Yesterday Origins – strong adventure game, sequel to Yesterday (see Seen and Heard Jan-Mar). Unlike this reviewer, I thought this was actually better than the original; at least the trans-historical story hung together better, and the female protagonist, basically just a love interest in the original game, here at least has a bit more to do. I rather liked her troubled relationship with John Yesterday with which the game starts, as well as the steady drip-feed of revelations in both the past (the era of the Spanish Inquisition) and the present. Nice puzzle-solving mechanic too, involving acquisition and selection of the correct ideas (represented by icons, generated by interaction with people and things) as well as objects in your inventory. I found myself caring about John and Pauline this time, which I didn’t in the previous game, despite (or maybe because) this one is even more grisly and pessimistic.
Ghostbusters Afterlife – now this is how to do a forty-years-on homage, with respect for the spirit of the original and the skill to recreate it with totally new characters, rather than depending on quotes and repetition of tropes (although there are plenty of those too). Mckenna Grace, playing geek girl Phoebe, is a revelation; her firing a proton pack from the external gunner seat of the speeding Ectomobile is one of the defining images of the film.
Horrible Histories: The Movie – tremendous, often hilarious, fun film, just like the TV series. Two really impressive things: (1) that they managed to extend what is essentially a sketch show into a full length story, set in Roman Britain and centred on Boudicca’s rebellion (including the definitive rendering of Boudicca’s song); (2) they neatly side-stepped the child-unfriendly aspects of the historical actuality, doing so with a knowing wink. (As in the happy ending finale song: “Merge our cultures, mix our past, / Maybe next time wait to be asked / Sharing's good, Sharing is fun, / Shame you had to kill everyone… / Yeah but let's not talk about that.”) Cudos too for securing Derek Jacobi to reprise his stammering role of Emperor Claudius, as a cameo (he dies, poisoned by his wife, in the first scene).
Mission Impossible – the sixties television show, now being re-shown on Legend. When the BBC first showed it in 1970, it was selective, omitting entirely the first season (in which the IMF was headed not by Jim Phelps but Dan Briggs, who wasn’t as good – for one thing, his plans didn’t always work), and then showing only the best episodes, and my own re-viewing has followed their selection, replaying the experience of my childhood. First episode: 'The Astrologer' (2:13), featuring Cinnamon (the beauteous Barbara Bain), pretending to be the titular astrologer, and a remote controlled dummy, which does just one thing, jerking his arm downwards (“that’s all he needs to do”); next 'The Mercenaries' (3:4), in which Barney and Willy extract the gold from a locked vault by drilling into it from below and melting it out. Other memorable episodes include 'The Exchange' (3:12), in which poor claustrophobic Cinnamon is captured and disturbingly terrorised, while Jim and the team liberate and extract information from one of their own side’s intelligence prisoners to exchange for her; and 'The Submarine' (4:17) in which an ex-Nazi is tricked into revealing the location of hidden Nazi funds, which he has stubbornly resisted for decades, by use of a fake submarine. These best episodes stand up really well today; the basic formula of the impossible mission, with the gradual revelation of the steps of its execution, thus preserving the mystery and surprise, is still a winner.
Astrid: Murder in Paris – classy French detective show. This is an argument for listings magazines; I’d never have spotted this, hidden away in the More4 schedules, if it hadn’t appeared in a Radio Times ‘Pick of the Day’ feature. The hook is that the principle character, Astrid, is autistic, and so we see her alternately terrified by everyday social interactions and brilliantly insightful into the clues of a case, through her ability to observe and recall detail and see patterns. The set-up pairs her, an archivist in the Criminal Records Bureau, with Raphaëlle, an inspector, and the relationship between them – Raphaëlle tenderly protective of Astrid – is one of the joys of the show.
Red Eye – high-voltage ITV-produced six-episode contemporary thriller, with Jing Lusi as the ex-Hong-Kong-Chinese Met officer escorting Richard Armitage as a prisoner on an overnight (red eye) flight to Beijing. Very compelling, and I’m just glad I was able to watch the episodes in quick succession, rather than having to wait a week, in order to keep track of the twisty, turney plot, in which revelations come fast, like summer thunderstorms, involving the secret services of the UK, the USA and China, all focused on that plane and the information which Richard Armitage may or may not, unknown to himself, be carrying. And of course I enjoyed seeing Chinese people taking a variety of leading roles in a top-quality drama.
