Sunday 2 December 2018

Cuttings: November 2018

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘With the evil twins of Trump and Brexit … There was no way of not writing about that, it is just in the air’ - interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "She is an ideal laureate in that she is happy to accept a wide range of commissions, a willingness I can vouch for having asked her to write poems for this paper on events including the Scottish referendum, the 2012 Olympics and the Manchester Arena bombing last year.... It’s a question of 'trying to keep your finger on the pulse of what people might be interested in, or where the voice or the language of poetry might be worth adding to the kind of national babble and blether and jabber,' she says."

Frankenstein and the gory gang: how the novel blazed a trail for high art horrors - article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The mad experimenters of the Romantic age, the people who really did seem able to create life from dead things, were not scientists. They were artists. Braving the anatomy theatre and the mortuary to study the human body, they transformed this dark knowledge into throbbingly vital art. The year Frankenstein was published, a young French painter named Théodore Géricault started a stupendously ambitious work ['The Raft of the Medusa'] that he planned to unveil at the Paris Salon the following year. ... Like Stubbs [who had dissected horses, hanging their carcasses from the roof of a barn in Horkstow, Lincolnshire], Géricault reasoned that to paint a truly extraordinary work of art, he had to delve deep into anatomy.... But can any of this compete with the terrifying masterpieces of Francisco Goya? ... Begun in 1819, Goya’s 14 horrifyingly brutal Black Paintings defiantly assert the freedom of art to think what it likes, to be what it likes, however dismal and despairing. It’s an assertion as bold as that of Frankenstein sculpting with the dead."

Sans Forgetica... hmmm - blog post by Rob Waller in The Simplification Centre, on the font Sans Forgetica, designed to improve reading retention by introducing “desirable difficulty”.
“I can understand that it can be desirable to slow the reader down, or at least for the reader to slow themselves down – that’s at the heart of higher order reading skills. Skilled readers change pace, re-read passages, make notes, stop and think, but they do it in a self-aware, deliberate way using metacognitive skills. But it appears the RMIT researchers are deliberately diverting the reader’s working memory away from grappling with content towards grappling with the font. This seems odd and counter intuitive, so I would have like to see some other conditions in the research – other strategies for slowing people down or encouraging metacognition and self-directed learning.
Classically these would include inserted test questions, activities or even just writing well… Or telling people to stop and think – the Open University in the 1970s used ‘student stoppers’ – bars across the page that signalled this was a good point to stop and reflect on what you’ve just read.
In fact, based admittedly only on its Wikipedia entry, ‘desirable difficulty’ as a teaching strategy appears to be much more akin to these techniques – test questions and flashcards are mentioned.”

Brexit is Suez 2.0 - blog post by John Naughton. "The Suez adventure was an epochal event that was widely seen in some parts of British society as a humiliation. But to detached observers it was the moment when it became clear that a UK that had been exhausted and effectively bankrupted by WW2 was no longer a global power.... However, in some sections of the British establishment — not to mention in its tabloid media and in the psyche of many of its older citizens — subliminal imperial delusions lingered. Which brings us to Brexit. This is — as Jo Johnson implies — another Suez moment. One of the (many) astonishing aspects of the Referendum campaign was that the question of the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland was never mentioned, despite the fact that — in the event of a decision by the UK to leave — that border would automatically become the western frontier of the EU (and therefore, of the Single Market). When the realisation dawned on people after the vote that there might be a problem here ... the old imperial delusions returned. It was surely inconceivable, the Brexiteers fumed, that a puny state like the Irish Republic (which was determined not to return to a hard border) could be allowed to frustrate the will of the great British nation. ... It was ... seen as inconceivable that the EU would, in the end, allow such a piffling matter to get in the way of an agreement with the mighty UK. Now, however, the penny has dropped: people in the UK are beginning to realise that this cavalier disregard of the ‘Irish problem’ was in fact another manifestation of imperial delusion."

