There is no "woke mind virus" – article by Dan Williams on Conspicuous Cognition website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Gad [Saad’s] The Parasitic Mind [is] a book-length complaint about ‘mind viruses’ like ‘postmodernism, radical feminism, and social constructivism’, all of which are ‘bound by the full rejection of reality and common sense.’ Saad is not alone in his analysis of ‘woke’ ideas. In the past several years, talk of the ‘woke mind virus’ has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors…. Since 2016, it has [also] been the favourite metaphor adopted by the opposite side in the culture war to characterise online misinformation and conspiracy theories…. [But] this metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other. I will make three general points: (1) The ‘mind virus’ metaphor assumes the truth is self-evident, so false beliefs must stem from irrationality. This neglects how people form beliefs based on different information, trusted sources, and interpretive frameworks, which means rational individuals can easily develop radically divergent worldviews. (2) People often embrace and spread ideas because they serve practical goals beyond truth-seeking. For example, religious, ideological, and conspiratorial narratives often serve propagandistic functions or promote people’s social interests. Such motivated reasoning looks nothing like the passive infection by ‘mind viruses’. (3) Belief systems do not spread via simple contagion. They are maintained through complex social dynamics and incentives in which members of belief-based tribes win status by enforcing, rationalising, and spreading bespoke realities."
Remaining steadfast in non-violence -–quoted from Jean Zaru’s book Occupied with Non-Violence, in Daily Meditation, Center for Action and Contemplation. “I call myself a Quaker or a Friend. And Friends, throughout history, have maintained a testimony to nonviolence. War, we say, is contrary to the teachings of Christ. Therefore, we are challenged to live in the presence of that power which wins through love rather than through war. This is no easy testimony..Early on in my struggles [as a Palestinian] with living nonviolently in a situation of violence, I found myself at a crossroads. I needed to know in my own deepest convictions whether I really did believe in the power of nonviolence to transform a situation of conflict.… How can I have peace within when I worry so much about life in general and the lives of my family members?… How can I have peace within when our movement is restricted in our own country, when walls are built to imprison us and separate us from one another?… As Palestinian women, we have a special burden and service. We are constantly being told to be peaceful. But the inner peace of which I speak is not simply being nice, or being passive, or permitting oneself to be trampled upon without protest. It is not passive nonviolence, but the nonviolence of courageous action…. What is that inner force that drives us, that provides regeneration and perseverance to speak the truth that desperately needs to be spoken in this moment of history?… If I deserve credit for courage, it is not for anything I do here, but for continuing in my daily struggle under occupation on so many fronts, for remaining samideh (steadfast) and, all the while, remaining open to love, to the beauty of the earth, and contributing to its healing when it is violated.”
Precipice by Robert Harris: the PM and the socialite – review by Alex Preston in The Guardian. "Precipice is set in the summer of 1914: 'that improbably glorious summer' before the great war opened up a chasm in the world.... We first meet the Honourable Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord and Lady Sheffield, in the buildup to a tragedy. She is part of a louche and aristocratic set, the Coterie, known for their cynicism and excess. Venetia decides not to join a cruise on the Thames during which one of their members, Sir Denis Anson, drowns. Venetia has other things on her mind. Although only 26, she’s in the midst of a romantic entanglement with the 61-year old Liberal prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith.... The letters from Asquith to Venetia were written in the white heat of political life, with Ireland on the verge of revolution and war glowering on the horizon. This backdrop makes their content all the more jaw-dropping. They intermix the moonings of a love-sick teenager with spectacularly indiscreet revelations about the inner workings of government. Venetia’s letters to Asquith have been lost, and so Harris only has one side of the conversation. The novel’s brilliance lies in the way the author has written into the void, giving life and voice to Venetia, bringing her to dazzling life through her imagined letters to Asquith and Harris’s portrait of a bright, unconventional and complex young woman seeking to escape the strictures of her aristocratic upbringing."
A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair – article by Jonathan Watts in The Guardian. "What has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.... They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. On 31 March 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data.... She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order – in homeostasis – not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had 'initiated' with Lovelock... This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point."
