Cuttings: January 2024

The Emotional Life of Populism – article by Eva Illouz in The Montréal Review, based on her book of the same title, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In my book I argue that populist politics blends together four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love – and makes these emotions dominant vectors of the political process. The mixture of these emotions forms the matrix of populism because they generate antagonism between social groups inside society and alienation from the institutions that safeguard democracy, and because they are, in many ways, oblivious to something we might call reality. More exactly: populism lives as much in reality (naming ills that have transformed working-class lives) as in the imagination. Fear provides compelling motivation to repeatedly name enemies as well as invent them, to view such enemies as fixed and unchanging, to shift politics from conflict resolution to a state of permanent vigilance to threats, even at the price of suspending the rule of law. ... Disgust creates and maintains the dynamic of distancing between social groups through the fear of pollution and contamination: it helps separate ethnic or religious minorities and, by the logic of contamination, it also contributes towards separating the political groups who either support or oppose the minorities. Ressentiment is a key process in self-victimization; its rhetoric has become generalized, as all groups, majority and minority, invoke it to designate the relationship of the other to them; it redefines the political self in terms of its wounds. Trumpist voters or Israeli settlers are united in their common sense of self-victimization against left-wing elites. When all groups are victims of each other, it creates antagonism and changes ordinary notions of justice. It also creates fantasies of revenge. Finally, a particular form of exclusionary patriotism promises solidarity to the in-group at the expense of the others, who become redefined as superfluous or dangerous members of the nation. We should not underestimate the deep relationship that nationalism entertains today with religion and tradition. All of these emotions, together, create large imaginary spaces impervious to the real; these spaces are filled by emotional projections and scenarios which become prone to a paranoid interpretation of social and political life. These emotional imaginary spaces energetically fuel conflict within society through unavenged wounds and enemies and aggrandize a supposedly primordial and authentic definition of the true people."

Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian, quoted by Br John Mayhead in his homily for the Feast of the Holy Family 31.12.23. "In August, I married the boy I have loved since we were 17.... I never wanted a wedding of any extravagance, and shied away from the attention it meant. But as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate. I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy, and reject hope. And so I chose to embrace it.... August 2023 was the tail end of the hottest consecutive months on record for the planet, the energy from which was being balled up and hurled back at us in summer storms. Nature was, quite rightly, retaliating.... On the day of the wedding Storm Antoni’s plan was to be everywhere. All 70mph of her tore up the church spire where the bells rang. She threw herself down the aisle as I held my father’s arm in the dress my mother had worn on her day and whistled herself into our voices as we sang. We sang louder. ... She huddled us into a tighter group. She pulled toddlers and 85-year-olds into laughter. She lifted petals to the sky. The storm should not have been there. But, in a strange sense, I respected the audacity and hoped her ferocity might stay, like the rings around our fingers. Like the rest of the natural world, Storm Antoni gave us everything she had.... I watched strangers conspire like old friends, and fought tears as others reunited after decades of separation. I was regarding a rainbow of humans at their finest, wearing scars of love, loss and hope, as we danced into the night.... Never again will this group collide, I thought.... I snuck into the farmhouse to observe from an upstairs window. By evening, Storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy, and the joining of hands, is activism after all. Care to dance?"

