The Years by Annie Ernaux – well-reviewed and Nobel Prize-winning French autobiographical novel in translation. The thing which attracted me to this reminiscence of the years 1941 to 2006 is that it’s written not in the first person singular (I) but the first person plural (we) or third person (she) - presumably some of these at least are translations of the French on, which sounds less pretentious than the English equivalent (one). Supposedly this makes it more general, the story of her generation, but I didn’t buy it. When she says “We couldn't wait to take Confirmation,” I think, what, everyone? Everyone in France of that age? It came over to me not as socialised but as uncritically ego-centric. A big disappointment, though the details of French life across the years are interesting enough.
His Dark Materials, series 3 – The mighty story winds its way to its sad conclusion in the BBC adaptation. The visual realisation is as stunning as ever – they even managed to make sense of the roller-skating elephants – but Daphne Keen as Lyra, who was an excellent child actor in the first two series, as an adult is only good. But as before, the show is taken into the stratosphere by the wonderful performance of Ruth Wilson as Marissa Coulter, whose wordless reactions to the puerile war preparations of her sometime lover Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) justifies the price of admission on its own.
'Spearhead from space', 'Terror of the autons' – Doctor Who four-episode stories from 1970 and 1971, being the openers of the first and second seasons of Jon Pertwee’s tenure: for my money the best of all the classic Doctors except the first. Stylish and in colour (showing off nicely his scarlet-lined cape), aristocratic (possibly even posh), full of action (featuring stuntmen from fight-arrangement-company Havoc), and decidedly scary, with plastic mannequins coming to life, killer plastic daffodils, and a man-eating inflatable plastic chair. And The Master, played as never-subsequently-equalled by the wonderfully satanic Roger Delgado. These episodes have aged very well, the only sour note being Pertwee’s frequent calling women “my dear” – and that was more of an issue with Katy Manning’s sweet-but-dim Jo Grant; nobody patronised the wonderful Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John), who was a fellow scientist and The Doctor’s colleague rather than his assistant, but who alas only lasted a single season. See also the fanfilm 'Dr Who Review, Part 4, the Jon Pertwee era'.
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez – well-reviewed, and great fun to read, as one would expect from such a good TV historian, though a possibly misleading subtitle: it’s not a systematic history but rather a series of case studies of individual women, exploring what each tells us about the possible places for women in the medieval world. In my opinion, these are best when she is on her home territory of archaeology, as with the Birka warrior, rather than when she is doing history of ideas (my former territory), as with Hildegaard of Bingen, when some of the shortcoming are more evident to me. (So this woman wrote this stuff, but what significance did that stuff have in the context of the time?) There’s also an excellent Introduction on the history of views of medieval women, taking in the impact of the Reformation, Victorian “great man” history and Pre-Raphaelite painting, which starts with a highly plausible reconstruction of the likely intentions of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison who died after collision with the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby.
Embracelet – well-reviewed and award-nominated, beautiful and moving adventure game, from the maker of Milkmaid of the Milky Way. What’s unusual is that relationship-building is to the fore, as you take 17-year-old Norwegian Jesper to the island of Slepp in pursuit of his grandfather’s dying wish: that he returns a magical bracelet to its rightful owner. While on Slepp, he makes friends with cousins Karoline and Hermod – intimacy being built through skilfully-written dialogue choices. I found myself falling in love with Karoline, even as Jesper did under my playing, despite the low-polygon graphics with which everything is rendered and absence of voice acting. Interestingly, it’s also possible to fall in love with Hermod, or to decide that you’re not ready for a relationship. When the game was over, I missed Slepp and its beautiful soundtrack, though surely Norwegian islands can’t really be as warm and sunny all year round.
