No one is safe until everyone is safe: we applied it to the pandemic, but why not our economy? – article by Rowan Williams in The Guardian. “A friend reminded me of that old song, All My Trials: ‘If living were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die.’ Which, of course, they do. … It is not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; it is also that all those things financial security makes possible – the freedom to celebrate, to plan for your children, to give gifts to people you love – become monstrously complicated. Living with any fullness or imagination recedes over the horizon when choices are all about survival…. In a society that prioritised security for everyone, the ‘cost’ of living would be virtually invisible. The systems and rhythms of exchange that support us – work, wages, welfare – could be taken for granted…. A ‘cost of living’ crisis is a sign that something basic about how we imagine society has gone fantastically wrong. When ‘living’ becomes a commodity that some can afford and some can’t, the assumption that we ought to be able to trust one another to sustain our security is being challenged at the root. We are being lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is as an individual purchaser acquiring desirable goods – not a contributor to the building of a trustworthy network of relations, dependable enough to allow more people to become active and generous contributors…. The story we heard in the carol services is about a moment in human history when it was confirmed, once and for all, that the deepest force and pressure within all reality ‘bends toward justice’, in Martin Luther King’s phrase… It is a story about what human living might be if we finally turned our backs on our addiction to commodifying everything we touch, reducing things and people to calculations of cost. If living were a thing that money could not buy, all might be free to live. The refusal to see this is the real crisis. The forgetting of this is the real religious and moral sea change.”
Nothing is Real: Craig Brown on the Slippery Art of Biography – article by Craig Brown on Literary Hub, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Biography as a form is necessarily artificial. In the end, all biography is a form of fiction.... The real life of anyone takes place largely in the mind, yet it is only the secondary, external stuff—people met, places visited, opinions expressed, and so forth—that is accessible to the biographer. Unless they are spoken or written down, an individual’s thoughts evaporate into nothing. The subject’s head is, you might say, a closed book. This has not, of course, prevented certain biographers from counterfeiting entry into the heads of their subjects. In the very last sentence of her vast biography of Mao Tse-Tung, Jung Chang somehow finds access to Mao’s dying thoughts: 'His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.' To which one is bound to ask: how do you know? Royal biographers regularly follow the same practice.... in the first paragraph of his biography of the Queen, Robert Lacey describes Her Majesty at Balmoral on the Thursday after the death of Princess Diana, reading the newspapers. 'Digesting their angry sermons with the long-practised pensiveness which caused her eyes to narrow, her jaw would firm slightly as her thought processes started, shifting her chin forward a fraction—a signal to her staff to think one more hard thought before they opened their mouths.' This passage raises any number of questions. Was the intrepid Mr Lacey in the Balmoral breakfast room that September morning, perhaps hiding under the table with a periscope to hand? If not, how could he know that the Queen’s reading 'caused her eyes to narrow?' And how does anyone, let alone the Queen, set about practising pensiveness? And—since, presumably, Lacey was crouching in her brain, like one of the Numbskull cartoon characters in The Beezer, could he please explain what, if anything, was going on in The Queen’s brain before she firmed her jaw and 'her thought processes started'?... Of course, more scrupulous biographers eschew such conjecture, relying on first-hand accounts: what do those who were there at the time remember? But this method raises problems. Are first-hand accounts reliable? In real life, people change their memories almost as often as they change their minds.... What of those who wrote it all down at the time, without a view to public show? Surely they can be trusted? I wonder. Who is to say that Pepys’s memory never played tricks on him, or that he never misheard a conversation, or that his interpretation of events was not warped by his own imagination, or his desire to shape a good story?”
Job discrimination faced by ethnic minorities convinces public about racism – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. “A groundbreaking project exploring how better to boost public support for action against systemic racism tested which messages best move people towards a more anti-racist position. Reframing Race, a charity, tested dozens of arguments on almost 20,000 people and found highlighting research from 2019 showing ethnic minority applicants received less positive responses to job applications than white people, was the “blockbuster” in terms of making people more likely to agree that all races and ethnic groups are equally as capable as one other. By contrast using well-trodden language about people 'suffering' from 'inequality' was less likely to convince people of the systemic problem and even sometimes backfired.”
