‘Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent’ – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian. An unusually personal article from this environmental writer and activist, about her own wedding and her unexpected desire for a large gathering of friends and family, in the teeth of the climate emergency: “as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate, I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy and to reject hope.” This article was the inspiration for a homily by Br John Mayhead (Monastery of Christ Our Saviour, Turvey) on the Feast of the Holy Family (31 December 2023). I do like Br John’s homilies; about as far away from telling-you-what-to-think as you could get, he simply shares his own spiritual reflections: on holy scripture, environmental observations (he’s a keen birdwatcher) and articles from The Guardian. In this case, Pavelle’s moving article illuminated for him the gospel for the day: the story of Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to the Temple and his being recognised by the aged Simeon. “You see this child: he is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign which is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own heart too – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke: 2, 22-40). Inspired by Pavelle’s story of hope in friends and family and the uninvited guest (or uninvited gust) of Storm Antoni coming together for her wedding, Br John came to see the text as saying something about the way the truth is revealed to us: that how we are with one another is how we truly are, and so how we are with God. The crisis in which we meet is not only the climate crisis (whose effects Br John observes regularly on his country walks) but the crisis which has always afflicted us as human beings – to love or not to be. Pavelle’s article concludes in joy: “I snuck into the farmhouse to observe what was happening from an upstairs window. By evening storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart the charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy and the joining of hands is activism after all. Care to dance?” To which Br John added: “Care to worship? Care to be together – whatever?” A truly magical meeting of minds. As St Paul says: “All things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).
Mr Bates v. the Post Office – powerful television drama series, one of a handful which have actually changed government policy. Like many people, I thought I knew the story: how sub-postmasters and mistresses were accused of theft when their accounts showed money missing, though this was actually due to faults in the Post Office’s new accounting system; how they were all told that they were the only one with problems; and how some were imprisoned, some were forced to pay back the thousands of pounds they had never stolen, most were ruined, financially and socially; and how some took their own lives. But it’s one thing to read all this in a factual news article, and to think, “that’s shocking”, or “that’s outrageous”, and another to see it played out across four hours (in real life, it was twenty years), happening to characters you grow to know and like, and you think “oh my god!”, and then when it gets worse “oh my god!!!”, and then when it gets worse still “OH MY GOD!!!” Excellent acting from Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Monica Dolan of course, but major credit due I think to the dramatist Gwyneth Hughes, who told the story so powerfully while sticking closely to verifiable facts in the public domain. What the drama brought out was the human cost, summed up for many of us by the moment when the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells appears on the television news and says “It’s about the reputation of the Post Office”, and Hesmondhalgh yells at the television set: "No it’s not! It’s about people’s lives, you moron!" See also ‘We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system – that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts’, article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian.
Frans Hals – exhibition at the National Gallery. Hals was one of my wife’s favourite artists, because of how he painted people and faces, and after seeing this exhibition I now understand what she meant. He’s famous for painting people smiling and even laughing, at a time when most portraits were solemnly formal, and for the first time (to my shame) it dawned on me why this is actually hard to do: unlike with a camera, you can’t capture a smile directly from life, because you can’t tell a sitter to hold their smile while you paint it -– or if you do, it’ll look fake and artificial. In other words, the painter has to remember the smile and recreate it in oils. Similarly with the other Hals trademark: catching people in mid-gesture. I loved his “pendant” portraits of couples – individual portraits painted simultaneously and intended to be hung side by side, some of these pairs reunited by this exhibition for the first time in centuries – and even more his single known example of a double portrait, in which husband and wife are totally relaxed, completely at ease with each other and with the viewer. As the caption said: “Few artists can represent nonchalance as well as Hals.”
Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading, by John Plotz – a personal tribute. I love the Earthsea books, so I read this in the expectation of some pleasure in seeing someone else sharing their enthusiasm, but I found it disappointing; it told me and showed me little I didn't already know. One thing it did remind me of, though: the simple, powerful, unexpected language Le Guin uses, in much of her writing but the Earthsea books above all. “Penthe selected the smallest [apple], out of politeness, and ate it in about ten juicy skillful interested bites.” (p. 48) "A great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.” (p. 46) How can a bite be “interested”, or a wind be “bright”? That’s part of the magic.
How We Read Now, by Naomi S. Baron – very readable and useful digest of the results of research on the differences between reading print and onscreen. I'm not surprised by the general conclusion, that it all depends on the attitude with which people go into their reading, but this gives helpful detail and offers some important insights. I had three key takeaways. (1) Prior knowledge of the subject and expectations of the experience (how much effort is going to be required) are far bigger determiners of reading effectiveness than medium. (2) There IS a "shallowing" effect in that reading of digital text tends to be more superficial than reading of print text, though this is mostly related to (1) (for example, learners approach a digital text with the assumption that it's going to be entertaining and not require much effort). (3) Audio presentation of a text has worse results than either digital or print, unless there is some additional component such as slides. All this just reinforced for me the important of never assigning reading except as part of a learning activity; we assume at our peril that learners are going to already know how to learn from reading a text. One thing troubled me greatly: the superficiality of the discussion about evaluating information sources. It's not just a matter of deciding whether a source is trustworthy or not, although that may be an important issue, and it's certainly an entry-level question. But at university level the focus should be on reconstructing what I call the information provenance: the process by which it was selected and compiled, and even more importantly the purpose for which it is presented.
Re-Wilding the Soul – Turvey Abbey day workshop, with Br John Mayhead of the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour. As a born naturalist, re-wilding is quite his thing, and he’s careful to distinguish between the kind of re-wilding which is about returning an area to its condition at some former time – requiring a judgement about the state you want to achieve – and the kind which is about literally doing nothing and seeing what nature comes up with. It’s the latter of course which has the more important spiritual parallel: stilling the mind and the will and seeing what God comes up with. But an important part of the workshop were the guided walks around the Monastery garden and the Abbey grounds. In these Br John showed us the natural and historical world around us: a matter of stopping to observe, but (as he pointed out) observation needs to be informed by knowledge. He could say: “Listen! What’s that?” and while most of us were thinking to ourselves “it’s a bird!” Br John was hearing a green woodpecker. Or again, he would identify (at least provisionally) a distant bird by what he called its jizz (the term apparently comes from aircraft spotting): the whole gestalt of its silhouette, speed and character of movement, as well as knowledge of what kinds of bird are likely to be active in this place and at this time of day. As a teacher and former academic, I find it intensely reassuring to hear the affirmation of the role for knowledge even in radical re-wilding, or radical spiritual re-wilding. (See a version of part of one of Br John's talks.)
The Room – well-respected puzzle game, the first in a whole series. I wasn’t inspired to continue, though; for me this missed the sweet spot of being neither too easy or too difficult. Either the solution to the current problem was totally obvious or I couldn’t get it no matter how hard I tried, and neither is a good experience. Stunning graphics and animation don’t compensate for this, unfortunately.
Little Women (2019) – recent film adaptation by Greta Gerwig. For me, this suffers by comparison with the 1994 version with Susan Sarandon and Wynona Ryder, which was so good – and it’s got to be pretty cool to have a Laurie (Christian Bale) who grows up to be Batman. The only thing this new version added was the story about Louisa May Alcott being told by her publisher that by the end all the women had to be either married or dead, and even that has been told better by Tom Gauld in his cartoon, which has Jo March opting for the third possibility of both and writing a book called Attack of the Zombie Brides. Otherwise it seem to me inferior in every way, and left out the strong moral tone, which no doubt is less acceptable today, smacking of preaching, but which was so much part of the original and which Sarandon carried off so well.
Room at the Top – classic post-war film of class aspiration and class tension. Seeing it for the first time, I found it much stronger and more powerful than I expected, fully deserving of its Oscar nominations and awards. The humiliation and subordination to which Joe is subjected, as a working-class man with aspirations, by his bosses and social superiors who control pretty much everything around, was very convincing. But what I’d not expected was the deep irony that at the end of the film Joe has attained exactly what he set out to achieve – marriage to the boss’s daughter and a seat at the middle-class table – and yet is deeply miserable and unfulfilled, feeling himself responsible for the death of the women who was his real true love. A slice of history for all the ages.
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley – highly readable biography. I gave this to my wife for her last birthday, because we’d enjoyed the television series and she loved Christie and the television Christie adaptations. It’s beautifully written, a model for how to tell the story of a life about which so much has been written and speculated: scholarly and discriminating, but accessible with finely judged personal touches, typically pointing out the feminist themes – though Christie would never have described herself as a feminist, and in fact didn’t really like describing herself as an author, preferring to present herself as a very ordinary women, although she was anything but. I’m so glad that she found happiness (and a fulfilling sexual relationship) with her second husband, Max, 13 years her junior.
Atlas of the Heart, by Brené Brown – accessible book about feelings and the thoughts that give rise to feelings. The aim is to enrich our everyday vocabulary for talking about our experiences, by enumerating and distinguishing 87 emotions and other mental states. The first chapter alone covers stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, dread, fear and vulnerability. Some of them are covered very well, with stories and research results and general good sense; others are thinner and left me wanting more. But the project as a whole is laudable, and the book is nicely produced, like what we used to call a coffee-table book, with photographs and big pull quotes to make it easy to browse through and light on passages of interest. Hmm, what exactly is the difference between shame and guilt?
Life is Strange: True Colors – good and well-reviewed immersive narrative game, though not for me as impressive as others in the Life is Strange series. (Admittedly the stratospherically good original was a hard act to follow.) The concept here is that Alex Cheung, a troubled young woman just discharged from care, is super-sensitive to the emotions of others; sometimes she is overwhelmed by them, but as the game proceeds she learns to use her sensitivity to understand and help the inhabitants of the small town to which she has relocated. All well and good, and the exploration of character and situation is fine, but to my mind there’s not enough actual story, and what there is doesn’t really hang together. I also found the location implausible; supposedly it’s a mining town, but the high street shops include a vinyl record shop and a cannabis store – which sounds to me like the culture of the game designers rather than that of miners. However, Alex is highly relatable, excellently voice-acted and animated with great subtlety of facial expression, and I very much wanted her to be all right – so I guess the story worked at that level.
Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil – another of my favourite stories from the Jon Pertwee era, watched on iPlayer. Very scary; the thing, which at first you think is a machine but it turns out to be a creature contained by the machine, destroys peoples’ minds, and it steadily grows in its power until even The Master can’t control it. At first, someone has to be connected to the machine for it to affect them; it’s supposedly a treatment for the rehabilitation of violent criminals. But then it becomes able to reach people who are just in the same room. And then it becomes able to travel, to teleport out of one room and into another, and then there’s no stopping it and no place which is safe. The other lovely feature for me is that it turns out The Doctor is fluent in Chinese, which he uses to charm the leader of a conference delegation from Red China (in 1971, still in the grip of the Cultural Revolution).
Wild Summon – extraordinary short (14 minute) film, showing the life cycle of a wild female salmon, migrating from a freshwater river to the open ocean and then returning upstream to spawn. But here’s the thing: the salmon you see is a human woman. Turn off the video and listen to the commentary only, and it sounds just like an ordinary nature documentary. Watch it with the images and you see something quite different. The film makers were following their hunch that viewers would find it easier to empathise with the salmon and and relate to its trials and dangers if it looked human. I think we can say that that hunch payed off. (The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or Best Short Film and the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.) See the film trailer and an interview with the film makers in The Guardian.
Dishonored 2 – another game I’ve started but abandoned as too hard and too frustrating. The trailer looked good, but the game experience is quite different, being first person perspective, so you barely get to see the character you’re playing. Moving around the wonderfully detailed open world is quite fun -– leaping between rooftops, jumping onto balconies and raiding houses – but the constant threat of being detected and killed by patrolling guards was just too stressful for me. You’re supposed to be able to get through by stealth, choking guards unconscious if you want to avoid killing, but I found even that hard to do reliably, and my coordination is far too poor to even consider fighting – I just pressed buttons frantically, occasionally getting lucky but mainly dying horribly. But the setting and the story were quite fun, so I watched a video walkthrough, letting someone else take the stress.
Frankinstein: The Read with Alex Kingston – dramatic reading, with the emphasis on dramatic. This is the thing to watch, if you're curious to know what Mary Shelly’s original novel was actually like but don't have the time or the patience to read the whole thing. Condensed to just over an hour, it somehow manages to cover the whole story, including the long slow scene-setting at the beginning, important for the original readership in establishing its plausibility. But the best thing about it is Alex Kingston’s full-on gothic performance, especially when she’s doing dialogue and the view cuts between different angles as she plays the different characters. A lovely production.
Three Faces of Eve – classic film study of what was then called multiple personality, now generally called dissociative identity disorder.. It was based on an actual case, with Alastair Cooke not only narrating but appearing on camera at the start to tell you that, though extraordinary, these events really did happen. Eve White (a pseudonym) was a quiet, submissive housewife, who was referred to a psychiatrist because she was having blackouts, during which she went on spending sprees. The psychiatrist discovered that during these blackouts a different personality emerged, wild and promiscuous, who called herself Eve Black and who was aware of Eve White, for whom she had nothing but contempt. Eventually a third more balanced personality called Jane emerged, who was aware of the other two and could recall the traumatic childhood event which had given rise to Eve Black. Joanne Woodward won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of all three personalities.
Yesterday – old but strong adventure game. The creepy and sometimes violent atmosphere (involving the Spanish Inquisition, satanism and psychopathic torturers) is mitigated by its presentation in comic book form (dialogue sequences are played out through pop-up panels) and the rueful world-weary demeanour of the eponymous John Yesterday. The story is complex; Yesterday has been cursed with immortality, and when killed comes back to life but without recollection of his former lives, so there are multiple flashbacks within the game as he gradually pieces together his past. I’m not sure the events actually make sense, if you were to put them into order, but the continual plot twist revelations keep up the pace admirably, rather like Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. It’s well-written and voice-acted (localised from the Spanish), and the puzzles are fair, with a friendly hint system when you get stuck, so despite the horrific storyline actually an enjoyable playing experience.