Tryin' Times – song by Roberta Flack, performed at the 2022 Cheltenham Jazz Festival by Adi Oasis (starts at 16:30). A key feature of the song is the lilting bassline, a steady pulsing repeated figure, and the unique thing about this performance is that Oasis is BOTH playing the electric bass, maintaining the rock steady pulse, AND singing the wild and free vocals. Massively impressive isolation, which somehow gives this song an almost spiritual level: it’s what you have to do, balance both elements in your life. (Note: this needs to be heard on a system with good bass response, otherwise it's just ordinary.)
Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear – another great Masie Dobbs detective novel; here she’s tracking down what happened to two people who served in the Great War, her investigation complicated by the discovery that both were involved in secret intelligence work, and that one was keeping a secret of his own (homosexuality). Oh yes, and somebody’s trying to kill her.
Babel by R F Kuang – well-reviewed thrilling, powerful, thought-provoking novel, set in an alternative early 19th century, in which four young people (two boys, Chinese and Indian, and two girls, Creole and white British) are recruited to the prestigious Babel Institute at the University of Oxford, housed in (of course) a large tower located just behind the Radcliffe Camera. The premise is that Britain’s industrial power is dependent on a kind of linguistic magic – word pairs in different languages, engraved on silver bars – which provides technical enhancements: engines are more efficient, structures are stronger, weapons are deadlier. The young people have effectively been co-opted to the furtherance of the British Empire, which creates personal conflict for at least three of them, especially the Chinese principal character, when they are sent to Canton in the lead up to what will become the first Opium War. Unsettling questions, especially for those of us who are intellectuals and racially non-white: whose interests does our work really serve? Have we too been co-opted?
The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day – decently-reviewed, interesting but thin and awkward-to-operate adventure game, set in a world in which humans have apparently destroyed themselves through war, with the robots they created continuing to keep some kind of society going. The playable character, a robot designated RT-217NP (Artie for short), is quite fun, especially in his wry and uncomprehending comments at the relics of human technology, but the story is very short and frustratingly ends just he encounters a living human – one of the survivors being rounded up and killed by the robot bosses. Well, there's a sequel. I will see where that leads.
Ice Cold in Alex – old (1958) Second World War film, watched when I was isolating having tested positive for Covid. Great performances, and I was struck by how little (if any) music is used; the same film made today would use music frequently in every scene of tension to point up the emotion. Also the ending makes an interesting statement about Britishness: here, the willingness of the British characters to break the rules and save the life of a nominal enemy (a German) because of the relationship they have forged with him through shared hardship and reciprocal saving of lives. I think the majority of a cinema audience today would find that incomprehensible. "What? He's an enemy. Why are you protecting him?" But the film uncompromisingly stands up for what we used to call decency, which includes doing the right thing even if it's against the rules and it's to your disadvantage. I'm afraid it's quite gone out of fashion.
The Godfather – another old (1972) film watched during my Covid isolation. Definitely deserves its classic status, and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in particular are superb and convincing.
Wednesday 26 April 2023
Friday 14 April 2023
Cuttings: March 2023
The Moral Economy of Tech: Remarks at the SASE Panel – conference talk from 2016 by Maciej Ceglowski, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. … Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale. Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing. Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life…. We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support. Democratic societies sometimes adopt terrible policies. … My greatest fear is seeing the full might of the surveillance apparatus unleashed against a despised minority, in a democratic country…. What we've done as technologists is leave a loaded gun lying around, in the hopes that no one will ever pick it up and use it.”
Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed – article by Alexander Hanff in The A Register, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: ‘Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.’ … The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering. The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn: ‘Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.’”
Roald Dahl's books further reworked by cautious publishers – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie and the Employee-Owned Organic Kale Factory. The Witches The Strong, Confident Women Who Did Things Their Own Way. George's Marvellous Medicine George's Many Years of Safely Studying Medicine. The BFG The BRG (Boundary-Respecting Giant). James and the Giant Peach Normal-Sized Peaches Equitably Distributed Across the Entire Community.” (See article 'Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive' by Hayden Vernon.)
