Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home: the wonder of the wireless revolution – review by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. "Rubens, a BBC producer for more than 35 years, is keen for her book to show how radio affected people’s lives – 'the shift in household habits, the awakenings of new tastes, the alterations and adaptations of attitudes'. Evidence for this was minimal before she discovered the work of two pioneering audience researchers, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, whose 1938 explorations into radio’s effects on working-class people in Barton Hill, near Bristol, was published, and quickly overlooked, in the week Britain declared war on Germany. In a box in the Bodleian Library, Rubens found the pamphlet and Gill’s original notepads, full of rare examples of early feedback. These included radio’s effects on a man who was once drunk and abusive ..., a Welsh grocer obsessed with the news ... and a husband who tunes the radio to foreign-language stations when he leaves for work, so his wife can’t understand it, then disconnects it completely when he goes away for a conference. 'She’s left him now,' trills the interviewee on this subject. Rubens’s findings may have been the book’s impetus, but other stories around the development of radio put flesh on these bones.... The finest testimony, however, comes from a 1928 letter to the BBC from a 'clerk in a provincial city'. His life is 'a tram-ride to the office, lunch in a tea-shop or saloon bar, a tram-ride home' and he can’t spend much money, 'because you’ve got your holidays to think of'. But, he adds: 'Please don’t think I’m complaining. I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It’s a real magic carpet.' Almost 100 years later, despite our world being so very different to his, radio, at its best, continues to be."
Researchers fool university markers with AI-generated exam papers – article by Richard Adams in The Guardian. "Researchers at the University of Reading fooled their own professors by secretly submitting AI-generated exam answers that went undetected and got better grades than real students. The project created fake student identities to submit unedited answers generated by ChatGPT-4 in take-home online assessments for undergraduate courses. The university’s markers – who were not told about the project – flagged only one of the 33 entries, with the remaining AI answers receiving higher than average grades than the students. The authors said their findings showed that AI processors such as ChatGPT were now passing the 'Turing test' – named after the computing pioneer Alan Turing – of being able to pass undetected by experienced judges. Billed as 'the largest and most robust blind study of its kind' to investigate if human educators could detect AI-generated responses, the authors warned that it had major implications for how universities assess students."
It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "The first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart. Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project.... Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they’d keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn’t how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable.... Rather cheeringly, however, it seems ... gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way. Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and 'digital detox' events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection."
Finishing a book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The writer. [Picture shows him hard at work.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The agent: 'It's great! I have a few notes.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The editor: 'It's great! I have a few suggestions.' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.] Writer: 'I've finished my book!' The readers: 'It's great! We need a sequel!' And so... [Picture shows the writer hard at work again.]"
‘AI will become very good at manipulating emotions’: Kazuo Ishiguro on the future of fiction and truth – interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "One of the things he has been thinking about recently is his responsibilities as a writer. 'I’ve become quite wary of the power to provoke emotions in readers... And most of my writing life, that’s how I justified my job. I would say that you won’t learn much about history from me; go to a historian. However, a novelist can provide the emotional dimension; we offer some sort of emotional truth that is not there in nonfiction, however scrupulously well researched and documented.' But over the last few years, he’s become increasingly worried that stirring up strong emotional responses has a far darker dimension, as we see in the way that political movements are able to harness citizens by appealing to their instincts rather than to evidence. 'In the post-truth Trump era, there’s this relentless attack on accredited news media. It’s not just Trump: it’s a general atmosphere that whatever the evidence, if you don’t like it, you can just claim some alternative emotional truth for yourself....' That can only be intensified, he believes, by the increasing power of AI. 'AI will become very good at manipulating emotions. I think we’re on the verge of that. At the moment we’re just thinking of AI crunching data or something. But very soon, AI will be able to figure out how you create certain kinds of emotions in people – anger, sadness, laughter.'... So in a post-truth society aided by AI and algorithms, is it enough for fiction to pack an emotional punch? 'If I was deploying that kind of gift for the service of a politician or for a large corporation that wanted to sell pharmaceuticals, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was commendable, you’d be highly suspicious of it. But if I’m doing it in the service of telling a story, that is considered to be something really valuable,' he says. 'It’s something that increasingly makes me feel uneasy, because I haven’t been praised for my incredible style, or because in my fiction I exposed great injustices in the world. I’ve usually been praised for producing stuff that makes people cry.' He laughs. 'They gave me a Nobel prize for it.'"