Trust no one: how Le Carré's Little Drummer Girl predicted our dangerous world - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "When his plotting is at its best, as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) or The Perfect Spy (1986), it is a rare literary achievement. These stories feel distant from the adventures of The Night Manager, especially when reimagined for television with more than a touch of James Bond. In Tinker Tailor, Smiley spends most of his time either reading through old files or interviewing old agents.... In The Little Drummer Girl, the shift back to a time without mobile phones or the internet – and with almost nothing in the way of video surveillance – emphasises the need for narrative and psychological ingenuity. The TV drama, like the novel, relies on operatives with binoculars and large cameras, gnomic calls from public telephones, coded messages scribbled on pieces of paper.... Like The Night Manager, The Little Drummer Girl is a story of infiltration. Charlie (AKA Charmian), a young would-be actor, has been picked by Martin Kurtz, a wise and wily Mossad spymaster, to infiltrate bomb-maker Khalil’s tightly controlled network.... In 1983, someone reading The Little Drummer Girl must have wondered where the book’s sympathies lay – or rather, where the reader’s sympathies were being directed. Even more so now.... The even-handedness is decisive and is built into the plot. The Mossad agents instruct their recruits for undercover work using the best arguments of the terrorists. They have to understand how it feels to believe in their enemies’ cause.... The moral failures of western intelligence agencies were always essential to the stories le Carré told, the cynicism of spymasters being a firm convention of the genre. But since 1989, the western spooks have begun looking like villains too. ... You become a spy because of something in your past. The idea is alive in The Little Drummer Girl too. Charlie has been driven by her own unhappiness into rebellion and excess, and, before the spooks ever get to her, has already constructed a fiction about her past to justify her bohemian life. She is entirely ready to adopt a new set of lies. ... The spy-turned‑novelist learned early and painfully about secretiveness – and made it his gift to the British novel."

Armistice Day: victory and beyond - article by Neal Ascherson in The Guardian. "When the armistice came, ... Cambridge undergrads made for Bertrand Russell’s rooms on Trinity Street and smashed them up. He had said the war was wrong. They said it had been right, and anyway we won it....  The general revulsion to the war, imagining it as a pointless mass murder conducted by bone-headed brass hats, really began some 10 years later. It was then that the memoirs and poetry of soldier-authors ... were published or republished in editions large enough to reach a wide public... It was different in the immediate wake of the armistice. War propaganda, much more crude and hate-filled than in the second world war, left many – perhaps most – happily certain that Britain had won a moral victory of good over evil. 'Hang the Kaiser' and 'Make Germany Pay' were the popular slogans.... Lloyd George had agreed that this had been 'the war to end wars', which meant British engagement in a European peace. ... He astonished the other allied leaders ... by arguing for a just peace that did not inflict intolerable punishment on Germany. The harsh option, he prophesied, would mean that 'we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years at three times the cost'. But the others thought he was mad. Lloyd George subsided. The terms Versailles imposed on Germany were even harsher than he feared, and his predictions came true."

A mission for journalism in a time of crisis - article by editor Katharine Viner in The Guardian. "Our moral conviction, as exemplified by [founder John Edward] Taylor and codified by [editor C.P.] Scott [in his centenary essay of 1921], rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair. ... But the past three decades – since the invention of the world wide web in 1989 – have transformed our idea of the public in ways that [they] could not have imagined.... Trust in all kinds of established institutions – including the media – is at an historic low. This is not a blip, and it should not be a surprise, when so many institutions have failed the people who trusted them and responded to criticism with contempt. As a result, people feel outraged but powerless – nothing they do seems to stop these things happening, and nobody seems to be listening to their stories. This has created a crisis for public life, and particularly for the press, which risks becoming wholly part of the same establishment that the public no longer trusts. At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation. 'If mistrust in institutions is changing how people participate in civics, news organisations might need to change as well,' the MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has argued. 'We could rethink our role as journalists as helping people … find the places where they, individually and collectively, can be the most effective and powerful.' To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent."

Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories - article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Sixty per cent of British people believe at least one conspiracy theory about how the country is run or the veracity of information they have been given, a major new study has found, part of a pattern of deep distrust of authority that has become widespread across Europe and the US.... Almost half (47%) of leave voters believed the government had deliberately concealed the truth about how many immigrants live in the UK, versus 14% of remain voters. A striking 31% of leave voters believed that Muslim immigration was part of a wider plot to make Muslims the majority in Britain, a conspiracy theory that originated in French far-right circles that was known as the 'great replacement'. The comparable figure for remain voters was 6%."

From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "When left populists rail against elites they are generally referring to economic and political power. Their target is the richest 1% that owns half the world’s wealth: the newspaper moguls, bankers, political donors and corporate lobbyists... But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, 'globalists', spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley.... They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on 'ordinary people' as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth.... The left could do worse than admit that it has given the right considerable material to work with.... Whenever liberal commentators insist they are in a better position to understand what working-class people’s best interests are than working-class people themselves, they should be called out on their arrogance. ... There is a paternalist streak in liberalism that is more comfortable in providing for the poor than listening to and empowering them, which is not only morally wrong but strategically self-defeating. 'How long do you think you can call people stupid and deplorable before they get mad?' asked ... a Trump voter I met ... in 2016."

