Cuttings: July 2024

 AI as Self-Erasure – article by Matthew B. Crawford on The Hedgehog Review website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A man ... related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride.... He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface. To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense.... Unlike an LLM or a parrot, things have significance for us, and we search for words that will do justice to this significance. For example, you try to find words that are apt for a wedding toast.... We do this also with respect to ourselves; we 'self-articulate' as part of the lifelong process of bringing ourselves more fully into view‚ how I stand, the particular shape that various universal goods have taken in my own biography, and in my aspirations. This is a moving target. One may cringe at one’s younger self. ... Or I may try to look back at my younger self with kindness, in the hope of overcoming regret about the decisions I made. We do all this with words, in our internal monologues. What would it mean, then, to outsource a wedding toast? To use Heidegger’s language, some entity has 'leaped in' on my behalf and disburdened me of the task of being human. For Heidegger, this entity is 'das Man,' an anonymized other that stands in for me, very much like Kierkegaard’s 'the Public.' It is a generalized consciousness—think of it as the geist of large language models."

Long ignored, at last the surrealist art of Leonora Carrington is getting the attention it’s due – article by Joanna Moorhead in The Observer. "Almost 20 years ago I travelled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. Back then, Leonora Carrington – though feted in her adoptive country, Mexico – was barely known in her native Britain. She had been as neglected by the art world in general as by her country, and our family. Two decades on, the story is very different. In April this year, one of her paintings – Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) – was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5m, making her the highest-selling female artist in British history.... Next month an exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate her broader work, exploring her output beyond the dream-like canvases of her paintings and the surreal fictional writing for which she is now best known.... In the 1980s, the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls made an ironic list entitled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. 'Pluses' included: 'Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80'; and 'being included in revised editions of art history'. For Carrington, this has been precisely the case. After my first visit to meet her in Mexico City in 2006, I visited her many more times over the next five years, until her death in 2011 aged 94. We would sometimes joke, sitting round her kitchen table, that one day her works, like those of her erstwhile friend Frida Kahlo, would spawn T-shirts and fridge magnets, tote bags and headscarves. It really was a joke, yet today I have all these items and more."

‘It was an awakening’: Diane Abbott, Nicola Sturgeon, Rory Stewart and more on the books that shaped their politics – Animal Farm by George Orwell, chosen by Alan Johnson. "It was 1964 when we 14-year-old boys of Form 4Y at Sloane Grammar were given Animal Farm to read by our English teacher Mr Carlen. Each of us had to read a page out loud before passing Orwell’s masterpiece to the next hinge-lidded desk for the narrative to continue. Mr Carlen’s contribution to our education wasn’t just to introduce us to a brilliant story, it was to explain its subtext. We were gripped by the animals’ uprising against the cruel and inebriated farmer, Mr Jones. It was our teacher who explained that Mr Jones was Tsar Nicholas II and that Snowball and Napoleon, the two young pigs who led the struggle to take over the farm, were Trotsky and Stalin. The word 'satire' was becoming common parlance with That Was the Week That Was appearing on our TV screens. For me, nothing could be as perfectly satirical as the alterations made to the 'Seven Commandments of Animalism”, in particular the distortion of 'All Animals Are Equal' by the addition of'“But Some Are More Equal Than Others'. There was another brilliant young teacher at Sloane. Peter Pallai taught us economics. He’d fled Budapest just as the Russian tanks rolled in to crush the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I remember asking if he’d read Animal Farm at school when he was our age. No, he hadn’t. There was a list of proscribed books in communist Hungary. At the top of that list was the Bible – second was Animal Farm."

How the Tories pushed universities to the brink of disaster – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "Against the naive liberal understanding of political economy, in which the market grows as the state shrinks (and vice versa), higher education reforms of the past 14 years have demonstrated a central truth about neoliberalism, that the power of the market and of the state can grow in tandem with one another. Right now, universities are buffeted by too many market forces and too much government control. Policy has forced them to engage in feverish competition with one another, but without ever leaving them alone, either. Political risk is now one of the main threats that all universities are striving to hedge against. Hilariously, the government’s recent Augar review of higher education funding took universities to task for spending too much money on marketing. (Just wait until the Tories find the people responsible.) The marketisation agenda has fallen apart because, like so many utopian plans, it was too optimistic. It underestimated the perverse incentives it would create for universities, for senior managers in particular, and what might happen when the media woke up to these. It overestimated the health of the graduate labour market, and the speed with which loans would be repaid. Perhaps it also underestimated George Osborne, and how little he cared about the longer-term consequences of his fiscal ambitions. Nobody expects that agenda to be suddenly undone or reversed thanks to a change of government. But there is one toxic ingredient from the last eight years of Tory rule, if not the last 14, that can be eliminated more easily: the constant drip-feed of paranoid, xenophobic and anti-intellectual rhetoric from the ruling party, which seeks to win approving newspaper headlines with mindless attacks on academics. This is within the gift of the incoming Starmer administration, though whether they will be able to resist the odd jibe remains to be seen."