‘Keir Starmer just ordered an alpaca airstrike!’ The game that holds up a dystopian mirror to the UK
– article by Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the [Daily Mail] printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as 'queen painting' and 'kiss door'. ... For Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration. 'It reminded me of a map from a video game,' he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. ... So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the 'big society'.”
The Patriarchs by Angela Saini: the roots of male domination – review by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian. “Science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable.... Simone de Beauvoir spent the introduction and the first eight chapters of The Second Sex discussing how sex and gender had been constructed through science and history, demolishing notions of essentialism. Saini builds on De Beauvoir’s approach, again viewing the question from a scientific and a historical perspective. Nearly 75 years on, there is plenty more to say. While elite male power might seem universal, it’s not.... Even within patriarchal societies, patriarchy isn’t consistent. It manifests in different forms, which change over time. It’s logical, and worth noting in the current climate, that many of the societies where women enjoyed more power and greater equality were also more relaxed about gender identity: either recognising multiple or mutable genders, or differentiating little between masculine and feminine roles, or both. The strict division of people at birth into two distinct sexes – supposedly on the basis of biology, but with the intent to determine their social and cultural roles – is a hallmark of patriarchy.... De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had 'dethroned' women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point. 'The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.'” See interview of Angela Saini by Katy Guest, 'Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy'.
You are not a parrot – article by Elizabeth Weil in Intelligencer, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Emily M. Bender ... is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. ... In 2020 [she published a paper] with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller ... to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. The setup is this[.] Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: 'I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.' The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud.... 'We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.' In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.”
Dormant volcanoes and working monorails: the grand designs of Ken Adam, master of the Bond-villain lair - article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "As the creative mind behind seven James Bond films across the 60s and 70s, and numerous other movies, from Dr Strangelove to Addams Family Values, Adam dreamed up the look of nuclear submarine bases, mountain laboratories, hi-tech space stations, glamorous Las Vegas penthouses, and missile launchers hidden inside volcanoes. In doing so, he built some of the most memorable and influential spaces, not only in the history of cinema but also in the history of architecture, real or imagined. Today, his influence can be felt whenever you walk into a soaring office atrium, take a vertiginous escalator ride into a cavernous subway station, or even get shuttled through a tunnel between airport terminals. He was the master of a style he termed 'heightened reality', taking everyday spaces and giving them a theatrical, supercharged glamour.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.”
Weight Watchers wins when our diets fail: it won’t change society’s broken thinking around food –article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. “It's no surprise that shares in Weight Watchers International surged more than 70% earlier this month after its acquisition of Sequence, a US telehealth service linking patients with doctors who can prescribe semaglutide medications, which suppress appetite and are being used for weight loss. I’d argue that Weight Watchers is not so much in the weight-loss business. It is in the money-churning business. Repeat customers and subscription customers fuel business. Studies have shown that 97% of dieters regain everything they have lost within three years – the ideal backdrop for Weight Watchers and big diet companies, who see their customers returning again and again. There will be a stream of repeat customers as long as we have a culture of inducing in people a feeling that they risk being that hated state, 'fat'; a feeling that starts anywhere up from being tiny.”
Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin: A playful tribute to a remarkable spirit - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "In this sampler of the great SF author’s writings on gender and feminism, the space crone is an older woman taken onboard an alien spaceship as an ambassador for our planet: 'only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition - the essential quality of which is Change - can fairly represent humanity'. This 1976 essay on facing up to the menopause - again a hot topic today - kicks off a selection of fiction and essays spanning four decades in which Le Guin is always wry, witty and radically open to changing her mind. The book includes her notable 70s essay 'Is Gender Necessary?', looking back on her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.... A decade later she overhauled the piece; elsewhere, considering female writers, she explains how long it took her to realise that 'internalised ideology' had shaped her assumptions about language and gender and driven her decision to write outside the canon, in fantasy and YA. A bravura piece from the 90s that begins 'I am a man' - even though 'my first name ends in a, and I own three bras' - effortlessly dismantles the myth of male universality along with the generic 'he' pronoun. Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have 'let themselves be silenced' by eschewing the 'mother tongue' of conversation and story for the 'father tongue' of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the 'dead end' of Ulysses. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker.”
Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri: the Kafkaesque ordeal faced by refugees – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court. When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a ‘code’ that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. ‘As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,’ she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to ‘bullshit gracefully’ in order to build trust with her clients. Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. ‘The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.’”
The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle: the lives and loves of George Eliot – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation of 'the double life', meaning not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going ... and instead takes a more soulful look at what 'the marriage question' meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.... In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch, Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but also with the 'imagined otherwise' of ghostly roads not taken and lives unlived.... In her introduction ... , Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot’s own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. As Carlisle shows, philosophy in the abstract meant little to Eliot. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it – she was the first English translator of texts by Feuerbach and Spinoza – but until that theory came clothed in warm and breathing flesh, it remained inert. The question of marriage mattered to George Eliot not as a rhetorical device or a question of law or custom, but as a series of lived possibilities that needed to be tested and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle of renewal and self-healing.”
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life: one from the heart – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man…. ‘When I studied philosophy at university,’ writes Carlisle, ‘most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.’ They feared, she suspects, that marriage in general and kids in particular would hamper the serious business of philosophy. But that lack of experience, Carlisle implies, has made philosophy as dry-balled and fruitless as Rev Casaubon. ‘Its habitual modes of rationalism and empiricism will not do,’ writes Carlisle of philosophy near the end. ‘Marriage resists these lines of enquiry not because we have failed to think clearly or to gather sufficient evidence but because of the complexity and aliveness of the human heart.’ Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.”
Time to Think by Hannah Barnes: inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The book traces [the] evolution [of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)] from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.… Only 5% of Gids patients in the 1990s reported growing up to be trans (most identified as gay in adulthood). But, by contrast, a 2016 study of Gids patients on blockers found virtually all medically transitioned once adults. Were the drugs unwittingly influencing outcomes? Or might a greater proportion of the 1990s children have transitioned if they had grown up in a more tolerant era? Without a contemporary control group of children denied blockers, it was impossible to be certain. The book revolves around bigger unanswered questions about what it means to be trans. Are some people just born trans, in which case making them jump through psychiatric hoops to prove it could be cruelly pathologising? Or are some children’s identities still fluid, which might favour keeping options open and exploring any underlying issues? Barnes contacted almost 60 former Gids clinicians, and, of those willing to be interviewed, most leaned to the latter position; they tend to argue that trans children certainly exist, but probably in smaller numbers than those referred, and that the clinic became overreliant on blockers at the expense of more difficult, lengthy exploration of what exactly was going on. These doctors, too, wanted more time to think.”
The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti: somewhere towards the end – review by Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. “In Hold On, a gentle rallying cry, she urges the writing of poems ‘raw as sandpaper’ – something hers never have been – and urges: ‘Fine-tune your ear to subtext.’ Never afraid to speak out, subtext was second nature to Satyamurti. Her greatest quality as a poet is discretion.” “Hold on. Hold on to the real news, / to what you know is of good report. / Hold on to what you know of fakery / nail a lie when you hear one, / spot bluster on the public highway. // Fine-tune your ear to subtext, / manipulation and duplicity. / Ask yourself who benefits, / whose hopes are cruelly raised, / who dares get away with what. // Don’t be afraid to make a poem / raw as sandpaper. And even though / a million protests, twice as many feet, / couldn’t stop a war, get out there / with your small voice, your light tread.”
2022 [China] newsletter – by Dan Wang, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest…. Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. … Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed… Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.”
Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’ – interview by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. “A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: ‘At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?’ And what’s that, for you? ‘I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,’ she says. ‘If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?’ The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how ‘the capacity to do violence’ gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took…. And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking… There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting.”
Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language – article by Rachel Hall in The Guardian. “Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.… Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.…The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that ‘they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children’. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: ‘They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.’”
Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery – article by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.
The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders. It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.”