The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts: man of many myths – review by Philip Ball in The Guardian. "Lovelock’s Gaia theory has, ever since its inception in the late 1960s, been whatever one wants to make of it: a smokescreen for polluting industries, a clarion call for environmentalists, a revolution in the earth sciences, a conceptual framework for astrobiology, a spiritual movement for reconnecting to the living earth. Remarkably, Lovelock himself embraced each of these positions at some time or another during his 103 years on the planet. Having worked for the Medical Research Council ... during the war, Lovelock quit a comfortable academic position to become a freelance inventor and consultant for clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to Nasa (especially on what became the Viking lander missions of the 1970s that searched for signs of life). In the mid-1950s he invented an instrument called the Electron Capture Detector, which allowed substances in the air to be detected with unprecedented sensitivity. Those studies led him to conceive of the atmosphere itself not as an aspect of the environment to which life adapts but as a component of the 'Earth system' that life is constantly shaping. In collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock shaped these ideas into the Gaia theory, which suggests that the whole planet functions rather like a living organism, stabilised by feedbacks between the biosphere, oceans, atmosphere and geosphere. ... It was Lovelock’s Wiltshire neighbour, William Golding, who suggested naming the idea after the Greek goddess – a 'poison gift', according to philosopher Bruno Latour, as the mythic associations alienated many scientists. Much of this is well known, but Watts digs deeper to find the source of Lovelock’s contradictory, maverick nature...."
These 21st-century demagogues aren’t mavericks, they’ve repeated on us throughout history – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "I’ve spent part of my summer reading Arno Mayer, the great historian who died in 2023. His book Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956, published in 1971, could have been written about any of the rightwing populists we face today... Mayer’s descriptions of the demagogues of his period are uncannily familiar. These leaders created the impression 'that they seek fundamental changes in government, society, and community'. But in reality, because they relied on the patronage of 'incumbent elites' to gain power ... they sought no major changes 'in class structure and property relations'. In fact, they ensured these were shored up. For this reason, Mayer explains how rightwing populists expose and overstate the cracks in a crisis-torn society, but fail to 'account for them in any coherent and systematic way'. They direct popular anger away from genuine elites and towards fictional conspiracies and minorities. They variously blame these minorities (whether it be Jews, Muslims, asylum seekers, immigrants, Black and Brown people) for the sense of inadequacy and powerlessness felt by their supporters; helping 'humiliated individuals to salvage their self-esteem by attributing their predicament to a plot' and giving them immediate targets on which to vent their frustrations and hatreds.... But there is one major difference. In Mayer’s era, the development of what he called 'crisis strata' of disillusioned, angry men to whom the demagogues appealed was a result of devastating war or state collapse. The rabble-rousers were able to appeal both to angry working-class men and to anxious elites by invoking the spectre of leftwing revolution. None of these conditions pertain today in countries like our own. So how does the current batch of populists succeed? I think they are responding to a crisis caused by a different force: 45 years of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism simultaneously promises the world and snatches it away. It tells us that if you work hard enough, you too can be an alpha. But it also creates the conditions which ensure that, no matter how hard you work, you are likely to remain subordinate and exploited.... It is in the vast gap between the promises of neoliberalism and their fulfilment that frustration, humiliation and a desire for vengeance grow: the same emotions that followed military defeat or state collapse in Mayer’s time. These impulses are then exploited by conflict entrepreneurs."
The Golden Road by William Dalrymple: when India ruled the world – review by Fara Dabholwala in The Guardian. "Forget the Silk Road, argues William Dalrymple in his dazzling new book. What came first, many centuries before that, was India’s Golden Road, which stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan in the far east. For more than a millennium, from about 250BC to AD1200, Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated a vast 'Indosphere'. Indian merchants, travelling huge distances on the monsoon winds, reaped vast profits from its matchless cloth, spices, oils, jewellery, ivory, hardwoods, glass and furniture. The Golden Road deftly charts these economic developments. But Dalrymple’s larger theme is India’s intellectual hegemony. As he shows, during this era India was the great religious and philosophical superpower of Eurasia, with lasting effects into the present. The book focuses first on the spread of Buddhism, which from a marginal Indian sect in due course became central to Chinese, Japanese and Korean culture, as well as flourishing elsewhere in the region. It then traces the extraordinary adoption of Hindu and Sanskrit culture by rulers across south-east Asia who were swayed by the prestige of these Indian modes of thought and life.... Finally, The Golden Road tells the gripping story of how fundamental astronomical and mathematical tools such as our modern number symbols, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm were developed in India and spread across the world and, along with the Indian game of chess, eventually reached the backward cultures of Christian Europe."