On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock: a whole new world – review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “Like other historians writing about the age of encounter and conquest that swept across the Americas from the late 15th century, [this book begins] with an account of a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. What is different is that this journey, of 1519, was from west to east – from the so-called 'New World' back towards Europe.... The focus here [is] not the European conquistadors but the indigenous people, in this case a group of Totonac men and women from what is now Mexico. The Totonacs, who were later presented to the court of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, were not the first indigenous Americans to arrive in Europe. In his early transatlantic voyages in the 1490s Christopher Columbus abducted dozens of Taíno people from what today are the Bahamas and Cuba. Over the course of his long and disturbing career he was to enslave thousands more. On Savage Shores is a work of historical recovery. It paints these marginalised figures back on to history’s canvas, complicating familiar narratives of 'exploration' and 'discovery'. It introduces us to the Brazilians who met Henry VIII and the Inuit man who was brought to late 16th-century Bristol and hunted ducks on the River Avon. We learn of the thousands of others who arrived as intermediaries and translators, diplomats and servants.”
Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud: spyware hiding in plain sight – review by Charles Arthur in The Guardian. “Pegasus originally arrived in the form of a text message from an unfamiliar number. If the recipient clicked on it, the phone would be infected. Later versions didn’t even need that interaction: the text message alone could be the agent of infection. The phone then became a portal for the government controllers: they could download any content, surreptitiously turn on the camera or microphone, listen to any call. The infection persisted until the phone was restarted – at which point the controllers would notice, and send another infecting message. The fundamental problem with Pegasus is that ... it’s too easy, and tempting, to misuse. NSO, and especially its chief executive, have publicly insisted that sales are conditional on the software being used only to target criminals. (And never American phone numbers; NSO knows not to anger the biggest beast.) But plenty of authoritarian states, and those wobbling on the edge, see telling the truth as a criminal act – and thus target journalists and lawyers too.”
A tragedy pushed to the shadows: the truth about China’s Cultural Revolution – article by Tania Branigan in The Guardian. “It is impossible to understand China without understanding the Cultural Revolution. It shapes the country’s politics, economy and culture; its scar runs through the heart of society, and the soul of its citizens. It is the pivot between socialist utopianism and capitalist frenzy, between merciless uniformity and pitiless individualism. Its end marked the decisive turn away from Maoism, so thoroughly discredited by the toll it had taken. ... Subtract it and today’s China makes no sense: it is Britain without its empire, the US without the civil war.... In parts it looks similar to the terrible genocides of the 20th century, though in China people killed their own kind – the line between victims and perpetrators shifted moment by moment. In some regards it echoes Stalinist purges, but with enthusiastic mass participation. Unlike other tragedies under the Chinese Communist party, it was all-encompassing. No workplace remained untouched. No household remained innocent. ... Yet this era, which forged modern China, exists today largely as an absence. In the past it was discussed more widely, although never freely. Accounts of its horrors helped to justify the turn away from socialist orthodoxy to the market. Over time, fear, guilt and official suppression have pushed it into the shadows.”
‘A contentious place’: the inside story of Tavistock’s NHS gender identity clinic – article by Libby Brooks in The Guardian. “Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust [is] a specialist centre for mental health therapies. Within it is the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), one of the longest running services for gender-diverse children and young people in the world, founded 33 years ago, but whose work here as a national centre will be wound up within months.... [The] interim report [by leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass] highlighted the lack of agreement 'and in many instances a lack of open discussion' on the nature of 'gender incongruence' in young people – and whether it is 'an inherent and immutable phenomenon for which transition is the best option for the individual, or a more fluid and temporal response to a range of developmental, social, and psychological factors'. Whistleblowers – and some parents – have also accused Gids of fast-tracking troubled young people on to under-researched medical interventions and failing to consider other factors, such as autism and abuse. Meanwhile, young transgender people who spoke to the Guardian are clearly fearful of losing a space to explore their gender identity.... With so much at stake, and amid so much uncertainty, the Guardian has spoken to specialists in the field, including some who are still at Gids, who have never spoken before. They talk about how the service evolved, the intense pressure they have been under and the divisions among colleagues. They also give detailed accounts of what happens when a young person seeks treatment there.”
The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner: Chaucer’s feminist hero – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. “Will any literary character written this decade still be as famous in the 27th century as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is today? The most memorable pilgrim from The Canterbury Tales, with her five husbands, her gap teeth and her big red hat, is still inspiring novels and plays, bars of soap and even organic cheeses.... If you’re wondering why this 14th-century figure is considered so much fun, then Marion Turner, a Chaucer biographer and Oxford professor of English literature, is here to tell you. And happily, she puts all the rude bits back in. Referring to her heroine by her first name throughout, Turner tells us that 'Alison' was 'the first ordinary woman in English literature'. Unlike the allegorical princesses and sorceresses who preceded her, she is a 'mercantile, working, sexually active woman', like many of her time. Turner explains that the plague, like the first world war, created huge opportunities for women. They did go on pilgrimages, as the 14th-century Pilgrimage Window in York Minster shows. They also remarried – 'Chaucer’s own mother had been widowed sometime after January 1366 and was married again before June.' They wrote books, joined guilds and hired apprentices. The Wife of Bath, a clothmaker by trade, would have been entirely familiar to Chaucer’s audience as they listened to her story about 'what women want'.”
