Cuttings: September 2024

There is no "woke mind virus" – article by Dan Williams on Conspicuous Cognition website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Gad [Saad’s] The Parasitic Mind [is] a book-length complaint about ‘mind viruses’ like ‘postmodernism, radical feminism, and social constructivism’, all of which are ‘bound by the full rejection of reality and common sense.’ Saad is not alone in his analysis of ‘woke’ ideas. In the past several years, talk of the ‘woke mind virus’ has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors…. Since 2016, it has [also] been the favourite metaphor adopted by the opposite side in the culture war to characterise online misinformation and conspiracy theories…. [But] this metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other. I will make three general points: (1) The ‘mind virus’ metaphor assumes the truth is self-evident, so false beliefs must stem from irrationality. This neglects how people form beliefs based on different information, trusted sources, and interpretive frameworks, which means rational individuals can easily develop radically divergent worldviews. (2) People often embrace and spread ideas because they serve practical goals beyond truth-seeking. For example, religious, ideological, and conspiratorial narratives often serve propagandistic functions or promote people’s social interests. Such motivated reasoning looks nothing like the passive infection by ‘mind viruses’. (3) Belief systems do not spread via simple contagion. They are maintained through complex social dynamics and incentives in which members of belief-based tribes win status by enforcing, rationalising, and spreading bespoke realities."

Remaining steadfast in non-violence -–quoted from Jean Zaru’s book Occupied with Non-Violence, in Daily Meditation, Center for Action and Contemplation. “I call myself a Quaker or a Friend. And Friends, throughout history, have maintained a testimony to nonviolence. War, we say, is contrary to the teachings of Christ. Therefore, we are challenged to live in the presence of that power which wins through love rather than through war. This is no easy testimony..Early on in my struggles [as a Palestinian] with living nonviolently in a situation of violence, I found myself at a crossroads. I needed to know in my own deepest convictions whether I really did believe in the power of nonviolence to transform a situation of conflict.… How can I have peace within when I worry so much about life in general and the lives of my family members?… How can I have peace within when our movement is restricted in our own country, when walls are built to imprison us and separate us from one another?… As Palestinian women, we have a special burden and service. We are constantly being told to be peaceful. But the inner peace of which I speak is not simply being nice, or being passive, or permitting oneself to be trampled upon without protest. It is not passive nonviolence, but the nonviolence of courageous action…. What is that inner force that drives us, that provides regeneration and perseverance to speak the truth that desperately needs to be spoken in this moment of history?… If I deserve credit for courage, it is not for anything I do here, but for continuing in my daily struggle under occupation on so many fronts, for remaining samideh (steadfast) and, all the while, remaining open to love, to the beauty of the earth, and contributing to its healing when it is violated.”

Precipice by Robert Harris: the PM and the socialite – review by Alex Preston in The Guardian. "Precipice is set in the summer of 1914: 'that improbably glorious summer' before the great war opened up a chasm in the world.... We first meet the Honourable Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord and Lady Sheffield, in the buildup to a tragedy. She is part of a louche and aristocratic set, the Coterie, known for their cynicism and excess. Venetia decides not to join a cruise on the Thames during which one of their members, Sir Denis Anson, drowns. Venetia has other things on her mind. Although only 26, she’s in the midst of a romantic entanglement with the 61-year old Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith.... The letters from Asquith to Venetia were written in the white heat of political life, with Ireland on the verge of revolution and war glowering on the horizon. This backdrop makes their content all the more jaw-dropping. They intermix the moonings of a love-sick teenager with spectacularly indiscreet revelations about the inner workings of government. Venetia’s letters to Asquith have been lost, and so Harris only has one side of the conversation. The novel’s brilliance lies in the way the author has written into the void, giving life and voice to Venetia, bringing her to dazzling life through her imagined letters to Asquith and Harris’s portrait of a bright, unconventional and complex young woman seeking to escape the strictures of her aristocratic upbringing."

A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair – article by Jonathan Watts in The Guardian. "What has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.... They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. On 31 March 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data.... She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order – in homeostasis – not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had 'initiated' with Lovelock... This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point."

