Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift: haunting visions from a Booker winner – review by Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian. "There are several wars, not all of them military ones, in these deftly turned stories from Booker winner Graham Swift. With characteristic exactness and compassion, Swift considers the cost of human conflict in all its forms – and the challenge, for those who manage to stay alive, of retrieving the past.... In Blushes the 'ghost world' we’re shown is the suddenly empty one created by the Covid pandemic, with its unpeopled streets and rising death toll. Here the war being fought is the war against disease. Hinges, meanwhile, takes us into the thoughts of a middle-aged woman during her father’s funeral. As the coffin is brought to the cemetery she thinks back to a day when, as a girl, she waited with him for a carpenter to arrive and fix their creaking front door. The door, he’d explained, was 90 years old. Swift’s conceptual agility is on dazzling display here: 'But she couldn’t have thought, then, what her 49-year-old self could think: that 90 years was the length of a decent human life, though rather longer, as it had proved, than her father’s. And she surely couldn’t have thought then, as she thought now, that there were two things, generally made of wood, specifically designed to accommodate the dimensions of a single human being. Two objects of carpentry. A door and a coffin. It was like the answer to a riddle.' Neat as the parallel is, if these stories occasionally feel a little pat, it is precisely because they are so smoothly jointed.... Where the moral focus is blurrier, the emotional payoff is often much greater. Beauty is a story of bereavement without a resolution: hoping for closure, a grandfather pays a secret visit to the university residence where his granddaughter Clare recently killed herself, only to feel like 'an old man among ghostly young people'.... Swift’s interest in what a meaningful reconstruction of the past might look like achieves an even deeper resonance in the final piece, Passport. Though she’s in her 80s and doesn’t expect to travel again, Anna-Maria Anderson has recently renewed this official proof of identity. She concedes ruefully that 'there really was no way of travelling through time', which is what she would really like to do. But of course, there is; this story is it. As she thinks, marvelling, of her parents’ love affair during the Spanish civil war and her own survival, as a baby, of the Blitz bomb that killed her mother, the piece becomes a moving reflection on the haphazardness as well as the serendipity of life. But it acknowledges something else too: the awkwardness of growing old, and its inescapable tedium. 'If life turns out to be short, well then that’s cruel,' Anna-Maria decides. 'But when life is long, that can be cruel too.' Skilful, generous and humane, these 12 tales suggest the complexity and heartbreak of being engaged on such an uncertain journey."
It’s my goal to live to 100, and it’s not just diet and exercise that will help me achieve it – article by Devi Sridhar in The Guardian. "For much of the past century, life expectancy continually increased. In most countries in the world, children could hope to live, on average, longer, healthier lives than their parents. This expectation is still true of the mega-wealthy.... But their efforts aren’t trickling down to the rest of us. The world’s health crises are getting worse, with life expectancy going backwards in several high-income countries, such as the UK and US. In Britain, stagnation started before the Covid pandemic and has decreased by six months, and in the US by 2.33 years.... We’ve been told for decades that if we just optimise ourselves, we can live longer, healthier lives.... The truth is, this 'self-help' narrative doesn’t reflect the reality of how health works. In fact, the focus on personal responsibility and self-improvement has distracted us from the real issue – the impact that public policy, infrastructure and community make in affecting our health chances and longevity. In public health, research projects have studied places where people live significantly longer, healthier lives... What stands out about these places is that the people living there don’t just make individual choices that lead to better health – they live in places where healthy lives are normalised by government and culture.... If I’m going to live to 100, I need more than fastidiously counting my calories and posting pictures of myself exercising on Instagram (which I am guilty of). I need to live in a world where health is a collective responsibility, not an individual one. This means supporting policies that make us all healthier – and politicians who prioritise the conditions for good health such as nutritious food especially for children, active cities, clean air policies, preventive healthcare and public provision of water, which should be at the core of what a government provides its citizens. There are lessons in how to improve life in all of these areas across the world: these are places where good health is built into daily life."
