‘Storm Antoni gatecrashed my wedding, and she was magnificent’ – article by Sophie Pavelle in The Guardian. An unusually personal article from this environmental writer and activist, about her own wedding and her unexpected desire for a large gathering of friends and family, in the teeth of the climate emergency: “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 to reject hope.” This article was the inspiration for a homily by Br John Mayhead (Monastery of Christ Our Saviour, Turvey) on the Feast of the Holy Family (31 December 2023). I do like Br John’s homilies; about as far away from telling-you-what-to-think as you could get, he simply shares his own spiritual reflections: on holy scripture, environmental observations (he’s a keen birdwatcher) and articles from The Guardian. In this case, Pavelle’s moving article illuminated for him the gospel for the day: the story of Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to the Temple and his being recognised by the aged Simeon. “You see this child: he is destined for the fall and rising of many in Israel, destined to be a sign which is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own heart too – so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke: 2, 22-40). Inspired by Pavelle’s story of hope in friends and family and the uninvited guest (or uninvited gust) of Storm Antoni coming together for her wedding, Br John came to see the text as saying something about the way the truth is revealed to us: that how we are with one another is how we truly are, and so how we are with God. The crisis in which we meet is not only the climate crisis (whose effects Br John observes regularly on his country walks) but the crisis which has always afflicted us as human beings – to love or not to be. Pavelle’s article concludes in joy: “I snuck into the farmhouse to observe what was happening from an upstairs window. By evening storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart the 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?” To which Br John added: “Care to worship? Care to be together – whatever?” A truly magical meeting of minds. As St Paul says: “All things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).
Mr Bates v. the Post Office – powerful television drama series, one of a handful which have actually changed government policy. Like many people, I thought I knew the story: how sub-postmasters and mistresses were accused of theft when their accounts showed money missing, though this was actually due to faults in the Post Office’s new accounting system; how they were all told that they were the only one with problems; and how some were imprisoned, some were forced to pay back the thousands of pounds they had never stolen, most were ruined, financially and socially; and how some took their own lives. But it’s one thing to read all this in a factual news article, and to think, “that’s shocking”, or “that’s outrageous”, and another to see it played out across four hours (in real life, it was twenty years), happening to characters you grow to know and like, and you think “oh my god!”, and then when it gets worse “oh my god!!!”, and then when it gets worse still “OH MY GOD!!!” Excellent acting from Toby Jones, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Monica Dolan of course, but major credit due I think to the dramatist Gwyneth Hughes, who told the story so powerfully while sticking closely to verifiable facts in the public domain. What the drama brought out was the human cost, summed up for many of us by the moment when the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells appears on the television news and says “It’s about the reputation of the Post Office”, and Hesmondhalgh yells at the television set: "No it’s not! It’s about people’s lives, you moron!" See also ‘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.
Frans Hals – exhibition at the National Gallery. Hals was one of my wife’s favourite artists, because of how he painted people and faces, and after seeing this exhibition I now understand what she meant. He’s famous for painting people smiling and even laughing, at a time when most portraits were solemnly formal, and for the first time (to my shame) it dawned on me why this is actually hard to do: unlike with a camera, you can’t capture a smile directly from life, because you can’t tell a sitter to hold their smile while you paint it -– or if you do, it’ll look fake and artificial. In other words, the painter has to remember the smile and recreate it in oils. Similarly with the other Hals trademark: catching people in mid-gesture. I loved his “pendant” portraits of couples – individual portraits painted simultaneously and intended to be hung side by side, some of these pairs reunited by this exhibition for the first time in centuries – and even more his single known example of a double portrait, in which husband and wife are totally relaxed, completely at ease with each other and with the viewer. As the caption said: “Few artists can represent nonchalance as well as Hals.”
Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading, by John Plotz – a personal tribute. I love the Earthsea books, so I read this in the expectation of some pleasure in seeing someone else sharing their enthusiasm, but I found it disappointing; it told me and showed me little I didn't already know. One thing it did remind me of, though: the simple, powerful, unexpected language Le Guin uses, in much of her writing but the Earthsea books above all. “Penthe selected the smallest [apple], out of politeness, and ate it in about ten juicy skillful interested bites.” (p. 48) "A great crowd had gathered on the snowy quays and colored pennants cracked above the people in the bright, cold wind.” (p. 46) How can a bite be “interested”, or a wind be “bright”? That’s part of the magic.
How We Read Now, by Naomi S. Baron – very readable and useful digest of the results of research on the differences between reading print and onscreen. I'm not surprised by the general conclusion, that it all depends on the attitude with which people go into their reading, but this gives helpful detail and offers some important insights. I had three key takeaways. (1) Prior knowledge of the subject and expectations of the experience (how much effort is going to be required) are far bigger determiners of reading effectiveness than medium. (2) There IS a "shallowing" effect in that reading of digital text tends to be more superficial than reading of print text, though this is mostly related to (1) (for example, learners approach a digital text with the assumption that it's going to be entertaining and not require much effort). (3) Audio presentation of a text has worse results than either digital or print, unless there is some additional component such as slides. All this just reinforced for me the important of never assigning reading except as part of a learning activity; we assume at our peril that learners are going to already know how to learn from reading a text. One thing troubled me greatly: the superficiality of the discussion about evaluating information sources. It's not just a matter of deciding whether a source is trustworthy or not, although that may be an important issue, and it's certainly an entry-level question. But at university level the focus should be on reconstructing what I call the information provenance: the process by which it was selected and compiled, and even more importantly the purpose for which it is presented.