The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts: man of many myths – review by Philip Ball in The Guardian. "Lovelock’s Gaia theory has, ever since its inception in the late 1960s, been whatever one wants to make of it: a smokescreen for polluting industries, a clarion call for environmentalists, a revolution in the earth sciences, a conceptual framework for astrobiology, a spiritual movement for reconnecting to the living earth. Remarkably, Lovelock himself embraced each of these positions at some time or another during his 103 years on the planet. Having worked for the Medical Research Council ... during the war, Lovelock quit a comfortable academic position to become a freelance inventor and consultant for clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to Nasa (especially on what became the Viking lander missions of the 1970s that searched for signs of life). In the mid-1950s he invented an instrument called the Electron Capture Detector, which allowed substances in the air to be detected with unprecedented sensitivity. Those studies led him to conceive of the atmosphere itself not as an aspect of the environment to which life adapts but as a component of the 'Earth system' that life is constantly shaping. In collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock shaped these ideas into the Gaia theory, which suggests that the whole planet functions rather like a living organism, stabilised by feedbacks between the biosphere, oceans, atmosphere and geosphere. ... It was Lovelock’s Wiltshire neighbour, William Golding, who suggested naming the idea after the Greek goddess – a 'poison gift', according to philosopher Bruno Latour, as the mythic associations alienated many scientists. Much of this is well known, but Watts digs deeper to find the source of Lovelock’s contradictory, maverick nature...."

These 21st-century demagogues aren’t mavericks, they’ve repeated on us throughout history – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today... Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression 'that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community'. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of 'incumbent elites' to gain power ... they sought no major changes 'in class structure and property relations'. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to 'account for them in any coherent and systematic way'. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping 'humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot' and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.... But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called 'crisis strata' of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse. The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited.... It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs."

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple: when India ruled the world – review by Fara Dabholwala in The Guardian. "Forget the Silk Road, argues William Dalrymple in his dazzling new book. What came first, many centuries before that, was India’s Golden Road, which stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan in the far east. For more than a millennium, from about 250BC to AD1200, Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated a vast 'Indosphere'. Indian merchants, travelling huge distances on the monsoon winds, reaped vast profits from its matchless cloth, spices, oils, jewellery, ivory, hardwoods, glass and furniture. The Golden Road deftly charts these economic developments. But Dalrymple’s larger theme is India’s intellectual hegemony. As he shows, during this era India was the great religious and philosophical superpower of Eurasia, with lasting effects into the present. The book focuses first on the spread of Buddhism, which from a marginal Indian sect in due course became central to Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture, as well as flourishing elsewhere in the region. It then traces the extraordinary adoption of Hindu and Sanskrit culture by rulers across south-east Asia who were swayed by the prestige of these Indian modes of thought and life.... Finally, The Golden Road tells the gripping story of how fundamental astronomical and mathematical tools such as our modern number symbols, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm were developed in India and spread across the world and, along with the Indian game of chess, eventually reached the backward cultures of Christian Europe."

In the face of grief, it’s hard to find the right words to say. What matters is that you keep trying – article by Ranjana Srivastana in The Guardian. “As I grow older, so grows the number of my friends experiencing their first ‘real‘ grief. The loss of a parent heads that list, a loss so hard-hitting that it’s impossible to describe its manifest implications. After [the] funeral [of a friend’s mother, who died suddenly], I text a tentative, ’How are you?’ ‘OK,’ she says. It’s the text equivalent of a shrug. I wish I had a better question. The next day, I ask if there is anything I can do – even though I tell other people this is one of the worst ways to ‘help‘. I promise to let you know, she replies, in the way of every polite, overwhelmed person. I yearn to do better.…I can’t help thinking that my good intention runs deep but my words keep missing the mark. Still, I want to obey the first commandment of friendship: showing up. I remember reading a paper about the surprising value of even a brief check-in with one’s friends: ‘We document a robust underestimation of how much other people appreciate being reached out to.’ In other words, people who initiated even brief and casual check-ins with their friends underestimated how much the friends appreciated hearing from them. Now I decide to take the same approach with my grieving friend. Instead of quietly receding and waiting for her to engage with me, I text a short message most days. You’re in my thoughts. What prayers will you do today? It must be difficult talking to so many people. Are you getting some sleep? The individual messages feel a little lame but I keep hoping that their sum will amount to an embrace.”