Mirages of Winter – a replay for me of this Zen-like meditative game, like an animated Chinese ink painting, in which you follow a fisherman as winter storms, snow and ice give way to spring. Much better second time, when I had some residual memory of the solutions to the puzzles – more precisely, what you need to do to move the game on to the next scene – and so spent very little time in frustration and more time enjoying the sights and sounds, which is surely the point of the game. (See Seen and Heard, April-June 2020.)
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow – well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. I suppose it should be classed as a horror game, but I’d say it’s more creepy than the shocks and scares than that label might imply; there’s a sense of menace and dread from the start, and it builds and builds until it can build no more. What keeps one playing, even though one just knows the ending is going to be horrible, is the principal character Thomasina Bateman: a late Victorian lady archaeologist, who arrives in a small Yorkshire town to excavate the nearby burial mound of Hob’s Barrow – about which the locals seem to either deny knowledge, be vague in their information, or adversarial in their warnings to Thomasina to stay away. The voice actor for Thomasina is particularly good, giving depth and character to each line; I particularly liked the way she says “Hogwash!” – her favourite word for dismissing the folklore of the locals (fairies, witches, hobgoblins, something worse): in the early parts of the game, where she is still strong in the scientific rationalism in which she was brought up by her father, she says it with confidence and contempt; in the later parts of the game, it is undeniably defensive, as the uncanny events pressing in on her become ever more threatening. The graphics are very simple and highly pixelated; nothing realistic is needed, and actually it helps one engage with the story to know that one’s never going to see anything too gory and horrible; the horror is all in the imagination. The title screen is particularly strong and well-designed; good games designers know that the title and main menu are the things which a player is going to see again and again, and so use it to establish mood and character for each playing session. In this case, we see Thomasina in a train carriage (the only non-pixelated graphic in the game), with Hob’s Barrow visible on a hillside through the window, the purple light which in the game is associated with the supernatural shining from its door. She is writing a letter; the game events are narrated by her in the past tense, so perhaps (as one reviewer thought) it’s the story of the game she is writing. But no, that can’t be it, because she is writing her account from – no, I won’t say! (Spoiler!) Unless perhaps what this shows is her travelling back to Hob’s Barrow in her imagination as she writes. So the imagination is already being invoked from the title screen. And the title music: howling, mournful, pounding. This is a game which stays with one long after one has finished playing.
On Chesil Beach and Effie Grey – two films, seen close together and connected in my mind, although very different (the first set in the early 1960s, sensitively based on a novel by Ian McEwan, the second set in the mid-nineteenth century and based on real historical characters) because of their similar theme of a love-relationship driven onto the rocks by a disastrous wedding night as a result of the would-be lovers’ sexual ignorance and inexperience. What struck me was how this could (and probably does) all happen again today, though perhaps not a late as a wedding night; the problem would not be ignorance but mis-information, thanks to internet pornography.
Draw On Sweet Night – concert by Voces8. Wonderful to hear them in the flesh, having first seriously discovered them through their livestreamed “Live from London” concerts during Covid Lockdown, with a programme of their (and our) favourites, including Arvo Pärt’s 'The Deer’s Cry', which I felt I understood for the first time. I knew the story: how St Patrick and his companions were kept safe from those who planned to ambush them, because he prayed for protection and so they appeared to their would-be attackers as a deer and a faun. But the Voces8 introduction explained how this relates to the music: why it keeps stopping and starting again. The repeated chant “Christ with me, Christ in me” is said by a person in terror of their life, pausing every few steps to check: have they been detected? And then, rather beautifully, as their confidence grows, and they realise that they are going to make it after all, they find they are able to extend their compassion even to their aggressors: “Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me.” We may never have to live through such a situation (although these days, who can be sure), but if one does, this is the breastplate to have.
Vox Musica, 'L'Eco di Monteverdi' – a superb concert by this London-based choir, in the chapel of the Ducal Palace, Mantua, while Polymnia were giving concerts in nearby towns. Lots of Monteverdi, of course, this being the chapel in which he was Director, before he went to Venice. A great sound and sensitive singing; it was like every member of the choir was a soloist (and many actually did sing solos).