Wednesday 17 April 2024
Tuesday 2 April 2024
Cuttings: March 2024
Public intellectuals have short shelf lives, but why? – online article by Tanner Greer, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Here is how one textbook describes research on [intelligence and creativity over the course of a lifespan]. 'In most fields creative production increases steadily from the 20s to the late 30s and early 40s then gradually declines thereafter, although not to the same low levels that characterized early adulthood. Peak times of creative achievement also vary from field to field. The productivity of scholars in the humanities (for example, that of philosophers or historians) continues well into old age and peaks in the 60s, possibly because creative work in these fields often involves integrating knowledge that has crystallized over the years. By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking. Scientists seem to be intermediate, peaking in their 40s and declining only in their 70s. Even with the same general field, differences in peak times have been noted. For example, poets reach their peak before novelists do, and mathematicians peak before other scientists do.'... Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s: these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work. By a person’s mid 40s this period is more or less over with. The brain does not shut down creativity altogether once you hit 45, but originality slows down. By then the central ideas and models you use to understand the world are more or less decided. Only rarely will a person who has reached this age add something new to their intellectual toolkit.... [It's] not impossible, just hard. And this bring my second, sociological explanation into play. There are things that a mind past its optimum can do to optimize what analytic and creative power it still has. But once a great writer has reached the top of their world, they face few incentives to do any of these things.... There are practical implications for all this. If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom."
Developing AI like raising kids – transcript of conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "TC: The phrase 'artificial intelligence' refers to widely disparate things. Sometimes it’s used to refer to hypothetical thinking machines, sometimes it’s used to refer to applied statistics, and there’s this unfortunate tendency to conflate the two.... In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats. A thermostat can be said to have a goal, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that that it has any preferences; it has no subjective experience. You can imagine a machine learning program that you have to train to maintain the temperature of a house, and in a sense, you are teaching this program, but you are basically interacting with a thermostat. And that is the situation that we are in with the existing technology.... But now suppose we’re talking about this more hypothetical idea of machines that have subjective experience.... One of the guiding questions for me when I was writing [his novella] Lifecycle of Software Objects was 'How do you make a person?' At some level, it seems like a simple thing, but the more you think about it, you realize that it is the hardest job in the world. It is maybe the job that requires the most wrestling with difficult ethical questions, but the fact that so many people raise children makes it very easy to devalue it. We tend to congratulate people who have written a novel or something like that, because relatively few people write novels. A lot of people have children! A lot of people raise children to adulthood! And what they have accomplished is something incredible.... AG: It’s odd, because on the one hand if you ask someone, What’s the most important thing in your life? What’s the hardest moral decision that you have to make? What’s the place where your deepest emotions were engaged? They’ll tell you something about close relationships of care. And yet, because these statements are associated with emotion and feeling and women, they haven’t had the theoretical impact that you might imagine."
We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."
The Science Fiction of the 1900s – substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "We are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours. How to make that clear? Try this: let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s. Hmm. Do that, and somehow the whole genre looks different.... This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of 'where’s my flying car?' is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it. Looked at this way, Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from."
‘What the hell is she doing here?’: the day an A-list actor came to me for therapy – article by Joshua Fletcher in The Guardian, extracted from his And How Does That Make You Feel? "I had a new client pencilled in under the name 'Daphne'. No surname provided – she wanted to remain anonymous, she’d told me on the phone.... Eight minutes had now passed. Still no Daphne. At this point I’d like to introduce you to my inner voices.... Training to be a therapist, [I learned] to identify the different thoughts and voices that my mind liked to throw at me throughout the day. ... Critic: What the hell are you doing, Daphne? This is rude. Time is money. Empathy: This could be her first time in therapy. Perhaps she’s really scared? Give her a chance. You remember your own experiences of therapy, right? Anxiety: What if she was hit by a bus on the way here? Irreverence: Imagine if she was caught hitting the bus instead. “Die, bus, die!” Analytical: You’re on edge because you’re nervous. Biology: Your sympathetic nervous system is activated. Compassion: It’s OK not to feel calm right now. It’s OK to feel uneasy. Detective: The evidence suggests that she isn’t going to turn up. Critic: Wow, man, you love to overthink. Volition: I am going to concentrate on my breath and the sounds of outside. Compassion: Good idea. // Twenty minutes passed and I concluded that Daphne was not going to turn up.... I pressed the button for the lift... The lift doors opened and … my jaw dropped to the floor. Unveiled like a prize on a 90s gameshow was one of the most striking-looking people I have ever seen. They were also instantly recognisable. This was A-list royalty, a celebrity, an award-winning actor... What the hell was she doing here and why on earth was she on my floor? Daphne: Hey, Josh, I’m so sorry I’m late. I have an appointment with you which I think I have missed."
‘He checks in on me more than my friends and family’: can AI therapists do better than the real thing? – article by Alice Robb in The Guardian. "Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs. Can texting with an AI therapist possibly soothe our souls?... A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a 'therapeutic alliance' between bot and patient developed within just five days.... Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared.... Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being.... AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy.... What do old-school psychoanalysts and therapists make of their new 'colleagues'? Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz ...warns that befriending a bot could delay patients’ ability 'to make a connection with an ordinary person. It could become part of a defence against human intimacy.' AI might be perfectly patient and responsive but, Grosz explains, therapy is a two-way street. 'It’s not bad when my patients learn to correct me or say, "I don’t agree." That give and take is important.'... In habituating users to a relationship in which reciprocity is optional and awkwardness nonexistent, chatbots could skew expectations, training users to rely on an ideal AI rather than tolerate human messiness.... Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. 'The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,' says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. [Furthermore,] Psychologists in the UK are bound to confidentiality and monitored by the Health and Care Professions Council. Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services."
AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan? – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "AI Needs You [is] a timely and fascinating new book by the former Downing Street aide-turned-tech executive Verity Harding, which argues that it’s high time the public got a say on what kind of world we actually want to live in.... [Harding is now] back in Britain, running an academic project at Cambridge University on regulating AI for the global good, and increasingly urgently banging a drum for stronger political leadership over something capable of turning jobs, lives and societies upside down if we let it.... The book draws comparisons with the way John F Kennedy took charge of the space race (he used the United States’ moonshot not merely to advance scientific research or inspire the public, but to show a frightened cold war Europe that liberal democracies could still outstrip mighty authoritarian Russia), and with Britain’s approach in the 1980s to the emerging science of IVF, which was novel and morally complex at the time. The principles devised by the philosopher Mary Warnock for governing embryology, reflecting the human and social consequences of making test tube babies as well as the science, became a model for governments worldwide. Both examples suggest we could have more choices and control than we think over AI, Harding argues, so long as we recognise that good things don’t happen by accident. That means tackling the antisocial uses of AI, which include the convincing 'deepfake' images of real people used in pornography, and political disinformation. But it will also require nudging markets towards socially useful outcomes. Why, Harding asks, aren’t we harnessing the incredible power of AI to help solve the climate crisis? Why do we act as if humanity is helpless to control something it’s actively inventing?... Harding, who knows these two incestuous worlds [of tech and politics] better than most, is right, however, that this extraordinary chapter of human history doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, or in angry mobs rising up against a tech elite perceived as having gone too far. But only perhaps if we all understand that we have more agency than we think; that the nerdy wizards yanking levers behind Silicon Valley’s curtain aren’t quite as omnipotent as they seem, that AI is still our servant not our master, and that the point of politics is to shape events, not to flap around limply in their wake."
The big idea: should you blame yourself for your bad habits? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Much of the modern world has been deliberately engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist. If you can’t seem to focus at work because you keep wasting time on social media or getting distracted by WhatsApp notifications, consider that your phone was designed to be addictive: it was built to capture your attention. 'There are a thousand people on the other side of your screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation that you have,' the tech ethicist Tristan Harris observed. If you can’t stick to your budget and keep buying pointless stuff, think of how many adverts you encounter daily, how often a new one will pop up on your computer screen, targeted specifically to your tastes. None of this suggests that you should give up on giving up bad habits or abandon any attempts at self‑discipline. We’d be miserable, unhealthy and ethically compromised if we resigned ourselves to having no say in how we behave. Instead, it may help to think about willpower differently. Research suggests that the people we tend to admire for their self-control actually have to exercise it less frequently. They are good at engineering their environment so that they don’t need to wrestle with temptation: they know, for example, that it’s easier to not buy a packet of biscuits than to stop eating after you’ve opened the packet, and they are good at building healthy habits and routines."
‘The hardest thing is for a woman to say ‘I was raped’’: Jodie Comer on the Prima Facie effect – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "After the opening night of the hit play Prima Facie in London in 2022, a young female producer came up to playwright Suzie Miller and said, 'Loved the play. I’m one in three,' a line from the script referring to the number of women who are sexually assaulted in the UK. 'She didn’t have to say "I was raped,"' Miller recalls. 'It was this moment where I thought, "Oh, you can say that now."' 'The hardest thing is for a woman to say "I was raped,"' adds Jodie Comer, whose solo performance as the young defence lawyer forced to confront the failings of the legal system after she herself is sexually assaulted made the play a sensation. 'Women struggle with those words. To see people come and voice "This happened to me" is enormous.' This month Miller publishes a novelised version of the play, also called Prima Facie: it is dedicated to 'all the women who comprise the "one in three".'"
Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring review: into the cesspit of online hatred – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it.... Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them.... What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the 'crippled epistemology' of conspiracy theorists. Given the abuse to which she has been subjected, this is remarkable. But, although Spring doesn’t spell this out, it also provides a clue to why liberal democracies are being undermined by conspiracy theories. The people she has been talking to are often living proof of what it’s like trying to get by in a society increasingly shaped by an economic ideology in which inequality is a feature, not a bug: it’s what neoliberalism is designed to do. The terrifying levels of social exclusion in modern 'prosperous' democracies bear testimony to that. And the widespread popularity of conspiracy theories is a symptom of it. What this means is that we need to acknowledge that networked technology is not the cause of our current ills. It’s a necessary factor but not a sufficient explanation for the mess democracies are in. And tackling it requires a frank admission that our politics are probably the main driving force of public disaffection. Which is the last thing that politicians fixated on the next election are likely to concede."
A conspiracy theorist’s book club discussion about The Gruffalo – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "'The Gruffalo' does not go down well at the Conspiracy Theorist Book Club. Conspiracist 1: 'Typical mainstream media pro-mouse propaganda, paid for by the powerful rodent lobby.' Conspiracist 2: 'The creature has clearly escaped from a lab, yet the "author" does not mention this.' Conspiracist 3: 'Gruffalo is an anagram of A FROG FLU. Coincidence? I think not!' Conspiracist 4: 'These elite warriors will not be happy until we are all living in the woods and eating nuts.'"
Rites of Passage by Judith Flanders review: a brilliant account of Victorian Britain in mourning – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "I devoured Judith Flanders’s Rites of Passage, a new book about Victorian death and its accoutrements... So many amazing facts! If it were a soup, there’d be a crouton in every spoonful. But still, I’m not sure I fully agree with her that funeral rituals ended (more or less) with the arrival of the 20th century, death becoming more personal and inward, 'shared only with family and close friends'. British people of my age – I’m 54 – will remember how their grandparents went on. The remnants of their Victorian parents’ behaviour could still be felt in my childhood: the curtains of the whole street closed on the day of a funeral; the undertaker walking slowly (and with a certain amount of relish) ahead of the hearse as it left the house, and again at the cemetery; strangers stopping, and removing their caps as the cortege passed.... But all this only makes Rites of Passage the more fascinating, of course. I felt it as a kind of double haunting, its ghosts at once distant and close by. Flanders covers everything from mortality rates to the rise of garden cemeteries, coffin designs to the movement for cremation, and she does so with compassion and a droll wit. She acknowledges the very human ways in which Victorians were the same as us (a mother grieved terribly, even if the children’s deaths were horribly commonplace). But she understands, too, that our forebears were very different to us. '… the children didn’t stay… they went back again,' one parishioner said to the Rev Francis Kilvert of the twins lost by her bereft neighbour. As Kilvert noted, it was as if they’d just 'come into a room and gone out again'."
The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities, including in Gaza – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "[Jonathan] Glazer was [on Sunday] accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as 'non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors', people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.... In one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of [the] controversies [currently afflicting Jewish communities]. 'All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, "Look what they did then"; rather, "Look what we do now,"' Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present. And he went further: 'We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.' For Glazer, Israel does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today.... Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them. When the film premiered last May, before Hamas’s 7 October attack and before Israel’s unending assault on Gaza, this was a thought experiment that could be contemplated with a degree of intellectual distance.... But by the time Zone made it into theatres in December, Glazer’s subtle challenge for audiences to contemplate their inner Hösses cut a lot closer to the bone.... What do we do to interrupt the momentum of trivialization and normalization? That is the question so many of us are struggling with right now." See also ‘Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”’ by David Hering in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog.
Developing AI like raising kids – transcript of conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "TC: The phrase 'artificial intelligence' refers to widely disparate things. Sometimes it’s used to refer to hypothetical thinking machines, sometimes it’s used to refer to applied statistics, and there’s this unfortunate tendency to conflate the two.... In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats. A thermostat can be said to have a goal, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that that it has any preferences; it has no subjective experience. You can imagine a machine learning program that you have to train to maintain the temperature of a house, and in a sense, you are teaching this program, but you are basically interacting with a thermostat. And that is the situation that we are in with the existing technology.... But now suppose we’re talking about this more hypothetical idea of machines that have subjective experience.... One of the guiding questions for me when I was writing [his novella] Lifecycle of Software Objects was 'How do you make a person?' At some level, it seems like a simple thing, but the more you think about it, you realize that it is the hardest job in the world. It is maybe the job that requires the most wrestling with difficult ethical questions, but the fact that so many people raise children makes it very easy to devalue it. We tend to congratulate people who have written a novel or something like that, because relatively few people write novels. A lot of people have children! A lot of people raise children to adulthood! And what they have accomplished is something incredible.... AG: It’s odd, because on the one hand if you ask someone, What’s the most important thing in your life? What’s the hardest moral decision that you have to make? What’s the place where your deepest emotions were engaged? They’ll tell you something about close relationships of care. And yet, because these statements are associated with emotion and feeling and women, they haven’t had the theoretical impact that you might imagine."