Misogyny in the metaverse: is Mark Zuckerberg’s dream world a no-go area for women? – article by Laura Bates in The Guardian, based on her book The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny. "Everybody knows that young women are not safe. They are not safe in the street, where 86% of those aged 18 to 24 have experienced sexual harassment. They are not safe at school, where 79% of young people told Ofsted that sexual assault was common in their friendship groups and almost a third of 16- to 18-year-old girls report experiencing 'unwanted sexual touching'. This ... is particularly relevant as Meta, the operator of some of the biggest social platforms on the internet, is busily engaged in constructing a whole new world. The company is pumping billions of dollars a year into building its metaverse, a virtual world that it hopes will become the future not just of socialising, but of education, business, shopping and live events. This raises a simple question: if Meta has utterly failed to keep women and girls safe in its existing online spaces, why should we trust it with the future? Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: 'In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.' It’s the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women."
The Myth of Automated Learning – blog post by Nicholas Carr, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way to cheat on papers and other assignments, students’ embrace of the technology has stirred uneasiness, and sometimes despair, among educators.... But cheating is a symptom of a deeper, more insidious problem. The real threat AI poses to education isn’t that it encourages cheating. It’s that it discourages learning.... Thanks to human-factors researchers and the mountain of evidence they’ve compiled on the consequences of automation for workers, we know that one of three things happens when people use a machine to automate a task they would otherwise have done themselves: (1) Their skill in the activity grows. (2) Their skill in the activity atrophies. (3) Their skill in the activity never develops.... AI’s use by high-school and college students to complete written assignments, to ease or avoid the work of reading and writing, ... puts the process of deskilling at education’s core. To automate learning is to subvert learning.... The paper a student hands in no longer provides evidence of the work of learning its creation entailed. It is a substitute for the work.... The work of learning is hard by design — unchallenged, the mind learns nothing... What AI too often produces is the illusion of learning. Students may well be able to write better papers with a chatbot than they could on their own, but they end up learning less.... Armed with generative AI, a B student can produce A work while turning into a C student."
How does woke start winning again? – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "By 2022, a word briefly synonymous with enlightened liberal consciousness – borrowed from a phrase used as far back as the 1930s by black Americans, urging each other to 'stay woke' to the threat of racial violence – was already becoming what the then Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon called 'a pejorative term of abuse'.... Did woke really go too far, or in some ways not far enough? And are there still ways of successfully advancing progressive causes, even in a time of backlash that is frightening for many?...
[Luke Tryl and Ed Hodgson of the cross-party think tank More in Common published a report on 'progressive activists' - one of seven political tribes identified from polling.] Though only around one in 10 of the population, Progressive Activists punch above their weight in national conversations by being well-educated, highly engaged – they’re four times as likely as the general population to post political content on social media – and driven to change the world. Five times as likely as other groups to say 'woke' was positive for society, they are its beating heart.... [Says Tryl:] 'If you ask people about lots of the changes that have been driven by Progressive Activists, they’re ranked high on the list of things the British people say they’re proudest of: advances in women’s rights and gay rights, reductions in outright racism. They make change happen.'... Yet Progressive Activists’ fatal flaw, the report argues, is that they’re further from mainstream public opinion on cultural issues than they realise. They’re the only group where a majority thinks that immigration should be as high or higher than it is now, and that protecting people from hate speech matters more than defending free speech (a key rationale behind 'no debate' – the idea that trans identities aren’t up for discussion – and 'no platforming'). .... His polling shows that Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two to three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender. Consequently they tend to invest too little time on persuasion, focusing instead on mobilising the masses they wrongly imagine are on board. 'If you’re reaching out to people, then you’re watering down,' is how Tryl describes this mindset.... Ironically, given its emphasis on inclusion, there was also one hidden power dynamic that 'woke' too often seemed to miss in those heady early days. Class, as defined by education level, is now a bigger dividing line than race in US politics, and a key predictor of Reform’s success in Britain. Were activists who scolded critics to 'educate yourself' or 'do the reading', while speaking the language of undergraduate sociology essays, always likely to grate on the two-thirds of British adults who don’t have degrees?...