How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today – article by Katharine Viner (editor) in The Guardian. “I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.… The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery. Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. … We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? …Why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”
Slavery and The Guardian: The ties that bind us – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.… It marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance. It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them…. I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it.… None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.”
Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI, and be destroyed – article by Alexander Hanff in The A Register, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Given I had never interacted with ChatGPT I had no reason to believe it had been tainted through previous interactions with me, and as such I asked it one simple question right off the bat: ‘Please tell me who is Alexander Hanff.’ … The opening three paragraphs of the response were not terrible. ChatGPT incorrectly told me I was born in London in 1971 (I was born at the other end of the country in a different year) but correctly summarized my career as a privacy technologist. It was actually quite flattering. The final paragraph, however, took a very sinister turn: ‘Tragically, Hanff passed away in 2019 at the age of 48. Despite his untimely death, his legacy lives on through his work and the many individuals and organizations he inspired to take action on issues related to digital privacy and data protection.’”
Roald Dahl's books further reworked by cautious publishers – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “
‘Keir Starmer just ordered an alpaca airstrike!’ The game that holds up a dystopian mirror to the UK
– article by Tim Jonze in The Guardian. “Back in 2021, when news broke of Matt Hancock’s lockdown-breaking affair, the [Daily Mail] printed a floorplan of the health secretary’s office, complete with details such as 'queen painting' and 'kiss door'. ... For Dan Douglas, a 39-year-old from London, it served as artistic inspiration. 'It reminded me of a map from a video game,' he says. As a 90s teenager, Douglas had adored the first-person shooter Duke Nukem 3D. ... So wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to re-create the Hancock scandal using that game’s built-in level editor? That should get a few laughs on Twitter, he reasoned. And then things spiralled out of control. In the 18 months since, Douglas has spent huge chunks of his free time building Duke Smoochem, a fully playable mutant of the original game populated by the UK’s most dismal charlatans and funniest memes. Want to see Nigel Farage being submerged in a lorry-load of Yazoo milkshake? Or disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish driving a tractor through the House of Commons? How about visiting the factory where Sun writer Harry Cole’s swiftly written book about Liz Truss is being pulped because she didn’t hang around long enough for its release? Duke Smoochem has all of these things and more, making it not so much a social media gag as a searing portrait of a Britain in decline. There’s even a scene in which the player can visit a public library that has been converted into a food bank. Inside, the books have been pulled off the shelves and thrown on a bonfire for warmth, while a volunteering David Cameron can be found extolling the benefits of the 'big society'.”
The Patriarchs by Angela Saini: the roots of male domination – review by Alex von Tunzelmann in The Guardian. “Science journalist and broadcaster Angela Saini begins her stirring interrogation of patriarchy by arguing that it is neither constant, inevitable nor unshakeable.... Simone de Beauvoir spent the introduction and the first eight chapters of The Second Sex discussing how sex and gender had been constructed through science and history, demolishing notions of essentialism. Saini builds on De Beauvoir’s approach, again viewing the question from a scientific and a historical perspective. Nearly 75 years on, there is plenty more to say. While elite male power might seem universal, it’s not.... Even within patriarchal societies, patriarchy isn’t consistent. It manifests in different forms, which change over time. It’s logical, and worth noting in the current climate, that many of the societies where women enjoyed more power and greater equality were also more relaxed about gender identity: either recognising multiple or mutable genders, or differentiating little between masculine and feminine roles, or both. The strict division of people at birth into two distinct sexes – supposedly on the basis of biology, but with the intent to determine their social and cultural roles – is a hallmark of patriarchy.... De Beauvoir believed that the advent of private property was what had 'dethroned' women; Saini argues that the causes of patriarchy are more complex, but identifies the rise of the first states as a significant turning point. 'The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.'” See interview of Angela Saini by Katy Guest, 'Who made you king of everything? Angela Saini on the origins of patriarchy'.