We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."
The Science Fiction of the 1900s – substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "We are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours. How to make that clear? Try this: let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s. Hmm. Do that, and somehow the whole genre looks different.... This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of 'where’s my flying car?' is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it. Looked at this way, Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from."
‘What the hell is she doing here?’: the day an A-list actor came to me for therapy – article by Joshua Fletcher in The Guardian, extracted from his And How Does That Make You Feel? "I had a new client pencilled in under the name 'Daphne'. No surname provided – she wanted to remain anonymous, she’d told me on the phone.... Eight minutes had now passed. Still no Daphne. At this point I’d like to introduce you to my inner voices.... Training to be a therapist, [I learned] to identify the different thoughts and voices that my mind liked to throw at me throughout the day. ... Critic: What the hell are you doing, Daphne? This is rude. Time is money. Empathy: This could be her first time in therapy. Perhaps she’s really scared? Give her a chance. You remember your own experiences of therapy, right? Anxiety: What if she was hit by a bus on the way here? Irreverence: Imagine if she was caught hitting the bus instead. “Die, bus, die!” Analytical: You’re on edge because you’re nervous. Biology: Your sympathetic nervous system is activated. Compassion: It’s OK not to feel calm right now. It’s OK to feel uneasy. Detective: The evidence suggests that she isn’t going to turn up. Critic: Wow, man, you love to overthink. Volition: I am going to concentrate on my breath and the sounds of outside. Compassion: Good idea. // Twenty minutes passed and I concluded that Daphne was not going to turn up.... I pressed the button for the lift... The lift doors opened and … my jaw dropped to the floor. Unveiled like a prize on a 90s gameshow was one of the most striking-looking people I have ever seen. They were also instantly recognisable. This was A-list royalty, a celebrity, an award-winning actor... What the hell was she doing here and why on earth was she on my floor? Daphne: Hey, Josh, I’m so sorry I’m late. I have an appointment with you which I think I have missed."
‘He checks in on me more than my friends and family’: can AI therapists do better than the real thing? – article by Alice Robb in The Guardian. "Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs. Can texting with an AI therapist possibly soothe our souls?... A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a 'therapeutic alliance' between bot and patient developed within just five days.... Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared.... Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being.... AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy.... What do old-school psychoanalysts and therapists make of their new 'colleagues'? Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz ...warns that befriending a bot could delay patients’ ability 'to make a connection with an ordinary person. It could become part of a defence against human intimacy.' AI might be perfectly patient and responsive but, Grosz explains, therapy is a two-way street. 'It’s not bad when my patients learn to correct me or say, "I don’t agree." That give and take is important.'... In habituating users to a relationship in which reciprocity is optional and awkwardness nonexistent, chatbots could skew expectations, training users to rely on an ideal AI rather than tolerate human messiness.... Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. 'The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,' says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. [Furthermore,] Psychologists in the UK are bound to confidentiality and monitored by the Health and Care Professions Council. Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services."
AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan? – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "AI Needs You [is] a timely and fascinating new book by the former Downing Street aide-turned-tech executive Verity Harding, which argues that it’s high time the public got a say on what kind of world we actually want to live in.... [Harding is now] back in Britain, running an academic project at Cambridge University on regulating AI for the global good, and increasingly urgently banging a drum for stronger political leadership over something capable of turning jobs, lives and societies upside down if we let it.... The book draws comparisons with the way John F Kennedy took charge of the space race (he used the United States’ moonshot not merely to advance scientific research or inspire the public, but to show a frightened cold war Europe that liberal democracies could still outstrip mighty authoritarian Russia), and with Britain’s approach in the 1980s to the emerging science of IVF, which was novel and morally complex at the time. The principles devised by the philosopher Mary Warnock for governing embryology, reflecting the human and social consequences of making test tube babies as well as the science, became a model for governments worldwide. Both examples suggest we could have more choices and control than we think over AI, Harding argues, so long as we recognise that good things don’t happen by accident. That means tackling the antisocial uses of AI, which include the convincing 'deepfake' images of real people used in pornography, and political disinformation. But it will also require nudging markets towards socially useful outcomes. Why, Harding asks, aren’t we harnessing the incredible power of AI to help solve the climate crisis? Why do we act as if humanity is helpless to control something it’s actively inventing?... Harding, who knows these two incestuous worlds [of tech and politics] better than most, is right, however, that this extraordinary chapter of human history doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, or in angry mobs rising up against a tech elite perceived as having gone too far. But only perhaps if we all understand that we have more agency than we think; that the nerdy wizards yanking levers behind Silicon Valley’s curtain aren’t quite as omnipotent as they seem, that AI is still our servant not our master, and that the point of politics is to shape events, not to flap around limply in their wake."
The big idea: should you blame yourself for your bad habits? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Much of the modern world has been deliberately engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist. If you can’t seem to focus at work because you keep wasting time on social media or getting distracted by WhatsApp notifications, consider that your phone was designed to be addictive: it was built to capture your attention. 'There are a thousand people on the other side of your screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation that you have,' the tech ethicist Tristan Harris observed. If you can’t stick to your budget and keep buying pointless stuff, think of how many adverts you encounter daily, how often a new one will pop up on your computer screen, targeted specifically to your tastes. None of this suggests that you should give up on giving up bad habits or abandon any attempts at self‑discipline. We’d be miserable, unhealthy and ethically compromised if we resigned ourselves to having no say in how we behave. Instead, it may help to think about willpower differently. Research suggests that the people we tend to admire for their self-control actually have to exercise it less frequently. They are good at engineering their environment so that they don’t need to wrestle with temptation: they know, for example, that it’s easier to not buy a packet of biscuits than to stop eating after you’ve opened the packet, and they are good at building healthy habits and routines."
‘The hardest thing is for a woman to say ‘I was raped’’: Jodie Comer on the Prima Facie effect – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "After the opening night of the hit play Prima Facie in London in 2022, a young female producer came up to playwright Suzie Miller and said, 'Loved the play. I’m one in three,' a line from the script referring to the number of women who are sexually assaulted in the UK. 'She didn’t have to say "I was raped,"' Miller recalls. 'It was this moment where I thought, "Oh, you can say that now."' 'The hardest thing is for a woman to say "I was raped,"' adds Jodie Comer, whose solo performance as the young defence lawyer forced to confront the failings of the legal system after she herself is sexually assaulted made the play a sensation. 'Women struggle with those words. To see people come and voice "This happened to me" is enormous.' This month Miller publishes a novelised version of the play, also called Prima Facie: it is dedicated to 'all the women who comprise the "one in three".'"
Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring review: into the cesspit of online hatred – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it.... Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them.... What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the 'crippled epistemology' of conspiracy theorists. Given the abuse to which she has been subjected, this is remarkable. But, although Spring doesn’t spell this out, it also provides a clue to why liberal democracies are being undermined by conspiracy theories. The people she has been talking to are often living proof of what it’s like trying to get by in a society increasingly shaped by an economic ideology in which inequality is a feature, not a bug: it’s what neoliberalism is designed to do. The terrifying levels of social exclusion in modern 'prosperous' democracies bear testimony to that. And the widespread popularity of conspiracy theories is a symptom of it. What this means is that we need to acknowledge that networked technology is not the cause of our current ills. It’s a necessary factor but not a sufficient explanation for the mess democracies are in. And tackling it requires a frank admission that our politics are probably the main driving force of public disaffection. Which is the last thing that politicians fixated on the next election are likely to concede."
A conspiracy theorist’s book club discussion about The Gruffalo – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "'The Gruffalo' does not go down well at the Conspiracy Theorist Book Club. Conspiracist 1: 'Typical mainstream media pro-mouse propaganda, paid for by the powerful rodent lobby.' Conspiracist 2: 'The creature has clearly escaped from a lab, yet the "author" does not mention this.' Conspiracist 3: 'Gruffalo is an anagram of A FROG FLU. Coincidence? I think not!' Conspiracist 4: 'These elite warriors will not be happy until we are all living in the woods and eating nuts.'"
Rites of Passage by Judith Flanders review: a brilliant account of Victorian Britain in mourning – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "I devoured Judith Flanders’s Rites of Passage, a new book about Victorian death and its accoutrements... So many amazing facts! If it were a soup, there’d be a crouton in every spoonful. But still, I’m not sure I fully agree with her that funeral rituals ended (more or less) with the arrival of the 20th century, death becoming more personal and inward, 'shared only with family and close friends'. British people of my age – I’m 54 – will remember how their grandparents went on. The remnants of their Victorian parents’ behaviour could still be felt in my childhood: the curtains of the whole street closed on the day of a funeral; the undertaker walking slowly (and with a certain amount of relish) ahead of the hearse as it left the house, and again at the cemetery; strangers stopping, and removing their caps as the cortege passed.... But all this only makes Rites of Passage the more fascinating, of course. I felt it as a kind of double haunting, its ghosts at once distant and close by. Flanders covers everything from mortality rates to the rise of garden cemeteries, coffin designs to the movement for cremation, and she does so with compassion and a droll wit. She acknowledges the very human ways in which Victorians were the same as us (a mother grieved terribly, even if the children’s deaths were horribly commonplace). But she understands, too, that our forebears were very different to us. '… the children didn’t stay… they went back again,' one parishioner said to the Rev Francis Kilvert of the twins lost by her bereft neighbour. As Kilvert noted, it was as if they’d just 'come into a room and gone out again'."
The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities, including in Gaza – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "[Jonathan] Glazer was [on Sunday] accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as 'non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors', people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.... In one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of [the] controversies [currently afflicting Jewish communities]. 'All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, "Look what they did then"; rather, "Look what we do now,"' Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present. And he went further: 'We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.' For Glazer, Israel does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today.... Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them. When the film premiered last May, before Hamas’s 7 October attack and before Israel’s unending assault on Gaza, this was a thought experiment that could be contemplated with a degree of intellectual distance.... But by the time Zone made it into theatres in December, Glazer’s subtle challenge for audiences to contemplate their inner Hösses cut a lot closer to the bone.... What do we do to interrupt the momentum of trivialization and normalization? That is the question so many of us are struggling with right now." See also ‘Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”’ by David Hering in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog.
Don’t Look Left by Atef Abu Saif review: in the line of fire – review by Helena Kennedy in The Guardian. "It is hard to describe the cumulative effect this devastating chronicle has over 280 pages. It describes a mounting toll of death and destruction, with each day bringing more heartrending news of homes demolished and relatives and colleagues killed. Gradually, it makes it clear that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip. Danger is everywhere, like the low hum of a mosquito.... Few who read this will have direct experience of war; we are among generations in the west that have been blessed to live without conflict. That is why we are duty‑bound to place ourselves in the shoes of those who do suffer these horrors, especially when our governments supply the armaments that make war possible. Abu Saif would say ruefully that his people, the Palestinians, have lived through 75 years of war, starting with displacement and forced exile and then the denial of self-determination and a secure homeland.... The people of southern Israel undoubtedly suffered terrible atrocities on 7 October 2023 at the hands of Hamas. However, we have to be capable of holding two truths in our hearts. What is happening to the people of Gaza is also deeply horrifying. Three principles underpin the law of armed conflict: the distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality, and the obligation to take appropriate precautions to minimise civilian harm. Is this a genocide? The international court of justice (ICJ) will decide that issue in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, under the genocide convention, the world is expected to prevent such a trajectory. The ICJ has given a warning to Israel; now is the time for all of us to say: enough is enough."
Pluralistic: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works" (17 Oct 2023) – blog post by Cory Doctorow, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other 'charismatic megaprojects,' connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning. Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.... So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance."
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer: a history of violence – review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. "Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair. Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage.... He has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.... What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to 'reclaim' his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory: the clothes people wore, their facial expressions and gestures, the idioms they used – it’s as if trauma has frozen these in time.... Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens."
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse – interview by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life.... The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years.... One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as 'horses, dogs, children', in that order).... The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was? 'It never occurred to me,' he says. 'And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.' He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. 'At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.'... I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested? 'One thing,' he says, 'is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: "You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do."'"
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev: the radio host who beat Goebbels at his own game – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. "[In the] summer [of 1941], a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game.... Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the 'inner pig-dog'. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature. As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a 'nearly forgotten genius of propaganda'. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered. Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery."
Heresy by Catherine Nixey: book of revelations – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "As far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off. 'Woe,' says the woman. Mary’s reaction is unrecorded, perhaps because she felt that she had made her point. This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. ... At the beginning of this revelatory account, Nixey tells us that she is the child of a former nun and monk, and, until her late 20s, counted herself a believing Roman Catholic. There is then nothing sneery about her wonderful writing, although you will detect occasional flashes of anger when she recounts some egregious bit of censorship and repression. What shines through is a kind of exasperated love for the tradition in which she was raised and an impossible-to-suppress laugh at the idea of a Virgin Mary who blasts out flames from every orifice as if it were some kind of Marvel superpower."
Pluralistic: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works" (17 Oct 2023) – blog post by Cory Doctorow, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other 'charismatic megaprojects,' connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning. Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.... So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance."
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer: a history of violence – review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. "Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair. Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage.... He has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.... What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to 'reclaim' his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory: the clothes people wore, their facial expressions and gestures, the idioms they used – it’s as if trauma has frozen these in time.... Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens."
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse – interview by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life.... The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years.... One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as 'horses, dogs, children', in that order).... The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was? 'It never occurred to me,' he says. 'And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.' He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. 'At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.'... I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested? 'One thing,' he says, 'is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: "You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do."'"
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev: the radio host who beat Goebbels at his own game – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. "[In the] summer [of 1941], a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game.... Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the 'inner pig-dog'. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature. As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a 'nearly forgotten genius of propaganda'. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered. Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery."