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – rewatching Season 2 of this show, which I reckon the most serious and most grown-up of the Star Trek franchises. Some episodes should have been good but weren’t (such as 'The Maquis' – why is Sisko’s betrayal by his old Starfleet Academy friend so unmoving), but a few are top notch and classics, notably 'The Alternate' (Odo suffers Oedipal problems when he re-encounters the Bajoran scientist who discovered and raised / experimented on him), 'Necessary Evil' (a burglary which leaves Quark fighting for his life leads Odo to reinvestigate a murder during the Cardassian occupation and hence to re-evaluate his relationship with Kira), and 'Whispers' (Chief O’Brien has an Invasion of the Body Snatchers experience, when everyone else on the station starts behaving oddly, so that a massive conspiracy seems the only possible explanation).
Sunday 21 July 2024
Monday 1 July 2024
Cuttings: June 2024
Pythagoras vs conspiracy theory – LinkedIn post by Alex Edmans. Lecturer: "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." Student responses: "Fake numbers!" "That's not a fact, it's only a theorem." "That's what they want us to believe!" "How much does geometry pay you to say that?" "You're a shill for big trig!" "Don't tell me what to think!" "Illuminati symbolism." "Pythagoras recanted on his deathbed." "Ha! You trust mainstream mathematics?" "Further proof that ancient aliens created the triangles." "I'm entitled to my own opinion."
Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts is a full-blown victory for DA Alvin Bragg – article by Sam Levine in The Guardian. "The decision to convict Trump on all 34 counts is significant. Jurors could have acquitted him on some and convicted on others. But the fact that they went all-in, and relatively quickly, suggests they believed the wider story prosecutors told at trial. It is a full-throated win for Bragg and the worst possible outcome for Trump.... over the last several weeks, prosecutors transformed a complex legal case into a carefully constructed narrative that was easy for jurors to understand. They took a case that was fundamentally about boring paper crimes and turned it into one that was about something simple: lying. At every step, prosecutors were focused on keeping jurors attention on their bigger picture. Their first witness, former American Media chief executive David Pecker, led them into the jaw-droppingly seedy world of tabloid journalism, laying out how he would pay for stories and then not publish them for the benefit of friends like Trump. It established the world that Trump operated in and showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to keep bad stories from coming to light. Pecker also delivered one of the most devastating moments in the trial against Trump. After several days of revealing how he bought and killed stories on behalf of Trump, he ended his testimony by saying how much he continued to admire Trump. It was a critical moment that showed how loyal those around Trump are, and severely undercut Trump’s claim that everyone was out to get him. Prosecutors also masterfully set up Cohen’s testimony for the jury. Cohen, a former Trump fixer, was a problematic witness for the prosecution because of his prior convictions for perjury and his known penchant for lying. Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was 'obsessed' with Trump. But from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors prepared jurors to brace themselves for Cohen. Pecker and Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, corroborated much of what Cohen would later say on the stand. The fact that Cohen was merely confirming what two witnesses before him had said made him seem more credible."
The reich stuff: what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.... 'Obviously, there are massive differences,' he acknowledges. 'Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?'... Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes. 'Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements? Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?'”
The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good? – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. "In the classic case, devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander at a switch that will swerve a trolley car from the track it’s on – hurtling towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – to a side track with a single victim who’ll be killed instead. Pop culture presentations of it suggest that the issue is knowing what to do: should you flip the switch or not? But the trolley problem starts with the fact that most of us have little doubt: you should turn the trolley to the side track, taking one life to save five.... But why, then, if we are right to flip the switch, is it wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, bringing it to a halt? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use their organs to save five lives – both of which strike most of us as grossly immoral?... The twist in this tale is that Judy Thomson ultimately changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it’s right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument turns on a variant of the classic case in which you have an additional option: as well as switching the trolley to a track with a single victim, you can swerve it into yourself. Thomson’s view is that you’re not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t then turn the trolley on to someone else, sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question has force even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case we started with: the absence of an option you wouldn’t take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.... We should not flip that switch because we would not, in most cases, be willing to sacrifice ourselves"
‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour, and why she’s running as an independent – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[Faiza Shaheen] was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent.... The problematic historic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor. Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.... I don’t want to sound partisan, and no shade on all the other candidates, but it’s unusual to find a person so accomplished, internationally respected, deeply networked and knowledgable in any political party; it’s quite a lot to lose.... By Friday, some commentators were building the case that Labour was being pretty smart, actually – riding high in the polls, the party could seal its victory by picking a fight with the left, and make sure once it entered government that it had its best people. Hence the deselection of Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the sitting Brighton MP suddenly suspended, and the row over Diane Abbott."
‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? – article by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs.... For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s 'social responsibility' in backing it for 'national strategy'. A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. 'At some point you’re like, "Oh my God, how is this not the story?"’ Halverson said. 'We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.'”
Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.... Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso....'When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,' said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. 'But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.'"
I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead – article by Lucy Foulkes in The Guardian. "The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, Anxious Generation, focuses on a significant problem: rates of anxiety and other mental health problems are increasing in this generation of teenagers. He links this to the emergence of social media and a decline in exploratory play, and says that we can solve the problem by banning smartphones for under-14s and social media for under‑16s.... Except that psychological science (and life) is rarely this neat. ... I recently wrote a book about this period of life, and alongside descriptions of the latest research, I included plenty of interviews with adults looking back on their own teenage years. I was struck by how powerful and self-shaping their adolescent memories were even decades later. But I was also fascinated by how similar the struggles were across the generations, whatever age people were now.... When puberty kicks off, it’s as though a flashing red light turns on in the brain, telling adolescents to care about one thing above all else: their peers. It’s a running joke that teenagers succumb to peer pressure and are obsessed with copying their friends, but this has a clear evolutionary purpose. To survive beyond the family unit, to integrate with a new social group and find a sexual partner, it’s imperative that an adolescent spends a lot of time thinking about what their peers think about them and whether or not they fit in with their friends. In my own adolescence, as with everyone else’s, no one was smoking or getting drunk on their own – they were doing these things with, and because of, their friends.... That doesn’t make the issue of phones irrelevant today. Social media has transformed social interactions for everyone: you have more people to compare yourself with, you can edit and curate how you present yourself to the world, and you can quantify how well liked you are – or not – by your peers.... Yet it’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun."
Coming of Age by Lucy Foulkes: our formative years – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "[For] her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, ... Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.... Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group."
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: chronicle of a disaster foretold – review by Killian Fox in The Guardian. "The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph.... As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail."
‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut – article by Rich Pelley in The Guardian. "There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa? But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988[,] written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald... Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts...."
At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong: changing state – review by John Simpson in The Guardian. "As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. 'Within four years,' he told me, 'we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.' Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned.... This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou. Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong."
Trump’s conviction on all 34 counts is a full-blown victory for DA Alvin Bragg – article by Sam Levine in The Guardian. "The decision to convict Trump on all 34 counts is significant. Jurors could have acquitted him on some and convicted on others. But the fact that they went all-in, and relatively quickly, suggests they believed the wider story prosecutors told at trial. It is a full-throated win for Bragg and the worst possible outcome for Trump.... over the last several weeks, prosecutors transformed a complex legal case into a carefully constructed narrative that was easy for jurors to understand. They took a case that was fundamentally about boring paper crimes and turned it into one that was about something simple: lying. At every step, prosecutors were focused on keeping jurors attention on their bigger picture. Their first witness, former American Media chief executive David Pecker, led them into the jaw-droppingly seedy world of tabloid journalism, laying out how he would pay for stories and then not publish them for the benefit of friends like Trump. It established the world that Trump operated in and showed the lengths he was willing to go to in order to keep bad stories from coming to light. Pecker also delivered one of the most devastating moments in the trial against Trump. After several days of revealing how he bought and killed stories on behalf of Trump, he ended his testimony by saying how much he continued to admire Trump. It was a critical moment that showed how loyal those around Trump are, and severely undercut Trump’s claim that everyone was out to get him. Prosecutors also masterfully set up Cohen’s testimony for the jury. Cohen, a former Trump fixer, was a problematic witness for the prosecution because of his prior convictions for perjury and his known penchant for lying. Cohen himself admitted on the stand that he was 'obsessed' with Trump. But from the beginning of the trial, prosecutors prepared jurors to brace themselves for Cohen. Pecker and Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, corroborated much of what Cohen would later say on the stand. The fact that Cohen was merely confirming what two witnesses before him had said made him seem more credible."