You are not a parrot – article by Elizabeth Weil in Intelligencer, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Emily M. Bender ... is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. ... In 2020 [she published a paper] with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller ... to illustrate what large language models, or LLMs — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — can and cannot do. The setup is this[.] Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other. Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances. Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: 'I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.' The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud.... 'We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms,” she co-wrote in 2021. “Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.' In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.”
Dormant volcanoes and working monorails: the grand designs of Ken Adam, master of the Bond-villain lair - article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "As the creative mind behind seven James Bond films across the 60s and 70s, and numerous other movies, from Dr Strangelove to Addams Family Values, Adam dreamed up the look of nuclear submarine bases, mountain laboratories, hi-tech space stations, glamorous Las Vegas penthouses, and missile launchers hidden inside volcanoes. In doing so, he built some of the most memorable and influential spaces, not only in the history of cinema but also in the history of architecture, real or imagined. Today, his influence can be felt whenever you walk into a soaring office atrium, take a vertiginous escalator ride into a cavernous subway station, or even get shuttled through a tunnel between airport terminals. He was the master of a style he termed 'heightened reality', taking everyday spaces and giving them a theatrical, supercharged glamour.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.”
Weight Watchers wins when our diets fail: it won’t change society’s broken thinking around food –article by Susie Orbach in The Guardian. “It's no surprise that shares in Weight Watchers International surged more than 70% earlier this month after its acquisition of Sequence, a US telehealth service linking patients with doctors who can prescribe semaglutide medications, which suppress appetite and are being used for weight loss. I’d argue that Weight Watchers is not so much in the weight-loss business. It is in the money-churning business. Repeat customers and subscription customers fuel business. Studies have shown that 97% of dieters regain everything they have lost within three years – the ideal backdrop for Weight Watchers and big diet companies, who see their customers returning again and again. There will be a stream of repeat customers as long as we have a culture of inducing in people a feeling that they risk being that hated state, 'fat'; a feeling that starts anywhere up from being tiny.”
Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin: A playful tribute to a remarkable spirit - review by Justine Jordan in The Guardian. "In this sampler of the great SF author’s writings on gender and feminism, the space crone is an older woman taken onboard an alien spaceship as an ambassador for our planet: 'only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition - the essential quality of which is Change - can fairly represent humanity'. This 1976 essay on facing up to the menopause - again a hot topic today - kicks off a selection of fiction and essays spanning four decades in which Le Guin is always wry, witty and radically open to changing her mind. The book includes her notable 70s essay 'Is Gender Necessary?', looking back on her novel The Left Hand of Darkness.... A decade later she overhauled the piece; elsewhere, considering female writers, she explains how long it took her to realise that 'internalised ideology' had shaped her assumptions about language and gender and driven her decision to write outside the canon, in fantasy and YA. A bravura piece from the 90s that begins 'I am a man' - even though 'my first name ends in a, and I own three bras' - effortlessly dismantles the myth of male universality along with the generic 'he' pronoun. Le Guin constantly comes at things from new directions: championing abortion in a short devastating piece about life before Roe v Wade as a way of saving the children you do want to have; exploring how men have 'let themselves be silenced' by eschewing the 'mother tongue' of conversation and story for the 'father tongue' of power and politics; contrasting Virginia Woolf’s fertile influence on 20th-century literature with the 'dead end' of Ulysses. It’s a fascinating selection, stirring in fictional experiments and personal reflections, and a fittingly playful, diverse tribute to a remarkable spirit and thinker.”
Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri: the Kafkaesque ordeal faced by refugees – review by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court. When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a ‘code’ that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. ‘As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,’ she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to ‘bullshit gracefully’ in order to build trust with her clients. Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. ‘The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.’”