Between the Algorithm and a Hard Place: The Worker's Dilemma – article by Diana Enríquez on TechPolicy, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Let’s say you decide to earn a little extra cash by picking up another job [with AmazonFlex].... Today you’re supposed to drop off a package... and the app wants you to drive on a street that you know has very hazardous road conditions. You also know that the app is always tracking your location and how closely you stick to the 'optimized route'. You’ve heard from other drivers that you might get a warning and a strike against you if you go too far off route. Too many strikes means you’ll lose your flexible job, and the supplemental income that is helping you pay your bills. You have two options: (1) Break the rules but complete the goal – ... You wait a few days to see what happens… and you get an automated ... warning saying they needed to check whether or not you delivered the final package because they saw you left the optimized route. (2) Follow the rules but at a heavy cost – you’ve heard too many stories about people being deactivated for not obeying the app’s guidance, so you stick to the route and try to figure out how to reach your final goal anyway. You take the short route but damage your car. The final bill to repair your car costs more than you made on the trip.... These are the types of decisions one has to make when your manager is automated. While AI and other algorithms that manage our routines at work can do a lot of things well, these systems do not work well in gray areas when conditions quickly change.... At present, automated management is happening primarily in lower paying jobs, but these experiences are also a preview of what we might expect as we see companies turning to ChatGPT and other AI tools with the hopes it might reduce some of their workforce costs.... What researchers consistently find is that our best work environments provide some rules for structure and quality control alongside flexibility for workers to innovate and adapt to changing conditions. Automation is designed for the “average case” and performs poorly in “edge cases” or changing conditions. Adaptation and innovation is what allows humans to thrive. There is a clear route here for a better partnership - so long as we don’t ignore the strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines. But it requires leadership to make design choices that reward BOTH rule following and adaptation, instead of strictly prioritizing process at the expense of poorer outcomes."

The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film by David Thomson: blood, guts and popcorn – review by John Banville in The Guardian. "Towards the end of a chapter on a ... movie set just after the first world war, David Thomson writes: 'I doubt there is any such thing as an anti-war film.' In its context it seems hardly more than a passing observation, but in fact the thought is fundamental to Thomson’s project. For what the eminent British film critic is writing about, at some length and in compelling and often limpidly beautiful prose, is war itself and our ambiguous relation to it, or at least to its representation in moving images – moving in more senses than one. But are we moved to sorrow and pity, sitting in a darkened cinema with our faces lifted rapturously to the light of battle flickering across the screen? At the pictures, everyone is 11 years old, and 11-year-olds glory in the mayhem going on up there, and the more blood and mangled bodies the better. Oh dear, the appalled adult in us murmurs, as the bullets fly and the arteries sever, oh dear, oh dear, but our exulting inner child silently shouts: go on, kill ’em all!... As quickly becomes clear, Thomson’s book is as much about war and our non-combatants’ attitudes to it as it is about war movies. This is the dilemma that he returns to again and again, 'that there is a tension in all war films between the vivid peril on screen and our demure safety in the dark'. When we enter a cinema, we leave our sense of responsibility behind in the popcorn-strewn foyer.... War films have been a large component of cinema in the century of warfare from 1914 to the present. Something in us, some dark and ultimately unfulfillable longing, is fed by images on a screen of soldiers slaughtering one another, and machines slaughtering soldiers, and cities toppling. In his superb and masterfully engineered book, Thomson – one of the finest living stylists in the English language – is unflinching in his contemplation of this disturbing hunger."

Nicholas Winton saved my father from the Nazis; here’s how One Life betrays him – article by Matthew Reisz in The Guardian. "In late 1938, everyone in Prague was braced for an imminent German invasion. When a friend asked Winton to come and witness the developing humanitarian crisis for himself, he set about organising a series of eight Kindertransports, which eventually brought 669 Czech Jewish children to safety in Britain.... Since my father was one of Winton’s 'children', my two brothers and I, and now our five children and three grandchildren, would ... not be here without him. So I had high hopes for James Hawes’ new biopic, One Life, and was delighted to be invited to the premiere. It is a great pity that the result is so soft-centred.... It reconstructs the rescue itself touchingly enough and shatters some common myths. Contrary to the comforting idea that the Kindertransports were a shining example of British decency in welcoming persecuted refugees, we get to see how hard it was for Winton to charm or bully the immigration authorities into speedily granting visas, and to find foster families and sponsors willing to provide £50 for each child to ensure they would not be a burden on the public purse.... What the new film doesn’t explore is how Elisabeth Maxwell [as well as as bringing Winton's actions to public attention] also organised a Holocaust conference called Remembering for the Future, later in 1988. This included a semi-private event where Winton got a chance to meet Kindertransportees and their close families on a much more informal basis.... Many were still visibly traumatised, regressing from successful middle-aged professionals into frightened children in front of my eyes. Others recalled poignant episodes from the train journeys across Europe, such as the moment when they crossed the Dutch border into safe territory and were welcomed with mugs of hot chocolate. Genuine celebration was tempered by a strong sense of what had been lost when they left families behind in Czechoslovakia. It was, in other words, an event which caught the real emotional complexity of the Kindertransport, rather than the kind of cheesy uplift offered by ... the biopic. It seems strange for a film on this theme to focus so entirely on Winton and to be so incurious about the later lives of the rescued children."