Heresy by Catherine Nixey: book of revelations – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "As far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off. 'Woe,' says the woman. Mary’s reaction is unrecorded, perhaps because she felt that she had made her point. This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. ... At the beginning of this revelatory account, Nixey tells us that she is the child of a former nun and monk, and, until her late 20s, counted herself a believing Roman Catholic. There is then nothing sneery about her wonderful writing, although you will detect occasional flashes of anger when she recounts some egregious bit of censorship and repression. What shines through is a kind of exasperated love for the tradition in which she was raised and an impossible-to-suppress laugh at the idea of a Virgin Mary who blasts out flames from every orifice as if it were some kind of Marvel superpower."
Sunday 31 March 2024
Cuttings: February 2024
‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people beauty, freedom and dignity – article by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. "For architects, who generally want to do more with their skills than adding some style to an office block or a private house, designing for older people and those living with age-related diseases such as dementia gives them a chance to contribute to something of social value. ... The Village Landais Alzheimer, on the edge of the town of Dax in south-west France, is a comprehensive attempt to 'give real life back' to people with Alzheimer’s, as one staff member puts it, to 'create conditions where they don’t just stay in a room waiting to die'.... Within each cluster of buildings, or quartier, are individual 'houses', each with private bedrooms and a shared sitting and dining area, and a kitchen run by staff. These in turn look through glass walls into informal courtyards, to create the possibility of community with the other houses.... The paths around the village are designed in loops, because people with Alzheimer’s sometimes get confused by dead ends. They also return walking routes back towards the centre and away from the boundary fence, which you barely notice.... The paving is a uniform beige colour throughout, as strong contrasts can be disturbing to people with Alzheimer’s. Mirrors, also potentially unsettling, can be concealed by shutters. Light and dark are used to attract attention where it should go, and deflect it from where it should not. Pale door handles are placed against darker backgrounds, and doors to service areas are barely noticeable in boarded walls. People with Alzheimer’s are 'more curious than other people, as they are lost all the time', says Charon-Burnel, so 'if you put a "no entry" or "staff only" sign on something they will go there'. It’s better to make the off-limits zones inconspicuous. 'There is as little signage as possible,' says Morten Rask Gregersen of Nord. 'People can see where they need to go instead of being shown.'”
Hardy Women by Paula Byrne: brilliant writer of women, very bad husband – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "How is it, [Byrne] wants to know, that while a female fan could write to the creator of Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead praising him for his 'complete understanding of a woman’s soul', his first wife could only rail at the way he reserved his sympathies exclusively for those females he invented? Drawing on Hardy’s correspondence, including some letters that were, Byrne says, unknown to previous biographers, she sets out in her new book to find answers by looking closely at all the women in his life – and I do mean all of them. Not only are his wives and lovers, his sisters and his mother here. At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.... While Hardy Women is deeply researched and often well-written, it is, unfortunately, one of those books that struggles to rise above its tricksy, completist concept. Chop-chop-chop, we go, through all the women, each chapter devoted to a different one, save for those few that return, by necessity, to a creature we’ve already met. The effect, in narrative terms, is frustratingly stop-start, and (unintentionally, I think) repetitive. ... The biggest problem, however, stems from the fact that the most fascinating period by far of Hardy’s life in terms of his relationships with women is ... those months and years when he was in a complicated and deceitful menage with [his wife] Emma and [his secretary] Florence. Of course it’s sad to see how he used his cousin Tryphena Sparks and a woman called Eliza Nicholls, who arrived, Miss Havisham-like, at Max Gate after Emma’s death in 1912, still in possession of the engagement ring he’d given her 40 years before – and Byrne tells both stories beautifully. But still, the reader waits – and waits – for Florence to appear and then collide with Emma, and you have to get through an awful lot of pages before she does (Hardy Women is long)."
Spent Light by Lara Pawson: the dark side of everyday things – review by Sarah Moss in The Guardian. "At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers... The gas burning under the egg pan reminds her of Zyklon B and the crematoriums of Auschwitz.... [But] these aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. Eventually, inevitably, Pawson turns her gaze to a phone... She cannot recall 'the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock … where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one are raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt'. And then, devastatingly, 'I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused.'... Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose."
On the 60th birthday of Vision On, we celebrate a creative powerhouse that inspired a generation – article by Mark Braxton on the Radio Times website. "Vision On was always a gem in the children's TV schedules – and now it's a diamond, 60 years old on 6th March. Between 1964 and 1976 it entertained children – and let's face it, their parents – with a quickfire and visually exhilarating mixture of comedy, creative ideas, multi-format animations, mime and viewers' artworks.... Input came from far and wide. [Says Vision On cornerstone Clive Doig:] 'We had a little cottage industry of regular contributors: animation artists, film directors who made little visually interesting films, many stop-motion film contributors...' Vision On [fixtures] included comic-strip-style mini-stories involving captioned conversations between Humphrey the Tortoise and a little girl called Susanne; or between The Burbles, invisible creatures who lived in a grandfather clock; the animated unearthings of The Digger on a construction site; and a cartoon cuckoo who was always losing the numbers from its clock.... 'Pat [Keysell] was terrific as the front presenter,' says Clive. 'When I was first assigned to Vision On, she had been there for many years. I think she really enjoyed breaking away from a rather plodding, stultified programme [For the Deaf] into a madcap programme of surreal ideas and visual comedy.'... Keysell assisted with the show's mime sequences, first with Ben Benison and when he left, future Doctor Who star Sylvester McCoy – billed in those days as Sylveste McCoy.... Of course, critical to the success and longevity of Vision On and its spin-offs Take Hart and Hartbeat was the brilliant artist and educator Tony Hart.. 'His type of art was amazing in the fact that he could take any little objects and turn them into great paintings.'... Humour was a big ingredient in Vision On and keeping the gag rate high on a weekly basis was David Cleveland in the gurning, lab-coated guise of The Prof. Week after week his mini masterpieces of surreal comedy were a major highlight and employed all kinds of trick photography."
Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus? – article by Marina Hyde in The Guardian. "Did some randos calling him a 'racist' on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them 'paedophiles'... A supposed free-speech nut suing for libel (not his first rodeo), Laurence brought his counterclaim on the basis that 'I felt that one of the most important things I had in this world was my good name'. Mm-hm. I can’t help feeling that that ship had not just already sailed, but been sunk in the Solent around 300 years before the development of the electric lightbulb.... Let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda.... Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. ... Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey."
The writer's attempts to improve his novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Writer (to three engineers, tending respectively to his desk, chair and laptop): Well, if there's nothing wrong with my chair, desk or computer, then why is my novel so terrible?"
A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer: sex and sanctimony – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Ninety years before the Lady Chatterley trial, the Old Bailey was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Fruits of Philosophy was the sort of thing that would corrupt wives and servants. Written in simple, unshowy language by an American physician, Fruits set out the basics of contraception, principally by means of 'the female' self-administering a spermicidal douche post-coitus. The tone was sensible and brisk, and about as far from a turn-on as could be imagined. Still, as far as the British authorities were concerned, the suggestion that married couples might want to have sex for any purpose other than making babies was downright obscene.... Standing in the dock was Annie Besant, a pretty, intelligent, public-spirited clergyman’s wife, the sort of woman whom any gentleman of the press or, indeed, the jury bench was likely to admire. Besant was charged, along with her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh, with selling The Fruits of Philosophy at the modest cost of six pence, making it easily available to all who needed it. Besant conducted her own defence with extraordinary assurance, calling expert medical witnesses to give heart-rending testimony as to the consequences for working-class families of being unable to control their fertility.... Michael Meyer plays up to all these stereotypes and even adds a comic commentary of his own. Thus, the Victorians enjoyed 'shagging like rabbits' while Besant was 'a badass'. This effortful attempt to sound relevant is unnecessary, though. Besant’s story is quite powerful enough without all the trimmings."
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review by Joe Moshenska in The Guardian. "When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, [Arendt] fled to the US. [She] questioned whether the traditions [she] had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them. As Stonebridge shows, what distinguished Arendt was her determination to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them. ... Her deepest concerns were with the nature of human beginnings – with the innovations and surprises of which people are capable, and the futures that their acts make possible; with the fact of human plurality – the fundamental variety of our common and fragile life that makes true thought possible; and with the possibility of love, which is for Arendt, as Stonebridge elegantly puts it, 'the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place'. Arendt clung on to these key commitments with the opposite of naive idealism. They were the basis of her lifelong exploration of the ways in which nazism and totalitarianism deform and nullify these fundamental capacities, and of the beleaguered but revolutionary possibilities that nonetheless remain. Her very way of being – idiosyncratic and original, while still feeling the shared world itching at her fingertips – embodied these ideals. The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Stonebridge’s book is an interesting generic mixture that itself feels like a sign of the times: it combines biography, critical assessment of Arendt’s legacy, practical handbook for action (six of the 10 chapters begin 'How to…'), and musings on the current geopolitical situation."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the contradictions of colonialism – review by Nandini Das in The Guardian. "Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of [Pennsylvania plant trader John] Bartram and [the Royal Gardens at] Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it, and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling. For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds that changed the English landscape and accelerated modern plant science also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world. And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism. Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.... 'It’s all true, but the opposite is also true', as Sanghera puts it. History is not a balance sheet: sometimes it requires that we hold multiple truths in our mind simultaneously. Nations – and individuals – can do great evil at the same time as doing good. And that’s where it gets complicated: sometimes doing what’s considered evil can lead to good, and vice versa."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the charge sheet against rule Britannia – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "In Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel to Empireland (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to the popularity of Indian restaurants.... His new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an influence.... The book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is 'not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding', he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists. Britain’s genius for propaganda has previously been used to cast its imperial identity as heroic rather than villainous. This has been replicated in the US, where the battle over the curation of history – in particular over alleged fears of the negative impact on children exposed to any text that contains traumatic events – has seen many rightwing commentators talk up the benefits of slavery to the enslaved. Such egregious arguments have not yet found favour in Britain, but they highlight the lure of revisionism. Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. Empireworld makes it more difficult for revisionists ... to return the genie to that bottle."
Christopher Priest – obituary by John Clute in The Guardian. "The novelist Christopher Priest ...became eminent more than once over the nearly 60 years of his active working life. But while he relished success, he displayed a wry reserve about the ambiguities attending these moments in the limelight. In 1983 he was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a 20-strong cohort, most of them – such as Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and AN Wilson – significantly younger than Priest, whose career had begun almost two decades earlier, and who had at least 15 books and 50 stories in print by the early 80s. He clearly felt that it was not so much the quality of his work that delayed his 'promotion' to the literary establishment, but his reluctance to deny, when asked, that he wrote science fiction. His large body of work never fitted easily into any mould. Only in recent years has it become widely understood that the sometimes baffling ingenuity and thrust of his fiction has been of a piece, no more detachable into convenient genres than, say, Amis’s or Ishiguro’s tales of the fantastic. Like them, he wove visions of Britain drifting into a post-empire future without secure signposts. Those stories, and the characters he let loose without a paddle, sink and dodge into realities that no longer count. Lacking much in the way of science-fiction gear, even his early work seems to describe the point that we have now arrived at."
Namesake by NS Nuseibeh: the pen and the sword – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. "'Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,' writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and 'easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed'.... Searching and honest, these essays carry the reader from New York dinner parties to seventh-century battlefields to Jerusalem checkpoints and down the alleyways of a shrewd and compassionate mind. As she trails Nusayba, the academic in her recedes and you can hear a girlish heart racing, her belief in her own courage blossoming. This subtext is what makes Namesake a pleasure to read: the shy, people-pleasing scholar behind all that incisive research diving headfirst into old myths as if trying to resurrect her redoubtable foremother. Will she find belonging and a connection to her ancestors? Will she ever return to Gaza or get flagged by Prevent? Will she stop worrying, make peace with overstaying houseguests and English aubergines? Will she be allowed to introduce herself as Arab and feminist without having to reject her Muslim history? At once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, here is an illuminating and trenchant exploration of Muslim feminism (a term I understand better now, though I still have a lot of arguing left in me). An essential read in the war against lazy stereotypes, cultural annihilation and every form of apartheid."
The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe? – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: '100% AI-generated'. Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first '100% AI-generated' essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.... Policy demands that I refer essays with high AI detection scores for academic misconduct, something that can lead to steep penalties, including expulsion. But my standout student contested the referral, claiming university-approved support software they used for spelling and grammar included limited generative AI capabilities that had been mistaken for ChatGPT.... I granted the appeal. I admit to trusting the human over the machine. But the defence was also convincing, and this particular student had been consistently writing in this style long before ChatGPT came into being. Still, I was making a high-stakes call without reliable evidence. It was a distressing experience for my student, and one that is being repeated across the sector."
Can these seven tips help you become a ‘supercommunicator’? – article by Lauren Mechling in The Guardian. "My weeklong experiment in being one of the 'supercommunicators' [was guided by] bestselling author Charles Duhigg’s zippy psychology cum self-help book of the same name. Inspired by his own chagrin at being a less than sterling conversational partner – with his children, wife and employees at his former workplace – he committed himself to learning how to talk to others in a way that makes them feel heard.... Duhigg’s conversations with neurologists, psychologists and negotiation experts led him to learn that superior conversationalists have a lot in common. They tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings, laugh freely and ask 20 times more questions than the average person.... Mirror their wants and needs.... Laugh your way into their heart.... Use your influence.... Assess what kind of conversation is needed.... Prepare a list of topics to discuss.... Repeat what they're saying.... Pay attention to non-verbal cues."