Opening our eyes to the science of sleep, in 1971 – archival exploration by Genevieve Fox in The Guardian. "'Sleep is like love. If you have it, you take it for granted,’ reports Wendy Cooper in the Observer Magazine on 24 January 1971.... In special sleep laboratories throughout the world, the ‘secrets of the strange phenomenon of sleep are being properly investigated for the first time,’ enthuses Cooper. They are armed with a new wonder machine: the electro-encephalograph (EEG), which detects the minute electrical changes taking place in the brain, amplifying and recording them.... The real excitement starts, says Cooper, when ‘the eyes make rapid jerky coordinated movements… This indicates a special form of sleep known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep; the brainwaves at these times resemble waking brainwaves and the body parallels this with a storm of activity’. Irregular heart-rate, increased oxygen intake, reduced muscle tone, It’s all preparation for action in the sleeper’s ‘personal world of dreams’, dreams that are vivid, ‘emotional, self-involved and often bizarre adventures’. This association between REM sleep and active dreaming is ‘perhaps the most exciting discovery so far made in sleep research’ – for ‘it makes possible the scientific study of dreams’."
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: are we really getting sicker? – review by Mark Honigsbaum in The Guardian. "As medicine has become more sophisticated and we have developed more sensitive tests and treatments, so more and more people have acquired diagnostic labels. As Suzanne O’Sullivan, who has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, argues in The Age of Diagnosis, this can be a good thing if the diagnosis leads to greater understanding and improved treatments, but not if the diagnosis is not as definitive as we think and risks medicalising people without long-term benefits to their health. For example, as many as half a million people in Australia are reported to have Lyme disease, even though the Lyme-carrying ticks are not present in Australia. Worldwide, the condition has an estimated 85% overdiagnosis rate. Or consider autism. Fifty years ago, autism was said to affect four in 10,000 people. Today, the worldwide prevalence is one in 100 and in the UK diagnoses of autism increased 787% between 1998 and 2018. Similarly, the proportion of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, a term first coined in 1987 to describe fidgety children who had trouble concentrating, doubled in boys and tripled in girls between 2000 and 2018 and today the diagnosis is also increasingly being applied to adults. But what if these reported increases do not reflect an actual increase in the prevalence of these conditions but are examples of 'diagnosis creep'? As O’Sullivan writes: 'It could be that borderline medical problems are becoming ironclad diagnoses and that normal differences are being pathologised… In other words: we are not getting sicker – we are attributing more to sickness.'”
The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O’Sullivan: do no harm – review by Adam Rutherford in The Guardian. "Thirty years a doctor, 25 a neurologist, [O'Sullivan's] excellent books occupy a space once dominated by Oliver Sacks, where individual tales of disease and distress reveal broader truths about science, medicine and people.... She describes a trinity of 'overs'. Overdiagnosis, where a medical problem is treated when treatment might not be needed; overmedicalisation, where non-medical behaviours are turned into the business of doctors; and underlying both, overdetection: we are ever better at identifying signals of disease, sometimes earlier than necessary, when those indicators may not end up presaging the disease itself. For example, some studies have shown that early screening programmes for cancers may result in arduous treatment when cancer itself was not inevitable. Alongside balanced analysis of the epidemiological data on prostate and breast cancer, O’Sullivan examines the growth in behavioural conditions such as autism and ADHD. The tone is not sneering or dismissive, as debunkings of bad science so often can be. O’Sullivan is instead full of compassion, care and grace.... O’Sullivan is brave to take this subject on, and she hits the target. I have little tolerance for tedious old men droning on about how 'in our day, you just got on with things', or 'now everyone’s got autism/ADHD', or worst of all that young people today are delicate snowflakes, medicalising everything and blaming everyone else. Apart from anything, this sentiment has been expressed by every older generation for thousands of years. So how do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from rightwing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."
They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed – article by J Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. "Ziz’s writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the 'rationalists'. The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology and the big questions of our time. Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all. They debate with earnest and deadly seriousness, and their preferred arena of intellectual combat is dense blogposts, often with footnotes.... Very few people had ever heard of Zizians until this January, when a US border patrol agent pulled over two young people, dressed in black, driving a Prius hybrid near the Vermont-Canada border. The ensuing shootout killed a federal officer. It also left one of the alleged shooters in custody and the other, a math prodigy who had formerly worked as a quant trader in New York, dead. From there, the story grew stranger. Reporting by Open Vallejo and other outlets found that the Vermont pair had ties to a group of leftwing anarchists in California – including one who won an $11,000 prize for AI research in 2023 and was also arrested this January for allegedly murdering a landlord. A few things drew those people together: all were militant vegans with a worldview that could be described as far-left. All were highly educated – or impressive autodidacts. Most were also, like Ziz, transgender. But what they had in common, above all, was a kinship with a philosophy, which Ziz largely promulgated, that takes abstract questions from AI research to extreme and selective conclusions.... How, exactly, did hyper-intelligent young altruists – who studied at Oxford, Waterloo and Rice, won academic prizes and research grants, and spoke sincerely of bettering the world – enter a trajectory that has ended with at least six people dead? What would cause a former spelling bee finalist to write in a chatroom discussion of having 'dramatic fantasies about becoming a knife murderer' – and then, a year later, allegedly participate in an attempt to stab someone to death? The answers lie in a strange saga of idealism and disenchantment: a violent collision of internet culture and the real world – and perhaps a harbinger of more uncanny tidings to come."