Re-Wilding the Soul – Turvey Abbey day workshop, with Br John Mayhead of the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour. As a born naturalist, re-wilding is quite his thing, and he’s careful to distinguish between the kind of re-wilding which is about returning an area to its condition at some former time – requiring a judgement about the state you want to achieve – and the kind which is about literally doing nothing and seeing what nature comes up with. It’s the latter of course which has the more important spiritual parallel: stilling the mind and the will and seeing what God comes up with. But an important part of the workshop were the guided walks around the Monastery garden and the Abbey grounds. In these Br John showed us the natural and historical world around us: a matter of stopping to observe, but (as he pointed out) observation needs to be informed by knowledge. He could say: “Listen! What’s that?” and while most of us were thinking to ourselves “it’s a bird!” Br John was hearing a green woodpecker. Or again, he would identify (at least provisionally) a distant bird by what he called its jizz (the term apparently comes from aircraft spotting): the whole gestalt of its silhouette, speed and character of movement, as well as knowledge of what kinds of bird are likely to be active in this place and at this time of day. As a teacher and former academic, I find it intensely reassuring to hear the affirmation of the role for knowledge even in radical re-wilding, or radical spiritual re-wilding. (See a version of part of one of Br John's talks.)
The Room – well-respected puzzle game, the first in a whole series. I wasn’t inspired to continue, though; for me this missed the sweet spot of being neither too easy or too difficult. Either the solution to the current problem was totally obvious or I couldn’t get it no matter how hard I tried, and neither is a good experience. Stunning graphics and animation don’t compensate for this, unfortunately.
Little Women (2019) – recent film adaptation by Greta Gerwig. For me, this suffers by comparison with the 1994 version with Susan Sarandon and Wynona Ryder, which was so good – and it’s got to be pretty cool to have a Laurie (Christian Bale) who grows up to be Batman. The only thing this new version added was the story about Louisa May Alcott being told by her publisher that by the end all the women had to be either married or dead, and even that has been told better by Tom Gauld in his cartoon, which has Jo March opting for the third possibility of both and writing a book called Attack of the Zombie Brides. Otherwise it seem to me inferior in every way, and left out the strong moral tone, which no doubt is less acceptable today, smacking of preaching, but which was so much part of the original and which Sarandon carried off so well.
Room at the Top – classic post-war film of class aspiration and class tension. Seeing it for the first time, I found it much stronger and more powerful than I expected, fully deserving of its Oscar nominations and awards. The humiliation and subordination to which Joe is subjected, as a working-class man with aspirations, by his bosses and social superiors who control pretty much everything around, was very convincing. But what I’d not expected was the deep irony that at the end of the film Joe has attained exactly what he set out to achieve – marriage to the boss’s daughter and a seat at the middle-class table – and yet is deeply miserable and unfulfilled, feeling himself responsible for the death of the women who was his real true love. A slice of history for all the ages.
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley – highly readable biography. I gave this to my wife for her last birthday, because we’d enjoyed the television series and she loved Christie and the television Christie adaptations. It’s beautifully written, a model for how to tell the story of a life about which so much has been written and speculated: scholarly and discriminating, but accessible with finely judged personal touches, typically pointing out the feminist themes – though Christie would never have described herself as a feminist, and in fact didn’t really like describing herself as an author, preferring to present herself as a very ordinary women, although she was anything but. I’m so glad that she found happiness (and a fulfilling sexual relationship) with her second husband, Max, 13 years her junior.
Atlas of the Heart, by Brené Brown – accessible book about feelings and the thoughts that give rise to feelings. The aim is to enrich our everyday vocabulary for talking about our experiences, by enumerating and distinguishing 87 emotions and other mental states. The first chapter alone covers stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, dread, fear and vulnerability. Some of them are covered very well, with stories and research results and general good sense; others are thinner and left me wanting more. But the project as a whole is laudable, and the book is nicely produced, like what we used to call a coffee-table book, with photographs and big pull quotes to make it easy to browse through and light on passages of interest. Hmm, what exactly is the difference between shame and guilt?
Life is Strange: True Colors – good and well-reviewed immersive narrative game, though not for me as impressive as others in the Life is Strange series. (Admittedly the stratospherically good original was a hard act to follow.) The concept here is that Alex Cheung, a troubled young woman just discharged from care, is super-sensitive to the emotions of others; sometimes she is overwhelmed by them, but as the game proceeds she learns to use her sensitivity to understand and help the inhabitants of the small town to which she has relocated. All well and good, and the exploration of character and situation is fine, but to my mind there’s not enough actual story, and what there is doesn’t really hang together. I also found the location implausible; supposedly it’s a mining town, but the high street shops include a vinyl record shop and a cannabis store – which sounds to me like the culture of the game designers rather than that of miners. However, Alex is highly relatable, excellently voice-acted and animated with great subtlety of facial expression, and I very much wanted her to be all right – so I guess the story worked at that level.
Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil – another of my favourite stories from the Jon Pertwee era, watched on iPlayer. Very scary; the thing, which at first you think is a machine but it turns out to be a creature contained by the machine, destroys peoples’ minds, and it steadily grows in its power until even The Master can’t control it. At first, someone has to be connected to the machine for it to affect them; it’s supposedly a treatment for the rehabilitation of violent criminals. But then it becomes able to reach people who are just in the same room. And then it becomes able to travel, to teleport out of one room and into another, and then there’s no stopping it and no place which is safe. The other lovely feature for me is that it turns out The Doctor is fluent in Chinese, which he uses to charm the leader of a conference delegation from Red China (in 1971, still in the grip of the Cultural Revolution).
Wild Summon – extraordinary short (14 minute) film, showing the life cycle of a wild female salmon, migrating from a freshwater river to the open ocean and then returning upstream to spawn. But here’s the thing: the salmon you see is a human woman. Turn off the video and listen to the commentary only, and it sounds just like an ordinary nature documentary. Watch it with the images and you see something quite different. The film makers were following their hunch that viewers would find it easier to empathise with the salmon and and relate to its trials and dangers if it looked human. I think we can say that that hunch payed off. (The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or Best Short Film and the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film.) See the film trailer and an interview with the film makers in The Guardian.