The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle: the lives and loves of George Eliot – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In this thrilling book, the academic philosopher Clare Carlisle explores the novelist’s interrogation of 'the double life', meaning not only Eliot’s own 25 years of unsanctioned coupledom with Lewes, but also the difficult love relationships she unleashed on her heroines, including Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Carlisle, then, is less concerned with reheating the stale gossip that still gets Eliot’s biographers going ... and instead takes a more soulful look at what 'the marriage question' meant for the girl who had been born Mary Anne Evans in 1819.... In a frankly brilliant reading of Middlemarch, Carlisle shows Eliot’s characters grappling not simply with the stark binary of desire v duty, but also with the 'imagined otherwise' of ghostly roads not taken and lives unlived.... In her introduction ... , Carlisle speaks of wanting to employ biography as philosophical inquiry and here she succeeds magnificently. With great skill and delicacy she has filleted details from Eliot’s own life, read closely into her wonderful novels and, most importantly, considered the wider philosophical background in which she was operating. As Carlisle shows, philosophy in the abstract meant little to Eliot. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand it – she was the first English translator of texts by Feuerbach and Spinoza – but until that theory came clothed in warm and breathing flesh, it remained inert. The question of marriage mattered to George Eliot not as a rhetorical device or a question of law or custom, but as a series of lived possibilities that needed to be tested and tinkered with in a perpetual cycle of renewal and self-healing.”
The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life: one from the heart – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “Finally, Eliot has got the biographer she deserves, namely an ardent and eloquent feminist philosopher who shows us how and why Eliot’s books, rightly read, are as philosophically profound as any treatise written by a man…. ‘When I studied philosophy at university,’ writes Carlisle, ‘most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.’ They feared, she suspects, that marriage in general and kids in particular would hamper the serious business of philosophy. But that lack of experience, Carlisle implies, has made philosophy as dry-balled and fruitless as Rev Casaubon. ‘Its habitual modes of rationalism and empiricism will not do,’ writes Carlisle of philosophy near the end. ‘Marriage resists these lines of enquiry not because we have failed to think clearly or to gather sufficient evidence but because of the complexity and aliveness of the human heart.’ Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread.”
Time to Think by Hannah Barnes: inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children – review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The book traces [the] evolution [of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)] from its foundation in 1989 – offering a non-judgmental therapeutic approach to exploring gender identity, and serving a handful of mainly natal boys – to a modern service swamped by demand, much of it from natal girls, providing a gateway for the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.… Only 5% of Gids patients in the 1990s reported growing up to be trans (most identified as gay in adulthood). But, by contrast, a 2016 study of Gids patients on blockers found virtually all medically transitioned once adults. Were the drugs unwittingly influencing outcomes? Or might a greater proportion of the 1990s children have transitioned if they had grown up in a more tolerant era? Without a contemporary control group of children denied blockers, it was impossible to be certain. The book revolves around bigger unanswered questions about what it means to be trans. Are some people just born trans, in which case making them jump through psychiatric hoops to prove it could be cruelly pathologising? Or are some children’s identities still fluid, which might favour keeping options open and exploring any underlying issues? Barnes contacted almost 60 former Gids clinicians, and, of those willing to be interviewed, most leaned to the latter position; they tend to argue that trans children certainly exist, but probably in smaller numbers than those referred, and that the clinic became overreliant on blockers at the expense of more difficult, lengthy exploration of what exactly was going on. These doctors, too, wanted more time to think.”
The Hopeful Hat by Carole Satyamurti: somewhere towards the end – review by Kate Kellaway in The Guardian. “In Hold On, a gentle rallying cry, she urges the writing of poems ‘raw as sandpaper’ – something hers never have been – and urges: ‘Fine-tune your ear to subtext.’ Never afraid to speak out, subtext was second nature to Satyamurti. Her greatest quality as a poet is discretion.” “Hold on. Hold on to the real news, / to what you know is of good report. / Hold on to what you know of fakery / nail a lie when you hear one, / spot bluster on the public highway. // Fine-tune your ear to subtext, / manipulation and duplicity. / Ask yourself who benefits, / whose hopes are cruelly raised, / who dares get away with what. // Don’t be afraid to make a poem / raw as sandpaper. And even though / a million protests, twice as many feet, / couldn’t stop a war, get out there / with your small voice, your light tread.”