The big idea: how the ‘protege effect’ can help you learn almost anything – article by David Robson in The Guardian. "Over breakfast this morning, I enjoyed a short chat with Mia, my new Spanish study buddy. I went over some of the stuff from my recent lesson and explained what I have learned about the psychology of happiness from a Spanish-language podcast. By the end of the 10-minute conversation, I felt that I had embedded more of the vocabulary, grammar and turns of phrase than if I’d done an hour of textbook exercises. Mia, however, does not exist in real life: they are an AI that I created to take advantage of a phenomenon called the 'protege effect'. According to a wealth of psychological research, we learn more effectively when we teach someone else about the topic we’ve just explored – even if that person doesn’t really exist. There are few shortcuts to mastery, but the protege effect appears to be one of the most effective ways of accelerating our knowledge and understanding. The principle of 'learning by teaching' was pioneered in the early 1980s by Jean-Pol Martin, a French teacher in Eichstätt, Germany who wished to improve his students’ experiences of learning a new language by allowing the teens themselves to research and present different parts of the curriculum to their classmates. ... Learning through teaching was relatively slow to catch on elsewhere, until a group of scientists at Stanford University began to test the idea scientifically. In one of the first experiments, Catherine Chase and colleagues recruited 62 eighth-graders from the San Francisco Bay Area, who were tasked with using a computer program to study the biological changes that occur when we get a fever. Over two lessons, they had to read a text and then create an on-screen flowchart illustrating the different processes and the relationships between them. For half the teens, the exercise was presented as a form of self-study. The others were told that their diagram would help to teach a virtual character, who appeared as a cartoon on the screen.... At the end of two 50-minute classes, the participants who had been assigned the role of teacher had learned considerably more of the material, with much stronger performance on test questions. Intriguingly, the improvements were particularly marked for the least able students; they performed at the same level as the highest achievers in the control group. Chases’s team named this the protege effect, and it has since been replicated many times. These later studies suggest that learning by teaching is more powerful than other mnemonic techniques such as self-testing or mind mapping. The brain boost appears to arise as much from the expectation of teaching as the act itself. If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, so we make a greater effort to fill in the gaps in our understanding and correct any mistaken assumptions before we pass those errors on to others. Articulating our knowledge then helps to cement what we have learned."

Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? – article by Stephen Harrison in The Guardian. "Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses. And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors.... At last month’s annual Wikimania conference ... many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.... As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.... Another obstacle to attracting gen Z contributors is that today’s Wikipedia is simply more established.... It’s harder for new editors to find their way in. Previous generations often began by making small edits, like fixing typos or spotting vandalism, but nowadays many of these tasks are handled by automated tools. Without clear entry points, new editors may dive into editing more contentious articles, where a single misstep could trigger harsh feedback.... While the different generations may eventually find common ground, the future relationship between human editors and AI remains uncertain. Will AI eventually replace human volunteers? Let’s hope not. Compiling an encyclopedia requires making judgments that are best understood by humans, who know the social context."

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: time to relax – review by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. "I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction. Thankfully, as readers of Oliver Burkeman’s old Guardian column already know, he’s a self-help sceptic, too. He doesn’t trade in magic bullets or revelatory hacks. Indeed, he rejects the premise that life can be somehow mastered and the implication that, until we manage get to that point, we’re still half-formed. Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. Meditation for Mortals follows the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman sought to realign our relationship with time and what we might do with it. The new book is thematically similar but more snackable, which is perfect for those of us whose imperfections include attention issues. Its 28 short chapters are meant to be read daily as a month-long 'retreat of the mind', but are just as illuminating if you use a dip-in, dip-out approach."

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke: a doctor’s remarkable account of an organ transplant – review by Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. "In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury.... As Keira lay in intensive care, a young boy from Cheshire was on his eighth month in hospital with a dangerously enlarged heart.... In The Story of a Heart, Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart. As the author of Dear Life, about the reality of end-of-life care, and Breathtaking, an account of the Covid crisis (later adapted for TV by Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio), Clarke has made her name telling tough medical stories in a way that is accessible and humane. As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen.... As she traces the complex medical journeys of Keira and Max, Clarke takes regular detours into the lives of those looking after them – the book features a lengthy cast of paramedics, ICU staff, anaesthetists and surgeons – as well as the scientific discoveries that inform their treatment.... There are moments, within this intricate tapestry, where Clarke’s evocative, empathetic writing makes you catch your breath. Taking in the spectacle of drivers in gridlocked traffic miraculously making way for an ambulance, she reflects on the unspoken knowledge 'that nothing more substantial than the whisper of fate keeps the people they love from the horror of such a blue-lit dash, the vehicle emblazoned with the cruellest combination of words: children’s intensive care ambulance'."