An (incomplete) list of every terrible policy the Conservatives have inflicted on Britain since 2010 – article by John Elledge in The Guardian. "It felt like it might be fun, in the run up to voting day this Thursday, to catalogue the failures that brought us here: to collate the policy mistakes that created the condition for what looks set to be a punishment election. After spending some time trawling the Guardian’s archive for examples, it rapidly turned out that this wasn’t fun at all...."

The big idea: why your brain needs other people – article by Huw Green in The Guardian. "Clinical work and life experience have revealed the ways in which, to a surprising degree, cognition is also something that goes on within our relationships with other people. It seems counterintuitive in the age of neuroscience, but I increasingly think that how cognitively impaired you are is a function of the social context in which you find yourself. When I first moved into our current house with my young family, one of our elderly neighbours, Emily, came out to introduce herself. She was warm and friendly and silly with our kids in a lovely, over-the-top way. She would also repeat herself in conversation. Frequently. I wondered whether she might have dementia and, as time went on, my impression was confirmed.... In some sense Emily was impaired.... But in another important way, the social context significantly ameliorated her impairment. Not only were her memory problems masked but she had found a space in which they were not important and where her joyous personality and infectious ebullience could thrive. ...This is especially true of thinking. Consider those times when the presence of others has reminded you of an appointment, a name, or simply encouraged you to focus your attention differently. Our relationships provide a context in which to think, and a reason to think. We deliberate with one another to arrive at important decisions, talk through ideas to test them out.... The people around us can also cognitively impair us. A conversational partner who seems to want to avoid a topic can make it surprisingly difficult for you to think about it properly. So while my brain is important, cognition exists beyond my head. I make important decisions by consulting with those close to me. I use reminders and rely on family and colleagues to deliberate about plans. This sort of social process is not only supportive of my cognition – it is my cognition. By extension, the extent to which a person is cognitively impaired is a function of the social supports they have around them."

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan: a lacerating exposé –review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "'Ask not,' said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, 'what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.' Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied. As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed....JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich.... A 'negative life force', Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls 'technical sex', short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death.... The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr 'dying was a high', an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. 'What a way to go,' he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized.... After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, 'just another New York woman on the go'. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called 'lust demons' he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012."

‘It comes for your very soul’: how Alzheimer’s undid my dazzling, creative wife in her 40s – article by Michael Aylwin in The Guardian. "My wife always said she would die of Alzheimer’s. It turns out she was right about that. For years, I insisted she would not. In the end, Vanessa clinched our little argument by dying last September, but we had known her fate since 2019, the year she was diagnosed, at the age of 49. For at least three years before that, though, the realisation dawned by hideous degrees which way the debate was going.... The problem was twofold. One, those MRI scans that kept coming back clear; two, Vanessa’s ability, even then, to turn on the charm. Sometimes, we had meetings with two consultants in the same room, and she would have us all roaring with laughter at her dark humour. On the surface, there seemed nothing wrong, even to experts.... It was a lumbar puncture that finally teased out the demon in her system. There was a deficiency of the protein amyloid in Vanessa’s spinal fluid, her neurologist explained to us, which meant it had to be gathering in her brain. Which meant she had dementia.... A few months after Vanessa’s diagnosis, the UK went into lockdown. These were strange times for all of us. As much as to be locked down with dementia in the house sounds – and was – difficult, I took comfort from the knowledge no one else was able to go out, either. But the domestic challenge was relentless and enervating. And infuriating. Absolutely infuriating. They don’t tell you that in the brochure. We’re all braced for the overarching tragedy of a dementia patient’s decline, but far too little airtime is given to how much it will drive you mad with irritation on a day-to-day level. Both of you. It works both ways. She annoyed me more than I can say, but if anything I annoyed her more.... I read some of my diary entries from that time and cringe.... By September 2021, matters had reached a stage where the local authority’s psychiatrist started Vanessa on a course of risperidone, an antipsychotic drug normally used for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. After I sent an emergency email about her rising levels of violence against me and her visiting carer, but also the first signs of aggression against our children, we were advised by the hospital to double her dose and to switch another of her several meds to something harder.... We are not sure what precipitated the seizure that took her away from home for good. It might have been the disease doing its thing. It might have been the meds. Our neurologist reckoned it was the meds. It turns out risperidone can be a vicious drug.... The paramedics carried her out of our front door. And the search for a nursing home, so far fruitless if not quite frantic, became much more urgent.... From a purely selfish position, the two years after Vanessa moved into the home was a period of release, a return to something like normality, albeit missing the one with whom you created that normality. Once continuing healthcare funding had been awarded, 15 months and three appeals after she had been admitted to the home, it did feel as if almost the last of the burden had been lifted.... I don’t believe it is possible to 'live well' with the type of dementia Vanessa had to deal with, but that does not mean there is no more joy to be had. And we had it – moments snatched amid the dehumanising cruelty of it all, but real and worth something all the same. Although her speech never returned, she did very suddenly get up from her chair and walk, a few days into her stay at the home, which empowered us to do more together in her first year there. Sunny days on the North Downs, brownies in the cafe, laughter in the pub. Those last two years were a chance for us to rebuild our relationship. I don’t know what it says about me that relations with my wife improved so much after she lost the power of speech, but there was a genuine beauty about the way she transcended what had gone before."

