The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now – article by Nick Cohen in The Guardian. "A shameful fact is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young. To understand their ineptitude, think of how conservatism turned into a know-nothing culture in the past decade, and ask what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be doing in an alternative universe where they never came close to power. I don’t think you need a wild imagination to find the answer. Trump would be propagating corona conspiracy theories about 5G and Bill Gates as enthusiastically as he endorsed the straight lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as US president. Johnson would have been egging on his colleagues at the Telegraph as they insisted last week the lockdown was a 'pant-wetting' response to the virus from a government of 'nervous nellies'. When it was Johnson’s turn to offer his two pennies’ worth, he would repeat the Brexit right’s party line that the government had 'petrified the public' to the point where it was overwhelmingly against lifting the lockdown and going back to work as it jolly well should. My guess is he would remind readers, for they are never allowed to forget, that he managed a second-class classics degree from Oxford sometime in the 1980s by deadlifting a Latin phrase and announcing “aegrescit medendo' – the cure is worse than the disease. For that is what the world that provided his most loyal support believes. ... We are witnessing the Oxbridge arts graduate’s fear of expertise, particularly the expertise of scientists who cannot cut a good figure or turn a catchy phrase. In Johnson’s days at Oxford, they were dismissed as 'northern chemists' – chemist being a catch-all term covering everyone studying subjects the suave could not understand."
It’s time for fantasy fiction and role-playing games to shed their racist history – article by Payal Dhar in The Guardian. “The racist history of fantasy fiction, including role-playing games (RPGs), has its roots in our fascination with medieval European history, says Kavita Mudan Finn, a first-generation Indian American, who is an interdisciplinary scholar of medieval and early modern European history. ‘It reaches back to a misplaced imaginary nostalgia for a golden age when everyone was in their place and, most importantly, they were happy to be there....’ What is popular fantasy today is inextricably linked to the idea of medievalism imagined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the social and cultural values of that time, where heroism was associated with masculinity and whiteness. Take JRR Tolkien. On the one hand, he spoke out against Nazi race doctrine and has been heralded for ‘multiculturalism’ in his work. Nevertheless, his stories are steeped in Eurocentric bias. As Dimitra Fimi, author of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History, writes on her blog, the forces of ‘good’ in Middle-earth are fair-skinned, while forces of ‘evil’ are dark; Orcs are ‘slant-eyed, swarthy and sallow-skinned’; the ‘heroes’ are all white-skinned. ... ‘When fantasy took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” says [Helen] Young, “a lot of what was produced was quite imitative of Tolkien in particular, but also of [Robert E.] Howard and his early sword-and-sorcery stories. So the 19th-century racisms … that founded the genre were then written into genre convention through that process of imitation.’”
Solitude, sunshine and sanctuary in The Secret Garden – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. “If the last time you encountered Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was in childhood, you probably think of Mary, a sour little girl, waking up in a house in India to find herself orphaned and alone; a vast wind-buffeted house on the Yorkshire moors, and the sound of crying; a robin, a key, and a hidden garden; the transcendent scene in that garden, one of the most famous in children’s literature, in which Colin, a previously bedridden child, stands and learns to walk. So far, so magical. But rereading the book in adulthood reveals that it is also a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness; a book that, for all its light, is underpinned by darkness. In fact, the novel offers such practical ways of coping, and even of healing that it was once suggested it should be prescribed on the NHS.”
Tragic deaths in the badly written novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. ”Choked on a piece of terrible dialogue. Lost forever down a colossal plot hole. Drowned in a sea of unnecessary details. Died in a fall from a bungled cliff-hanger. Crushed by an enormous chunk of exposition.”