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers: a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. 'He has all the Arles women he wants,' wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to renew himself. Why does this exhibition start with these two paintings, instead of the blossoming trees or golden fields he painted that spring? The answer lies in the portraits’ very lack of prosaic fact. Van Gogh is an artist we’re still catching up with.... The Van Gogh this great show explores, with moving and addictive aplomb, is barely an observer at all. He transfigures what he sees. It starts with those portraits of ordinary blokes in whom he sees eternal romance and poetry, proof of how utterly he remade the world around him. This is a journey not to the actual town of Arles, where if you go looking for The Yellow House you’ll find just a plaque, but the Provence in Van Gogh’s mind – or, I want to say, his soul."

Solved: the mystery of how Victorians built Crystal Palace in just 190 days – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Experts have discovered that the answer to this 173-year-old riddle lies in the first known use of standardised nuts and bolts in construction – a humble engineering innovation that would power the British empire and revolutionise the industrial world. Measuring a colossal 92,000 sq metres, the groundbreaking iron and glass structure of the Crystal Palace was built in just 190 days to house the 14,000 exhibitors taking part in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, in Hyde Park, London. Newly analysed evidence suggests the pioneering building could not have been built without cutting-edge Victorian technology: interchangeable nuts and bolts that were made on machines to match one standardised size across the industry. Prior to this, skilled craftsmen would typically make each individual nut and bolt bespoke and ensure they fitted together. Since no two screws were necessarily alike, it was almost impossible to replace one that got lost or broken, causing “endless trouble” for contemporary engineers and ensuring big construction projects relied primarily on bricks and mortar.Prof John Gardner, of Anglia Ruskin University,... approached the Crystal Palace Museum, which houses the remnants of the building, to get hold of some of the original nuts and bolts and analyse them ... and discovered they were all standardised.... 'They were using a standard that had been suggested by Joseph Whitworth 10 years before, in 1841, but wasn’t adopted as a British standard until 1905. That was an absolutely groundbreaking decision by Fox Henderson [the construction firm that built the palace], because it meant you could have a nut made in one workshop and a bolt made in another – and they could fit together.'”

Mother State by Helen Charman; What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman: the body political – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "'Motherhood is a political state,' declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of 'motherhood' in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years.... She revisits the heyday of the 1980s women’s peace camps at Greenham Common, and shows that, even at the time, feminists were arguing over the centring of maternal anxiety as a driver for anti-nuclear activism. Another chapter, titled Mother Ireland, looks at the history of women’s involvement in Northern Irish political struggles since the 1970s, on either side of the divide, and how mothers, as both combatants and peacemakers, were also battling 'the gendered expectations of their own communities'.... The ambivalence over biological motherhood among many millennial women that Charman touches on is at the heart of What Are Children For?, co-authored by US journalists Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman and prompted by their frequent conversations on their own uncertainty. They, too, acknowledge the explicitly political nature of the issue; since the repeal of Roe v Wade, the lack of access to safe abortion in many US states means that pregnancy is potentially a life-threatening condition, creating a further deterrent on top of the obvious material factors of cost-of-living and career disruption. They are also conscious that the topic of declining fertility rates 'has been so thoroughly co-opted by the far right' that many feminists are loath to tackle it, choosing instead to see falling birthrates as a sign of positive social change.... So many of the issues covered in both these books were subjects of fierce debate when I became a mother 22 years ago. The fact that women are still fighting the same battles is a wearying reminder of how contingent any victories have been, and how essential it is to keep expanding these conversations because, as all the writers point out, finding better solutions should not be the sole responsibility of women."