Magus by Anthony Grafton: spellbound – review by Dennis Duncan in The Guardian. "In Grafton’s history of learned magic, an early fascination with the military possibilities of charmed objects gives way in the 15th century to an inward focus, a kind of astrological self-help to improve the health of the aspiring scholar. ... The balance between licit and illicit magic was in constant flux, with every magus keen to draw a line between the arts that he himself practised and those that were beyond the pale.... By [the 16th century], however, the work of the seriously inclined magus was beginning to align more closely with another kind of magic: the feats of mathematics, engineering and perspective that could conjure spectacles and astound audiences."

The Alternative by Nick Romeo: moral substitutes for the free market model – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism.... You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how employees are hired, paid and enabled to share in the value they create. There is no need for ordinary workers to be pawns in a system that makes humanity and ethics secondary to the unbending logic of the marketplace and blind, selfish capital. On the other hand, is it all worth more than a can of beans? How are a collection of disparate, often small scale, if great, initiatives going to grow into a systemic challenge to the way things are currently organised? The Mondragon co-operative movement that Romeo applauds fascinated me as a teenager for all the reasons he sets out. The hope was the virtues he cites – essentially treating workers fairly, decently and with respect – would unleash such increased engagement, productivity and purpose that the good would drive out the bad of its own accord. A more moral economy, retaining the pluralism of capitalism but less of its innate exploitativeness, was there for the having. Well, more than 50 years later Mondragon has grown into one of the top 10 companies in Spain – but has too few emulators even in its own country. This admirable, readable book tries to offer hope. But for all Romeo’s enthusiasm, the question is left hanging. Why so little progress when the case against how so much of the way work and welfare is organised is so strong – and the alternatives so viable?... Until these ideas are framed by a new economics, a viable political philosophy, a critical mass of thought leaders and of political, economic and social actors, they will remain in the foothills. Romeo has done a service in marshalling our knowledge of the varying contrarian forces abroad – but there is more heavy lifting to make any of this the new normal."