Dishonored 2 – another game I’ve started but abandoned as too hard and too frustrating. The trailer looked good, but the game experience is quite different, being first person perspective, so you barely get to see the character you’re playing. Moving around the wonderfully detailed open world is quite fun -– leaping between rooftops, jumping onto balconies and raiding houses – but the constant threat of being detected and killed by patrolling guards was just too stressful for me. You’re supposed to be able to get through by stealth, choking guards unconscious if you want to avoid killing, but I found even that hard to do reliably, and my coordination is far too poor to even consider fighting – I just pressed buttons frantically, occasionally getting lucky but mainly dying horribly. But the setting and the story were quite fun, so I watched a video walkthrough, letting someone else take the stress.
Frankinstein: The Read with Alex Kingston – dramatic reading, with the emphasis on dramatic. This is the thing to watch, if you're curious to know what Mary Shelly’s original novel was actually like but don't have the time or the patience to read the whole thing. Condensed to just over an hour, it somehow manages to cover the whole story, including the long slow scene-setting at the beginning, important for the original readership in establishing its plausibility. But the best thing about it is Alex Kingston’s full-on gothic performance, especially when she’s doing dialogue and the view cuts between different angles as she plays the different characters. A lovely production.
Three Faces of Eve – classic film study of what was then called multiple personality, now generally called dissociative identity disorder.. It was based on an actual case, with Alastair Cooke not only narrating but appearing on camera at the start to tell you that, though extraordinary, these events really did happen. Eve White (a pseudonym) was a quiet, submissive housewife, who was referred to a psychiatrist because she was having blackouts, during which she went on spending sprees. The psychiatrist discovered that during these blackouts a different personality emerged, wild and promiscuous, who called herself Eve Black and who was aware of Eve White, for whom she had nothing but contempt. Eventually a third more balanced personality called Jane emerged, who was aware of the other two and could recall the traumatic childhood event which had given rise to Eve Black. Joanne Woodward won a well-deserved Oscar for her portrayal of all three personalities.
Yesterday – old but strong adventure game. The creepy and sometimes violent atmosphere (involving the Spanish Inquisition, satanism and psychopathic torturers) is mitigated by its presentation in comic book form (dialogue sequences are played out through pop-up panels) and the rueful world-weary demeanour of the eponymous John Yesterday. The story is complex; Yesterday has been cursed with immortality, and when killed comes back to life but without recollection of his former lives, so there are multiple flashbacks within the game as he gradually pieces together his past. I’m not sure the events actually make sense, if you were to put them into order, but the continual plot twist revelations keep up the pace admirably, rather like Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. It’s well-written and voice-acted (localised from the Spanish), and the puzzles are fair, with a friendly hint system when you get stuck, so despite the horrific storyline actually an enjoyable playing experience.
Wednesday 17 April 2024
Tuesday 2 April 2024
Cuttings: March 2024
Public intellectuals have short shelf lives, but why? – online article by Tanner Greer, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Here is how one textbook describes research on [intelligence and creativity over the course of a lifespan]. 'In most fields creative production increases steadily from the 20s to the late 30s and early 40s then gradually declines thereafter, although not to the same low levels that characterized early adulthood. Peak times of creative achievement also vary from field to field. The productivity of scholars in the humanities (for example, that of philosophers or historians) continues well into old age and peaks in the 60s, possibly because creative work in these fields often involves integrating knowledge that has crystallized over the years. By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking. Scientists seem to be intermediate, peaking in their 40s and declining only in their 70s. Even with the same general field, differences in peak times have been noted. For example, poets reach their peak before novelists do, and mathematicians peak before other scientists do.'... Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s: these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work. By a person’s mid 40s this period is more or less over with. The brain does not shut down creativity altogether once you hit 45, but originality slows down. By then the central ideas and models you use to understand the world are more or less decided. Only rarely will a person who has reached this age add something new to their intellectual toolkit.... [It's] not impossible, just hard. And this bring my second, sociological explanation into play. There are things that a mind past its optimum can do to optimize what analytic and creative power it still has. But once a great writer has reached the top of their world, they face few incentives to do any of these things.... There are practical implications for all this. If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom."
Developing AI like raising kids – transcript of conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "TC: The phrase 'artificial intelligence' refers to widely disparate things. Sometimes it’s used to refer to hypothetical thinking machines, sometimes it’s used to refer to applied statistics, and there’s this unfortunate tendency to conflate the two.... In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats. A thermostat can be said to have a goal, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that that it has any preferences; it has no subjective experience. You can imagine a machine learning program that you have to train to maintain the temperature of a house, and in a sense, you are teaching this program, but you are basically interacting with a thermostat. And that is the situation that we are in with the existing technology.... But now suppose we’re talking about this more hypothetical idea of machines that have subjective experience.... One of the guiding questions for me when I was writing [his novella] Lifecycle of Software Objects was 'How do you make a person?' At some level, it seems like a simple thing, but the more you think about it, you realize that it is the hardest job in the world. It is maybe the job that requires the most wrestling with difficult ethical questions, but the fact that so many people raise children makes it very easy to devalue it. We tend to congratulate people who have written a novel or something like that, because relatively few people write novels. A lot of people have children! A lot of people raise children to adulthood! And what they have accomplished is something incredible.... AG: It’s odd, because on the one hand if you ask someone, What’s the most important thing in your life? What’s the hardest moral decision that you have to make? What’s the place where your deepest emotions were engaged? They’ll tell you something about close relationships of care. And yet, because these statements are associated with emotion and feeling and women, they haven’t had the theoretical impact that you might imagine."