Robert Wintemute is professor of human rights law at King’s College London, a gay man who worked for decades on anti-discrimination test cases and helped draft the so-called 'Yogyakarta Principles', a founding statement of the campaign for self-identification, or the right for trans people to gain legal recognition in their preferred sexual orientation or gender identity without requiring a doctor’s diagnosis of gender dysphoria.... [But then] Wintemute wondered if he had dismissed some women’s concerns about self-ID too quickly. [Protests against a lecture he was due to give in Montrea backfired.] TV interviews he gave about the fracas reached more people via YouTube than the lecture would have, and six days later, publishers accepted his book proposal. He wasn’t silenced, but amplified, and if anything encouraged to double down. What makes Wintemute’s journey from sympathy with self-ID to hostility towards it worth studying is that it mirrors a strikingly rapid broader shift in public opinion.... By 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found public backing for the legal right to change sex had almost halved and admissions of anti-trans prejudice almost doubled, at a time when public opinion became more liberal on other social issues.... In retrospect, Stonewall seemingly fell into the trap – identified by More in Common – of overestimating how mainstream its views were, while gender-critical feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK focused on persuading the wavering via open public meetings. Jubilant at what seemed an easy victory on self-ID, Stonewall had adopted a 'trans women are women, get over it' stance, declaring that, while willing to engage in debates that furthered understanding, 'we do not and will not' acknowledge any conflict between trans rights and women’s sex-based rights. (Some activists insisted it was transphobic even to say conflict existed, for example over access to domestic violence refuges, though the Equality Act 2010 explicitly anticipates such conflicts.) But refusing to answer difficult questions did not make them go away. Instead they were ultimately settled in the courts, where gender-critical feminists won a string of victories culminating at the supreme court earlier this year. A campaign for self-ID initially enjoying cross-party support had somehow ended not just in defeat but in reverse....
Against Identity by Alexander Douglas: a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we 'identify as'. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.... Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing 'activist' is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional....The escape route Douglas recommends is nothing so banal, then, as policing misinformation or even just being nicer to one another; no, we should strive to abandon identity all together. He deploys close readings of three thinkers from wildly differing epochs and cultures: the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and the 20th-century historian-critic René Girard. Each of them, he argues, hints at a similar ideal of enlightenment: to abandon our attachment to identity and become one with the undifferentiated flow of all things."
The two-state solution is a delusion – article by Rabea Eghbariah in The Guardian. "Last year, amid a crescendo in calls for the two-state solution, Israel approved the largest land theft in the West Bank in over three decades, further fragmenting the occupied territory and obliterating any meaningful prospect for a sovereign Palestinian state in it. The two-state solution has not only become detached from reality, but for too long steered the discussion away from reality itself.... This mantra continues to prop up the illusion that Israeli occupation is on the brink of ending – if only more states recognize the Palestinian state and if only Palestinians and Israelis would just sit down and talk. But three decades of so-called peace negotiations have yielded nothing but deeper entrenchment of Israeli occupation, systematic land theft and escalating subjugation of Palestinians....It’s time for the international community to confront the simple truth: the two-state solution is not just a fantasy – it has always been a misdiagnosis. If world leaders are serious about resolving the question of Palestine, they must abandon failed frameworks and confront root causes....Put simply, the Nakba never came to an end.... A reckoning with the Nakba is long overdue. It brings to the surface vital and unresolved legal, moral and historical questions: the status of lands conquered in 1948, the right of return for refugees, the inferior status of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the universal right of Palestinians to self-determination, regardless of where they live or what legal category they fall into.... Reckoning with the Nakba is a prerequisite for justice, let alone peace"
A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon: explaining psychology’s most important theory – review by Huw Green in The Guardian. "The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice.... The phenomenon we call 'seeing' is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counterintuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: 'perception is a controlled hallucination'.... One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon’s book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable ('we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise'); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems ('your brain begins to perceive what it expects'); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat."
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war – article by Adam Curtis in The Guardian, about his TV series Shifty. "I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past.... Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn’t start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd.... The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control [state bureaucrats]. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR.... But the roots of distrust didn’t just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid. It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting.... By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn’t trust anyone in public life ... finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren’t the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good.... By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad.... It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that [in] 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."