Universality by Natasha Brown: clever satire of identity politics – review by Jo Hamya in The Guardian. "The first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses [a gold bar] to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining 'microsociety' on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic.... Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with 'multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend'. A perfect symbol, in short, of 'the excessive fruits of late capitalism'.... [But] after the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters’ perspectives. We learn to read carefully.... [After her previous novel Assembly,] Brown is having more fun within the constraints of our current sociopolitical discourse. Universality is less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core question: nothing about the language in it is neutral. Pronouncements on 'wokeism', on meritocracy, on race and culture wars fall from characters’ mouths like bombs. Thanks to the novel’s ingenious structure, the more you hear them, the more you realise how inhibiting they are, and how soul-crushingly tiring it is to spend your one precious life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and utterly useless system: a realisation only one character profits from, though dangerously so. It’ll be interesting to watch Brown navigate her publicity run in an era of tech bros heralding a very particular mode of free speech. If Assembly was a meditation on the linguistic construction of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identity, then the final two chapters of Universality successfully consolidate this new novel as an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths."
Unearthed notebooks shed light on [Michael Faraday, the] Victorian genius who inspired Einstein – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "The little-known notebooks of the Victorian scientist Michael Faraday have been unearthed from the archive of the Royal Institution and are to be digitised and made permanently accessible online for the first time. The notebooks include Faraday’s handwritten notes on a series of lectures given by the electrochemical pioneer Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in 1812.... The notebooks shed light on the workings of Faraday’s mind and reveal he made intricate drawings to visualise the scientific experiments and principles he was learning about at the lectures. 'He’s taking the time to make his own publication and grounding what’s being taught to him in his own understanding,' said [Charlotte New, head of heritage for the Royal Institution]. 'He’s heavily illustrating his notes to understand the principle that’s been taught to him.' He even wrote an index for each notebook, she said, just for his own use and personal research.... A curated selection of key pages from the notebooks will be launched online for the first time on the Royal Institution website on 24 March, to mark 200 years since Faraday founded the annual Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Inspired by Davy’s talks to pursue a career in science, Faraday established these lectures in 1825 in the hope of encouraging others in the same way.... Eventually, every page of Faraday’s notebooks will be digitised and made searchable online."
The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic - article from 2013 in Slate, referenced in 'The big idea: do we worry too much about misinformation?' by by Adam Kucharski in The Guardian. "Wednesday [30 October 2013] marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. 'Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,' narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program.... That’s the story you already know—it’s the narrative widely reprinted in academic textbooks and popular histories.... There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast. How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.... A curious (but predictable) phenomenon occurred: As the show receded in time and became more infamous, more and more people claimed to have heard it. As weeks, months, and years passed, the audience’s size swelled to such an extent that you might actually believe most of America was tuned to CBS that night. But that was hardly the case. Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. 'To what program are you listening?' the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio 'play' or 'the Orson Welles program,' or something similar indicating CBS. None said a 'news broadcast,' according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising. Welles’ program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time—ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show."