The hidden life of Camila Batmanghelidjh: why was her exoneration so widely ignored? – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. "Kids Company began in south London in 1996. Batmanghelidjh, an Iran-born charity worker who had trained as a therapist, set out her vision for the charity as protecting and supporting vulnerable youngsters by showing them unconditional love and care. Unlike other services, Kids Company would never turn away a child in need. While that might sound naive and sentimental, in practice it was resource-intensive, rigorous and exhausting.... When social work or NHS services refused to help, or gave up on or lost track of a difficult or aggressive teenager – which happened thousands of times – Kids Company would step in. Batmanghelidjh’s team would take legal action to force authorities to meet their obligations, which did not make the charity popular in town halls. ...Batmanghelidjh’s idealism and charisma were magnetic to politicians, the media and celebrities, from Coldplay to Prince Charles. Her ascent was extraordinary – and would mark the great first act of her career. ... Batmanghelidjh’s second act would be one of tragedy: a brutal fall from grace that would destroy her reputation overnight. ... [A rescue] deal [as Kid's Company struggled to help the austerity-created wave of children in need] was scuppered at the 11th hour when the BBC’s Newsnight programme revealed that historical abuse allegations involving Kids Company were being investigated by the Metropolitan police. With potential donors spooked, Kids Company’s trustees concluded that the charity was no longer viable. It went into receivership five days later. Scotland Yard completed its investigation six months later, in January 2016. It found no evidence of physical or sexual abuse, criminality or safeguarding failures. The 32 allegations were mostly hearsay and “vague in detail”, it concluded. Meanwhile, the House of Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs select committee (Pacac)... rushed through an inquiry that concluded that Kids Company was financially incontinent, poorly governed and unable to demonstrate that the money it spent made any difference to the young people it supported.... However, a week [later] one of the committee’s most senior members and Batmanghelidjh’s most aggressive interrogators [revealed that after the report's publication] a Kids Company trustee ... had presented them with evidence showing that, far from being negligent and badly governed, the board of Kids Company had provided rigorous oversight and scrutiny of the charity. ... Still, the report’s findings continued to be reported – mostly unchallenged. They helped to underpin what fast became an entrenched media narrative: that Kids Company had been not only a financial mess, but also a giant confidence trick.... Two years after the closure of Kids Company, the official receiver ... applied to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and all [the] trustees from holding directorships of companies or charities for up to six years.... Three and a half years, 18,000 pages of evidence and £8m of public money later, the case against Kids Company was thrown out in February 2021.... The judge, Mrs Justice Falk, concluded that there was no evidence that payments made to young people were unsupervised, unscrutinised or clinically unjustified. Kids Company was a challenging, financially high-risk operation, in common with many charities, she ruled, but it was not a failing organisation, nor was its board negligent or incompetent. The seven trustees – who did not include Batmanghelidjh, whom Falk praised separately – were 'a highly impressive group of individuals' and entirely fit to hold future senior positions. In fact, she wrote in her ruling, the cause of Kids Company’s collapse was most likely not management incompetence, but 'unfounded allegations' of sexual assault. It was a near-total exoneration of Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company – and a complete disaster for the government. But instead of her third act being one of exoneration and vindication, the ruling went largely unnoticed."

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world’: 10 things I learned when my father had dementia – article by Fanny Johnstone in The Guardian. "My dad’s prognosis was not good. He wasn’t expected to live for more than a couple of years – and he didn’t. I had 18 months with him and Mum... This is what I learned. Writing helps.... We are surrounded by carers....It can be explosively funny.... You have to learn to adapt....The tiniest details can make a difference....You have to be organised.... You can forget who you are.... Everyone needs a break....The law [on assisted dying] needs to change....It can be a profound and valuable experience. I was able to care for my dad, love him, indulge him and show affection in ways that would have been impossible for me to imagine when I was young. It gave me a sense of self-worth and respect that I think had been missing for much of my life. My suspicion that he had been disappointed with me eroded during that time. I think he saw qualities in me that he hadn’t known were there. I think I did too. And as a result I’ve had a bit more faith in myself since. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that the experience redeemed me in my own eyes. I had chased fun and freedom for much of my life at the expense of responsibility and a steady career, but here I faced up to life, and grew up, I think. A few weeks after his death, my best friend, who had known my father since childhood, invited me for a drink.... She said: 'So how was it then?' Meaning all of it – the last 18 months, and my father’s death. My exact words – which surprised us both a lot – were: 'I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.'”

We’ve all felt like ‘skint little people’ against the system: that’s why the Post Office drama broke our hearts – article by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. "Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from 'news story of moderate interest' to 'massive political priority'. Take the phone-hacking scandal.... Or ... the Windrush scandal.... The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that 'skint little people', to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011.... With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives.... The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.... The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are 'skint little people'. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. 'It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,' says Vennells on the TV. 'No it’s not' yells Hesmondhalgh, 'It’s about people’s lives, you moron!' It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard."