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."
The Science Fiction of the 1900s – substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "We are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours. How to make that clear? Try this: let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s. Hmm. Do that, and somehow the whole genre looks different.... This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of 'where’s my flying car?' is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it. Looked at this way, Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from."
‘What the hell is she doing here?’: the day an A-list actor came to me for therapy – article by Joshua Fletcher in The Guardian, extracted from his And How Does That Make You Feel? "I had a new client pencilled in under the name 'Daphne'. No surname provided – she wanted to remain anonymous, she’d told me on the phone.... Eight minutes had now passed. Still no Daphne. At this point I’d like to introduce you to my inner voices.... Training to be a therapist, [I learned] to identify the different thoughts and voices that my mind liked to throw at me throughout the day. ... Critic: What the hell are you doing, Daphne? This is rude. Time is money. Empathy: This could be her first time in therapy. Perhaps she’s really scared? Give her a chance. You remember your own experiences of therapy, right? Anxiety: What if she was hit by a bus on the way here? Irreverence: Imagine if she was caught hitting the bus instead. “Die, bus, die!” Analytical: You’re on edge because you’re nervous. Biology: Your sympathetic nervous system is activated. Compassion: It’s OK not to feel calm right now. It’s OK to feel uneasy. Detective: The evidence suggests that she isn’t going to turn up. Critic: Wow, man, you love to overthink. Volition: I am going to concentrate on my breath and the sounds of outside. Compassion: Good idea. // Twenty minutes passed and I concluded that Daphne was not going to turn up.... I pressed the button for the lift... The lift doors opened and … my jaw dropped to the floor. Unveiled like a prize on a 90s gameshow was one of the most striking-looking people I have ever seen. They were also instantly recognisable. This was A-list royalty, a celebrity, an award-winning actor... What the hell was she doing here and why on earth was she on my floor? Daphne: Hey, Josh, I’m so sorry I’m late. I have an appointment with you which I think I have missed."
‘He checks in on me more than my friends and family’: can AI therapists do better than the real thing? – article by Alice Robb in The Guardian. "Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs. Can texting with an AI therapist possibly soothe our souls?... A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a 'therapeutic alliance' between bot and patient developed within just five days.... Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared.... Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being.... AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy.... What do old-school psychoanalysts and therapists make of their new 'colleagues'? Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz ...warns that befriending a bot could delay patients’ ability 'to make a connection with an ordinary person. It could become part of a defence against human intimacy.' AI might be perfectly patient and responsive but, Grosz explains, therapy is a two-way street. 'It’s not bad when my patients learn to correct me or say, "I don’t agree." That give and take is important.'... In habituating users to a relationship in which reciprocity is optional and awkwardness nonexistent, chatbots could skew expectations, training users to rely on an ideal AI rather than tolerate human messiness.... Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. 'The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,' says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. [Furthermore,] Psychologists in the UK are bound to confidentiality and monitored by the Health and Care Professions Council. Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services."
AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan? – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "AI Needs You [is] a timely and fascinating new book by the former Downing Street aide-turned-tech executive Verity Harding, which argues that it’s high time the public got a say on what kind of world we actually want to live in.... [Harding is now] back in Britain, running an academic project at Cambridge University on regulating AI for the global good, and increasingly urgently banging a drum for stronger political leadership over something capable of turning jobs, lives and societies upside down if we let it.... The book draws comparisons with the way John F Kennedy took charge of the space race (he used the United States’ moonshot not merely to advance scientific research or inspire the public, but to show a frightened cold war Europe that liberal democracies could still outstrip mighty authoritarian Russia), and with Britain’s approach in the 1980s to the emerging science of IVF, which was novel and morally complex at the time. The principles devised by the philosopher Mary Warnock for governing embryology, reflecting the human and social consequences of making test tube babies as well as the science, became a model for governments worldwide. Both examples suggest we could have more choices and control than we think over AI, Harding argues, so long as we recognise that good things don’t happen by accident. That means tackling the antisocial uses of AI, which include the convincing 'deepfake' images of real people used in pornography, and political disinformation. But it will also require nudging markets towards socially useful outcomes. Why, Harding asks, aren’t we harnessing the incredible power of AI to help solve the climate crisis? Why do we act as if humanity is helpless to control something it’s actively inventing?... Harding, who knows these two incestuous worlds [of tech and politics] better than most, is right, however, that this extraordinary chapter of human history doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, or in angry mobs rising up against a tech elite perceived as having gone too far. But only perhaps if we all understand that we have more agency than we think; that the nerdy wizards yanking levers behind Silicon Valley’s curtain aren’t quite as omnipotent as they seem, that AI is still our servant not our master, and that the point of politics is to shape events, not to flap around limply in their wake."
The big idea: should you blame yourself for your bad habits? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Much of the modern world has been deliberately engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist. If you can’t seem to focus at work because you keep wasting time on social media or getting distracted by WhatsApp notifications, consider that your phone was designed to be addictive: it was built to capture your attention. 'There are a thousand people on the other side of your screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation that you have,' the tech ethicist Tristan Harris observed. If you can’t stick to your budget and keep buying pointless stuff, think of how many adverts you encounter daily, how often a new one will pop up on your computer screen, targeted specifically to your tastes. None of this suggests that you should give up on giving up bad habits or abandon any attempts at self‑discipline. We’d be miserable, unhealthy and ethically compromised if we resigned ourselves to having no say in how we behave. Instead, it may help to think about willpower differently. Research suggests that the people we tend to admire for their self-control actually have to exercise it less frequently. They are good at engineering their environment so that they don’t need to wrestle with temptation: they know, for example, that it’s easier to not buy a packet of biscuits than to stop eating after you’ve opened the packet, and they are good at building healthy habits and routines."