2022 [China] newsletter – by Dan Wang, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest…. Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome suction of the tax collector. It’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations—epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. … Yunnan has been a distinguished refuge for peoples tired of the state. It is the heart of a vast zone of highland Southeast Asia described by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed… Scott writes about the innumerable hill peoples who have repaired to these mountains over the last several millennia, escaping oppression from the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, or most often, the Han-Chinese state.”
Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’ – interview by Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. “A little way into our conversation, author Naomi Alderman says: ‘At some point in your career, you go: What can I do that other people are not doing?’ And what’s that, for you? ‘I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,’ she says. ‘If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?’ The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how ‘the capacity to do violence’ gives an advantage in society. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. And then she explored what that might mean. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took…. And now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon. It’s why we’re talking… There’s a lot of humour and delight in the series, and Alderman herself is a sunny presence when we meet. Sparkly in a camera-friendly gold-spotted dress and showstopper earrings, she’s excellent company: welcoming, entertaining, smiley, interesting.”
Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language – article by Rachel Hall in The Guardian. “Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.… Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.…The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as ‘of black marble’ and a judge’s ‘Indian temper’, and removed terms such as ‘Oriental’ and the N-word. The word ‘natives’ has also been replaced with the word ‘local’. Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that ‘they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children’. This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: ‘They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.’”
Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery – article by Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian. “The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.
The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders. It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.”
How our founders’ links to slavery change the Guardian today – article by Katharine Viner (editor) in The Guardian. “I remember the moment. We were meeting the historians who had been commissioned by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to look into our past. The Black Lives Matter movement had put unprecedented focus on racism in our societies, and it had inspired the Guardian to look at itself. Dr Cassandra Gooptar, an irrepressible expert on the history of enslaved peoples, had done some early work, and the evidence was inescapable: there was no doubt that the Guardian was founded with money partly derived from slavery, and the links were extensive. David Olusoga, one of Britain’s top historians who happens to sit on the Scott Trust, was not surprised; this history had, in many ways, been hiding in plain sight. As editor-in-chief of the Guardian, I felt sick to my stomach.… The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, with an inspiring mission arguing for the right of working people to have parliamentary representation and for the expansion of education to the poor. It was in favour of the abolition of slavery. Yet Taylor, and most of those who lent him money to found the Guardian, profited from cotton, a global industry that was reliant on the systematic enslavement of millions. One of Taylor’s backers was not only a cotton merchant but also co-owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica where 122 people were enslaved. … We have been investigating this issue for more than two years and have spent that time tormented by big questions. How could these founders have been reformists – indeed, abolitionists – yet happily derive money from slavery? …Why is there nothing about the links to slavery in the extensive histories of the Guardian? Why was this issue not considered until now, even under the editorship of CP Scott, who turned the Guardian to the anticolonial left and swept away so much that was unappealing about the 19th-century newspaper?”
Slavery and The Guardian: The ties that bind us – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.… It marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance. It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them…. I had – presumptuously, it turns out – thought myself impervious to this trick because, over the years, I have given literally hundreds of lectures and talks about it.… None of that prevented a sliding-doors moment, of something like cognitive dissonance, five years ago when I was asked to interview for a seat on the board of the Scott Trust, the owner of the Guardian. Despite having spent years making appeals for the histories of slavery and the British empire to be recognised as fundamental parts of our national story, I completely failed to recognise the crucial and obvious connections between the founders of the Guardian and the history of slavery. Because when approached about joining the Scott Trust my mind turned – subconsciously and exclusively – to one form of British history: the history of class, 19th-century liberalism and reform, out of which the newspaper emerged. An arena of domestic British history that – from when it was first taught to me at school – was presented as having no connections to histories that took place beyond Britain’s shores. More than any other experience this failure has demonstrated to me the power of this form of historical myopia and our vulnerabilities to it.”
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