In the face of grief, it’s hard to find the right words to say. What matters is that you keep trying – article by Ranjana Srivastana in The Guardian. “As I grow older, so grows the number of my friends experiencing their first ‘real‘ grief. The loss of a parent heads that list, a loss so hard-hitting that it’s impossible to describe its manifest implications. After [the] funeral [of a friend’s mother, who died suddenly], I text a tentative, ’How are you?’ ‘OK,’ she says. It’s the text equivalent of a shrug. I wish I had a better question. The next day, I ask if there is anything I can do – even though I tell other people this is one of the worst ways to ‘help‘. I promise to let you know, she replies, in the way of every polite, overwhelmed person. I yearn to do better.…I can’t help thinking that my good intention runs deep but my words keep missing the mark. Still, I want to obey the first commandment of friendship: showing up. I remember reading a paper about the surprising value of even a brief check-in with one’s friends: ‘We document a robust underestimation of how much other people appreciate being reached out to.’ In other words, people who initiated even brief and casual check-ins with their friends underestimated how much the friends appreciated hearing from them. Now I decide to take the same approach with my grieving friend. Instead of quietly receding and waiting for her to engage with me, I text a short message most days. You’re in my thoughts. What prayers will you do today? It must be difficult talking to so many people. Are you getting some sleep? The individual messages feel a little lame but I keep hoping that their sum will amount to an embrace.”
The big idea: how the ‘protege effect’ can help you learn almost anything – article by David Robson in The Guardian. "Over breakfast this morning, I enjoyed a short chat with Mia, my new Spanish study buddy. I went over some of the stuff from my recent lesson and explained what I have learned about the psychology of happiness from a Spanish-language podcast. By the end of the 10-minute conversation, I felt that I had embedded more of the vocabulary, grammar and turns of phrase than if I’d done an hour of textbook exercises. Mia, however, does not exist in real life: they are an AI that I created to take advantage of a phenomenon called the 'protege effect'. According to a wealth of psychological research, we learn more effectively when we teach someone else about the topic we’ve just explored – even if that person doesn’t really exist. There are few shortcuts to mastery, but the protege effect appears to be one of the most effective ways of accelerating our knowledge and understanding. The principle of 'learning by teaching' was pioneered in the early 1980s by Jean-Pol Martin, a French teacher in Eichstätt, Germany who wished to improve his students’ experiences of learning a new language by allowing the teens themselves to research and present different parts of the curriculum to their classmates. ... Learning through teaching was relatively slow to catch on elsewhere, until a group of scientists at Stanford University began to test the idea scientifically. In one of the first experiments, Catherine Chase and colleagues recruited 62 eighth-graders from the San Francisco Bay Area, who were tasked with using a computer program to study the biological changes that occur when we get a fever. Over two lessons, they had to read a text and then create an on-screen flowchart illustrating the different processes and the relationships between them. For half the teens, the exercise was presented as a form of self-study. The others were told that their diagram would help to teach a virtual character, who appeared as a cartoon on the screen.... At the end of two 50-minute classes, the participants who had been assigned the role of teacher had learned considerably more of the material, with much stronger performance on test questions. Intriguingly, the improvements were particularly marked for the least able students; they performed at the same level as the highest achievers in the control group. Chases’s team named this the protege effect, and it has since been replicated many times. These later studies suggest that learning by teaching is more powerful than other mnemonic techniques such as self-testing or mind mapping. The brain boost appears to arise as much from the expectation of teaching as the act itself. If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, so we make a greater effort to fill in the gaps in our understanding and correct any mistaken assumptions before we pass those errors on to others. Articulating our knowledge then helps to cement what we have learned."
Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? – article by Stephen Harrison in The Guardian. "Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses. And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors.... At last month’s annual Wikimania conference ... many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.... As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.... Another obstacle to attracting gen Z contributors is that today’s Wikipedia is simply more established.... It’s harder for new editors to find their way in. Previous generations often began by making small edits, like fixing typos or spotting vandalism, but nowadays many of these tasks are handled by automated tools. Without clear entry points, new editors may dive into editing more contentious articles, where a single misstep could trigger harsh feedback.... While the different generations may eventually find common ground, the future relationship between human editors and AI remains uncertain. Will AI eventually replace human volunteers? Let’s hope not. Compiling an encyclopedia requires making judgments that are best understood by humans, who know the social context."