‘The hardest thing is for a woman to say ‘I was raped’’: Jodie Comer on the Prima Facie effect – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "After the opening night of the hit play Prima Facie in London in 2022, a young female producer came up to playwright Suzie Miller and said, 'Loved the play. I’m one in three,' a line from the script referring to the number of women who are sexually assaulted in the UK. 'She didn’t have to say "I was raped,"' Miller recalls. 'It was this moment where I thought, "Oh, you can say that now."' 'The hardest thing is for a woman to say "I was raped,"' adds Jodie Comer, whose solo performance as the young defence lawyer forced to confront the failings of the legal system after she herself is sexually assaulted made the play a sensation. 'Women struggle with those words. To see people come and voice "This happened to me" is enormous.' This month Miller publishes a novelised version of the play, also called Prima Facie: it is dedicated to 'all the women who comprise the "one in three".'"
Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring review: into the cesspit of online hatred – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it.... Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them.... What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the 'crippled epistemology' of conspiracy theorists. Given the abuse to which she has been subjected, this is remarkable. But, although Spring doesn’t spell this out, it also provides a clue to why liberal democracies are being undermined by conspiracy theories. The people she has been talking to are often living proof of what it’s like trying to get by in a society increasingly shaped by an economic ideology in which inequality is a feature, not a bug: it’s what neoliberalism is designed to do. The terrifying levels of social exclusion in modern 'prosperous' democracies bear testimony to that. And the widespread popularity of conspiracy theories is a symptom of it. What this means is that we need to acknowledge that networked technology is not the cause of our current ills. It’s a necessary factor but not a sufficient explanation for the mess democracies are in. And tackling it requires a frank admission that our politics are probably the main driving force of public disaffection. Which is the last thing that politicians fixated on the next election are likely to concede."
A conspiracy theorist’s book club discussion about The Gruffalo – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "'The Gruffalo' does not go down well at the Conspiracy Theorist Book Club. Conspiracist 1: 'Typical mainstream media pro-mouse propaganda, paid for by the powerful rodent lobby.' Conspiracist 2: 'The creature has clearly escaped from a lab, yet the "author" does not mention this.' Conspiracist 3: 'Gruffalo is an anagram of A FROG FLU. Coincidence? I think not!' Conspiracist 4: 'These elite warriors will not be happy until we are all living in the woods and eating nuts.'"
Rites of Passage by Judith Flanders review: a brilliant account of Victorian Britain in mourning – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "I devoured Judith Flanders’s Rites of Passage, a new book about Victorian death and its accoutrements... So many amazing facts! If it were a soup, there’d be a crouton in every spoonful. But still, I’m not sure I fully agree with her that funeral rituals ended (more or less) with the arrival of the 20th century, death becoming more personal and inward, 'shared only with family and close friends'. British people of my age – I’m 54 – will remember how their grandparents went on. The remnants of their Victorian parents’ behaviour could still be felt in my childhood: the curtains of the whole street closed on the day of a funeral; the undertaker walking slowly (and with a certain amount of relish) ahead of the hearse as it left the house, and again at the cemetery; strangers stopping, and removing their caps as the cortege passed.... But all this only makes Rites of Passage the more fascinating, of course. I felt it as a kind of double haunting, its ghosts at once distant and close by. Flanders covers everything from mortality rates to the rise of garden cemeteries, coffin designs to the movement for cremation, and she does so with compassion and a droll wit. She acknowledges the very human ways in which Victorians were the same as us (a mother grieved terribly, even if the children’s deaths were horribly commonplace). But she understands, too, that our forebears were very different to us. '… the children didn’t stay… they went back again,' one parishioner said to the Rev Francis Kilvert of the twins lost by her bereft neighbour. As Kilvert noted, it was as if they’d just 'come into a room and gone out again'."
The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities, including in Gaza – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "[Jonathan] Glazer was [on Sunday] accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as 'non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors', people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.... In one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of [the] controversies [currently afflicting Jewish communities]. 'All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, "Look what they did then"; rather, "Look what we do now,"' Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present. And he went further: 'We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.' For Glazer, Israel does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today.... Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them. When the film premiered last May, before Hamas’s 7 October attack and before Israel’s unending assault on Gaza, this was a thought experiment that could be contemplated with a degree of intellectual distance.... But by the time Zone made it into theatres in December, Glazer’s subtle challenge for audiences to contemplate their inner Hösses cut a lot closer to the bone.... What do we do to interrupt the momentum of trivialization and normalization? That is the question so many of us are struggling with right now." See also ‘Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”’ by David Hering in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog.
Developing AI like raising kids – transcript of conversation between Alison Gopnik and Ted Chiang, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "TC: The phrase 'artificial intelligence' refers to widely disparate things. Sometimes it’s used to refer to hypothetical thinking machines, sometimes it’s used to refer to applied statistics, and there’s this unfortunate tendency to conflate the two.... In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats. A thermostat can be said to have a goal, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that that it has any preferences; it has no subjective experience. You can imagine a machine learning program that you have to train to maintain the temperature of a house, and in a sense, you are teaching this program, but you are basically interacting with a thermostat. And that is the situation that we are in with the existing technology.... But now suppose we’re talking about this more hypothetical idea of machines that have subjective experience.... One of the guiding questions for me when I was writing [his novella] Lifecycle of Software Objects was 'How do you make a person?' At some level, it seems like a simple thing, but the more you think about it, you realize that it is the hardest job in the world. It is maybe the job that requires the most wrestling with difficult ethical questions, but the fact that so many people raise children makes it very easy to devalue it. We tend to congratulate people who have written a novel or something like that, because relatively few people write novels. A lot of people have children! A lot of people raise children to adulthood! And what they have accomplished is something incredible.... AG: It’s odd, because on the one hand if you ask someone, What’s the most important thing in your life? What’s the hardest moral decision that you have to make? What’s the place where your deepest emotions were engaged? They’ll tell you something about close relationships of care. And yet, because these statements are associated with emotion and feeling and women, they haven’t had the theoretical impact that you might imagine."