‘Who am I without him?’: what I learned about grief from reading other women’s diaries – article by Sarah Gristwood in The Guardian. "When death ends a marriage, it is both ugly and lonely. You have lost the person you loved, of course – but it seems as though everybody else, too, has gone far away. When death ended my marriage to the Guardian film critic Derek Malcolm last summer, after more than four decades of partnership, everyone else seemed to be on a different planet, their voices coming from a strange place called normal – through a glass, distantly. Except, that is, for the voices that came from a real distance – a distance in time. I’d spent many months diving into 400 years of women’s diaries; editing a new anthology, Secret Voices, even as Derek’s health took that final, definitive turn for the worse.... The diaries were a vigorous flood of pleasure and pain, anger and adventure. What struck a nerve with me, however, was the sense of familiarity.... Other women before me had walked the same walk; written down their own feelings, however furious or self-pitying. However much at odds with society’s wish that a widow’s grief should be uncomplicated, retiring – almost pretty. Their emotion seemed to license my own. In editing the book it felt as though I’d been trying to free the voices of these earlier women. Now, could they free me?"

The History of Ideas by David Runciman: big thinkers with visions of a better world – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, wears his scholarship with half a smile. He has that gift, both as a podcaster and as a writer, to illuminate abstruse and abstract ideas with human charm. He also has a journalistic sense of where the story lies. In different ways, then, the meditations here, each 20 or so pages long, on figures as distinct as Jeremy Bentham, and Rosa Luxemburg and Simone de Beauvoir are that rare kind of treat: page-turning life stories that, sentence by sentence, make you feel a little more learned than you felt before. He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality... At the other 'bracing' extreme from Rousseau he argues that Nietzsche, another great unraveller of human political DNA, comes at the 'how the hell did we get here?' question from the diametrically opposed position: not 'how did the privileged few come to dominate the many' but how did the many, through religion and democracy, come to dominate the few, the elite, the powerful, their true masters?... Between these biggest of philosophical beasts, his accounts of how the nuance and practicality of the world might be remade starts to get evermore interesting. Bentham, a figure too often reduced to his utilitarian catchphrase (and armchair-diagnosed as autistic), is brilliantly revived here; the section on Frederick Douglass, who spent his early years as an enslaved person in Maryland and became the most erudite voice of emancipation, makes you want to immediately download everything he wrote."

The power of proprioception: how to improve your ‘sixth sense’ – and become healthier and happier – article by Joel Snape in The Guardian. "The next time you’re somewhere non-embarrassing, try this quick test: stand on one leg with your arms stretched out to the sides, imagining that one hand is holding a rock. Next, the tricky bit: “pass” the rock overhead to your other hand without putting your leg down, then pass it back, and repeat the whole movement 10 times without losing your balance... Dan Edwardes, one of the UK’s most experienced coaches in the athletic obstacle-leaping discipline of parkour, calls this the 'rock pass' drill – and says it’s one of the simplest ways to check up on your proprioception, or your body’s sense of where it is in space.... 'Any complex movement skill, from jumping to vaulting to climbing, requires a high level of proprioception,' says Edwardes. 'Think of adding these moves to your daily movement "diet" to keep yourself strong and functional.' Or, in other words, it’s becoming clear, as our understanding of it improves, that improving or maintaining our proprioceptive ability is key to our quality of life as we age."

