patisseries and boulangiers, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, and your very own Paris apartment with a Christmas tree you can decorate and multiple games and puzzles appearing over the season, any of which could be a paid-for app in its own right. Lots of new things to do every day: a winning formula, which Jacquie Lawson has by now got down pat.
Conclave by Robert Harris – great and masterly novel. It’s now also a film, but I’m very glad to have read the book first, because no matter how good the acting (and with Ralph Finnes and Stanley Tucci the indications are excellent) the film can’t possibly reproduce the subtlety and above all the interiority of the book: the internal thoughts and (of course) prayers of the poor cardinal who has to run the conclave process to choose a new pope, and has somehow to investigate rumours of scandal surrounding the leading candidates while in isolation from the outside world. What I find most impressive is the detail, which I feared at first would be confusing, but it’s like background: you can look at just as much or as little of it as you like. If you do choose to look at it then it’s all authentic and plausible (as Catholic friends of mine have reported), but if you choose to let it slide past you then you miss nothing critical. That’s beautifully kind writing for the reader.
Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear – another good novel in the series featuring the detective Masie Dobbs, which I used to read with my wife in the last few months of her life. In this, the Great War continues to cast its long shadow over people's lives, as Masie investigates the apparently accidental death of a painter, whose emotionally honest depictions of the War ruffled feathers amongst the great and powerful.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe – a novel of now, or the very recent past, given that the key events are set during the ultra-short premiership of Liz Truss in 2022. I do like Coe's writing, which is both intelligent and compassionate, even when it's about people, such as here the libertarian extreme right, whom views he despises. It's also clever, spanning at least three genres, and also very funny (I laughed at loud at one joke about a boomerang which came back). Coe is a couple of years younger than me, so it was also interesting to see his view of Cambridge in the 1980s and the right-wing salons which supported the politics of Thatcher and Reagan. (There were left-wing salons then as well, of course, though those are not his concern; they probably had about as much influence on politics as the SDP.)
Tuesday, 3 December 2024
Cuttings: November 2024
The Powerful Density of Hypertextual Writing – blog post by Jason Kottke, referenced in John Naughton’s Observer column. "The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety. 'You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.’ What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument.“
My friend has embraced conspiracy theories and I’m fed up with it – Philippa Perry's advice column in The Guardian. The question: "I’ve had a good friend for more than 30 years, but since Covid he has become a conspiracy theorist. He only sources “alternative news” from the internet. He quotes hard right, conspiracy narratives. He supports Trump and Putin. He claims he is an anarchist and won’t vote. He becomes arrogant and insulting because I disagree with him.... Is there any hope?" Philippa's answer: "During ... turbulent times, many individuals feel lost and fearful. It’s a natural response to crave solid ground in an effort to gain a sense of clarity amid the chaos. Historically, this craving for certainty has often led people to seek out leaders and ideologies that offer simple, definitive answers.... Your friend’s embrace of conspiracy theories seems to be a modern manifestation of this same desire for certainty. By aligning himself with right-wing narratives, he has constructed a worldview that feels predictable and ordered. His admiration for figures who present themselves as 'strong', decisive leaders will be tied to his need for clear, unambiguous answers.... Trying to push against his beliefs deepens his defensiveness. Think of him like a car in a skid, you want to take the wheel and switch direction, but the car has too much momentum and it will carry on the same path. However, if you take hold of the wheel and steer into the skid, then there is a chance you can steer out of it. This means putting yourself in his shoes, understanding that his fears were triggered by the pandemic and how – for him – it was much less frightening to imagine that Covid was not a horrible freak of nature, but caused by a group of bad people. For him to then make those people his enemy, and attack that enemy, makes the ground feel safer under his feet. This is how you handle children who believe in monsters under the bed, you ask the child to tell you about the monsters and then you empathise and the child feels comforted. Then, and only then, will it be possible for the child not to believe in the monsters. Such an intervention could work with your friend, but it is a long shot. You deserve relationships where your voice is heard and respected. It is not selfish to seek out friends who enrich your life rather than drain it. If steering into the skid doesn’t work, I’d call it a day and move on."