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."
The Science Fiction of the 1900s – substack post by Karl Schroeder, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "We are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours. How to make that clear? Try this: let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s. Hmm. Do that, and somehow the whole genre looks different.... This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of 'where’s my flying car?' is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it. Looked at this way, Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from."
‘What the hell is she doing here?’: the day an A-list actor came to me for therapy – article by Joshua Fletcher in The Guardian, extracted from his And How Does That Make You Feel? "I had a new client pencilled in under the name 'Daphne'. No surname provided – she wanted to remain anonymous, she’d told me on the phone.... Eight minutes had now passed. Still no Daphne. At this point I’d like to introduce you to my inner voices.... Training to be a therapist, [I learned] to identify the different thoughts and voices that my mind liked to throw at me throughout the day. ... Critic: What the hell are you doing, Daphne? This is rude. Time is money. Empathy: This could be her first time in therapy. Perhaps she’s really scared? Give her a chance. You remember your own experiences of therapy, right? Anxiety: What if she was hit by a bus on the way here? Irreverence: Imagine if she was caught hitting the bus instead. “Die, bus, die!” Analytical: You’re on edge because you’re nervous. Biology: Your sympathetic nervous system is activated. Compassion: It’s OK not to feel calm right now. It’s OK to feel uneasy. Detective: The evidence suggests that she isn’t going to turn up. Critic: Wow, man, you love to overthink. Volition: I am going to concentrate on my breath and the sounds of outside. Compassion: Good idea. // Twenty minutes passed and I concluded that Daphne was not going to turn up.... I pressed the button for the lift... The lift doors opened and … my jaw dropped to the floor. Unveiled like a prize on a 90s gameshow was one of the most striking-looking people I have ever seen. They were also instantly recognisable. This was A-list royalty, a celebrity, an award-winning actor... What the hell was she doing here and why on earth was she on my floor? Daphne: Hey, Josh, I’m so sorry I’m late. I have an appointment with you which I think I have missed."
‘He checks in on me more than my friends and family’: can AI therapists do better than the real thing? – article by Alice Robb in The Guardian. "Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs. Can texting with an AI therapist possibly soothe our souls?... A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a 'therapeutic alliance' between bot and patient developed within just five days.... Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared.... Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being.... AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy.... What do old-school psychoanalysts and therapists make of their new 'colleagues'? Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz ...warns that befriending a bot could delay patients’ ability 'to make a connection with an ordinary person. It could become part of a defence against human intimacy.' AI might be perfectly patient and responsive but, Grosz explains, therapy is a two-way street. 'It’s not bad when my patients learn to correct me or say, "I don’t agree." That give and take is important.'... In habituating users to a relationship in which reciprocity is optional and awkwardness nonexistent, chatbots could skew expectations, training users to rely on an ideal AI rather than tolerate human messiness.... Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. 'The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,' says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. [Furthermore,] Psychologists in the UK are bound to confidentiality and monitored by the Health and Care Professions Council. Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services."
AI could be an extraordinary force for good. So why do our politicians still not have a plan? – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "AI Needs You [is] a timely and fascinating new book by the former Downing Street aide-turned-tech executive Verity Harding, which argues that it’s high time the public got a say on what kind of world we actually want to live in.... [Harding is now] back in Britain, running an academic project at Cambridge University on regulating AI for the global good, and increasingly urgently banging a drum for stronger political leadership over something capable of turning jobs, lives and societies upside down if we let it.... The book draws comparisons with the way John F Kennedy took charge of the space race (he used the United States’ moonshot not merely to advance scientific research or inspire the public, but to show a frightened cold war Europe that liberal democracies could still outstrip mighty authoritarian Russia), and with Britain’s approach in the 1980s to the emerging science of IVF, which was novel and morally complex at the time. The principles devised by the philosopher Mary Warnock for governing embryology, reflecting the human and social consequences of making test tube babies as well as the science, became a model for governments worldwide. Both examples suggest we could have more choices and control than we think over AI, Harding argues, so long as we recognise that good things don’t happen by accident. That means tackling the antisocial uses of AI, which include the convincing 'deepfake' images of real people used in pornography, and political disinformation. But it will also require nudging markets towards socially useful outcomes. Why, Harding asks, aren’t we harnessing the incredible power of AI to help solve the climate crisis? Why do we act as if humanity is helpless to control something it’s actively inventing?... Harding, who knows these two incestuous worlds [of tech and politics] better than most, is right, however, that this extraordinary chapter of human history doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, or in angry mobs rising up against a tech elite perceived as having gone too far. But only perhaps if we all understand that we have more agency than we think; that the nerdy wizards yanking levers behind Silicon Valley’s curtain aren’t quite as omnipotent as they seem, that AI is still our servant not our master, and that the point of politics is to shape events, not to flap around limply in their wake."
The big idea: should you blame yourself for your bad habits? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "Much of the modern world has been deliberately engineered to tap into our reward systems, making temptation ubiquitous and harder to resist. If you can’t seem to focus at work because you keep wasting time on social media or getting distracted by WhatsApp notifications, consider that your phone was designed to be addictive: it was built to capture your attention. 'There are a thousand people on the other side of your screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation that you have,' the tech ethicist Tristan Harris observed. If you can’t stick to your budget and keep buying pointless stuff, think of how many adverts you encounter daily, how often a new one will pop up on your computer screen, targeted specifically to your tastes. None of this suggests that you should give up on giving up bad habits or abandon any attempts at self‑discipline. We’d be miserable, unhealthy and ethically compromised if we resigned ourselves to having no say in how we behave. Instead, it may help to think about willpower differently. Research suggests that the people we tend to admire for their self-control actually have to exercise it less frequently. They are good at engineering their environment so that they don’t need to wrestle with temptation: they know, for example, that it’s easier to not buy a packet of biscuits than to stop eating after you’ve opened the packet, and they are good at building healthy habits and routines."