Shifty: Adam Curtis’s new show is an utter rarity: stylish, intelligent TV with something to say – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Hello and welcome to the latest addition to Adam Curtis’s growing compendium of documentaries I have unofficially entitled How Did Things Get So Shit? Let Me Explain in a Weirdly Uplifting Manner. Previous volumes include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, HyperNormalisation, Can’t Get You Out of My Head and Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. Even if you have not had the challenging pleasure of watching, the titles alone should be enough to evoke most of the concerns found therein – the rise of individualism, the fragmentation of old systems, the political vacuums new people and powers have rushed to fill, the death rattle of formerly dependable entities on which western civilisation has traditionally rested and once allowed us to sleep peacefully at night, the creeping destabilisation of all things, and so very much on.... We stop before Brexit and Donald Trump, but it is clear how Curtis believes the seeds have been sown for all our current sorrows. Is the viewer persuaded? It depends where you start from, of course – I can’t speak for anyone who wasn’t already halfway there before kick-off as I was – and it will depend perhaps even more on how you feel about this most Marmite of film-makers. Now that I have learned to let his films wash over me, to pay attention but not drill down as they go, then wait and see how they work on my consciousness afterwards, I manage much better and admire much more. But perhaps that is partly a function of context too. It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then present stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now."
Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is you get out – interview by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a 'Slavicist', yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own.... In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, 'We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US'.... Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.... 'It’s all almost too stereotypical,' Shore reflects. 'A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,' she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. 'As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.' That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the 'neo-totalitarianism' exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin.... [With the rise of Trump.] it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. 'Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,' she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast 'eschatological vision', the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is 'advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.'... When Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. 'So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.'”
The big idea: should we embrace boredom? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again. The study’s authors concluded that 'people prefer doing to thinking', even if the only thing available to do is painful – perhaps because, if left to their own devices, our minds tend to wander in unwanted directions. Since the mass adoption of smartphones, most people have been walking around with the psychological equivalent of a shock button in their pocket.... Smartphones have also increased the pressure to use our time productively, to optimise every minute of our lives.... Most psychologists studying boredom would agree that, while it can feel unpleasant, it’s useful. Like hunger or loneliness, it alerts us to a need, a desire to do something different.... When boredom strikes it should ideally serve as a prompt to do something more engaging or meaningful.... When boredom strikes, we should resist the urge to assuage it instantly and ask ourselves: are we in search of pure entertainment or something more purposeful, an opportunity to connect with friends or our community or something different, something new? The people who choose to embrace boredom, at least for a while, may paradoxically experience less of it. It could even be the first step towards a life that feels more stimulating overall: meaningful, creative and free."
Britons have just 23 hours of ‘genuinely free’ time a week: so much for labour-saving technology –article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "As the AI revolution heralds a new dawn – or living nightmare – in the world of work, I find my thoughts turning increasingly to Kellogg’s.... In 1930, the 'managed work reduction' movement – seeking to take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by automation to usher in a golden age of leisure – found an influential champion in WK Kellogg. Intrigued by the utopian possibilities, Kellogg opted to shorten his factory’s workday from eight hours to six, and increased daily shifts from three to four. The 30-hour working week was widely taken up by US business leaders as a smart and progressive strategy – not just protecting against the threat of mass unemployment caused by mechanisation, but also spreading the benefits.... By the 1932 US presidential election, the six-hour workday was the favoured solution to national unemployment, and hours were expected to continue to decline nationally....Today the dream of 'work reduction' is long dead, even forgotten. OECD data shows that the average time spent on leisure has decreased since the 1980s, even in economies (such as the UK’s) that have grown in that time.... A century ago, there was a collective desire and will to use technology to manage work, underpinned by the belief that leisure was akin to freedom. It was assumed that people would make choices to free up more time to spend with family, or on their hobbies. But that vision was tested – and eventually crushed – by the emerging view of progress as more money with which to buy more things, and of work as 'the centre of life'. The Kellogg’s workers eventually voted in 1983 to abandon the six-hour shift, swayed by the threat of redundancies – and the promise of pay rises. Overtime was widely seen as a fair trade-off for less leisure. As one dissenting employee put it: 'The work hogs won.'... I fear we are at a similar crossroads now. New technologies really could give us more free time, shift the locus of life and meaning away from work, and even restructure society towards recreation and connection; they will replace vast numbers of us in our jobs.... But if we don’t fight for our free time, we’ll just find more ways to waste it at work."