Mary Poppins: why we need a spoonful of sugar more than ever - article by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "After many years of not watching or thinking about the movie, I have been forced to re-engage with it as my children work their way through the Disney back catalogue... What strikes me is how devastating the original film was. Poppins is a cypher at the heart of the movie who exerts influence not, as Mr Banks specifies in his advert in the Times, by being a 'nanny who can give commands', but in accordance with the principle that one changes others by changing one’s behaviour around them – in the case of Poppins – through a combination of beady observation and strategic obliviousness.... While she is sent to the Banks household to comfort sad children, it is also her mission to critique the English: coldness as a vehicle for stability; blind adherence to tradition and emotional detachment as modes mistaken for virtue, all of which, over the course of the movie, Poppins smartly dismantles. There might have been a question of warmth with the character, were Julie Andrews not such a nuanced performer and there is real pathos in her Poppins, not just in the sadness when she says goodbye to the children, but in ... Feed the Birds.... Scepticism is her greatest asset; a stand against credulousness and therefore systems, social and political, which would have the children mindlessly repeat what came before simply because it is familiar. And then she buggers off, truly a shocking moment of childhood. I remember the first time I saw this and could not believe a film was allowed to behave this way, break one’s heart so insistently then pretend the reunification of the Banks family was, in fact, a happy ending. No child I know bought into this. Poppins’ departure presages death and even as eight-year-olds, at some level, we knew it."

Liberals must learn the politics of emotion to beat rightwing populist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Probably the best short definition of neoliberalism as a system rather than an ideology [is] 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'. By this, [Will Davies] means the introduction of market logic into all forms of social life by force, which has severely limited the scope for political choice. If I want to save Port Talbot steelworks, for instance, I cannot legally do so on grounds of national security, or preference for British goods, or sentiment, or because the town will die without the blast furnaces. I can only do so if I present a chop-logic argument that meets various national, European and global rules on trade and investment. If I just want to save it because I feel good driving past a giant piece of human ingenuity on the way to the surfing beach, the emotion is effectively blocked by the rules-based coercion states have signed up to. Another way of phrasing Davies’s definition, then, could be the evisceration of politics by economics, or more simply the surgical removal of emotional reasoning from political decision-making. At the most basic level – and this explains the rise of both the left and right opponents of neoliberalism – people understood that emotion, and with it feelings of identity, place, nation and class, could only reinsert itself into decision-making if the system were disrupted."

Why we stopped trusting elites - article by William Davies in The Guardian. “The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.... When trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham. This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy. It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost credibility... The problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks, whistleblowing and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.”

The far right will try to exploit any Brexit outcome. We can’t let it happen - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "On 9 December a convicted fraudster and thug named Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – or 'Tommy Robinson', as he styles himself – will lead a so-called Great Brexit Betrayal protest in London. The Tory Brexiteers ran a referendum of impossible promises in 2016; the consequent disillusionment is an unmissable opportunity for the far right.... The classic hard-right trope is the 'stab in the back' myth, of a great national project – normally going to war – betrayed by internal subversion and a lack of fight. Whether May’s plan passes or fails, a narrative will be woven of a true, pure Brexit betrayed by elites. Yaxley-Lennon wishes to present himself as the leader of the 52% who opted for leave in the referendum. He must not be gifted this mantle.... Little plays into the far right’s hands more than the portrayal of leave voters as a bloc of bigots and brainwashed dupes, or a remain campaign with an image of establishment entitlement. ... It may well be that a second referendum becomes the only option. But such a campaign will be far more vicious than the last, with a leave campaign offered a megaphone for several months to whip up bigotry and bitterness. ... It is when the far right are able to deceitfully dress themselves in the garb of anti-establishment rebellion that they thrive: we must not let them."

Why it’s wise to give people advice - article by Oliver Burkeman in his 'This column will change your life' column in The Guardian. "[Here's a message for] parents, teachers, managers and anyone else who finds themselves in the position of needing to motivate others: far better than giving them advice is to give them the opportunity to give advice. That’s the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, who found that American middle-school pupils were much more enthusiastic about doing their homework after dispensing advice on the topic to younger children, as compared with after receiving advice from teachers. This motivational effect lasted weeks, and was also observed among adults who were attempting to lose weight, save money, control their temper or find a job. Teach a man to fish and he’ll know how to fish – but get him to teach others how to fish, and he might actually get on with some damned fishing. ... Faced with a challenge, we tend to assume we need to seek advice in order to obtain more knowledge about how to proceed; yet the truth, very often, is that we know exactly what we need to do – we just lack the confidence to do it. The act of giving advice reacquaints us with the knowledge we already possess, which instils confidence, which motivates action."



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