‘The hardest thing is for a woman to say ‘I was raped’’: Jodie Comer on the Prima Facie effect – interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "After the opening night of the hit play Prima Facie in London in 2022, a young female producer came up to playwright Suzie Miller and said, 'Loved the play. I’m one in three,' a line from the script referring to the number of women who are sexually assaulted in the UK. 'She didn’t have to say "I was raped,"' Miller recalls. 'It was this moment where I thought, "Oh, you can say that now."' 'The hardest thing is for a woman to say "I was raped,"' adds Jodie Comer, whose solo performance as the young defence lawyer forced to confront the failings of the legal system after she herself is sexually assaulted made the play a sensation. 'Women struggle with those words. To see people come and voice "This happened to me" is enormous.' This month Miller publishes a novelised version of the play, also called Prima Facie: it is dedicated to 'all the women who comprise the "one in three".'"
Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring review: into the cesspit of online hatred – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Marianna Spring is the BBC’s first disinformation and social media correspondent, a post best described as prolonged recumbence on a bed of very sharp nails. She is also a plucky and dogged investigative reporter who has repeatedly dived into the cesspit of online hatred and misinformation with the aim of trying to understand, rather than merely ridicule or condemn it.... Among the Trolls is her compelling account of what the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies looks like now. Much of it involves conspiracy theories – those who believe them and those who profit from them.... What’s striking about Spring’s approach is her empathic capacity to try to understand what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein disdainfully called the 'crippled epistemology' of conspiracy theorists. Given the abuse to which she has been subjected, this is remarkable. But, although Spring doesn’t spell this out, it also provides a clue to why liberal democracies are being undermined by conspiracy theories. The people she has been talking to are often living proof of what it’s like trying to get by in a society increasingly shaped by an economic ideology in which inequality is a feature, not a bug: it’s what neoliberalism is designed to do. The terrifying levels of social exclusion in modern 'prosperous' democracies bear testimony to that. And the widespread popularity of conspiracy theories is a symptom of it. What this means is that we need to acknowledge that networked technology is not the cause of our current ills. It’s a necessary factor but not a sufficient explanation for the mess democracies are in. And tackling it requires a frank admission that our politics are probably the main driving force of public disaffection. Which is the last thing that politicians fixated on the next election are likely to concede."
A conspiracy theorist’s book club discussion about The Gruffalo – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "'The Gruffalo' does not go down well at the Conspiracy Theorist Book Club. Conspiracist 1: 'Typical mainstream media pro-mouse propaganda, paid for by the powerful rodent lobby.' Conspiracist 2: 'The creature has clearly escaped from a lab, yet the "author" does not mention this.' Conspiracist 3: 'Gruffalo is an anagram of A FROG FLU. Coincidence? I think not!' Conspiracist 4: 'These elite warriors will not be happy until we are all living in the woods and eating nuts.'"
Rites of Passage by Judith Flanders review: a brilliant account of Victorian Britain in mourning – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "I devoured Judith Flanders’s Rites of Passage, a new book about Victorian death and its accoutrements... So many amazing facts! If it were a soup, there’d be a crouton in every spoonful. But still, I’m not sure I fully agree with her that funeral rituals ended (more or less) with the arrival of the 20th century, death becoming more personal and inward, 'shared only with family and close friends'. British people of my age – I’m 54 – will remember how their grandparents went on. The remnants of their Victorian parents’ behaviour could still be felt in my childhood: the curtains of the whole street closed on the day of a funeral; the undertaker walking slowly (and with a certain amount of relish) ahead of the hearse as it left the house, and again at the cemetery; strangers stopping, and removing their caps as the cortege passed.... But all this only makes Rites of Passage the more fascinating, of course. I felt it as a kind of double haunting, its ghosts at once distant and close by. Flanders covers everything from mortality rates to the rise of garden cemeteries, coffin designs to the movement for cremation, and she does so with compassion and a droll wit. She acknowledges the very human ways in which Victorians were the same as us (a mother grieved terribly, even if the children’s deaths were horribly commonplace). But she understands, too, that our forebears were very different to us. '… the children didn’t stay… they went back again,' one parishioner said to the Rev Francis Kilvert of the twins lost by her bereft neighbour. As Kilvert noted, it was as if they’d just 'come into a room and gone out again'."
The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities, including in Gaza – article by Naomi Klein in The Guardian. "[Jonathan] Glazer was [on Sunday] accepting the award for best international film for The Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as 'non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors', people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.... In one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of [the] controversies [currently afflicting Jewish communities]. 'All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present – not to say, "Look what they did then"; rather, "Look what we do now,"' Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous present. And he went further: 'We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.' For Glazer, Israel does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today.... Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them. When the film premiered last May, before Hamas’s 7 October attack and before Israel’s unending assault on Gaza, this was a thought experiment that could be contemplated with a degree of intellectual distance.... But by the time Zone made it into theatres in December, Glazer’s subtle challenge for audiences to contemplate their inner Hösses cut a lot closer to the bone.... What do we do to interrupt the momentum of trivialization and normalization? That is the question so many of us are struggling with right now." See also ‘Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”’ by David Hering in the Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog.