A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-1965 by David Kynaston: cheerfulness through the gloom – review by Anthony Quinn in The Guardian. "On Saturday afternoon, 27 October 1962, a 19-year-old Juliet Gardiner sat 'rigid with fear' in her local launderette reading that day’s news report of Soviet ships heading towards the US blockade around Cuba. She wondered 'what on earth was the point of having clean knickers, pillowcases and tea towels, since the world seemed about to end in a nuclear holocaust'. The moment comes early in the latest volume of David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem, and typifies its brilliant double vision, between the wide angle and the closeup: world and washing both in a spin.... Much of [this account] chimes weirdly with our present moment. A Conservative government was clinging on, 13 years in power and humiliated by scandal (Profumo instead of Partygate), while Labour, ahead in the polls under Harold Wilson, was sitting pretty for the next general election. France thought Britain too 'insular' for membership of the EEC, and De Gaulle slammed the door on Macmillan. The PM’s verdict in 1957 that we’d 'never had it so good' was looking doubtful in the face of a continuing north-south divide. Despite improvements, poverty was chronic and the guardians of the welfare state weren’t often reliable in judging who needed help the most.... Cheerfulness keeps breaking through the gloom, albeit often coated in irony. On telly – coming into its own as the whizzy new medium – The Likely Lads and That Was the Week That Was were building an audience.... But the most significant noise rising from these pages is the music of the Beatles... Despite the talk of aspiration and prosperity common to the era, A Northern Wind is a chill reminder of calamitous social management, not least in the replacement of solid Victorian terraces by high-rise housing.... Not much to cheer in education, either, where the continuing unfairness of the 11-plus, the unloveliness of secondary moderns and the 'barrier to democracy' represented by private schools kept British society more or less benighted. 'Ultimately,' writes Kynaston, 'this was an issue about social class.' It always is. The 1960s was still a conservative age, still hidebound by deference at one end of the class spectrum and complacent in its privileges at the other."

‘I’ve got a massive ego!’: Jess Phillips on feminism, Farage and being an attention-seeker – interview by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian. "Today, hard right or extremist views appear to be on the rise in Britain. While the general election was a landslide for Labour in terms of seats (412 out of 650), it only won 33.8% of the vote share. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s rightwing populist Reform UK party secured 14% of the vote share (but only five seats). Does she find it … ? She completes the question for me. 'Terrifying? Yes.' She calls it a broad but shallow victory. How does Labour turn that into a more meaningful victory? 'You have to deliver. People think the upset in my constituency was all strictly Gaza. It wasn’t. Gaza was the catalyst for years and years of everything being shit. Reform and the Workers party are just against things. The policies of grievance are very easy to sell; easiest trick in the book. Any fucker can do it. Building something based on hope is much harder. But you have to be honest about delivery. You can’t just go to the places where the Labour party did badly and whack a youth centre in there. That won’t work, either. It has to be based on genuine delivery and being honest about how long improvement will take. That is how you take a loveless landslide into a second term of a Labour government.' She is convinced Farage will be hopeless as a constituency MP and as a performer in the Commons. 'It’s like with George Galloway. His whole power is in the hat. He’s been in parliament recently and he’s not allowed to wear the hat, and he just looks like a shuffling man who stands up and speaks for three minutes. I’m like, oh my God, you’re like Samson. You’ve got no hat, you’ve got no sparkle. I think Farage is going to be the same. Parliament crushes people. It crushed Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson never managed to land a moment of bombast in parliament, because it’s a bigger institution than you. I am better in parliament than Boris Johnson and I’ll be better than Nigel Farage.'”

‘Redefine conversation’: how Just a Minute can help people living with dementia – article by Steven Morris In The Guardian. "An academic paper jointly produced by a university linguist [Alison Wray, Cardiff University] and one of the greatest exponents of Just a Minute [the comedian Paul Merton] has suggested the game is so devious that the best way to succeed is to let go of any ambition to win. [It] also looks at how exploring the challenges the show presents may help dementia patients and their carers. Wray said ... 'In regular speech, we aim to be fluent, so we don’t get interrupted and lose our chance to talk. We manage the flow of ideas and gain time while we plan what to say next by inserting hesitation filler words, repeating material and putting in asides or deviations. Just a Minute outlaws these options. The contortions of speaking fluently in these circumstances create high risk of brain fry.'... Merton said he found the most effective way of avoiding 'brain fry' was to re-conceptualise the game away from something to try to win. Instead, he focuses on keeping the show enjoyable and well paced. Which turns out to be a winning formula for him.... Wray said: ... 'Those interacting with people living with dementia often find that it helps if they take the pressure off getting specific information and focus on the overall experience of a conversation. Thus, if the person wants to tell an anecdote, does it really matter if they can’t recall the person or place it relates to? To reminisce about their childhood, does it matter if it takes a while for them to describe a place or experience?'”

A Reign of Peace and Harmony - ‘Daily Meditations’ from the Center for Action and Contemplation, by Brian McLaren. “For many people today, kingdom language evokes patriarchy, chauvinism, imperialism, domination, and a regime without freedom. Not a pretty picture—and the very opposite of the liberating, barrier-breaking, domination-shattering, reconciling movement the kingdom of God was intended to be!… “