Five of the best books about grief – article by Sophie Ratcliffe in The Guardian. "Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter... Sad Book by Michael Rosen... You Are Not Alone: A New Way to Grieve by Cariad Lloyd... Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley... Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross"
Rocking the boat: would your marriage survive being shipwrecked together? – article by Sophie Elmhirst in The Guardian. "Let’s play it as a game. Two-player, ideally lovers.... The set-up is simple. You’re in a boat in the middle of an ocean. You have no radio. Oh, and one of you can’t swim. That’s key. A whale collides with your boat and as it fills with water you salvage a few tins of food and containers of fresh water, a couple of books, some clothes, a small inflatable dinghy and an even smaller life raft. You climb into the raft and watch your boat sink below the waves. And then the game begins. The challenges are initially practical: how do you eat? How do you find water? How do you sleep? Then they’re psychological: what do you do all day? How do you stay hopeful? How do you not go insane? ... There are questions of power to resolve: who’s in charge? Who makes the decisions? Who chooses what you eat or how much water you’re allowed to drink? Towards the end, as in all good games, things turn nicely existential. Do you make it or do you die? How do you die? Who dies first?... The version I’ve written, Maurice and Maralyn, isn’t fictional, but tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who, in 1973, endured nearly four months adrift on a small life raft in the Pacific before they were rescued.... The only thing we know for sure, obviously, is how the game ends, and it’s not with salvation. Ending Maurice and Maralyn’s story with their rescue would be like ending a love story with a wedding. A sentimental misrepresentation: bullshit. No, the game can only end one way, which is death.... You can avoid the emptiness, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to stare at it, right in the eye. Acknowledge the emptiness and know that you have to keep doing anyway, that you have to live in the knowledge of death without it dictating the terms.... I think that’s how Maralyn played the game. Maurice uncovered the emptiness, bathed in the stuff, almost let it smother him, while she kept going, kept doing. She didn’t feel she had a choice. In fact, she was grateful for the purpose he gave her. Later, an interviewer asked Maralyn how Maurice had helped her. 'I think it was having someone else to think about, rather than think about myself all the time,' she replied. It wasn’t just the doing; it was the thinking, too. She thought, and found meaning, beyond the limits of herself – which is, if you think about it, the ultimate cheat code. Death can’t touch you once you’re no longer supremely invested in yourself. She won." See also 'Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst review – how to keep a marriage afloat' review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
Hardy Women by Paula Byrne: brilliant writer of women, very bad husband – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "How is it, [Byrne] wants to know, that while a female fan could write to the creator of Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead praising him for his 'complete understanding of a woman’s soul', his first wife could only rail at the way he reserved his sympathies exclusively for those females he invented? Drawing on Hardy’s correspondence, including some letters that were, Byrne says, unknown to previous biographers, she sets out in her new book to find answers by looking closely at all the women in his life – and I do mean all of them. Not only are his wives and lovers, his sisters and his mother here. At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.... While Hardy Women is deeply researched and often well-written, it is, unfortunately, one of those books that struggles to rise above its tricksy, completist concept. Chop-chop-chop, we go, through all the women, each chapter devoted to a different one, save for those few that return, by necessity, to a creature we’ve already met. The effect, in narrative terms, is frustratingly stop-start, and (unintentionally, I think) repetitive. ... The biggest problem, however, stems from the fact that the most fascinating period by far of Hardy’s life in terms of his relationships with women is ... those months and years when he was in a complicated and deceitful menage with [his wife] Emma and [his secretary] Florence. Of course it’s sad to see how he used his cousin Tryphena Sparks and a woman called Eliza Nicholls, who arrived, Miss Havisham-like, at Max Gate after Emma’s death in 1912, still in possession of the engagement ring he’d given her 40 years before – and Byrne tells both stories beautifully. But still, the reader waits – and waits – for Florence to appear and then collide with Emma, and you have to get through an awful lot of pages before she does (Hardy Women is long)."
Spent Light by Lara Pawson: the dark side of everyday things – review by Sarah Moss in The Guardian. "At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers... The gas burning under the egg pan reminds her of Zyklon B and the crematoriums of Auschwitz.... [But] these aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. Eventually, inevitably, Pawson turns her gaze to a phone... She cannot recall 'the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock … where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one are raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt'. And then, devastatingly, 'I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused.'... Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose."
On the 60th birthday of Vision On, we celebrate a creative powerhouse that inspired a generation – article by Mark Braxton on the Radio Times website. "Vision On was always a gem in the children's TV schedules – and now it's a diamond, 60 years old on 6th March. Between 1964 and 1976 it entertained children – and let's face it, their parents – with a quickfire and visually exhilarating mixture of comedy, creative ideas, multi-format animations, mime and viewers' artworks.... Input came from far and wide. [Says Vision On cornerstone Clive Doig:] 'We had a little cottage industry of regular contributors: animation artists, film directors who made little visually interesting films, many stop-motion film contributors...' Vision On [fixtures] included comic-strip-style mini-stories involving captioned conversations between Humphrey the Tortoise and a little girl called Susanne; or between The Burbles, invisible creatures who lived in a grandfather clock; the animated unearthings of The Digger on a construction site; and a cartoon cuckoo who was always losing the numbers from its clock.... 'Pat [Keysell] was terrific as the front presenter,' says Clive. 'When I was first assigned to Vision On, she had been there for many years. I think she really enjoyed breaking away from a rather plodding, stultified programme [For the Deaf] into a madcap programme of surreal ideas and visual comedy.'... Keysell assisted with the show's mime sequences, first with Ben Benison and when he left, future Doctor Who star Sylvester McCoy – billed in those days as Sylveste McCoy.... Of course, critical to the success and longevity of Vision On and its spin-offs Take Hart and Hartbeat was the brilliant artist and educator Tony Hart.. 'His type of art was amazing in the fact that he could take any little objects and turn them into great paintings.'... Humour was a big ingredient in Vision On and keeping the gag rate high on a weekly basis was David Cleveland in the gurning, lab-coated guise of The Prof. Week after week his mini masterpieces of surreal comedy were a major highlight and employed all kinds of trick photography."
Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus? – article by Marina Hyde in The Guardian. "Did some randos calling him a 'racist' on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them 'paedophiles'... A supposed free-speech nut suing for libel (not his first rodeo), Laurence brought his counterclaim on the basis that 'I felt that one of the most important things I had in this world was my good name'. Mm-hm. I can’t help feeling that that ship had not just already sailed, but been sunk in the Solent around 300 years before the development of the electric lightbulb.... Let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda.... Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. ... Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey."
The writer's attempts to improve his novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Writer (to three engineers, tending respectively to his desk, chair and laptop): Well, if there's nothing wrong with my chair, desk or computer, then why is my novel so terrible?"
A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer: sex and sanctimony – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Ninety years before the Lady Chatterley trial, the Old Bailey was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Fruits of Philosophy was the sort of thing that would corrupt wives and servants. Written in simple, unshowy language by an American physician, Fruits set out the basics of contraception, principally by means of 'the female' self-administering a spermicidal douche post-coitus. The tone was sensible and brisk, and about as far from a turn-on as could be imagined. Still, as far as the British authorities were concerned, the suggestion that married couples might want to have sex for any purpose other than making babies was downright obscene.... Standing in the dock was Annie Besant, a pretty, intelligent, public-spirited clergyman’s wife, the sort of woman whom any gentleman of the press or, indeed, the jury bench was likely to admire. Besant was charged, along with her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh, with selling The Fruits of Philosophy at the modest cost of six pence, making it easily available to all who needed it. Besant conducted her own defence with extraordinary assurance, calling expert medical witnesses to give heart-rending testimony as to the consequences for working-class families of being unable to control their fertility.... Michael Meyer plays up to all these stereotypes and even adds a comic commentary of his own. Thus, the Victorians enjoyed 'shagging like rabbits' while Besant was 'a badass'. This effortful attempt to sound relevant is unnecessary, though. Besant’s story is quite powerful enough without all the trimmings."
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review by Joe Moshenska in The Guardian. "When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, [Arendt] fled to the US. [She] questioned whether the traditions [she] had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them. As Stonebridge shows, what distinguished Arendt was her determination to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them. ... Her deepest concerns were with the nature of human beginnings – with the innovations and surprises of which people are capable, and the futures that their acts make possible; with the fact of human plurality – the fundamental variety of our common and fragile life that makes true thought possible; and with the possibility of love, which is for Arendt, as Stonebridge elegantly puts it, 'the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place'. Arendt clung on to these key commitments with the opposite of naive idealism. They were the basis of her lifelong exploration of the ways in which nazism and totalitarianism deform and nullify these fundamental capacities, and of the beleaguered but revolutionary possibilities that nonetheless remain. Her very way of being – idiosyncratic and original, while still feeling the shared world itching at her fingertips – embodied these ideals. The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Stonebridge’s book is an interesting generic mixture that itself feels like a sign of the times: it combines biography, critical assessment of Arendt’s legacy, practical handbook for action (six of the 10 chapters begin 'How to…'), and musings on the current geopolitical situation."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the contradictions of colonialism – review by Nandini Das in The Guardian. "Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of [Pennsylvania plant trader John] Bartram and [the Royal Gardens at] Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it, and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling. For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds that changed the English landscape and accelerated modern plant science also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world. And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism. Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.... 'It’s all true, but the opposite is also true', as Sanghera puts it. History is not a balance sheet: sometimes it requires that we hold multiple truths in our mind simultaneously. Nations – and individuals – can do great evil at the same time as doing good. And that’s where it gets complicated: sometimes doing what’s considered evil can lead to good, and vice versa."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the charge sheet against rule Britannia – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "In Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel to Empireland (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to the popularity of Indian restaurants.... His new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an influence.... The book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is 'not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding', he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists. Britain’s genius for propaganda has previously been used to cast its imperial identity as heroic rather than villainous. This has been replicated in the US, where the battle over the curation of history – in particular over alleged fears of the negative impact on children exposed to any text that contains traumatic events – has seen many rightwing commentators talk up the benefits of slavery to the enslaved. Such egregious arguments have not yet found favour in Britain, but they highlight the lure of revisionism. Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. Empireworld makes it more difficult for revisionists ... to return the genie to that bottle."
Christopher Priest – obituary by John Clute in The Guardian. "The novelist Christopher Priest ...became eminent more than once over the nearly 60 years of his active working life. But while he relished success, he displayed a wry reserve about the ambiguities attending these moments in the limelight. In 1983 he was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a 20-strong cohort, most of them – such as Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and AN Wilson – significantly younger than Priest, whose career had begun almost two decades earlier, and who had at least 15 books and 50 stories in print by the early 80s. He clearly felt that it was not so much the quality of his work that delayed his 'promotion' to the literary establishment, but his reluctance to deny, when asked, that he wrote science fiction. His large body of work never fitted easily into any mould. Only in recent years has it become widely understood that the sometimes baffling ingenuity and thrust of his fiction has been of a piece, no more detachable into convenient genres than, say, Amis’s or Ishiguro’s tales of the fantastic. Like them, he wove visions of Britain drifting into a post-empire future without secure signposts. Those stories, and the characters he let loose without a paddle, sink and dodge into realities that no longer count. Lacking much in the way of science-fiction gear, even his early work seems to describe the point that we have now arrived at."
Namesake by NS Nuseibeh: the pen and the sword – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. "'Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,' writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and 'easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed'.... Searching and honest, these essays carry the reader from New York dinner parties to seventh-century battlefields to Jerusalem checkpoints and down the alleyways of a shrewd and compassionate mind. As she trails Nusayba, the academic in her recedes and you can hear a girlish heart racing, her belief in her own courage blossoming. This subtext is what makes Namesake a pleasure to read: the shy, people-pleasing scholar behind all that incisive research diving headfirst into old myths as if trying to resurrect her redoubtable foremother. Will she find belonging and a connection to her ancestors? Will she ever return to Gaza or get flagged by Prevent? Will she stop worrying, make peace with overstaying houseguests and English aubergines? Will she be allowed to introduce herself as Arab and feminist without having to reject her Muslim history? At once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, here is an illuminating and trenchant exploration of Muslim feminism (a term I understand better now, though I still have a lot of arguing left in me). An essential read in the war against lazy stereotypes, cultural annihilation and every form of apartheid."
The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe? – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: '100% AI-generated'. Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first '100% AI-generated' essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.... Policy demands that I refer essays with high AI detection scores for academic misconduct, something that can lead to steep penalties, including expulsion. But my standout student contested the referral, claiming university-approved support software they used for spelling and grammar included limited generative AI capabilities that had been mistaken for ChatGPT.... I granted the appeal. I admit to trusting the human over the machine. But the defence was also convincing, and this particular student had been consistently writing in this style long before ChatGPT came into being. Still, I was making a high-stakes call without reliable evidence. It was a distressing experience for my student, and one that is being repeated across the sector."
Can these seven tips help you become a ‘supercommunicator’? – article by Lauren Mechling in The Guardian. "My weeklong experiment in being one of the 'supercommunicators' [was guided by] bestselling author Charles Duhigg’s zippy psychology cum self-help book of the same name. Inspired by his own chagrin at being a less than sterling conversational partner – with his children, wife and employees at his former workplace – he committed himself to learning how to talk to others in a way that makes them feel heard.... Duhigg’s conversations with neurologists, psychologists and negotiation experts led him to learn that superior conversationalists have a lot in common. They tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings, laugh freely and ask 20 times more questions than the average person.... Mirror their wants and needs.... Laugh your way into their heart.... Use your influence.... Assess what kind of conversation is needed.... Prepare a list of topics to discuss.... Repeat what they're saying.... Pay attention to non-verbal cues."