Don’t Look Left by Atef Abu Saif review: in the line of fire – review by Helena Kennedy in The Guardian. "It is hard to describe the cumulative effect this devastating chronicle has over 280 pages. It describes a mounting toll of death and destruction, with each day bringing more heartrending news of homes demolished and relatives and colleagues killed. Gradually, it makes it clear that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip. Danger is everywhere, like the low hum of a mosquito.... Few who read this will have direct experience of war; we are among generations in the west that have been blessed to live without conflict. That is why we are duty‑bound to place ourselves in the shoes of those who do suffer these horrors, especially when our governments supply the armaments that make war possible. Abu Saif would say ruefully that his people, the Palestinians, have lived through 75 years of war, starting with displacement and forced exile and then the denial of self-determination and a secure homeland.... The people of southern Israel undoubtedly suffered terrible atrocities on 7 October 2023 at the hands of Hamas. However, we have to be capable of holding two truths in our hearts. What is happening to the people of Gaza is also deeply horrifying. Three principles underpin the law of armed conflict: the distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality, and the obligation to take appropriate precautions to minimise civilian harm. Is this a genocide? The international court of justice (ICJ) will decide that issue in the fullness of time. Meanwhile, under the genocide convention, the world is expected to prevent such a trajectory. The ICJ has given a warning to Israel; now is the time for all of us to say: enough is enough."
Pluralistic: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works" (17 Oct 2023) – blog post by Cory Doctorow, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other 'charismatic megaprojects,' connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning. Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.... So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance."
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer: a history of violence – review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. "Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair. Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage.... He has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.... What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to 'reclaim' his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory: the clothes people wore, their facial expressions and gestures, the idioms they used – it’s as if trauma has frozen these in time.... Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens."
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse – interview by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life.... The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years.... One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as 'horses, dogs, children', in that order).... The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was? 'It never occurred to me,' he says. 'And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.' He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. 'At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.'... I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested? 'One thing,' he says, 'is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: "You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do."'"
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev: the radio host who beat Goebbels at his own game – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. "[In the] summer [of 1941], a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game.... Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the 'inner pig-dog'. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature. As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a 'nearly forgotten genius of propaganda'. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered. Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery."
Heresy by Catherine Nixey: book of revelations – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "As far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off. 'Woe,' says the woman. Mary’s reaction is unrecorded, perhaps because she felt that she had made her point. This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. ... At the beginning of this revelatory account, Nixey tells us that she is the child of a former nun and monk, and, until her late 20s, counted herself a believing Roman Catholic. There is then nothing sneery about her wonderful writing, although you will detect occasional flashes of anger when she recounts some egregious bit of censorship and repression. What shines through is a kind of exasperated love for the tradition in which she was raised and an impossible-to-suppress laugh at the idea of a Virgin Mary who blasts out flames from every orifice as if it were some kind of Marvel superpower."
Pluralistic: Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works" (17 Oct 2023) – blog post by Cory Doctorow, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other 'charismatic megaprojects,' connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning. Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.... So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance."
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer: a history of violence – review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian. "Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair. Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage.... He has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.... What’s striking about the book isn’t just its vehemence and the therapeutic purpose it serves in allowing Spencer to 'reclaim' his childhood, but the authenticating detail of his memory: the clothes people wore, their facial expressions and gestures, the idioms they used – it’s as if trauma has frozen these in time.... Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens."
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse – interview by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life.... The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years.... One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as 'horses, dogs, children', in that order).... The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was? 'It never occurred to me,' he says. 'And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.' He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. 'At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.'... I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested? 'One thing,' he says, 'is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: "You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do."'"
How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev: the radio host who beat Goebbels at his own game – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. "[In the] summer [of 1941], a talented journalist called Sefton Delmer was given the job of beating the Nazis at their own information game.... Working from an English country house, Delmer launched an experimental radio station. He called it Gustaf Siegfried Eins, or GS1. Instead of invoking lofty precepts, or Marxism, Delmer targeted what he called the 'inner pig-dog'. The answer to Goebbels, Delmer concluded, was more Goebbels. His radio show became a grotesque cabaret aimed at the worst and most Schwein-like aspects of human nature. As Peter Pomerantsev writes in his compelling new study How to Win an Information War, Delmer was a 'nearly forgotten genius of propaganda'. GS1 backed Hitler and was staunchly anti-Bolshevik. Its mysterious leader, dubbed der Chef, ridiculed Churchill using foul Berlin slang. At the same time the station lambasted the Nazi elite as a group of decadent crooks. They stole and whored, it said, as British planes bombed and decent Germans suffered. Delmer’s goal was to undermine nazism from within, by turning ordinary citizens against their aloof party bosses. A cast of Jewish refugees and former cabaret artists played the role of Nazis. Recordings took place in a billiards room, located inside the Woburn Abbey estate in Bedfordshire, a centre of wartime operations. Some of the content was real. Other elements were made up, including titillating accounts of SS orgies at a Bavarian monastery."
Heresy by Catherine Nixey: book of revelations – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "As far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the air, a shepherd’s arm is frozen and the stars stand still. A few minutes later, a woman arrives and, sceptical about whether Mary can really be a virgin, insists on shoving her finger up the new mother’s vagina, whereupon her hand is immediately burned off. 'Woe,' says the woman. Mary’s reaction is unrecorded, perhaps because she felt that she had made her point. This is just one of the hundreds – thousands, probably – of alternative versions of Christianity that teemed in the centuries following Jesus’s life and death. ... At the beginning of this revelatory account, Nixey tells us that she is the child of a former nun and monk, and, until her late 20s, counted herself a believing Roman Catholic. There is then nothing sneery about her wonderful writing, although you will detect occasional flashes of anger when she recounts some egregious bit of censorship and repression. What shines through is a kind of exasperated love for the tradition in which she was raised and an impossible-to-suppress laugh at the idea of a Virgin Mary who blasts out flames from every orifice as if it were some kind of Marvel superpower."
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