Off-White, The Truth About Antisemitism by Rachel Shabi: racism by any other name – review by Natasha Walter in The Guardian. "As [Shabi] writes: 'The left has ceded the space on antisemitism… and the right has smartly and strategically filled that void.'... It has been hard to talk about this for a long time, for fear of detracting from what feels like more pressing anti-black racism. But now, when charges of antisemitism are being used by defenders of Israel to head off criticism of horrific crimes against Palestinians, it often feels pretty much impossible. Still, not dealing with it is not doing anyone except racists any favours, and many of us will feel grateful to Shabi for stepping out into this maze.... There is no simple truth here, but rather a host of interconnected and complex stories. Shabi, who was born in Israel to Iraqi Jewish parents, and whose previous book explored the experiences of Israeli Jews from Arab countries, is a good and careful guide through many of these thorny paths.... She is sharp on the ways that antisemitism differs from other kinds of racism, and how that can make it difficult to confront.... As other writers have also pointed out, ... Jews [are] both white and not white – as the title has it: Off-White – depending on the situation. But antisemitism can be as harmful as any other racism, and spawned the genocide whose trauma still echoes down the generations. Shabi is honest that, while she doesn’t personally share this sense of trauma, she recognises that for many Jewish people it is still present, and the assumption that they should see themselves as 'white' 'can flatten out the sense of paper-thin conditionality that feels ever-present for many Jewish people'. As a Jew brought up in a family still dealing with the ghosts of the past, I would agree that leftwingers need to do better at accepting this all-too-real sense of vulnerability, 'without dismissal, disbelief, or bad faith'. For sure, the Holocaust is currently being weaponised to head off criticism of Israel, but we don’t get past that simply by denying the reality of Jewish anguish. As Shabi says at one point: 'There has rarely been a more urgent need for us to stretch our compassion, to hold Jewish trauma even while a savagely catastrophic war is inflicted on Palestinians in its name.'”
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas: what makes life worth living? – review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. “You’re diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 46. How do you react? In all likelihood with rage, grief and self-pity, especially if, like Simon Boas, you were told it was only acid reflux, and cancelled scans and bureaucratic cock-ups further delayed treatment. You love your wife, you have a great job, you’re addicted to cheese fondue and muscadet, and death will take all that away. A nightmare, it seems, but far from bewailing his lot Boas tells us how insanely contented he feels and ‘how lucky it is to have lived at all’…. Be kind and grateful, he urges. ‘Feast and laugh and voyage and sing!’ His positivity, conveyed in breezy exclamation marks, is a slap in the face for those of us who are afraid of death and who feel entitled to threescore-and-ten. Boas wants people to smile when they remember him and to ‘think of me as a book they are glad they’ve read’. Why should he complain when he has lived longer than most humans in history and when his experiences as an aid worker, in war zones and shattered communities, have taught him how privileged those of us in developed countries are? ‘Cheer up you buggers’ is the message. Enjoyably self-deprecating, he doesn’t claim to be a philosopher but offers cogent reasons for equanimity in the face of death. Acceptance offers perspective, he says, and is better than pursuing miracle cures.“
‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber – article by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, from her foreword to Graeber's The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. "David Graeber was a joyful, celebratory person. An enthusiast, voluble, on fire with the possibilities in the ideas and ideologies he wrestled with.... He insisted, again and again, that industrialised Euro-American civilisation was, like other societies past and present, only one way of doing things among countless options. He cited times when societies rejected agriculture or technology or social hierarchy, when social groups chose what has often been dismissed as primitive because it was more free. And he rejected all the linear narratives that present contemporary human beings as declining from primordial innocence or ascending from primitive barbarism. He offered, in place of a single narrative, many versions and variations; a vision of societies as ongoing experiments, and human beings as endlessly creative. That variety was a source of hope for him, a basis for his recurrent insistence that it doesn’t have to be this way.... He was often credited with coining the Occupy Wall Street slogan 'We are the 99%', but he insisted on paring his credit down to having contributed the 99% part to a phrase so compelling that 'the 1%' remains a widely used description of the uppermost elite. 'The 99%' is a hopeful phrase, in opposition to the old layer-cake description of the working, middle, and upper classes. It’s an assertion that the great majority of us are working, and often financially struggling or precarious; that most of us have a lot in common – and a lot of reasons to oppose the super-rich... We have to recognise that ideas are tools that we wield – and with them, some power. David wanted to put these tools in everyone’s hands, or remind them that they are already there. Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that wasn’t always simple but was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too. Our mutual friend the writer, film-maker, and debt abolitionist Astra Taylor texted him: 'Re-reading Debt. You are such a damn good writer. A rare skill among lefties.' He texted back that August, a month before his demise: 'Why thanks! Well at least I take care to do so – I call it "being nice to the reader," which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.'”.