Five of the best books about grief – article by Sophie Ratcliffe in The Guardian. "Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter... Sad Book by Michael Rosen... You Are Not Alone: A New Way to Grieve by Cariad Lloyd... Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley... Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross"
Rocking the boat: would your marriage survive being shipwrecked together? – article by Sophie Elmhirst in The Guardian. "Let’s play it as a game. Two-player, ideally lovers.... The set-up is simple. You’re in a boat in the middle of an ocean. You have no radio. Oh, and one of you can’t swim. That’s key. A whale collides with your boat and as it fills with water you salvage a few tins of food and containers of fresh water, a couple of books, some clothes, a small inflatable dinghy and an even smaller life raft. You climb into the raft and watch your boat sink below the waves. And then the game begins. The challenges are initially practical: how do you eat? How do you find water? How do you sleep? Then they’re psychological: what do you do all day? How do you stay hopeful? How do you not go insane? ... There are questions of power to resolve: who’s in charge? Who makes the decisions? Who chooses what you eat or how much water you’re allowed to drink? Towards the end, as in all good games, things turn nicely existential. Do you make it or do you die? How do you die? Who dies first?... The version I’ve written, Maurice and Maralyn, isn’t fictional, but tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who, in 1973, endured nearly four months adrift on a small life raft in the Pacific before they were rescued.... The only thing we know for sure, obviously, is how the game ends, and it’s not with salvation. Ending Maurice and Maralyn’s story with their rescue would be like ending a love story with a wedding. A sentimental misrepresentation: bullshit. No, the game can only end one way, which is death.... You can avoid the emptiness, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to stare at it, right in the eye. Acknowledge the emptiness and know that you have to keep doing anyway, that you have to live in the knowledge of death without it dictating the terms.... I think that’s how Maralyn played the game. Maurice uncovered the emptiness, bathed in the stuff, almost let it smother him, while she kept going, kept doing. She didn’t feel she had a choice. In fact, she was grateful for the purpose he gave her. Later, an interviewer asked Maralyn how Maurice had helped her. 'I think it was having someone else to think about, rather than think about myself all the time,' she replied. It wasn’t just the doing; it was the thinking, too. She thought, and found meaning, beyond the limits of herself – which is, if you think about it, the ultimate cheat code. Death can’t touch you once you’re no longer supremely invested in yourself. She won." See also 'Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst review – how to keep a marriage afloat' review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
Friday 2 February 2024
Cuttings: January 2024
The Emotional Life of Populism – article by Eva Illouz in The Montréal Review, based on her book of the same title, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In my book I argue that populist politics blends together four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love – and makes these emotions dominant vectors of the political process. The mixture of these emotions forms the matrix of populism because they generate antagonism between social groups inside society and alienation from the institutions that safeguard democracy, and because they are, in many ways, oblivious to something we might call reality. More exactly: populism lives as much in reality (naming ills that have transformed working-class lives) as in the imagination. Fear provides compelling motivation to repeatedly name enemies as well as invent them, to view such enemies as fixed and unchanging, to shift politics from conflict resolution to a state of permanent vigilance to threats, even at the price of suspending the rule of law. ... Disgust creates and maintains the dynamic of distancing between social groups through the fear of pollution and contamination: it helps separate ethnic or religious minorities and, by the logic of contamination, it also contributes towards separating the political groups who either support or oppose the minorities. Ressentiment is a key process in self-victimization; its rhetoric has become generalized, as all groups, majority and minority, invoke it to designate the relationship of the other to them; it redefines the political self in terms of its wounds. Trumpist voters or Israeli settlers are united in their common sense of self-victimization against left-wing elites. When all groups are victims of each other, it creates antagonism and changes ordinary notions of justice. It also creates fantasies of revenge. Finally, a particular form of exclusionary patriotism promises solidarity to the in-group at the expense of the others, who become redefined as superfluous or dangerous members of the nation. We should not underestimate the deep relationship that nationalism entertains today with religion and tradition. All of these emotions, together, create large imaginary spaces impervious to the real; these spaces are filled by emotional projections and scenarios which become prone to a paranoid interpretation of social and political life. These emotional imaginary spaces energetically fuel conflict within society through unavenged wounds and enemies and aggrandize a supposedly primordial and authentic definition of the true people."
Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his homily for the Feast of the Holy Family 31.12.23. "In August, I married the boy I have loved since we were 17.... I never wanted a wedding of any extravagance, and shied away from the attention it meant. But as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate. I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy, and reject hope. And so I chose to embrace it.... August 2023 was the tail end of the hottest consecutive months on record for the planet, the energy from which was being balled up and hurled back at us in summer storms. Nature was, quite rightly, retaliating.... On the day of the wedding Storm Antoni’s plan was to be everywhere. All 70mph of her tore up the church spire where the bells rang. She threw herself down the aisle as I held my father’s arm in the dress my mother had worn on her day and whistled herself into our voices as we sang. We sang louder. ... She huddled us into a tighter group. She pulled toddlers and 85-year-olds into laughter. She lifted petals to the sky. The storm should not have been there. But, in a strange sense, I respected the audacity and hoped her ferocity might stay, like the rings around our fingers. Like the rest of the natural world, Storm Antoni gave us everything she had.... I watched strangers conspire like old friends, and fought tears as others reunited after decades of separation. I was regarding a rainbow of humans at their finest, wearing scars of love, loss and hope, as we danced into the night.... Never again will this group collide, I thought.... I snuck into the farmhouse to observe from an upstairs window. By evening, Storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy, and the joining of hands, is activism after all. Care to dance?"
Between the Algorithm and a Hard Place: The Worker's Dilemma – article by Diana Enríquez on TechPolicy, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Let’s say you decide to earn a little extra cash by picking up another job [with AmazonFlex].... Today you’re supposed to drop off a package... and the app wants you to drive on a street that you know has very hazardous road conditions. You also know that the app is always tracking your location and how closely you stick to the 'optimized route'. You’ve heard from other drivers that you might get a warning and a strike against you if you go too far off route. Too many strikes means you’ll lose your flexible job, and the supplemental income that is helping you pay your bills. You have two options: (1) Break the rules but complete the goal – ... You wait a few days to see what happens… and you get an automated ... warning saying they needed to check whether or not you delivered the final package because they saw you left the optimized route. (2) Follow the rules but at a heavy cost – you’ve heard too many stories about people being deactivated for not obeying the app’s guidance, so you stick to the route and try to figure out how to reach your final goal anyway. You take the short route but damage your car. The final bill to repair your car costs more than you made on the trip.... These are the types of decisions one has to make when your manager is automated. While AI and other algorithms that manage our routines at work can do a lot of things well, these systems do not work well in gray areas when conditions quickly change.... At present, automated management is happening primarily in lower paying jobs, but these experiences are also a preview of what we might expect as we see companies turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools with the hopes it might reduce some of their workforce costs.... What researchers consistently find is that our best work environments provide some rules for structure and quality control alongside flexibility for workers to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. Automation is designed for the “average case” and performs poorly in “edge cases” or changing conditions. Adaptation and innovation is what allows humans to thrive. There is a clear route here for a better partnership - so long as we don’t ignore the strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines. But it requires leadership to make design choices that reward BOTH rule following and adaptation, instead of strictly prioritizing process at the expense of poorer outcomes."
The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson: blood, guts and popcorn – review by John Banville in The Guardian. "Towards the end of a chapter on a ... movie set just after the first world war, David Thomson writes: 'I doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film.' In its context it seems hardly more than a passing observation, but in fact the thought is fundamental to Thomson’s project. For what the eminent British film critic is writing about, at some length and in compelling and often limpidly beautiful prose, is war itself and our ambiguous relation to it, or at least to its representation in moving images – moving in more senses than one. But are we moved to sorrow and pity, sitting in a darkened cinema with our faces lifted rapturously to the light of battle flickering across the screen? At the pictures, everyone is 11 years old, and 11-year-olds glory in the mayhem going on up there, and the more blood and mangled bodies the better. Oh dear, the appalled adult in us murmurs, as the bullets fly and the arteries sever, oh dear, oh dear, but our exulting inner child silently shouts: go on, kill ’em all!... As quickly becomes clear, Thomson’s book is as much about war and our non-combatants’ attitudes to it as it is about war movies. This is the dilemma that he returns to again and again, 'that there is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on screen and our demure safety in the dark'. When we enter a cinema, we leave our sense of responsibility behind in the popcorn-strewn foyer.... War films have been a large component of cinema in the century of warfare from 1914 to the present. Something in us, some dark and ultimately unfulfillable longing, is fed by images on a screen of soldiers slaughtering one another, and machines slaughtering soldiers, and cities toppling. In his superb and masterfully engineered book, Thomson – one of the finest living stylists in the English language – is unflinching in his contemplation of this disturbing hunger."
Nicholas Winton saved my father from the Nazis; here’s how One Life betrays him – article by Matthew Reisz in The Guardian. "In late 1938, everyone in Prague was braced for an imminent German invasion. When a friend asked Winton to come and witness the developing humanitarian crisis for himself, he set about organising a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain.... Since my father was one of Winton’s 'children', my two brothers and I, and now our five children and three grandchildren, would ... not be here without him. So I had high hopes for James Hawes’ new biopic, One Life, and was delighted to be invited to the premiere. It is a great pity that the result is so soft-centred.... It reconstructs the rescue itself touchingly enough and shatters some common myths. Contrary to the comforting idea that the Kindertransports were a shining example of British decency in welcoming persecuted refugees, we get to see how hard it was for Winton to charm or bully the immigration authorities into speedily granting visas, and to find foster families and sponsors willing to provide £50 for each child to ensure they would not be a burden on the public purse.... What the new film doesn’t explore is how Elisabeth Maxwell [as well as as bringing Winton's actions to public attention] also organised a Holocaust conference called Remembering for the Future, later in 1988. This included a semi-private event where Winton got a chance to meet Kindertransportees and their close families on a much more informal basis.... Many were still visibly traumatised, regressing from successful middle-aged professionals into frightened children in front of my eyes. Others recalled poignant episodes from the train journeys across Europe, such as the moment when they crossed the Dutch border into safe territory and were welcomed with mugs of hot chocolate. Genuine celebration was tempered by a strong sense of what had been lost when they left families behind in Czechoslovakia. It was, in other words, an event which caught the real emotional complexity of the Kindertransport, rather than the kind of cheesy uplift offered by ... the biopic. It seems strange for a film on this theme to focus so entirely on Winton and to be so incurious about the later lives of the rescued children."
Magus by Anthony Grafton: spellbound – review by Dennis Duncan in The Guardian. "In Grafton’s history of learned magic, an early fascination with the military possibilities of charmed objects gives way in the 15th century to an inward focus, a kind of astrological self-help to improve the health of the aspiring scholar. ... The balance between licit and illicit magic was in constant flux, with every magus keen to draw a line between the arts that he himself practised and those that were beyond the pale.... By [the 16th century], however, the work of the seriously inclined magus was beginning to align more closely with another kind of magic: the feats of mathematics, engineering and perspective that could conjure spectacles and astound audiences."
The Alternative by Nick Romeo: moral substitutes for the free market model – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism.... You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how employees are hired, paid and enabled to share in the value they create. There is no need for ordinary workers to be pawns in a system that makes humanity and ethics secondary to the unbending logic of the marketplace and blind, selfish capital. On the other hand, is it all worth more than a can of beans? How are a collection of disparate, often small scale, if great, initiatives going to grow into a systemic challenge to the way things are currently organised? The Mondragon co-operative movement that Romeo applauds fascinated me as a teenager for all the reasons he sets out. The hope was the virtues he cites – essentially treating workers fairly, decently and with respect – would unleash such increased engagement, productivity and purpose that the good would drive out the bad of its own accord. A more moral economy, retaining the pluralism of capitalism but less of its innate exploitativeness, was there for the having. Well, more than 50 years later Mondragon has grown into one of the top 10 companies in Spain – but has too few emulators even in its own country. This admirable, readable book tries to offer hope. But for all Romeo’s enthusiasm, the question is left hanging. Why so little progress when the case against how so much of the way work and welfare is organised is so strong – and the alternatives so viable?... Until these ideas are framed by a new economics, a viable political philosophy, a critical mass of thought leaders and of political, economic and social actors, they will remain in the foothills. Romeo has done a service in marshalling our knowledge of the varying contrarian forces abroad – but there is more heavy lifting to make any of this the new normal."
The hidden life of Camila Batmanghelidjh: why was her exoneration so widely ignored? – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. "Kids Company began in south London in 1996. Batmanghelidjh, an Iran-born charity worker who had trained as a therapist, set out her vision for the charity as protecting and supporting vulnerable youngsters by showing them unconditional love and care. Unlike other services, Kids Company would never turn away a child in need. While that might sound naive and sentimental, in practice it was resource-intensive, rigorous and exhausting.... When social work or NHS services refused to help, or gave up on or lost track of a difficult or aggressive teenager – which happened thousands of times – Kids Company would step in. Batmanghelidjh’s team would take legal action to force authorities to meet their obligations, which did not make the charity popular in town halls. ...Batmanghelidjh’s idealism and charisma were magnetic to politicians, the media and celebrities, from Coldplay to Prince Charles. Her ascent was extraordinary – and would mark the great first act of her career. ... Batmanghelidjh’s second act would be one of tragedy: a brutal fall from grace that would destroy her reputation overnight. ... [A rescue] deal [as Kid's Company struggled to help the austerity-created wave of children in need] was scuppered at the 11th hour when the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that historical abuse allegations involving Kids Company were being investigated by the Metropolitan police. With potential donors spooked, Kids Company’s trustees concluded that the charity was no longer viable. It went into receivership five days later. Scotland Yard completed its investigation six months later, in January 2016. It found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse, criminality or safeguarding failures. The 32 allegations were mostly hearsay and “vague in detail”, it concluded. Meanwhile, the House of Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs select committee (Pacac)... rushed through an inquiry that concluded that Kids Company was financially incontinent, poorly governed and unable to demonstrate that the money it spent made any difference to the young people it supported.... However, a week [later] one of the committee’s most senior members and Batmanghelidjh’s most aggressive interrogators [revealed that after the report's publication] a Kids Company trustee ... had presented them with evidence showing that, far from being negligent and badly governed, the board of Kids Company had provided rigorous oversight and scrutiny of the charity. ... Still, the report’s findings continued to be reported – mostly unchallenged. They helped to underpin what fast became an entrenched media narrative: that Kids Company had been not only a financial mess, but also a giant confidence trick.... Two years after the closure of Kids Company, the official receiver ... applied to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and all [the] trustees from holding directorships of companies or charities for up to six years.... Three and a half years, 18,000 pages of evidence and £8m of public money later, the case against Kids Company was thrown out in February 2021.... The judge, Mrs Justice Falk, concluded that there was no evidence that payments made to young people were unsupervised, unscrutinised or clinically unjustified. Kids Company was a challenging, financially high-risk operation, in common with many charities, she ruled, but it was not a failing organisation, nor was its board negligent or incompetent. The seven trustees – who did not include Batmanghelidjh, whom Falk praised separately – were 'a highly impressive group of individuals' and entirely fit to hold future senior positions. In fact, she wrote in her ruling, the cause of Kids Company’s collapse was most likely not management incompetence, but 'unfounded allegations' of sexual assault. It was a near-total exoneration of Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company – and a complete disaster for the government. But instead of her third act being one of exoneration and vindication, the ruling went largely unnoticed."