The reich stuff: what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? – article by David Smith in The Guardian. "Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.... 'Obviously, there are massive differences,' he acknowledges. 'Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died. But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?'... Above all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes. 'Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements? Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?'”
The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good? – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. "In the classic case, devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander at a switch that will swerve a trolley car from the track it’s on – hurtling towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – to a side track with a single victim who’ll be killed instead. Pop culture presentations of it suggest that the issue is knowing what to do: should you flip the switch or not? But the trolley problem starts with the fact that most of us have little doubt: you should turn the trolley to the side track, taking one life to save five.... But why, then, if we are right to flip the switch, is it wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, bringing it to a halt? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use their organs to save five lives – both of which strike most of us as grossly immoral?... The twist in this tale is that Judy Thomson ultimately changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it’s right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument turns on a variant of the classic case in which you have an additional option: as well as switching the trolley to a track with a single victim, you can swerve it into yourself. Thomson’s view is that you’re not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t then turn the trolley on to someone else, sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question has force even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case we started with: the absence of an option you wouldn’t take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.... We should not flip that switch because we would not, in most cases, be willing to sacrifice ourselves"
‘How can they treat people like this?’ Faiza Shaheen on Labour, and why she’s running as an independent – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "[Faiza Shaheen] was deselected as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green on Wednesday 29 May. It’s a move that stunned her supporters locally, and reverberated far beyond her constituency. A recording of that meeting made it on to the Today programme. A week later, Shaheen has announced her decision to stand as an independent.... The problematic historic tweets included one that congratulated an old colleague who had decided to stand as a Green councillor. Another was liking a tweet that called for a boycott of Israeli goods, during the 2014 Gaza war.... I don’t want to sound partisan, and no shade on all the other candidates, but it’s unusual to find a person so accomplished, internationally respected, deeply networked and knowledgable in any political party; it’s quite a lot to lose.... By Friday, some commentators were building the case that Labour was being pretty smart, actually – riding high in the polls, the party could seal its victory by picking a fight with the left, and make sure once it entered government that it had its best people. Hence the deselection of Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the sitting Brighton MP suddenly suspended, and the row over Diane Abbott."
‘The big story of the 21st century’: is this the most shocking documentary of the year? – article by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs.... For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s 'social responsibility' in backing it for 'national strategy'. A similar national security motivation undergirded Saudi-backed land purchases in such disparate regions as Arizona and Zambia, or Russia’s import of American cowboys to manage its state-incentivized cattle herds. These seemingly unrelated developments form The Grab, a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources. 'At some point you’re like, "Oh my God, how is this not the story?"’ Halverson said. 'We’re just seeing the early stages of what’s going to be the big story of the 21st century.'”
Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.... Paris-born Maar was a respected experimental photographer whose work was about to appear in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London alongside Salvador Dalí and Man Ray when the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard introduced her to Picasso....'When Dora met Picasso, she was already a gifted artist and her surrealist photographs were considered revolutionary,' said Amar Singh, curator of the exhibition. 'But Picasso was extremely controlling and psychologically abusive, and she was discouraged by Picasso to continue with her photography.'"