‘Poor management leads to fatal crushes’: how Glastonbury and others are dealing with big crowds – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. "With recent fatal crowd disasters ... music fans are understandably concerned about their safety at mass events. This has led to well-meaning but misguided explainers like that offered in a BBC video before 2023’s Notting Hill Carnival, titled 'how to stay safe in a crowd'. The common suggestions of what to do if you are caught in an uncomfortable level of crowd density – have an exit plan, hold your arms out, breathe deeply – 'mostly aren’t going to help', says social psychology professor John Drury, who does training in crowd psychology and behaviour for the events industry ... 'Focusing on individual behaviour and responsibility is misplaced,' he says. 'By the time the crowd is so dense that a crush is likely or is happening, it’s too late.' Really, this kind of advice only serves to deflect attention from event organisers, venue owners, site designers, security, local authorities, health and safety inspectors and the emergency services – all organisations with the professional expertise, not to mention legal responsibility, that an individual crowd member is lacking. 'The individuals within a crowd can’t possibly know what’s going on at the other end,' Drury continues. 'It is poor management that leads to fatal crushes. It’s still too common to blame the crowd for decisions that should have been made weeks beforehand.'... When crowd scientist Keith Still is called in to investigate a crowd disaster, ... the first two documents he asks to see are the risk assessment and the crowd management plan. 'The characteristics, the DNA of these accidents, are always the same,' Still says. 'Insufficient preparation, lack of staff training, lack of wayfinding, poor signage, and allowing the volume of people-flow to exceed capacity, or throughput. They inevitably tend to point the finger at the crowd being at fault, rather than asking: what were the underlying fundamentals?'”
Are we witnessing the death of international law? – article by Linda Kinstler in The Guardian. "The erosion of international law began long before Trump first took power in 2017. The relevance, and even the very existence, of international law has been up for debate since the moment it emerged almost two centuries ago. Its champions argue that it is the bulwark against another great war, a restraint against criminality and mass violence. Its critics argue that, far from shielding the world from the worst crimes, it has instead protected states by providing them with a language with which to justify their wrongs. International lawyers are themselves divided over whether their discipline is alive and well, in hibernation, in its death throes, or long ago deceased, a 'moral ghost' that hovers over the world map.... [The institutions in The Hague] are physical embodiments of the discipline known as 'international law', though scholars tend to disagree on what international law actually is.... But to speak of international law as merely a set of rules and agreements is to elide its function as the 'lingua franca of the international system', and as a means of expressing the belief that perpetrators of global crimes should be punished just as domestic offenders are, and (more often) of expressing incredulity when they are not. (International law has become the vernacular of the 'educated middle classes'[)] Today, there is a growing sense in the field that international criminal law is a failed project, 'a dead man walking'. Few of the lawyers I spoke with were willing to defend it without caveat. 'The gap between the aspirations of international criminal law and the reality for people on the ground is greater and greater,' said Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University. 'And that is a problem for the law, because law is supposed to achieve things in the real world.'... For critics of the field, the problem is not just that law doesn’t stop wars or protect civilians, but also that it offers a vocabulary for states to justify the unchecked use of force. ... For instance, international humanitarian law restricts the use of certain kinds of weapons, such as cluster bombs... That did not stop Israel, which first ratified the convention on certain conventional weapons in 1995, from deploying cluster bombs against a civilian population in 2006, during the Lebanon war. ... The Israeli military claimed that the use of cluster bombs was not a violation of international law, because they were focused on military targets and because the population of Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area called Dahiya, had been warned of the attack in advance.... For the Israeli legal scholar Itamar Mann, Dahiya felt like the beginning of the end of international law as a credible system for preventing atrocities. 'They weren’t just ignoring the rule: they were invoking it for the very purposes that it was supposed to limit or control,' he said. By attempting to justify a legally unjustified action in the language of international law, Israel made a mockery of the spirit and letter of the law."
Against Identity by Alexander Douglas: a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we 'identify as'. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.... Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing 'activist' is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional....The escape route Douglas recommends is nothing so banal, then, as policing misinformation or even just being nicer to one another; no, we should strive to abandon identity all together. He deploys close readings of three thinkers from wildly differing epochs and cultures: the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and the 20th-century historian-critic René Girard. Each of them, he argues, hints at a similar ideal of enlightenment: to abandon our attachment to identity and become one with the undifferentiated flow of all things."