The National Trust is under attack because it cares about history, not fantasy – article by Peter Mitchell in The Guardian. “The National Trust is in trouble. Earlier this week, 26 MPs and two peers from the recently formed ‘Common Sense Group’ wrote to the Daily Telegraph recommending that the heritage organisation’s funding applications to public bodies be reviewed in light of its having ‘tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons [Winston Churchill] by linking his family home, Chartwell, with slavery and colonialism’. ... The National Trust’s major crime was to have produced a report in September that examined Trust properties’ relationship to the slave trade and colonialism. It explored how the proceeds of foreign conquest and the slavery economy built and furnished houses and properties, endowed the families who kept them, and in many ways helped to create the idyll of the country house. ... The MPs’ letter’s main charge is that the National Trust’s leadership has been captured by ‘elitist bourgeois liberals’... The narrative that the culture of these islands is being stolen from the (implicitly white, native and straight) majority is now disturbingly commonplace in our politics. Suggestions that demographic change – orchestrated by the treachery or connivance of a ‘cosmopolitan’ liberal elite – threaten British identity, or indeed the entirety of western civilisation, have been around since the late 19th century, but they have become ever more insistent in recent years, and have characterised much of the commentary surrounding Black Lives Matter and the statue protests of the summer.”
'It's the screams of the damned!' The eerie AI world of deepfake music – article by Derek Robertson in The Guardian. “‘It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him.... The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by ‘research and deployment company’ OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. ... It’s not hard to foresee, though, how such deepfakes could lead to ethical and intellectual property issues. If you didn’t want to pay the market rate for using an established artist’s music in a film, TV show or commercial, you could create your own imitation. Streaming services could, meanwhile, pad out genre playlists with similar sounding AI artists who don’t earn royalties, thereby increasing profits. Ultimately, will streaming services, radio stations and others increasingly avoid paying humans for music?“
'Hello work' or job centre? language experts spell trouble for Japan's mangled English – article by Justin McCurry in The Guardian. “Encountering mangled English is a frequent source of mirth for many residents of Japan, but for one group of language professionals, the proliferation of inappropriate words and phrases is becoming a national embarrassment. Their recently formed group, loosely translated as the association for the consideration of Japan’s English, is taking local governments and other bodies to task for their over-reliance on machine translation on official websites and public signage.... [The] group, comprising interpreters, researchers and employees of foreign companies, had long been frustrated by the widespread use of wasei-eigo – Japanese-made English – in official literature, advertising and marketing. ... Even major corporations occasionally fall into the wasei-eigo trap, Tsuruta said, citing Hitachi’s long-running ‘Inspire the Next’, and Toyota’s Olympic-inspired ‘Start your Impossible’. ... Others, though, are guilty only of the same poor punctuation found on shop signage in countries where English is the first language. This month, Takashimaya department store in Kyoto was forced to cover up posters after social media users pointed out how a missing comma had sabotaged its simple, and supposedly inspirational, message. ‘Rising Again,’ it began. ‘Save the World from Kyoto JAPAN.’ ”
Why Mangrove is guilty of being a better courtroom drama than Sorkin's Chicago 7 – article by Caspar Salmon in The Guardian. “Sorkin can’t get to the trial soon enough: after some perfunctory exposition, his film arrives at the courthouse in its 13th minute, whereas it takes Steve McQueen nearly an hour before his protagonists face a jury. This is because Sorkin loves a courtroom drama: his movie revels in legalese and repartee, with every other event in the film taking a backseat to the case itself. Many of the events the film centres on are presented in flashback; the first time Bobby Seale is even seen is in court. This means the characters are presented as legal subjects foremost – a perspective that aligns Sorkin with the state. Conversely McQueen spends time with his characters, taking time and sometimes joy in depicting a whole community, a place for gathering, and the anti-police protest itself. Not for nothing is the film called Mangrove (after the Mangrove restaurant, a hub for Notting Hill’s Black community) and not The Trial of the Mangrove 9. In other words, McQueen’s portrayal of his protagonists is fully in keeping with their outsider status: by the time they arrive in court, the institution feels brutal and alien.... Mangrove’s film-making shows up the limits, cliches and hollowness of the courtroom drama in general, while a flimsy exemplar of it such as The Trial of the Chicago 7 only underscores McQueen’s rigour. His project upends conventions, the better to carve out space for his subjects to live in.”