In Defence of Mean Girls – article by Sarah Haque on The Fence, referenced in First Edition Daily Bulletin in The Guardian. “Challney (Chawl-nee) High School for Girls is a short walk from the motorway, Junction 11 on the M1.... The year is 2009. Kate Moss has convinced us all to starve ourselves. We fry our hair every morning between hot tongs, then fashion it into long, side-swept fringes and backcombed nests.... Luton-born Tommy Robinson has just founded the EDL. For some inexplicable reason, the height of chicness is owning a middle-aged businessman’s phone, the BlackBerry.... We are in the impenetrable membrane of an all-girls school and the world starts and ends here.... Inside, life hums within the sensory meridian of any girls’ school: the toilets. There, the fog of fruity Victoria’s Secret perfume barely masks the smell of menstrual blood. The place has its own microclimate – it is damp and muggy all year round. This is where girls come to see out their panic attacks. They come to pinch their stomach rolls in the mirror and hike up the waistbands of their skirts. They come to sit in cubicles and press the razor blades they’d smuggled in their bag into their forearms. They flock here to peruse leaked nudes, to listen to that voice note of that one girl masturbating. Build a girls’ toilets and they will come. To cry, to make each other cry. It is sanctuary for friends to find comfort and praise. And it is wilderness, a watering hole in the Savanna, for enemies to lock eyes and pounce.”
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie. Review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Guardian. “Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia.... In her debut novel Victoria MacKenzie has distilled this chaotic, episodic rampage of a life into a beautifully lucid account of a spiritual adventure.... But hers is not the only story. Margery’s wandering quest orbits a very still centre – the life of the anchorite Julian of Norwich, confined to a tiny cell and effectively living out her days in her own tomb.... If MacKenzie distills Margery’s adventures to their essence, here she does the opposite, entering a body narrowly confined so that the soul and mind can play across a cosmic landscape, and opening up for us Julian’s giant intellect." Review by Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian. "In 1413, two of the most important women in the history of literature met. They were the anchoress (or religious hermit) Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book written in English by a woman, and Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography is the first ever to have been written in English by man or woman. Their encounter, in Norwich at the cell in which Julian had by then been willingly incarcerated for more than 20 years, provides the climax to Victoria MacKenzie’s transfixing debut novel. As alternating first-person accounts of their lives reveal, they could scarcely be more different. Kempe is a mayor’s daughter, fashion-conscious and often comically unfiltered. Having wed a man entirely lacking in business sense and borne 14 children, she’s also exhausted. When Christ first appears before her he is the 'handsomest' man she’s ever seen; their subsequent encounters are intimate, physical – carnal, even.... About Julian considerably less is known, allowing MacKenzie to imagine for her a beloved husband and baby daughter, both lost to the plague. When she herself falls ill with a fever, she experiences 16 'shewings', or visions, and is persuaded to retreat from the world.”
The writer who burned her own books – article by Audrey Wollen in The New Yorker, referenced in First Edition Daily Briefing in The Guardian. “[Rosemary] Tonks was born in 1928. By the age of forty, she had accomplished what many strive for: opportunities to publish her work and critical respect for it. Her Baudelaire-inflected poems were admired by Cyril Connolly and A. Alvarez, and her boisterous semi-autobiographical novels had some commercial success.… At the parties that she hosted at her home in Hampstead, the bohemian literati of Swinging London were spellbound by her easy, unforgiving wit.…After a series of harrowing crises in the nineteen-seventies, culminating in temporary blindness, she disappeared from public life, in 1980, leaving London for the small seaside town of Bournemouth, where she was known as Mrs. Lightband; she made anonymous appearances in the city to pass out Bibles at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. She felt a calling to protect the public from the sinfulness of her own writing by burning her manuscripts, actively preventing republication in her lifetime, and destroying evidence of her career. There are tales of her systematically checking out her own books from libraries across England in order to burn them in her back garden. This is a level of self-annihilation that can be categorized as transcendent or suicidal, or a perfect cocktail of both, depending on who you ask.”