‘Many people would throw a tantrum at this point’: An Israeli and a Palestinian discuss 7 October, Gaza, and the future – edited dialogues between Orla (Israeli) and Christine (Palestinian) in The Guardian. Both living in New York, they met on the docuseries Couples Therapy, in which Orna was the couples therapist and Christine one of the participants. "Orna: As a couples therapist, I typically sit as the person outside of a conflict, and I can almost always tune in to each person and understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling.... That business of getting out of your own perspective, holding it lightly and understanding another perspective – I believe in that. When it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that’s what I have always tried to do. One of the shocking things that happened to me on 7 October, and I think to many people, is that I temporarily lost that ability. When I first heard about what Hamas did, and heard from friends in Israel about what they were going through, I was just like: 'Oh, I had it wrong. Maybe I was just a fool all along, and those extreme rightwingers actually had it right.' My whole internal system of making sense of the conflict in the Middle East collapsed. I lost my ethics. I lost my purpose. I lost my belief.... As I started reading what Israel began doing in Gaza, Israeli narratives were being spun to justify its war machine as if this was the only response imaginable. Once Israel unleashed the IDF on Gaza, I could no longer hold on to this idea that Israel was just a victim, because it was not just a victim. And ever since, I’ve gradually lost my identification with much of the Israeli narrative about itself, which is a very complicated place to be. I feel endless grief about Israel, what Israel was and what I understand it to be now. It’s probably my deepest source of grief."... "Christine: I want you to see what I see; to put yourself in the shoes of Palestinians as it relates to the type of daily violence that we are being subjected to and have been subjected to long before 7 October. You’ve changed my mind about there being different kinds of violence, but I have a hard time condemning Palestinian resistance. .... I think what is difficult to ascertain is how the Palestinians would react if we were free, because ever since Israel was created, we’ve been subjugated by systems of oppression. I struggle with the question of trying to blame Palestinians. I do agree that if we had leadership that could unify the Palestinian people and come to some sort of negotiations that didn’t require unilateral concessions on the part of Palestinians who have already lost so much, of course, that would be wonderful. However, many of our best leaders have been imprisoned or assassinated by Israel." ... "Orna: Palestine and the occupation is one thing, and then there are the surrounding Arab countries, and their absolute disgust at having a western Israeli Jewish state there. Their war is not your war. Their war is a war against the invasion of a different kind of culture into the region." "Christine: I guess what I want to clarify is that the Arab world attacking Israel has less to do with the fact that Israel is Jewish and more to do with the fact that it was perceived as a colonising power. Many of the people who are the founders of modern political Zionism and contributed to the creation of the state of Israel called it a colonial project." "Orna: We can debate different versions of why the Arab world is at war with Israel. But the wars are the reason Israel needs an army – it wouldn’t have survived for a second without one. The issue for the Arab world is not this tiny piece of land. It is the presence of a very small group of people that represent the west and its differing economic, political and social systems."

Hilary Mantel was my mentor. Here are seven things she taught me about writing, and life – article by Katie Ward in The Guardian. "In 2007 I was an aspiring young novelist with a manuscript that had been rejected by 43 literary agents.... At the time Hilary was a well-established author of fiction and memoir. But this was two years before Wolf Hall was published and the stellar success that was to follow.... To me, Hilary was a calm voice at the end of an email, patiently telling me what I needed to hear. She became a beloved friend who I stayed in touch with for 15 years and saw occasionally in person. I treasured every moment I spent with her, always trying to absorb her wisdom between fits of giggles. On Sunday 22 September it will be the autumnal equinox, and the second anniversary of Hilary’s death. While darkness and daylight are briefly balanced, here are the things I learned from her. (1) Know how your story ends and write towards it.... (2) Write every day.... (3) Greatness and gentleness are possible.... (4) Back yourself.... (5) The quality of writing matters more than quantity.... (6) We don’t reproduce the past, we create it.... (7) Our best ideas have a timeline of their own...."

My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss: an interrogation of an eating disorder – review by Ellen Pierson-Hagger in The Guardian. "Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.... The author, an academic, is best known for her novels (most recently The Fell), in which she variously dissects the climate emergency and Britishness after Brexit. Here she continues to write with wit about humans’ relationship to the natural world.... A tension is evident from the first few pages. After a section of Moss’s second-person narrative (she addresses herself as 'you' for the bulk of the book), another, italicised voice appears, contradicting her, telling her to 'shut up, no one cares', accusing her of lying. This is the niggling voice in the back of your head, the one that makes you doubt what you know to be true. Its presence is felt throughout."

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder: an essential manifesto for change – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In the years since the 2016 US presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder. The Yale history professor effectively took a sabbatical from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a series of 20 lessons derived from his close study of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the last century and how they might apply to the US in this one. He followed that book, in 2018, with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and disturbing account of the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was being seeded as a global virus, promoted by the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and amplified by the self-serving populists in the White House and Downing Street and elsewhere.... On Freedom is a companion volume to those earlier books, penetrating in its analysis of our current crises – of information and climate and civil society – and clear in its prescriptions for change. In it, Snyder reclaims several words that have been co-opted by the so-called libertarians of the right, not least his titular subject, which here becomes defined not as a negative – as in 'freedom from' regulation, or from the demands of fact, or from social obligation – but as an active, physical demand.... It has been Snyder’s developing contention as a writer that the body is where we site our opposition to the dehumanising advance of 'screen culture'; he has encouraged a vigorous 'corporeal politics', voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; eye-to-eye interaction, rather than social media; marching and debating, not online likes and anonymous snark.'Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen,' he wrote in 2017. 'Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.'"

Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "'We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,' says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg [Institute, London]. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country.... The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space.... It has been an essential resource for artists and scholars for decades, but few outside the rarefied ranks of researchers knew the Warburg was there.... [Now,] where once visitors were greeted with an off-putting glass screen and security desk, a new welcoming entrance leads you through to the gallery, where an opening exhibition charts the journey of the institute, alongside artist Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile of books by exiled authors. Windows from the entrance foyer provide views down into the new archive reading room – giving a glimpse of the previously hidden inner workings of the institute – and across to the auditorium, which appears to float in the white-tiled courtyard, illuminated by light-wells either side.... The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – 'uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,' as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century."

The Wild Robot: heartfelt animated adventure is a soaring success – review by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot – the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI – the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar."

‘Everyone is thinking at the same time’: how Codenames became the board game of the decade – article by Charis McGowan in The Guardian. "My mother and I, like millions of other people across the world, have become addicted to Codenames, the biggest breakthrough board game of the past 10 years. The game has been likened to a crossover between charades and Battleship: two teams face each other over a grid of cards, each of them displaying a single word. Only the “spymasters” on each team know which of these cards represent secret agents, but to help their teammates expose them quicker than their rivals, they are only allowed to give one-word clues. The best players are able to come up with word associations that connect two, three, four or even more cards at a single stroke. Teammates with an instinctive understanding of the lateral connections in each others’ minds tend to do particularly well at this: couples, siblings and best-friend teams have a natural advantage. But when the hints fail to register, like [sometimes between him and his mother], the mutual incomprehension can feel existential. I’ve heard people say it’s a great date game to suss out potential partners who really get you (and put a red flag on those who don’t)."

Social workers in England begin using AI system to assist their work – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "Hundreds of social workers in England have begun using an artificial intelligence system that records conversations, drafts letters to doctors and proposes actions that human workers might not have considered. Councils in Swindon, Barnet and Kingston are among seven now using the AI tool that sits on social workers’ phones to record and analyse face-to-face meetings. The Magic Notes AI tool writes almost instant summaries and suggests follow-up actions, including drafting letters to GPs. Two dozen more councils have or are piloting it. By cutting the time social workers spend taking notes and filling out reports, the tool has the potential to save up to £2bn a year, claims Beam, the company behind the system that has recruited staff from Meta and Microsoft. But the technology is also likely to raise concerns about how busy social workers weigh up actions proposed by the AI system, and how they decide whether to ignore a proposed action.... One pilot council said it needed greater reassurance that the AI tool was accurately summarising meetings before notes went on file about potentially life-changing choices."

Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling: essential reading – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Inspired by the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, which followed 14 children born in 1957, Dorling’s book enters the private worlds of seven typical five-year-olds – born in the autumn of 2018 – who represent today’s spread of family income in the UK. These range from 'Monday’s child' Anna, an average representative of the bottom 14% of children who has 'less than a large posh coffee' spent on her needs weekly, via 'Thursday’s child' David, whose dad incessantly worries about his insecure income, to 'Sunday’s child' Gemma, daughter of successful corner shop owners yet her father feels the pinch and is flirting with far-right ideas. As a group, children entering primary school in the UK – for whom the most significant ABCs are austerity, Brexit and Covid-19 – have never had it so bad. Not since the Great Depression has the UK been so unequal, home as it now is to the greatest concentration of poor children in Europe. Rather than wealth, Dorling focuses on weekly disposable income after housing costs, as accommodation is a non-negotiable outgoing and a much greater percentage of income at the bottom of society than at the top. While Seven Up! chose to highlight extreme lives rather than averages across society, Dorling shows how the UK has been 'stretched apart' and, moreover, how inequality is starkest for families with young children. He has constructed his seven characters through thousands of data points; they are highly factual fictions. He cleaves to his theme on economic income, explaining that 'none of the eight "protected characteristics" enshrined in UK law matter even a fraction as much as income and wealth' when it comes to inequality: whether or not you can afford a winter coat, internet access, heating, holidays, a new kettle if the old one breaks, or a school friend over for tea are what segregates us. Through these windows on each child’s life, Dorling exposes how financial inequity affects housing, education, health, employment, tech access, social care, rent and food. The stress for families of securing these necessities hums through the chapters."

Cuttings: August 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuttings: July 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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