The cheap pen that changed writing forever – article by Stephen Dowling on the BBC Futures website in the Heroes of Design series, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The new [cheap ballpoint] pen had [a] dramatic effect on the act of writing itself, says David Sax, the Canadian journalist who wrote the book The Revenge of Analog. ‘The ballpoint pen was the equivalent of today’s smartphone. Before then, writing was a stationary act that had to be done in a certain environment, on a certain kind of desk, with all these other things to hand that allowed you to write. What the ballpoint pen did was to make writing something that could happen anywhere. I’ve written in snow and rain, on the back of an ATV and in a boat at sea and in the middle of the night,’ says Sax. Biros don’t drain batteries, they don’t require plugging in in the middle of nowhere, and even the tightest pocket can accommodate them. ‘It only fails if it runs out of ink,’ Sax adds.”
How 'woke' became the word of our era – article by Kenya Hunt in The Guardian. “What is ‘woke’? Most online dictionaries define it as a perceived awareness of inequality and other forms of injustice that are normally racial in nature. A few describe the term as characterising people who are merely ‘with it’ – as in, every cool kid you knew at uni. And increasingly, these days, many use it as a pejorative term to describe someone who is a slave to identity politics. How can all three possibly be the same? It’s a sensibility, a quality, a state of being, a feeling backed up by a set of actions, sometimes all these things at once.”
Sarah Cooper: ‘Trump has bigger fish to fry than me’ – interview by Sophie Heawood in The Guardian. “Sarah Cooper is ... an American comedian who has appeared out of nowhere and made millions of us actually want to listen to Donald Trump. That is, as long as his voice is coming out of her mouth, in the videos where she lip-syncs and mimes along to his rambling speeches.... Cooper ... graduated in economics from the University of Maryland, encouraged by parents who thought she should make some money, rather than taking the risk of pursuing her performing dreams. She also studied design, another sensible decision that helped her get jobs at Yahoo and Google in user experience, only to find that Silicon Valley was all about pursuing your dreams. Allegedly. ‘In the tech world there’s ...this idea that your job has to be your dream and the thing that you live for, and not just the paycheque, it’s difficult – because it is a paycheque. Having to put this mask on and pretend all day is very draining.’ Or as she put it during a recent comedy performance, ‘People always ask me if it was fun to work at Google, and it was fun. I knew that it was fun because they kept telling me how much fun I should have each quarter, else I would be fired.’ Ironically enough, she ditched all that follow-your-dreams stuff, so she could follow her actual dream, which was to become a comedian who made fun of workplaces that said such things.”
Let Us Dream by Pope Francis review: the holy father of fraternity – review by Julian Coman in The Guardian. “Not long into these reflections on the lessons of a traumatic year, Pope Francis offers a line from his favourite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Where the danger is, grows the saving power.’ ... The book is recognisably a product of that strange, surreal first phase of the coronavirus pandemic. ... Calamities such as this, says Francis, can be a ‘threshold’ experience, dividing one era from another. ‘This is a moment to dream big,’ he writes, ‘to rethink our priorities – what we value, what we want, what we seek – and commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.’ The Covid crisis, argues the pope, has given the lie to a ‘myth of self-sufficiency’ that sanctions rampant inequalities and frays the ties that bind societies together. Pitilessly, the virus has demonstrated our mutual dependency and common vulnerability. We have collectively relied on the state as never before. ... There is a spiritual urgency and warmth to Let Us Dream that will appeal to lay readers as well as the faithful. But these thoughts of a pope in lockdown already feel a little as if they belong to another time. The stark strangeness of spring and summer has gone, along with the Thursday night applause and that sense of shocking novelty and a shared predicament. ... Can the fraternal intimations of the first wave survive the divisions of the second?”
Want to understand the Covid map? Look at where we live and how we work – article by Danny Dorling in The Guardian. “Why is [Covid-19] currently more common in the north? ... In poorer, more often northern, parts more people have jobs that cannot be done from home and more use public transport. Frequently, childcare is provided by the extended family who live nearby – wages and benefits are usually too low to allow other childcare options. There is less early retirement and more pensioners need to work too. Further, overcrowding in homes in cities is more common and anyone out of work exacerbates that. There is also the question of taking a test. People are often not sure whether they have symptoms or not. If the implication of volunteering to take a test is that you and your family are then trapped in a small home for two weeks, that your older children cannot go out to work, that your school-age children will be trying to learn at home with whatever computer you have (if any), and that you and any partner you have also cannot go out – would that influence whether you thought a test was worth it? Of course it would."