From the Post Office scandal to nuclear attack: 13 TV shows that shook Britain – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "Mr Bates vs the Post Office seems set to be remembered as a show that changed society more than most politicians and lawyers could ever imagine. But what are the other contenders? Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)... The War Game (BBC, 1966)... Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory (BBC Northern Ireland, 1980)... Police: A Complaint of Rape (BBC Two, 1982)... Crimewatch UK (BBC One, 1984-2017)... That’s Life! (BBC One, 1988)... Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, 1990)... Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000)... Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC Two, 2011)... Care (BBC One, 2018)... A statement by the Prime Minister (all channels, 2020)."

Update law on computer evidence to avoid Horizon repeat, ministers urged – article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "Ministers need to 'immediately' update the law to acknowledge that computers are fallible or risk a repeat of the Horizon scandal, legal experts say. In English and Welsh law, computers are assumed to be “reliable” unless proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: 'It says, for the person who’s saying ‘there’s something wrong with this computer’, that they have to prove it. Even if it’s the person accusing them who has the information.'... The legal presumption that computers are reliable stems from an older common law principle that “mechanical instruments” should be presumed to be in working order unless proven otherwise. That assumption means that if, for instance, a police officer quotes the time on their watch, a defendant cannot force the prosecution to call a horologist to explain from first principles how watches work. For a period, computers lost that protection in England and Wales. A 1984 act of parliament ruled that computer evidence was only admissible if it could be shown that the computer was used and operating properly. But that act was repealed in 1999, just months before the first trials of the Horizon system began."

Blood: The Science, Medicine and Mythology of Menstruation by Dr Jen Gunter: why periods are ‘a muddled burden’ – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Dr Jen Gunter’s Blood takes an unapologetically scientific approach to the menstrual cycle, written for anyone who wants to understand its often mystified ways and what medicine can do to help. Perhaps Gunter’s resolve to reduce stigma around women’s health was a reaction to her own upbringing in Canada, with a mother who thought tampons were 'evil'. Now a gynaecologist in San Francisco with three decades of experience, Gunter became famous in 2018 for ridiculing the pseudoscientific offerings on Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness platform Goop, and has since continued her battle against disinformation with her Substack newsletter the Vajenda, alongside bestselling books The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto. Without fear, favour or sponsor, Gunter is a cheerleader for professional expertise, informed consent and reproductive justice. Brutally put, the menstrual cycle is 'resource curation to ensure the healthiest pregnancy outcome, but at the expense of the person who menstruates', Gunter writes.... The book’s ability to make science sing and stick is impressive, but an even greater achievement of Blood is to expose the playbook of medical misinformation. Gunter helps readers sort out claims that 'sound truthy' from those that are in fact true. Menstrual blood souring milk, ruining crops and wilting flowers seem like misogynistic tales from the past, but similar myths circulate online today.... Gunter regularly faces accusations of being closed-minded to alternative practice and overconfident in her opinions. To which she would say that evidence-based medicine is not an opinion, even if you don’t like it. Consenting adults can do as they please, and she isn’t criticising consumer choices but rather the peddlers who prey on women’s discomfort and fears in the name of feminism while making money. Medics are wrongly demonised as puppets of big pharma, she says, while influencers flog untested and unregulated supplements with clear self-interest."