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: time to relax – review by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. "I have always resisted anything that smells a bit self-helpy. Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty content with my pretty average, relatively low-stress life, where days seized and squandered pass in fairly equal number, attended by tides of frustration or mild satisfaction. Thankfully, as readers of Oliver Burkeman’s old Guardian column already know, he’s a self-help sceptic, too. He doesn’t trade in magic bullets or revelatory hacks. Indeed, he rejects the premise that life can be somehow mastered and the implication that, until we manage get to that point, we’re still half-formed. Floundering is living, too, Burkeman explains. And if there is any key to success, it’s giving up altogether the quest for super-productivity and rejecting the nagging impulse to get on top of things. Instead, we’d all be happier and more productive if we did what we could – and no more – while embracing our imperfections. Now that’s the kind of pep talk I can get on board with. Meditation for Mortals follows the bestselling Four Thousand Weeks, in which Burkeman sought to realign our relationship with time and what we might do with it. The new book is thematically similar but more snackable, which is perfect for those of us whose imperfections include attention issues. Its 28 short chapters are meant to be read daily as a month-long 'retreat of the mind', but are just as illuminating if you use a dip-in, dip-out approach."
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke: a doctor’s remarkable account of an organ transplant – review by Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. "In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury.... As Keira lay in intensive care, a young boy from Cheshire was on his eighth month in hospital with a dangerously enlarged heart.... In The Story of a Heart, Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart. As the author of Dear Life, about the reality of end-of-life care, and Breathtaking, an account of the Covid crisis (later adapted for TV by Line of Duty’s Jed Mercurio), Clarke has made her name telling tough medical stories in a way that is accessible and humane. As well as a tender account of two families linked by tragic circumstances, and the transfer of a human organ from one body to another, The Story of a Heart provides a detailed map of the surgical innovations, people and logistics that allowed that transplant to happen.... As she traces the complex medical journeys of Keira and Max, Clarke takes regular detours into the lives of those looking after them – the book features a lengthy cast of paramedics, ICU staff, anaesthetists and surgeons – as well as the scientific discoveries that inform their treatment.... There are moments, within this intricate tapestry, where Clarke’s evocative, empathetic writing makes you catch your breath. Taking in the spectacle of drivers in gridlocked traffic miraculously making way for an ambulance, she reflects on the unspoken knowledge 'that nothing more substantial than the whisper of fate keeps the people they love from the horror of such a blue-lit dash, the vehicle emblazoned with the cruellest combination of words: children’s intensive care ambulance'."
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers: a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars – review by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "Neither The Poet nor The Lover, whose portraits open this heart-stopping Van Gogh exhibition, were quite what they seem. The Lover’s eyes gazes dreamily from a face of blue-green tints, wearing a red cap flaming against an emerald sky, in which a gold moon and star twinkle. In reality, he was an army officer called Paul-Eugène Milliet, whose affairs were less ethereal than the painting suggests. 'He has all the Arles women he wants,' wrote Van Gogh enviously. The Poet’s face, meanwhile, is anxious and gaunt, its ugliness badly hidden by a thin beard, as the night around him bursts into starshine. He was a Belgian painter called Eugène Boch whose work Van Gogh thought so-so. But beggars can’t be choosers. They were among the few friends Van Gogh had in Arles, after he arrived in February 1888 to renew himself. Why does this exhibition start with these two paintings, instead of the blossoming trees or golden fields he painted that spring? The answer lies in the portraits’ very lack of prosaic fact. Van Gogh is an artist we’re still catching up with.... The Van Gogh this great show explores, with moving and addictive aplomb, is barely an observer at all. He transfigures what he sees. It starts with those portraits of ordinary blokes in whom he sees eternal romance and poetry, proof of how utterly he remade the world around him. This is a journey not to the actual town of Arles, where if you go looking for The Yellow House you’ll find just a plaque, but the Provence in Van Gogh’s mind – or, I want to say, his soul."