'It will renew your faith in humanity’: books to bring comfort in dark times – article by Francesca Segal in The Guardian. "'Life is short and the world / is at least half terrible,' observes the poet Maggie Smith. But which are the books to reach for when the terrible half is in the ascendant? I’ve come to treasure a particular category I’d define as the literary comfort novel: elegant and beautifully written stories that renew our faith in humanity, that leave us better than they found us, that work – and thus expand – the muscle of the heart. Lately, I’ve come to realise that I want to read one story: despite everything, it is going to be OK.... The novels that bring most comfort to writer Sathnam Sanghera all share landlocked settings, as a reader 'both from the Midlands and with heritage from the Punjab'. He’s comforted when the world of the novel feels safe, and cites fellow Black Country writer Jonathan Coe as his ultimate comfort read because 'there’s so much warmth to his characters'. Also Possession by AS Byatt, which is 'a book about books, and therefore safety within safety'.... Everyone by now has read the wonderful Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus: funny, poignant, unbelievably satisfying. I loved it – and in a similar vein, have you also read Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple? The two have in common a gifted woman resisting the role in which she has been cast; losing and then triumphantly finding herself.... For the novelist Naomi Alderman a literary comfort read should be 'a pep talk in the corner of the boxing ring of life', and her own favourites are Susanna Clarke’s magisterial Piranesi, 'which is really a book about surviving a long illness, but somehow also about how it’s OK to be changed by life, by hard times, by the world; that being changed can be a power as well as a wound'. And George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, 'about a man facing the worst possible thing, the death of his child, and having to haul himself together to save his country. It’s a book that’s rich and tender, and so full of clear-eyed love for humanity – the belief that, with all our rough edges and unsavouriness, we are still worth saving.'”
Far-right leaders are winning across the globe. Blaming ‘the economy’ or ‘the left-behinds’ won’t cut it – article by Richard Seymour in The Guardian. "Why does the far right keep winning? Is it 'the economy, stupid', as James Carville put it during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically 'left behind' is quite popular. There is a kernel of truth to this: the state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters in 2024.... Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface.... The political effects of economic misery are more indirect... Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and 'spongers' who threaten their lifestyle. Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics. Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a 'politics of existential revenge'. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of 'communist' takeover and amplifies the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against 'white genocide' and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism."
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe: a blue murder mystery – review by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "The Proof of My Innocence – proof as in both demonstration and correctable copy, and innocence as in both lack of guilt and naivety – is a more serious examination of literature’s power and limitations than the mixture of whodunit and political chronicle in which it is wrapped at first suggests. That outer wrapper is itself diverting and instructive. Revolving around the murder of an investigative journalist at TrueCon, a rightwing conference held in a crumbling stately home in the early days of Liz Truss’s premiership, it features an exploration of how and why things fell apart, a deft tracing of the history of American conservatism and its arrival in the UK, and a white-haired, hard-drinking detective called Pru Freeborne (or, of course, Proof Reborn).... As ever, Coe’s study of the way we live now is underpinned by his interest in nostalgia, its personal allure – the lullaby half-remembered, the Morecambe and Wise sketch – and its larger dangers. In the aftermath of the pivot from collective responsibility to individual aspiration licensed and extended if not created by Thatcherism, we are nostalgic for 'that brief postwar moment', a time 'when our bowler hats may have got run over by steamrollers and our song-and-dance routines may have gone comically wrong but at least we could depend on each other, at least we had each other’s backs'. Where the novel sits in times like these is one of Coe’s questions, and if asking it involves deploying secret passages, treacherous hairpin bends, burned manuscripts and, naturally, a villain hiding in plain sight, then so be it. As he might observe, you have to move with the times."