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world’: 10 things I learned when my father had dementia – article by Fanny Johnstone in The Guardian. "My dad’s prognosis was not good. He wasn’t expected to live for more than a couple of years – and he didn’t. I had 18 months with him and Mum... This is what I learned. Writing helps.... We are surrounded by carers....It can be explosively funny.... You have to learn to adapt....The tiniest details can make a difference....You have to be organised.... You can forget who you are.... Everyone needs a break....The law [on assisted dying] needs to change....It can be a profound and valuable experience. I was able to care for my dad, love him, indulge him and show affection in ways that would have been impossible for me to imagine when I was young. It gave me a sense of self-worth and respect that I think had been missing for much of my life. My suspicion that he had been disappointed with me eroded during that time. I think he saw qualities in me that he hadn’t known were there. I think I did too. And as a result I’ve had a bit more faith in myself since. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that the experience redeemed me in my own eyes. I had chased fun and freedom for much of my life at the expense of responsibility and a steady career, but here I faced up to life, and grew up, I think. A few weeks after his death, my best friend, who had known my father since childhood, invited me for a drink.... She said: 'So how was it then?' Meaning all of it – the last 18 months, and my father’s death. My exact words – which surprised us both a lot – were: 'I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.'”
We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."
From the Post Office scandal to nuclear attack: 13 TV shows that shook Britain – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "Mr Bates vs the Post Office seems set to be remembered as a show that changed society more than most politicians and lawyers could ever imagine. But what are the other contenders? Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)... The War Game (BBC, 1966)... Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory (BBC Northern Ireland, 1980)... Police: A Complaint of Rape (BBC Two, 1982)... Crimewatch UK (BBC One, 1984-2017)... That’s Life! (BBC One, 1988)... Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, 1990)... Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000)... Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC Two, 2011)... Care (BBC One, 2018)... A statement by the Prime Minister (all channels, 2020)."
Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged – article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "Ministers need to 'immediately' update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say. In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: 'It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.'... The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that “mechanical instruments” should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work. For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began."
Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr Jen Gunter: why periods are ‘a muddled burden’ – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Dr Jen Gunter’s Blood takes an unapologetically scientific approach to the menstrual cycle, written for anyone who wants to understand its often mystified ways and what medicine can do to help. Perhaps Gunter’s resolve to reduce stigma around women’s health was a reaction to her own upbringing in Canada, with a mother who thought tampons were 'evil'. Now a gynaecologist in San Francisco with three decades of experience, Gunter became famous in 2018 for ridiculing the pseudoscientific offerings on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness platform Goop, and has since continued her battle against disinformation with her Substack newsletter the Vajenda, alongside bestselling books The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. Without fear, favour or sponsor, Gunter is a cheerleader for professional expertise, informed consent and reproductive justice. Brutally put, the menstrual cycle is 'resource curation to ensure the healthiest pregnancy outcome, but at the expense of the person who menstruates', Gunter writes.... The book’s ability to make science sing and stick is impressive, but an even greater achievement of Blood is to expose the playbook of medical misinformation. Gunter helps readers sort out claims that 'sound truthy' from those that are in fact true. Menstrual blood souring milk, ruining crops and wilting flowers seem like misogynistic tales from the past, but similar myths circulate online today.... Gunter regularly faces accusations of being closed-minded to alternative practice and overconfident in her opinions. To which she would say that evidence-based medicine is not an opinion, even if you don’t like it. Consenting adults can do as they please, and she isn’t criticising consumer choices but rather the peddlers who prey on women’s discomfort and fears in the name of feminism while making money. Medics are wrongly demonised as puppets of big pharma, she says, while influencers flog untested and unregulated supplements with clear self-interest."
Work ‘wellness’ programmes don’t make employees happier, but I know what does – article by André Spicer in The Guardian. "A new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examines the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions such as stress management and mindfulness classes, and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these interventions had any statistically significant impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction. They did not improve employees’ sense of belonging at work or reduce perceived time pressures. Nor did they make employees feel supported or improve workplace relationships. In some cases, wellbeing interventions seemed to make matters worse, the study suggested. For instance, workplace resilience and mindfulness training had a slightly negative impact on employees’ self-rated mental health.... While companies seem to excel at making their employees ill, the question remains about what they can do to help them feel better. Fleming points out that it is possible to improve employee wellbeing by focusing on more structural aspects of work. These include improving pay, providing secure contracts, giving employees some flexibility and control over their work schedule, and providing opportunities for upskilling and mentoring. Birkbeck’s Kevin Teoh and Rashi Dhensa-Kahlon looked at employee wellbeing interventions in the NHS and came to a remarkably similar conclusion. The most effective way to improve wellbeing in healthcare workplaces included cutting back pointless bureaucratic procedures, reducing the length of meetings, improving staff rotas and giving employees a sense of psychological safety in their team. My colleague Amanda Goodall has found one important way that organisations can improve wellbeing: improving the quality of frontline managers. Getting rid of David Brent-style bosses and giving managers proper training can significantly improve employee wellbeing.... The good news for leaders and employees is that we know what does work; instead of investing in ineffective initiatives, leaders should focus on taking away stressors. This means getting rid of unnecessarily complicated systems, poorly trained managers, and – in some cases – ineffective wellness interventions."
How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living by Vincent Deary: the ways in which we’re undone – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. This book, part memoir of his working practice, part inquiry into the ways in which mental health is undone, is a sequel to an earlier volume, How We Are, published in 2015. The chronology is pertinent. The trajectory of those intervening nine years of austerity, and pandemic, and precarity, serve to make this volume both inevitable and urgent.... There is a rawness to Deary’s analysis that gives a compelling human edge to his theorising. Some of that comes from his allusions to a breakdown he himself suffered in recent years. Otherwise, he dwells on case studies of people he has met in his work, individuals whose 'allostatic load' of stresses – the camel’s-back-of-straws waiting for one too many – become overwhelming.... Deary punctuates his book with a series of health checks: 'How precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?' In doing so he makes a powerful argument against some of the contemporary factors that undermine security: the 'audit culture' of the world of work that seeks to constantly measure our performance against nebulous targets; the shift in focus in the welfare state away from a culture of care toward homilies about 'resilience'; the erosion of healthy perspective in the 'ambient hum' of social media; and the fact that, as a society, 'we have lost the knack of convalescence', the space and capacity for deep rest that might accelerate recovery. Deary is clearly an eclectic reader and his studies have him reaching as often for quotations from Terry Pratchett and George Eliot as from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.... At the heart of Deary’s analysis ... is the idea of our minds as storytelling machines, which go haywire in 'our periods of trembling and breaking', feeding us delusion and addiction and compulsion and paranoia. The second half of his book is devoted to the strategies that might protect us from those rogue internal narratives.... he self-help wisdom here is properly caveated and hard-won, but there is still enough for the odd inspirational Post-it note. Here’s one: 'The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.'”
How We Break by Vincent Deary: look after yourself – review by Alex Curmi in The Guardian. "In this book, the second in a planned trilogy, and a follow-up to 2015’s How We Are, health psychologist Deary delivers a much-needed message: we have a finite capacity to meet the unpredictable challenges life throws at us. The concept of allostatic load (the wear and tear of chronic stress) crops up repeatedly. ... A particular strength of the book is the way Deary weaves between different schools of thought within psychology, philosophy and religion. The result is not merely a discussion of abstract ideas, but a collection of valuable observations about what it means to be human in the modern world, taking in biological, societal and economic realities.... The various chapters work as stand-alone essays and discuss very different questions. How do stories and narratives shape us? What is the difference between useful and destructive thinking? How do dysfunctional psychological processes like anxiety or anorexia come to possess us? What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? The resulting insights apply whether we have a diagnosable mental health condition or not.... The third instalment of the trilogy will be called How We Mend. In the meantime, this book offers a cathartic meditation on just how difficult life can be. Although the concept of self-care has become an overused and sometimes unhelpful trope on social media, Deary makes a compelling argument as to the necessity of self-compassion. He leads us to a more humane understanding of our suffering and offers practical advice for navigating life’s ups and downs with greater grace and equanimity."
Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his homily for the Feast of the Holy Family 31.12.23. "In August, I married the boy I have loved since we were 17.... I never wanted a wedding of any extravagance, and shied away from the attention it meant. But as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate. I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy, and reject hope. And so I chose to embrace it.... August 2023 was the tail end of the hottest consecutive months on record for the planet, the energy from which was being balled up and hurled back at us in summer storms. Nature was, quite rightly, retaliating.... On the day of the wedding Storm Antoni’s plan was to be everywhere. All 70mph of her tore up the church spire where the bells rang. She threw herself down the aisle as I held my father’s arm in the dress my mother had worn on her day and whistled herself into our voices as we sang. We sang louder. ... She huddled us into a tighter group. She pulled toddlers and 85-year-olds into laughter. She lifted petals to the sky. The storm should not have been there. But, in a strange sense, I respected the audacity and hoped her ferocity might stay, like the rings around our fingers. Like the rest of the natural world, Storm Antoni gave us everything she had.... I watched strangers conspire like old friends, and fought tears as others reunited after decades of separation. I was regarding a rainbow of humans at their finest, wearing scars of love, loss and hope, as we danced into the night.... Never again will this group collide, I thought.... I snuck into the farmhouse to observe from an upstairs window. By evening, Storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy, and the joining of hands, is activism after all. Care to dance?"
Between the Algorithm and a Hard Place: The Worker's Dilemma – article by Diana Enríquez on TechPolicy, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Let’s say you decide to earn a little extra cash by picking up another job [with AmazonFlex].... Today you’re supposed to drop off a package... and the app wants you to drive on a street that you know has very hazardous road conditions. You also know that the app is always tracking your location and how closely you stick to the 'optimized route'. You’ve heard from other drivers that you might get a warning and a strike against you if you go too far off route. Too many strikes means you’ll lose your flexible job, and the supplemental income that is helping you pay your bills. You have two options: (1) Break the rules but complete the goal – ... You wait a few days to see what happens… and you get an automated ... warning saying they needed to check whether or not you delivered the final package because they saw you left the optimized route. (2) Follow the rules but at a heavy cost – you’ve heard too many stories about people being deactivated for not obeying the app’s guidance, so you stick to the route and try to figure out how to reach your final goal anyway. You take the short route but damage your car. The final bill to repair your car costs more than you made on the trip.... These are the types of decisions one has to make when your manager is automated. While AI and other algorithms that manage our routines at work can do a lot of things well, these systems do not work well in gray areas when conditions quickly change.... At present, automated management is happening primarily in lower paying jobs, but these experiences are also a preview of what we might expect as we see companies turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools with the hopes it might reduce some of their workforce costs.... What researchers consistently find is that our best work environments provide some rules for structure and quality control alongside flexibility for workers to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. Automation is designed for the “average case” and performs poorly in “edge cases” or changing conditions. Adaptation and innovation is what allows humans to thrive. There is a clear route here for a better partnership - so long as we don’t ignore the strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines. But it requires leadership to make design choices that reward BOTH rule following and adaptation, instead of strictly prioritizing process at the expense of poorer outcomes."
The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson: blood, guts and popcorn – review by John Banville in The Guardian. "Towards the end of a chapter on a ... movie set just after the first world war, David Thomson writes: 'I doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film.' In its context it seems hardly more than a passing observation, but in fact the thought is fundamental to Thomson’s project. For what the eminent British film critic is writing about, at some length and in compelling and often limpidly beautiful prose, is war itself and our ambiguous relation to it, or at least to its representation in moving images – moving in more senses than one. But are we moved to sorrow and pity, sitting in a darkened cinema with our faces lifted rapturously to the light of battle flickering across the screen? At the pictures, everyone is 11 years old, and 11-year-olds glory in the mayhem going on up there, and the more blood and mangled bodies the better. Oh dear, the appalled adult in us murmurs, as the bullets fly and the arteries sever, oh dear, oh dear, but our exulting inner child silently shouts: go on, kill ’em all!... As quickly becomes clear, Thomson’s book is as much about war and our non-combatants’ attitudes to it as it is about war movies. This is the dilemma that he returns to again and again, 'that there is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on screen and our demure safety in the dark'. When we enter a cinema, we leave our sense of responsibility behind in the popcorn-strewn foyer.... War films have been a large component of cinema in the century of warfare from 1914 to the present. Something in us, some dark and ultimately unfulfillable longing, is fed by images on a screen of soldiers slaughtering one another, and machines slaughtering soldiers, and cities toppling. In his superb and masterfully engineered book, Thomson – one of the finest living stylists in the English language – is unflinching in his contemplation of this disturbing hunger."