What is the meaning of life? 15 possible answers, from a palliative care doctor, a Holocaust survivor, a jail inmate and more – article by James Bailey in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Meaning of Life: Letters from Extraordinary People and their Answer to Life’s Biggest Question. "I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932. I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers.... What follows is a small selection of the responses... Hilary Mantel: 'I’ve had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: “meaning” and “purpose”. I don’t think they’re the same. I’m not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.' ... Michael Frayn: 'Thank you for inviting me to contribute to your anthology of views on the meaning of life. It’s not something I can respond to, I’m afraid, because it’s not clear to me how “life” can have a “meaning” in any ordinary sense of either word. It might be an idea to start with something smaller, say a pickled walnut. Once we’ve got it clear how a pickled walnut could have a “meaning”, we might move on to something larger – the borough of Haringey, say, or influenza – and work our way up.'... Kathryn Mannix (palliative care consultant): 'Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That’s what I’ve learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it’s shown me that it isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.'... Susan Pollack (Holocaust survivor): 'I am a camp survivor from Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. I was totally dehumanised, fearful, distrustful, lost to contemplate the future, all alone, unable to comprehend the values for a life in a modern civilisation.... The first awareness, in Bergen-Belsen, was the discovery that kindness and goodwill had also survived. When the British soldier lifted me up from the mud hole – seeing a twitch in my body – he gently placed me in one of the small ambulances. From that experience, miraculous goodwill is one of the guiding lights to this day. I often think of that moment and ask, “What part of that goodness with your heart do you take from that soldier?”'... Oliver Burkeman: 'I agree with the scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell, that it makes more sense to say that what we’re seeking isn’t a meaning for life, so much as the experience of feeling fully alive. There are experiences that I know, in my bones, are “why I’m here” – unhurried time with my son, or deep conversations with my wife, hikes in the North York Moors, writing and communicating with people who’ve found liberation in something I have written.... What’s changed for me is that I no longer feel these experiences need this particular kind of justification. I want to show up fully, or as fully as possible, for my time on Earth. That’s all – but, then again, I think that is everything.'"
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley: how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. "In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures ...on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, 'English clocks' and 'British explorers', written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It’s hard to imagine a more patriotic project ... except that, 'at every level except for the texts', this was 'an entirely central European endeavour'. Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson. This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain’s cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children’s literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre ... created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray."
AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End – text of lecture by Stephen Fry for King's College London's Digital Futures Institute, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ll take you back fifteen or so years to a time when I found myself being ... asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called.... What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. ... I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. 'Local and global rivalries will dissolve,' I said. 'Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely,' I cried, 'Twitter and Facebook and this new world of "social media" will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity.' Two years later as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria rose against their dictators, the Arab Spring bloomed. How right I had been. How clever and percipient I was. But… Just a year or so on and that blissful dawn had turned into the darkest of nights. Libya leapt out of the frying pan of Gaddafi into the fire of anarchy and chaos, Egypt into a military coup, Yemen into brutal civil war, Syria into a bloodbath. Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all.... Welcome to today.... Hilariously enough, just like the French Revolution, the Twitter revolution also ended with a little Napoleon seizing power and crowning himself Emperor, a little NapolElon I should say."
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock: haunting accounts of horrific medical abuse – review by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. "William Sargant, ... one of the most notorious figures in British psychiatry,... firmly believed that a broken brain was no different to any other damaged organ or limb, and best fixed with aggressive physical treatment. Not for him the namby-pamby chitchat of Freud’s 'sofa merchants' and their spurious talking cures. Rather, psychiatric illnesses such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia could all be cured with excessive doses of drugs and electricity, or, if they failed, with surgical lobotomy. Sargant’s patients were sequestered away behind locked doors on the top floor of the hospital. The most infamous part of his ward was a six-bedded area known as the Sleep Room. Here, the patients, nearly all of whom were female, were drugged into long-term stupors, being roused from their beds only to be fed, washed or given innumerable doses of ECT. A typical 'narcosis' treatment comprised three months of near-total unconsciousness, after which time the patient had often been reduced to a 'walking zombie' with permanent memory loss. The Sleep Room is peppered with haunting first-hand accounts of horrific treatment at the hands of William Sargant. The actor Celia Imrie, for example, ... was admitted under Sargant’s care because she was close to death from anorexia nervosa. She recounts being forced to drink such large doses of chlorpromazine – the first antipsychotic - that she dribbled, shook uncontrollably and found her hair in clumps on her pillow. She was injected daily with enough insulin to make her drowsy, weak, sweaty and near comatose. She remembers other women around her having huge rubber plugs jammed between their teeth before the high-voltage electricity of ECT was sent through their temples, and their bodies 'shuddered and jerked' with the 'scent of burning hair and flesh'. Sometimes a patient would reappear on the ward with their head thickly bandaged, scarcely able to walk after being lobotomised. Amid the moans, screams and stale stench of sleep, Imrie recalls the nurses reporting her own resistance to the drugs to Sargant, to which he ominously responded: 'every dog has his breaking point. To say that these stories are difficult to read is an understatement. Even as someone who learned, as a medical student, about the unspeakable mid-century vogue for lobotomy – permanently subduing patients by gouging out parts of their frontal lobes – some of the accounts made my skin crawl. It is to Stock’s great credit that he places patient testimony centre stage, allowing several patients to tell their stories at length in their own, unedited words."
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
Saturday, 22 March 2025
Cuttings: February 2025
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.”
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.”
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."
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