Work ‘wellness’ programmes don’t make employees happier, but I know what does – article by André Spicer in The Guardian. "A new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examines the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions such as stress management and mindfulness classes, and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these interventions had any statistically significant impact on worker wellbeing or job satisfaction. They did not improve employees’ sense of belonging at work or reduce perceived time pressures. Nor did they make employees feel supported or improve workplace relationships. In some cases, wellbeing interventions seemed to make matters worse, the study suggested. For instance, workplace resilience and mindfulness training had a slightly negative impact on employees’ self-rated mental health.... While companies seem to excel at making their employees ill, the question remains about what they can do to help them feel better. Fleming points out that it is possible to improve employee wellbeing by focusing on more structural aspects of work. These include improving pay, providing secure contracts, giving employees some flexibility and control over their work schedule, and providing opportunities for upskilling and mentoring. Birkbeck’s Kevin Teoh and Rashi Dhensa-Kahlon looked at employee wellbeing interventions in the NHS and came to a remarkably similar conclusion. The most effective way to improve wellbeing in healthcare workplaces included cutting back pointless bureaucratic procedures, reducing the length of meetings, improving staff rotas and giving employees a sense of psychological safety in their team. My colleague Amanda Goodall has found one important way that organisations can improve wellbeing: improving the quality of frontline managers. Getting rid of David Brent-style bosses and giving managers proper training can significantly improve employee wellbeing.... The good news for leaders and employees is that we know what does work; instead of investing in ineffective initiatives, leaders should focus on taking away stressors. This means getting rid of unnecessarily complicated systems, poorly trained managers, and – in some cases – ineffective wellness interventions."

How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living by Vincent Deary: the ways in which we’re undone – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. This book, part memoir of his working practice, part inquiry into the ways in which mental health is undone, is a sequel to an earlier volume, How We Are, published in 2015. The chronology is pertinent. The trajectory of those intervening nine years of austerity, and pandemic, and precarity, serve to make this volume both inevitable and urgent.... There is a rawness to Deary’s analysis that gives a compelling human edge to his theorising. Some of that comes from his allusions to a breakdown he himself suffered in recent years. Otherwise, he dwells on case studies of people he has met in his work, individuals whose 'allostatic load' of stresses – the camel’s-back-of-straws waiting for one too many – become overwhelming.... Deary punctuates his book with a series of health checks: 'How precarious are you, in your labour, in your home life, in yourself?' In doing so he makes a powerful argument against some of the contemporary factors that undermine security: the 'audit culture' of the world of work that seeks to constantly measure our performance against nebulous targets; the shift in focus in the welfare state away from a culture of care toward homilies about 'resilience'; the erosion of healthy perspective in the 'ambient hum' of social media; and the fact that, as a society, 'we have lost the knack of convalescence', the space and capacity for deep rest that might accelerate recovery. Deary is clearly an eclectic reader and his studies have him reaching as often for quotations from Terry Pratchett and George Eliot as from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.... At the heart of Deary’s analysis ... is the idea of our minds as storytelling machines, which go haywire in 'our periods of trembling and breaking', feeding us delusion and addiction and compulsion and paranoia. The second half of his book is devoted to the strategies that might protect us from those rogue internal narratives.... he self-help wisdom here is properly caveated and hard-won, but there is still enough for the odd inspirational Post-it note. Here’s one: 'The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.'”

How We Break by Vincent Deary: look after yourself – review by Alex Curmi in The Guardian. "In this book, the second in a planned trilogy, and a follow-up to 2015’s How We Are, health psychologist Deary delivers a much-needed message: we have a finite capacity to meet the unpredictable challenges life throws at us. The concept of allostatic load (the wear and tear of chronic stress) crops up repeatedly. ... A particular strength of the book is the way Deary weaves between different schools of thought within psychology, philosophy and religion. The result is not merely a discussion of abstract ideas, but a collection of valuable observations about what it means to be human in the modern world, taking in biological, societal and economic realities.... The various chapters work as stand-alone essays and discuss very different questions. How do stories and narratives shape us? What is the difference between useful and destructive thinking? How do dysfunctional psychological processes like anxiety or anorexia come to possess us? What does it mean to have a healthy relationship with yourself? The resulting insights apply whether we have a diagnosable mental health condition or not.... The third instalment of the trilogy will be called How We Mend. In the meantime, this book offers a cathartic meditation on just how difficult life can be. Although the concept of self-care has become an overused and sometimes unhelpful trope on social media, Deary makes a compelling argument as to the necessity of self-compassion. He leads us to a more humane understanding of our suffering and offers practical advice for navigating life’s ups and downs with greater grace and equanimity."