I’m an expert on adolescence: here’s why a smartphone ban isn’t the answer, and what we should do instead – article by Lucy Foulkes in The Guardian. "The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, Anxious Generation, focuses on a significant problem: rates of anxiety and other mental health problems are increasing in this generation of teenagers. He links this to the emergence of social media and a decline in exploratory play, and says that we can solve the problem by banning smartphones for under-14s and social media for under‑16s.... Except that psychological science (and life) is rarely this neat. ... I recently wrote a book about this period of life, and alongside descriptions of the latest research, I included plenty of interviews with adults looking back on their own teenage years. I was struck by how powerful and self-shaping their adolescent memories were even decades later. But I was also fascinated by how similar the struggles were across the generations, whatever age people were now.... When puberty kicks off, it’s as though a flashing red light turns on in the brain, telling adolescents to care about one thing above all else: their peers. It’s a running joke that teenagers succumb to peer pressure and are obsessed with copying their friends, but this has a clear evolutionary purpose. To survive beyond the family unit, to integrate with a new social group and find a sexual partner, it’s imperative that an adolescent spends a lot of time thinking about what their peers think about them and whether or not they fit in with their friends. In my own adolescence, as with everyone else’s, no one was smoking or getting drunk on their own – they were doing these things with, and because of, their friends.... That doesn’t make the issue of phones irrelevant today. Social media has transformed social interactions for everyone: you have more people to compare yourself with, you can edit and curate how you present yourself to the world, and you can quantify how well liked you are – or not – by your peers.... Yet it’s an oversimplification to blame social media for the rise in adolescent mental health problems. First, there are many other factors at play. Second, social media affects individual teenagers differently. The majority of teenagers do not have mental health problems, and do have social media, so clearly it’s possible to use social media without incurring notable harm. Some young people are merely unbothered by social media, but some will benefit from it. Teenagers use social media to enjoy all the aspects of friendship that exist offline: providing and receiving social support, being validated, having fun."
Coming of Age by Lucy Foulkes: our formative years – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "[For] her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, ... Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi’s account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage.... Foulkes’s chapter on risk-taking is especially interesting, debunking the idea that teenagers have an illusion of invincibility making them more likely to step into harm’s way. She says there’s little evidence they’re unaware of the potential dangers of so-called “pseudomature” behaviours like smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex. In fact, they tend to overestimate the likelihood of bad stuff happening, but do it anyway. Why? Well, apart from the undeniable rewards – some of those things just feel good – it’s often because they’re more scared of the social risk of not taking part. Adolescents are in one sense highly conservative – they’ll do anything to preserve their good standing in the group."
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham: chronicle of a disaster foretold – review by Killian Fox in The Guardian. "The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.... That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph.... As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail."
‘It’s impossible to play for more than 30 minutes without feeling I’m about to die’: lawn-mowing games uncut – article by Rich Pelley in The Guardian. "There’s a school of thought that insists video games are purely about escapism. Where else can you pretend you’re a US Marine Force Recon (Call of Duty), a heroic eco warrior preventing a dodgy company from draining a planet’s spiritual energy (Final Fantasy), or a football manager (Football Manager) – all from the comfort of your sofa? But the antithesis of these thrills-and-spills experiences are the so-called anti-escapist games. Farming Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator – these hugely successful titles challenge the whole concept of interactive entertainment as something, well, exciting. Now we have what at first glance appears the most boring of all, Lawn Mowing Simulator. Recreating the act of trimming grass is nothing new. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator for the ZX Spectrum came free on a Your Sinclair magazine cover tape in 1988[,] written as an April fool joke by writer Duncan MacDonald... Lawn Mowing Simulator, created by Liverpool-based studio Skyhook Games, is not an April fool joke. It strives for realism and has its own unique gaggle of fans. But why would you want to play a game about something you could easily do in real life? As a journalist, I had to know, so I decided to consult some experts...."
At the Edge of Empire by Edward Wong: changing state – review by John Simpson in The Guardian. "As late as 2008 there was a real sense of optimism among liberal-minded Chinese people. That year I was smuggled in to a flat where a former leading party official was kept under house arrest. 'Within four years,' he told me, 'we will have proper elections, and I will be a member of a real parliament.' Instead, Xi Jinping came to power, and any such ideas were abandoned.... This, and much more, forms the background to Edward Wong’s book. Nowadays he is the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, but from 2008 to 2016 he reported for the paper from Beijing, and was the bureau chief there, writing with great perception about the years when Xi Jinping was establishing himself. Before that, from 2003 to 2007, he was a remarkably brave and honest correspondent in Iraq. His father, now in his 90s, was a boy in Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded in 1941, but his middle-class merchant family had strong links in mainland China, and after the Japanese surrender he and his brother lived in Guangzhou. Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating. At the heart of this book lies a deep awareness of the changes that China has endured since the elder Wong watched the first Japanese planes fly over Hong Kong."
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