The two-state solution is a delusion – article by Rabea Eghbariah in The Guardian. "Last year, amid a crescendo in calls for the two-state solution, Israel approved the largest land theft in the West Bank in over three decades, further fragmenting the occupied territory and obliterating any meaningful prospect for a sovereign Palestinian state in it. The two-state solution has not only become detached from reality, but for too long steered the discussion away from reality itself.... This mantra continues to prop up the illusion that Israeli occupation is on the brink of ending – if only more states recognize the Palestinian state and if only Palestinians and Israelis would just sit down and talk. But three decades of so-called peace negotiations have yielded nothing but deeper entrenchment of Israeli occupation, systematic land theft and escalating subjugation of Palestinians....It’s time for the international community to confront the simple truth: the two-state solution is not just a fantasy – it has always been a misdiagnosis. If world leaders are serious about resolving the question of Palestine, they must abandon failed frameworks and confront root causes....Put simply, the Nakba never came to an end.... A reckoning with the Nakba is long overdue. It brings to the surface vital and unresolved legal, moral and historical questions: the status of lands conquered in 1948, the right of return for refugees, the inferior status of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the universal right of Palestinians to self-determination, regardless of where they live or what legal category they fall into.... Reckoning with the Nakba is a prerequisite for justice, let alone peace"
A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon: explaining psychology’s most important theory – review by Huw Green in The Guardian. "The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice.... The phenomenon we call 'seeing' is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counterintuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: 'perception is a controlled hallucination'.... One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon’s book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable ('we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise'); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems ('your brain begins to perceive what it expects'); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat."
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war – article by Adam Curtis in The Guardian, about his TV series Shifty. "I wanted to make a series set in Britain over the past 45 years that shows how all our political certainties dissolved. It is built of hundreds of moments that try to evoke what it has felt like to live through this age. The mood is that strange twilight zone between history and memory; fragments that have not yet been fixed into a formal version of the past.... Above all, I wanted to trace the rise of the thing that has destroyed the confidence of our age: distrust – not just of those in power, and of 'truth', but of everything and everyone around us and, ultimately, of ourselves. It didn’t start like that. Thatcher believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd.... The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control [state bureaucrats]. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as 'doing good'. Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR.... But the roots of distrust didn’t just come from the right. The patrician liberals in Britain were completely shocked that large sections of the working class voted for Thatcher. They had always drawn their influence and prestige from the idea that they cared for the 'little people' and the 'less well-off'. Now they turned on them in fury. I found a clip of the novelist Martin Amis promoting his book Money. Dripping with disdain, he says the working class have been seduced by the vulgar allure of money. They are, he said, stupid. It was at that moment the influence of liberal intellectuals began to slip. Power was shifting.... By the end of the 80s the belief that you couldn’t trust anyone in public life ... finally came round to the politicians themselves. It was basic logic. If you believed public duty was a fiction, and all public servants were lying when they spoke of public duty, weren’t the politicians also public servants? Which meant they must also be lying when they proclaimed they were working for the public good.... By the second half of the 90s, even the politicians came to believe they were bad.... It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that [in] 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how. And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."
Shifty: Adam Curtis’s new show is an utter rarity: stylish, intelligent TV with something to say – review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. "Hello and welcome to the latest addition to Adam Curtis’s growing compendium of documentaries I have unofficially entitled How Did Things Get So Shit? Let Me Explain in a Weirdly Uplifting Manner. Previous volumes include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, HyperNormalisation, Can’t Get You Out of My Head and Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. Even if you have not had the challenging pleasure of watching, the titles alone should be enough to evoke most of the concerns found therein – the rise of individualism, the fragmentation of old systems, the political vacuums new people and powers have rushed to fill, the death rattle of formerly dependable entities on which western civilisation has traditionally rested and once allowed us to sleep peacefully at night, the creeping destabilisation of all things, and so very much on.... We stop before Brexit and Donald Trump, but it is clear how Curtis believes the seeds have been sown for all our current sorrows. Is the viewer persuaded? It depends where you start from, of course – I can’t speak for anyone who wasn’t already halfway there before kick-off as I was – and it will depend perhaps even more on how you feel about this most Marmite of film-makers. Now that I have learned to let his films wash over me, to pay attention but not drill down as they go, then wait and see how they work on my consciousness afterwards, I manage much better and admire much more. But perhaps that is partly a function of context too. It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then present stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now."
Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is you get out – interview by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a 'Slavicist', yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own.... In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, 'We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US'.... Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task, recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.... 'It’s all almost too stereotypical,' Shore reflects. 'A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,' she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. 'As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.' That response captures the double lens through which Shore sees the Trump phenomenon, informed by both the Third Reich and the 'neo-totalitarianism' exhibited most clearly in the Russia of Vladimir Putin.... [With the rise of Trump.] it was the lack of truthfulness that terrified her. 'Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil,' she says. Lying is essential to totalitarianism; she understood that from her scholarly research. But while Hitler and Stalin’s lies were in the service of some vast 'eschatological vision', the post-truth dishonesty of a Trump or Putin struck her as different. The only relevant criterion for each man is whether this or that act is 'advantageous or disadvantageous to him at any given moment. It’s pure, naked transaction.'... When Trump won again last November, there was no doubt in her mind. However bad things had looked in 2016, now was worse. 'So much had been dismantled … the guardrails, or the checks and balances, had systematically been taken down. The supreme court’s ruling on immunity; the failure to hold Trump accountable for anything, including the fact that he incited, you know, a violent insurrection on the Capitol, that he encouraged a mob that threatened to hang his vice-president, that he called up the Georgia secretary of state and asked him to find votes. I felt like we were in much more dangerous territory.'”
The big idea: should we embrace boredom? – article by Sophie McBain in The Guardian. "In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again. The study’s authors concluded that 'people prefer doing to thinking', even if the only thing available to do is painful – perhaps because, if left to their own devices, our minds tend to wander in unwanted directions. Since the mass adoption of smartphones, most people have been walking around with the psychological equivalent of a shock button in their pocket.... Smartphones have also increased the pressure to use our time productively, to optimise every minute of our lives.... Most psychologists studying boredom would agree that, while it can feel unpleasant, it’s useful. Like hunger or loneliness, it alerts us to a need, a desire to do something different.... When boredom strikes it should ideally serve as a prompt to do something more engaging or meaningful.... When boredom strikes, we should resist the urge to assuage it instantly and ask ourselves: are we in search of pure entertainment or something more purposeful, an opportunity to connect with friends or our community or something different, something new? The people who choose to embrace boredom, at least for a while, may paradoxically experience less of it. It could even be the first step towards a life that feels more stimulating overall: meaningful, creative and free."
Britons have just 23 hours of ‘genuinely free’ time a week: so much for labour-saving technology –article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "As the AI revolution heralds a new dawn – or living nightmare – in the world of work, I find my thoughts turning increasingly to Kellogg’s.... In 1930, the 'managed work reduction' movement – seeking to take advantage of the productivity gains enabled by automation to usher in a golden age of leisure – found an influential champion in WK Kellogg. Intrigued by the utopian possibilities, Kellogg opted to shorten his factory’s workday from eight hours to six, and increased daily shifts from three to four. The 30-hour working week was widely taken up by US business leaders as a smart and progressive strategy – not just protecting against the threat of mass unemployment caused by mechanisation, but also spreading the benefits.... By the 1932 US presidential election, the six-hour workday was the favoured solution to national unemployment, and hours were expected to continue to decline nationally....Today the dream of 'work reduction' is long dead, even forgotten. OECD data shows that the average time spent on leisure has decreased since the 1980s, even in economies (such as the UK’s) that have grown in that time.... A century ago, there was a collective desire and will to use technology to manage work, underpinned by the belief that leisure was akin to freedom. It was assumed that people would make choices to free up more time to spend with family, or on their hobbies. But that vision was tested – and eventually crushed – by the emerging view of progress as more money with which to buy more things, and of work as 'the centre of life'. The Kellogg’s workers eventually voted in 1983 to abandon the six-hour shift, swayed by the threat of redundancies – and the promise of pay rises. Overtime was widely seen as a fair trade-off for less leisure. As one dissenting employee put it: 'The work hogs won.'... I fear we are at a similar crossroads now. New technologies really could give us more free time, shift the locus of life and meaning away from work, and even restructure society towards recreation and connection; they will replace vast numbers of us in our jobs.... But if we don’t fight for our free time, we’ll just find more ways to waste it at work."