Nicholas Winton saved my father from the Nazis; here’s how One Life betrays him – article by Matthew Reisz in The Guardian. "In late 1938, everyone in Prague was braced for an imminent German invasion. When a friend asked Winton to come and witness the developing humanitarian crisis for himself, he set about organising a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain.... Since my father was one of Winton’s 'children', my two brothers and I, and now our five children and three grandchildren, would ... not be here without him. So I had high hopes for James Hawes’ new biopic, One Life, and was delighted to be invited to the premiere. It is a great pity that the result is so soft-centred.... It reconstructs the rescue itself touchingly enough and shatters some common myths. Contrary to the comforting idea that the Kindertransports were a shining example of British decency in welcoming persecuted refugees, we get to see how hard it was for Winton to charm or bully the immigration authorities into speedily granting visas, and to find foster families and sponsors willing to provide £50 for each child to ensure they would not be a burden on the public purse.... What the new film doesn’t explore is how Elisabeth Maxwell [as well as as bringing Winton's actions to public attention] also organised a Holocaust conference called Remembering for the Future, later in 1988. This included a semi-private event where Winton got a chance to meet Kindertransportees and their close families on a much more informal basis.... Many were still visibly traumatised, regressing from successful middle-aged professionals into frightened children in front of my eyes. Others recalled poignant episodes from the train journeys across Europe, such as the moment when they crossed the Dutch border into safe territory and were welcomed with mugs of hot chocolate. Genuine celebration was tempered by a strong sense of what had been lost when they left families behind in Czechoslovakia. It was, in other words, an event which caught the real emotional complexity of the Kindertransport, rather than the kind of cheesy uplift offered by ... the biopic. It seems strange for a film on this theme to focus so entirely on Winton and to be so incurious about the later lives of the rescued children."
Magus by Anthony Grafton: spellbound – review by Dennis Duncan in The Guardian. "In Grafton’s history of learned magic, an early fascination with the military possibilities of charmed objects gives way in the 15th century to an inward focus, a kind of astrological self-help to improve the health of the aspiring scholar. ... The balance between licit and illicit magic was in constant flux, with every magus keen to draw a line between the arts that he himself practised and those that were beyond the pale.... By [the 16th century], however, the work of the seriously inclined magus was beginning to align more closely with another kind of magic: the feats of mathematics, engineering and perspective that could conjure spectacles and astound audiences."
The Alternative by Nick Romeo: moral substitutes for the free market model – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism.... You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how employees are hired, paid and enabled to share in the value they create. There is no need for ordinary workers to be pawns in a system that makes humanity and ethics secondary to the unbending logic of the marketplace and blind, selfish capital. On the other hand, is it all worth more than a can of beans? How are a collection of disparate, often small scale, if great, initiatives going to grow into a systemic challenge to the way things are currently organised? The Mondragon co-operative movement that Romeo applauds fascinated me as a teenager for all the reasons he sets out. The hope was the virtues he cites – essentially treating workers fairly, decently and with respect – would unleash such increased engagement, productivity and purpose that the good would drive out the bad of its own accord. A more moral economy, retaining the pluralism of capitalism but less of its innate exploitativeness, was there for the having. Well, more than 50 years later Mondragon has grown into one of the top 10 companies in Spain – but has too few emulators even in its own country. This admirable, readable book tries to offer hope. But for all Romeo’s enthusiasm, the question is left hanging. Why so little progress when the case against how so much of the way work and welfare is organised is so strong – and the alternatives so viable?... Until these ideas are framed by a new economics, a viable political philosophy, a critical mass of thought leaders and of political, economic and social actors, they will remain in the foothills. Romeo has done a service in marshalling our knowledge of the varying contrarian forces abroad – but there is more heavy lifting to make any of this the new normal."
The hidden life of Camila Batmanghelidjh: why was her exoneration so widely ignored? – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. "Kids Company began in south London in 1996. Batmanghelidjh, an Iran-born charity worker who had trained as a therapist, set out her vision for the charity as protecting and supporting vulnerable youngsters by showing them unconditional love and care. Unlike other services, Kids Company would never turn away a child in need. While that might sound naive and sentimental, in practice it was resource-intensive, rigorous and exhausting.... When social work or NHS services refused to help, or gave up on or lost track of a difficult or aggressive teenager – which happened thousands of times – Kids Company would step in. Batmanghelidjh’s team would take legal action to force authorities to meet their obligations, which did not make the charity popular in town halls. ...Batmanghelidjh’s idealism and charisma were magnetic to politicians, the media and celebrities, from Coldplay to Prince Charles. Her ascent was extraordinary – and would mark the great first act of her career. ... Batmanghelidjh’s second act would be one of tragedy: a brutal fall from grace that would destroy her reputation overnight. ... [A rescue] deal [as Kid's Company struggled to help the austerity-created wave of children in need] was scuppered at the 11th hour when the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that historical abuse allegations involving Kids Company were being investigated by the Metropolitan police. With potential donors spooked, Kids Company’s trustees concluded that the charity was no longer viable. It went into receivership five days later. Scotland Yard completed its investigation six months later, in January 2016. It found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse, criminality or safeguarding failures. The 32 allegations were mostly hearsay and “vague in detail”, it concluded. Meanwhile, the House of Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs select committee (Pacac)... rushed through an inquiry that concluded that Kids Company was financially incontinent, poorly governed and unable to demonstrate that the money it spent made any difference to the young people it supported.... However, a week [later] one of the committee’s most senior members and Batmanghelidjh’s most aggressive interrogators [revealed that after the report's publication] a Kids Company trustee ... had presented them with evidence showing that, far from being negligent and badly governed, the board of Kids Company had provided rigorous oversight and scrutiny of the charity. ... Still, the report’s findings continued to be reported – mostly unchallenged. They helped to underpin what fast became an entrenched media narrative: that Kids Company had been not only a financial mess, but also a giant confidence trick.... Two years after the closure of Kids Company, the official receiver ... applied to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and all [the] trustees from holding directorships of companies or charities for up to six years.... Three and a half years, 18,000 pages of evidence and £8m of public money later, the case against Kids Company was thrown out in February 2021.... The judge, Mrs Justice Falk, concluded that there was no evidence that payments made to young people were unsupervised, unscrutinised or clinically unjustified. Kids Company was a challenging, financially high-risk operation, in common with many charities, she ruled, but it was not a failing organisation, nor was its board negligent or incompetent. The seven trustees – who did not include Batmanghelidjh, whom Falk praised separately – were 'a highly impressive group of individuals' and entirely fit to hold future senior positions. In fact, she wrote in her ruling, the cause of Kids Company’s collapse was most likely not management incompetence, but 'unfounded allegations' of sexual assault. It was a near-total exoneration of Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company – and a complete disaster for the government. But instead of her third act being one of exoneration and vindication, the ruling went largely unnoticed."
‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world’: 10 things I learned when my father had dementia – article by Fanny Johnstone in The Guardian. "My dad’s prognosis was not good. He wasn’t expected to live for more than a couple of years – and he didn’t. I had 18 months with him and Mum... This is what I learned. Writing helps.... We are surrounded by carers....It can be explosively funny.... You have to learn to adapt....The tiniest details can make a difference....You have to be organised.... You can forget who you are.... Everyone needs a break....The law [on assisted dying] needs to change....It can be a profound and valuable experience. I was able to care for my dad, love him, indulge him and show affection in ways that would have been impossible for me to imagine when I was young. It gave me a sense of self-worth and respect that I think had been missing for much of my life. My suspicion that he had been disappointed with me eroded during that time. I think he saw qualities in me that he hadn’t known were there. I think I did too. And as a result I’ve had a bit more faith in myself since. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that the experience redeemed me in my own eyes. I had chased fun and freedom for much of my life at the expense of responsibility and a steady career, but here I faced up to life, and grew up, I think. A few weeks after his death, my best friend, who had known my father since childhood, invited me for a drink.... She said: 'So how was it then?' Meaning all of it – the last 18 months, and my father’s death. My exact words – which surprised us both a lot – were: 'I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.'”
We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."
From the Post Office scandal to nuclear attack: 13 TV shows that shook Britain – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "Mr Bates vs the Post Office seems set to be remembered as a show that changed society more than most politicians and lawyers could ever imagine. But what are the other contenders? Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)... The War Game (BBC, 1966)... Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory (BBC Northern Ireland, 1980)... Police: A Complaint of Rape (BBC Two, 1982)... Crimewatch UK (BBC One, 1984-2017)... That’s Life! (BBC One, 1988)... Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, 1990)... Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000)... Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC Two, 2011)... Care (BBC One, 2018)... A statement by the Prime Minister (all channels, 2020)."
Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged – article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "Ministers need to 'immediately' update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say. In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: 'It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.'... The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that “mechanical instruments” should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work. For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began."
Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr Jen Gunter: why periods are ‘a muddled burden’ – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Dr Jen Gunter’s Blood takes an unapologetically scientific approach to the menstrual cycle, written for anyone who wants to understand its often mystified ways and what medicine can do to help. Perhaps Gunter’s resolve to reduce stigma around women’s health was a reaction to her own upbringing in Canada, with a mother who thought tampons were 'evil'. Now a gynaecologist in San Francisco with three decades of experience, Gunter became famous in 2018 for ridiculing the pseudoscientific offerings on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness platform Goop, and has since continued her battle against disinformation with her Substack newsletter the Vajenda, alongside bestselling books The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. Without fear, favour or sponsor, Gunter is a cheerleader for professional expertise, informed consent and reproductive justice. Brutally put, the menstrual cycle is 'resource curation to ensure the healthiest pregnancy outcome, but at the expense of the person who menstruates', Gunter writes.... The book’s ability to make science sing and stick is impressive, but an even greater achievement of Blood is to expose the playbook of medical misinformation. Gunter helps readers sort out claims that 'sound truthy' from those that are in fact true. Menstrual blood souring milk, ruining crops and wilting flowers seem like misogynistic tales from the past, but similar myths circulate online today.... Gunter regularly faces accusations of being closed-minded to alternative practice and overconfident in her opinions. To which she would say that evidence-based medicine is not an opinion, even if you don’t like it. Consenting adults can do as they please, and she isn’t criticising consumer choices but rather the peddlers who prey on women’s discomfort and fears in the name of feminism while making money. Medics are wrongly demonised as puppets of big pharma, she says, while influencers flog untested and unregulated supplements with clear self-interest."
Work ‘wellness’ programmes don’t make employees happier, but I know what does – article by André Spicer in The Guardian. "A new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examines the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions such as stress management and mindfulness classes, and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these interventions had any statistically significant impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction. They did not improve employees’ sense of belonging at work or reduce perceived time pressures. Nor did they make employees feel supported or improve workplace relationships. In some cases, wellbeing interventions seemed to make matters worse, the study suggested. For instance, workplace resilience and mindfulness training had a slightly negative impact on employees’ self-rated mental health.... While companies seem to excel at making their employees ill, the question remains about what they can do to help them feel better. Fleming points out that it is possible to improve employee wellbeing by focusing on more structural aspects of work. These include improving pay, providing secure contracts, giving employees some flexibility and control over their work schedule, and providing opportunities for upskilling and mentoring. Birkbeck’s Kevin Teoh and Rashi Dhensa-Kahlon looked at employee wellbeing interventions in the NHS and came to a remarkably similar conclusion. The most effective way to improve wellbeing in healthcare workplaces included cutting back pointless bureaucratic procedures, reducing the length of meetings, improving staff rotas and giving employees a sense of psychological safety in their team. My colleague Amanda Goodall has found one important way that organisations can improve wellbeing: improving the quality of frontline managers. Getting rid of David Brent-style bosses and giving managers proper training can significantly improve employee wellbeing.... The good news for leaders and employees is that we know what does work; instead of investing in ineffective initiatives, leaders should focus on taking away stressors. This means getting rid of unnecessarily complicated systems, poorly trained managers, and – in some cases – ineffective wellness interventions."
How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living by Vincent Deary: the ways in which we’re undone – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. This book, part memoir of his working practice, part inquiry into the ways in which mental health is undone, is a sequel to an earlier volume, How We Are, published in 2015. The chronology is pertinent. The trajectory of those intervening nine years of austerity, and pandemic, and precarity, serve to make this volume both inevitable and urgent.... There is a rawness to Deary’s analysis that gives a compelling human edge to his theorising. Some of that comes from his allusions to a breakdown he himself suffered in recent years. Otherwise, he dwells on case studies of people he has met in his work, individuals whose 'allostatic load' of stresses – the camel’s-back-of-straws waiting for one too many – become overwhelming.... Deary punctuates his book with a series of health checks: 'How precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?' In doing so he makes a powerful argument against some of the contemporary factors that undermine security: the 'audit culture' of the world of work that seeks to constantly measure our performance against nebulous targets; the shift in focus in the welfare state away from a culture of care toward homilies about 'resilience'; the erosion of healthy perspective in the 'ambient hum' of social media; and the fact that, as a society, 'we have lost the knack of convalescence', the space and capacity for deep rest that might accelerate recovery. Deary is clearly an eclectic reader and his studies have him reaching as often for quotations from Terry Pratchett and George Eliot as from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.... At the heart of Deary’s analysis ... is the idea of our minds as storytelling machines, which go haywire in 'our periods of trembling and breaking', feeding us delusion and addiction and compulsion and paranoia. The second half of his book is devoted to the strategies that might protect us from those rogue internal narratives.... he self-help wisdom here is properly caveated and hard-won, but there is still enough for the odd inspirational Post-it note. Here’s one: 'The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.'”
How We Break by Vincent Deary: look after yourself – review by Alex Curmi in The Guardian. "In this book, the second in a planned trilogy, and a follow-up to 2015’s How We Are, health psychologist Deary delivers a much-needed message: we have a finite capacity to meet the unpredictable challenges life throws at us. The concept of allostatic load (the wear and tear of chronic stress) crops up repeatedly. ... A particular strength of the book is the way Deary weaves between different schools of thought within psychology, philosophy and religion. The result is not merely a discussion of abstract ideas, but a collection of valuable observations about what it means to be human in the modern world, taking in biological, societal and economic realities.... The various chapters work as stand-alone essays and discuss very different questions. How do stories and narratives shape us? What is the difference between useful and destructive thinking? How do dysfunctional psychological processes like anxiety or anorexia come to possess us? What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? The resulting insights apply whether we have a diagnosable mental health condition or not.... The third instalment of the trilogy will be called How We Mend. In the meantime, this book offers a cathartic meditation on just how difficult life can be. Although the concept of self-care has become an overused and sometimes unhelpful trope on social media, Deary makes a compelling argument as to the necessity of self-compassion. He leads us to a more humane understanding of our suffering and offers practical advice for navigating life’s ups and downs with greater grace and equanimity."
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