Solved: the mystery of how Victorians built Crystal Palace in just 190 days – article by Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. "Experts have discovered that the answer to this 173-year-old riddle lies in the first known use of standardised nuts and bolts in construction – a humble engineering innovation that would power the British empire and revolutionise the industrial world. Measuring a colossal 92,000 sq metres, the groundbreaking iron and glass structure of the Crystal Palace was built in just 190 days to house the 14,000 exhibitors taking part in the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, in Hyde Park, London. Newly analysed evidence suggests the pioneering building could not have been built without cutting-edge Victorian technology: interchangeable nuts and bolts that were made on machines to match one standardised size across the industry. Prior to this, skilled craftsmen would typically make each individual nut and bolt bespoke and ensure they fitted together. Since no two screws were necessarily alike, it was almost impossible to replace one that got lost or broken, causing “endless trouble” for contemporary engineers and ensuring big construction projects relied primarily on bricks and mortar.Prof John Gardner, of Anglia Ruskin University,... approached the Crystal Palace Museum, which houses the remnants of the building, to get hold of some of the original nuts and bolts and analyse them ... and discovered they were all standardised.... 'They were using a standard that had been suggested by Joseph Whitworth 10 years before, in 1841, but wasn’t adopted as a British standard until 1905. That was an absolutely groundbreaking decision by Fox Henderson [the construction firm that built the palace], because it meant you could have a nut made in one workshop and a bolt made in another – and they could fit together.'”
Mother State by Helen Charman; What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman: the body political – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "'Motherhood is a political state,' declares the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Charman at the beginning of Mother State, her provocative and wide-ranging study of 'motherhood' in all its iterations, and its relationship to the wider social context in Britain and Northern Ireland over the past 50 years.... She revisits the heyday of the 1980s women’s peace camps at Greenham Common, and shows that, even at the time, feminists were arguing over the centring of maternal anxiety as a driver for anti-nuclear activism. Another chapter, titled Mother Ireland, looks at the history of women’s involvement in Northern Irish political struggles since the 1970s, on either side of the divide, and how mothers, as both combatants and peacemakers, were also battling 'the gendered expectations of their own communities'.... The ambivalence over biological motherhood among many millennial women that Charman touches on is at the heart of What Are Children For?, co-authored by US journalists Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman and prompted by their frequent conversations on their own uncertainty. They, too, acknowledge the explicitly political nature of the issue; since the repeal of Roe v Wade, the lack of access to safe abortion in many US states means that pregnancy is potentially a life-threatening condition, creating a further deterrent on top of the obvious material factors of cost-of-living and career disruption. They are also conscious that the topic of declining fertility rates 'has been so thoroughly co-opted by the far right' that many feminists are loath to tackle it, choosing instead to see falling birthrates as a sign of positive social change.... So many of the issues covered in both these books were subjects of fierce debate when I became a mother 22 years ago. The fact that women are still fighting the same battles is a wearying reminder of how contingent any victories have been, and how essential it is to keep expanding these conversations because, as all the writers point out, finding better solutions should not be the sole responsibility of women."
‘Many people would throw a tantrum at this point’: An Israeli and a Palestinian discuss 7 October, Gaza, and the future – edited dialogues between Orla (Israeli) and Christine (Palestinian) in The Guardian. Both living in New York, they met on the docuseries Couples Therapy, in which Orna was the couples therapist and Christine one of the participants. "Orna: As a couples therapist, I typically sit as the person outside of a conflict, and I can almost always tune in to each person and understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling.... That business of getting out of your own perspective, holding it lightly and understanding another perspective – I believe in that. When it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, that’s what I have always tried to do. One of the shocking things that happened to me on 7 October, and I think to many people, is that I temporarily lost that ability. When I first heard about what Hamas did, and heard from friends in Israel about what they were going through, I was just like: 'Oh, I had it wrong. Maybe I was just a fool all along, and those extreme rightwingers actually had it right.' My whole internal system of making sense of the conflict in the Middle East collapsed. I lost my ethics. I lost my purpose. I lost my belief.... As I started reading what Israel began doing in Gaza, Israeli narratives were being spun to justify its war machine as if this was the only response imaginable. Once Israel unleashed the IDF on Gaza, I could no longer hold on to this idea that Israel was just a victim, because it was not just a victim. And ever since, I’ve gradually lost my identification with much of the Israeli narrative about itself, which is a very complicated place to be. I feel endless grief about Israel, what Israel was and what I understand it to be now. It’s probably my deepest source of grief."... "Christine: I want you to see what I see; to put yourself in the shoes of Palestinians as it relates to the type of daily violence that we are being subjected to and have been subjected to long before 7 October. You’ve changed my mind about there being different kinds of violence, but I have a hard time condemning Palestinian resistance. .... I think what is difficult to ascertain is how the Palestinians would react if we were free, because ever since Israel was created, we’ve been subjugated by systems of oppression. I struggle with the question of trying to blame Palestinians. I do agree that if we had leadership that could unify the Palestinian people and come to some sort of negotiations that didn’t require unilateral concessions on the part of Palestinians who have already lost so much, of course, that would be wonderful. However, many of our best leaders have been imprisoned or assassinated by Israel." ... "Orna: Palestine and the occupation is one thing, and then there are the surrounding Arab countries, and their absolute disgust at having a western Israeli Jewish state there. Their war is not your war. Their war is a war against the invasion of a different kind of culture into the region." "Christine: I guess what I want to clarify is that the Arab world attacking Israel has less to do with the fact that Israel is Jewish and more to do with the fact that it was perceived as a colonising power. Many of the people who are the founders of modern political Zionism and contributed to the creation of the state of Israel called it a colonial project." "Orna: We can debate different versions of why the Arab world is at war with Israel. But the wars are the reason Israel needs an army – it wouldn’t have survived for a second without one. The issue for the Arab world is not this tiny piece of land. It is the presence of a very small group of people that represent the west and its differing economic, political and social systems."