‘Have your bot speak to my bot’: can AI productivity apps turbocharge my life? – article by Victoria Turk in The Guardian. "Generative AI has been eagerly adopted in the productivity tech space... I’ve generally been sceptical of such products,... But with a new generation on the scene, I wondered if my workflow couldn’t benefit from an AI boost.... I approached NotebookLM with caution, noting the disclaimer at the bottom of the screen: 'NotebookLM may still sometimes give inaccurate responses, so you may want to confirm any facts independently.' As a journalist, I’m wary of AI’s tendency to 'hallucinate'. But NotebookLM differs from text generators such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini in that it only works with the information you provide. ... I tried uploading notes and interview files for a story I was working on, then asked the 'Notebook guide' – an AI assistant – to produce a briefing doc based on their content. I immediately saw the appeal. The brief summarised key points raised from hours of audio and drew links between my sources. It even pulled out key quotes. Using the AI chat function, I interrogated the material further, asking which findings were most surprising and posing specific questions about the content. Rather than trawling through my transcripts to remember which interviewees had made a particular point, I simply asked: 'Who spoke about [X topic]?' and got a detailed summary of who said what – along with footnotes directing me to the exact wording in the original material. It’s the restriction at the core of NotebookLM – using only the information you provide – that makes it so useful. I could see it being adopted by students and knowledge workers of all stripes."
How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world – article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "... 2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. ... Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.... 4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate. 5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice. 6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.... 7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, 'Do not obey in advance', is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: 'Know what you stand for and what you think is good.' ... 15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: 'If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.'"
The climate crisis and all the evil in the world drives me to despair – Philippa Perry's advice column in The Guardian. The question: "I am finding it ever more difficult to be in this nasty world. Everything that I cherish is being destroyed and there is nowhere to go to find solace." Philippa's answer: "I cannot offer you the false balm of easy answers. What I can offer, however, is this: the world has ever been thus. The great and the small, all have trampled on one another in their greed, ignorance and pursuit of power. In the end, Voltaire decided, we are left with but one solution: to cultivate our own garden. I do not mean this literally,... though your love of nature might lend itself well to such a task. I mean, rather, that you must focus on what is within your power. The world, with all its evils, is vast and terrible, but there is a corner of it that you can tend, that you can preserve with your heart and your mind.... I urge you, like Candide, to find your own way, to act where you can and to care deeply for those who share your values. The world will continue to be absurd, but you, with all your passion, your intellect, and your sorrow, can still make your corner of it more bearable. What if you sought a relationship not out of fear, but out of a desire for shared strength in facing the future? When you meet others who share your values and concerns, those relationships can become sources of resilience. In this world, we must cultivate our garden. And if we all do that, the gardens might add up to make a difference."
A caring Thomas Cromwell makes good TV, but beware the ‘yes’ men who enable tyrants – article by Kate Maltby in The Guardian. "Thomas Cromwell is back, and this time he’s a romantic. In Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the latest BBC TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, we see Henry VIII’s chief facilitator turn 21st-century empath, offering a listening ear to half the young women of the Henrician court.... This is not the real Thomas Cromwell. It is true that the Tudor politician was a strategic, careful and self-taught Renaissance man. He was also a killer who rewrote a nation’s constitution and bullied its parliament into submission in the service of an impulsive dictator. Now, as Donald Trump returns to the White House, we need to be clear-eyed about the men who enable tyrants. When we whitewash Cromwell’s legacy, we blind ourselves to the warning he offers us.... Mantel always understood that Henry VIII was a tyrant; TV writer Peter Straughan makes him a psychopath, played by a cold-eyed Damian Lewis.... Whether or not Henry was a psychopath, Cromwell was a familiar figure, the legal officer who facilitated the human rights abuses of a despot in the highest office. Tudor monarchs aimed to bend the law to their will, but they were always constrained by its basic principles. Cromwell made a career of finding legal excuses for Henry’s diktats. This makes him a poor role model for our times. Last week, Trump unveiled his own list of Thomas Cromwells: the yes men and enablers who will frame US law to fulfil his wishes. First on the agenda is Trump’s promise to deport the full undocumented population, thought to include 11 million migrants.... Mantel’s original novels are more morally complicated. The Mirror and the Light, as a text, was never an exoneration of Cromwell but a Faustian narrative in which our unreliable narrator slowly comes to realise his own moral decay. In the most revelatory chapter, he is confronted by his betrayal of the Protestant William Tyndale. The TV series, so far, has missed this point. In an era which demands that we each examine our political conscience, that is an unforgivable mistake."
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