‘Poor management leads to fatal crushes’: how Glastonbury and others are dealing with big crowds – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. "With recent fatal crowd disasters ... music fans are understandably concerned about their safety at mass events. This has led to well-meaning but misguided explainers like that offered in a BBC video before 2023’s Notting Hill Carnival, titled 'how to stay safe in a crowd'. The common suggestions of what to do if you are caught in an uncomfortable level of crowd density – have an exit plan, hold your arms out, breathe deeply – 'mostly aren’t going to help', says social psychology professor John Drury, who does training in crowd psychology and behaviour for the events industry ... 'Focusing on individual behaviour and responsibility is misplaced,' he says. 'By the time the crowd is so dense that a crush is likely or is happening, it’s too late.' Really, this kind of advice only serves to deflect attention from event organisers, venue owners, site designers, security, local authorities, health and safety inspectors and the emergency services – all organisations with the professional expertise, not to mention legal responsibility, that an individual crowd member is lacking. 'The individuals within a crowd can’t possibly know what’s going on at the other end,' Drury continues. 'It is poor management that leads to fatal crushes. It’s still too common to blame the crowd for decisions that should have been made weeks beforehand.'... When crowd scientist Keith Still is called in to investigate a crowd disaster, ... the first two documents he asks to see are the risk assessment and the crowd management plan. 'The characteristics, the DNA of these accidents, are always the same,' Still says. 'Insufficient preparation, lack of staff training, lack of wayfinding, poor signage, and allowing the volume of people-flow to exceed capacity, or throughput. They inevitably tend to point the finger at the crowd being at fault, rather than asking: what were the underlying fundamentals?'”
Are we witnessing the death of international law? – article by Linda Kinstler in The Guardian. "The erosion of international law began long before Trump first took power in 2017. The relevance, and even the very existence, of international law has been up for debate since the moment it emerged almost two centuries ago. Its champions argue that it is the bulwark against another great war, a restraint against criminality and mass violence. Its critics argue that, far from shielding the world from the worst crimes, it has instead protected states by providing them with a language with which to justify their wrongs. International lawyers are themselves divided over whether their discipline is alive and well, in hibernation, in its death throes, or long ago deceased, a 'moral ghost' that hovers over the world map.... [The institutions in The Hague] are physical embodiments of the discipline known as 'international law', though scholars tend to disagree on what international law actually is.... But to speak of international law as merely a set of rules and agreements is to elide its function as the 'lingua franca of the international system', and as a means of expressing the belief that perpetrators of global crimes should be punished just as domestic offenders are, and (more often) of expressing incredulity when they are not. (International law has become the vernacular of the 'educated middle classes'[)] Today, there is a growing sense in the field that international criminal law is a failed project, 'a dead man walking'. Few of the lawyers I spoke with were willing to defend it without caveat. 'The gap between the aspirations of international criminal law and the reality for people on the ground is greater and greater,' said Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University. 'And that is a problem for the law, because law is supposed to achieve things in the real world.'... For critics of the field, the problem is not just that law doesn’t stop wars or protect civilians, but also that it offers a vocabulary for states to justify the unchecked use of force. ... For instance, international humanitarian law restricts the use of certain kinds of weapons, such as cluster bombs... That did not stop Israel, which first ratified the convention on certain conventional weapons in 1995, from deploying cluster bombs against a civilian population in 2006, during the Lebanon war. ... The Israeli military claimed that the use of cluster bombs was not a violation of international law, because they were focused on military targets and because the population of Beirut’s southern suburbs, an area called Dahiya, had been warned of the attack in advance.... For the Israeli legal scholar Itamar Mann, Dahiya felt like the beginning of the end of international law as a credible system for preventing atrocities. 'They weren’t just ignoring the rule: they were invoking it for the very purposes that it was supposed to limit or control,' he said. By attempting to justify a legally unjustified action in the language of international law, Israel made a mockery of the spirit and letter of the law."
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