Hilary Mantel was my mentor. Here are seven things she taught me about writing, and life – article by Katie Ward in The Guardian. "In 2007 I was an aspiring young novelist with a manuscript that had been rejected by 43 literary agents.... At the time Hilary was a well-established author of fiction and memoir. But this was two years before Wolf Hall was published and the stellar success that was to follow.... To me, Hilary was a calm voice at the end of an email, patiently telling me what I needed to hear. She became a beloved friend who I stayed in touch with for 15 years and saw occasionally in person. I treasured every moment I spent with her, always trying to absorb her wisdom between fits of giggles. On Sunday 22 September it will be the autumnal equinox, and the second anniversary of Hilary’s death. While darkness and daylight are briefly balanced, here are the things I learned from her. (1) Know how your story ends and write towards it.... (2) Write every day.... (3) Greatness and gentleness are possible.... (4) Back yourself.... (5) The quality of writing matters more than quantity.... (6) We don’t reproduce the past, we create it.... (7) Our best ideas have a timeline of their own...."
My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss: an interrogation of an eating disorder – review by Ellen Pierson-Hagger in The Guardian. "Sarah Moss’s memoir, the story of how her upbringing developed in her a lifelong, destructive relationship to food, is full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom.... The author, an academic, is best known for her novels (most recently The Fell), in which she variously dissects the climate emergency and Britishness after Brexit. Here she continues to write with wit about humans’ relationship to the natural world.... A tension is evident from the first few pages. After a section of Moss’s second-person narrative (she addresses herself as 'you' for the bulk of the book), another, italicised voice appears, contradicting her, telling her to 'shut up, no one cares', accusing her of lying. This is the niggling voice in the back of your head, the one that makes you doubt what you know to be true. Its presence is felt throughout."
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder: an essential manifesto for change – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In the years since the 2016 US presidential election there has been no more significant critic of the advance of Trump’s form of nihilism than Timothy Snyder. The Yale history professor effectively took a sabbatical from his day job in 2017 to write On Tyranny, a series of 20 lessons derived from his close study of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the last century and how they might apply to the US in this one. He followed that book, in 2018, with The Road to Unfreedom, an illuminating and disturbing account of the ways in which Vladimir Putin’s war on truth was being seeded as a global virus, promoted by the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and amplified by the self-serving populists in the White House and Downing Street and elsewhere.... On Freedom is a companion volume to those earlier books, penetrating in its analysis of our current crises – of information and climate and civil society – and clear in its prescriptions for change. In it, Snyder reclaims several words that have been co-opted by the so-called libertarians of the right, not least his titular subject, which here becomes defined not as a negative – as in 'freedom from' regulation, or from the demands of fact, or from social obligation – but as an active, physical demand.... It has been Snyder’s developing contention as a writer that the body is where we site our opposition to the dehumanising advance of 'screen culture'; he has encouraged a vigorous 'corporeal politics', voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; eye-to-eye interaction, rather than social media; marching and debating, not online likes and anonymous snark.'Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen,' he wrote in 2017. 'Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.'"
Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. "'We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,' says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg [Institute, London]. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country.... The institute was founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by pioneering German art historian Aby Warburg, whose work focused on tracing the roots of the Renaissance in ancient civilisations, mapping out how images are transmitted across time and space.... It has been an essential resource for artists and scholars for decades, but few outside the rarefied ranks of researchers knew the Warburg was there.... [Now,] where once visitors were greeted with an off-putting glass screen and security desk, a new welcoming entrance leads you through to the gallery, where an opening exhibition charts the journey of the institute, alongside artist Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile of books by exiled authors. Windows from the entrance foyer provide views down into the new archive reading room – giving a glimpse of the previously hidden inner workings of the institute – and across to the auditorium, which appears to float in the white-tiled courtyard, illuminated by light-wells either side.... The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – 'uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,' as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century."
The Wild Robot: heartfelt animated adventure is a soaring success – review by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot – the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI – the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar."
‘Everyone is thinking at the same time’: how Codenames became the board game of the decade – article by Charis McGowan in The Guardian. "My mother and I, like millions of other people across the world, have become addicted to Codenames, the biggest breakthrough board game of the past 10 years. The game has been likened to a crossover between charades and Battleship: two teams face each other over a grid of cards, each of them displaying a single word. Only the “spymasters” on each team know which of these cards represent secret agents, but to help their teammates expose them quicker than their rivals, they are only allowed to give one-word clues. The best players are able to come up with word associations that connect two, three, four or even more cards at a single stroke. Teammates with an instinctive understanding of the lateral connections in each others’ minds tend to do particularly well at this: couples, siblings and best-friend teams have a natural advantage. But when the hints fail to register, like [sometimes between him and his mother], the mutual incomprehension can feel existential. I’ve heard people say it’s a great date game to suss out potential partners who really get you (and put a red flag on those who don’t)."
Social workers in England begin using AI system to assist their work – article by Robert Booth in The Guardian. "Hundreds of social workers in England have begun using an artificial intelligence system that records conversations, drafts letters to doctors and proposes actions that human workers might not have considered. Councils in Swindon, Barnet and Kingston are among seven now using the AI tool that sits on social workers’ phones to record and analyse face-to-face meetings. The Magic Notes AI tool writes almost instant summaries and suggests follow-up actions, including drafting letters to GPs. Two dozen more councils have or are piloting it. By cutting the time social workers spend taking notes and filling out reports, the tool has the potential to save up to £2bn a year, claims Beam, the company behind the system that has recruited staff from Meta and Microsoft. But the technology is also likely to raise concerns about how busy social workers weigh up actions proposed by the AI system, and how they decide whether to ignore a proposed action.... One pilot council said it needed greater reassurance that the AI tool was accurately summarising meetings before notes went on file about potentially life-changing choices."
Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling: essential reading – review by Kate Womersley in The Guardian. "Inspired by the 1964 documentary Seven Up!, which followed 14 children born in 1957, Dorling’s book enters the private worlds of seven typical five-year-olds – born in the autumn of 2018 – who represent today’s spread of family income in the UK. These range from 'Monday’s child' Anna, an average representative of the bottom 14% of children who has 'less than a large posh coffee' spent on her needs weekly, via 'Thursday’s child' David, whose dad incessantly worries about his insecure income, to 'Sunday’s child' Gemma, daughter of successful corner shop owners yet her father feels the pinch and is flirting with far-right ideas. As a group, children entering primary school in the UK – for whom the most significant ABCs are austerity, Brexit and Covid-19 – have never had it so bad. Not since the Great Depression has the UK been so unequal, home as it now is to the greatest concentration of poor children in Europe. Rather than wealth, Dorling focuses on weekly disposable income after housing costs, as accommodation is a non-negotiable outgoing and a much greater percentage of income at the bottom of society than at the top. While Seven Up! chose to highlight extreme lives rather than averages across society, Dorling shows how the UK has been 'stretched apart' and, moreover, how inequality is starkest for families with young children. He has constructed his seven characters through thousands of data points; they are highly factual fictions. He cleaves to his theme on economic income, explaining that 'none of the eight "protected characteristics" enshrined in UK law matter even a fraction as much as income and wealth' when it comes to inequality: whether or not you can afford a winter coat, internet access, heating, holidays, a new kettle if the old one breaks, or a school friend over for tea are what segregates us. Through these windows on each child’s life, Dorling exposes how financial inequity affects housing, education, health, employment, tech access, social care, rent and food. The stress for families of securing these necessities hums through the chapters."
