The Lego Batman Movie – frenetic, clever and compassionate fun, like the Lego Movie made with the world’s largest (virtual) Lego set.
Wonder Woman soundtrack – top of the Classic FM chart for a couple of weeks in June, and much superior to the acoustic filler which you find on most film soundtracks these days. Definitely captures the Amazon spirit, with great use of drums.
Echo – podcast in the BBC’s Digital Human series. Interesting exploration of how technology can support – develop? improve? – inner dialogue, which of course is critical to advanced learning skills.
Digital Transformation - interview with David Egerton. I loved his Shock of the Old, calling into question the usual accounts of technology change, which he argues focus at the wrong time and place: too early, close to the time of discovery, and not on the technologies which people actually use. Here he argues we make ourselves ignorant by focusing on the digital. Sample: “The promoters of technology for many decades …have argued that we absolutely need this one, two or three new machines and that they will transform our world…. All that changes is the particular machine. So once the radio would bring the world together, later it was television and now it’s the Internet.…It’s extraordinary really that people still get away with giving the impression that this is an original story.”
Phil Spencer: Find Me a Home – neat twist on the usual TV property show in which Phil off Location Location Location tries to find homes for two families facing homelessness. Though not as naïve as he pretends to be for the programme (he’s patron of a homelessness charity), he was I think genuinely shocked to discover how many landlords will simply not let to people on benefits. Happy endings for the families, though in one case it was fairly clear they were successful only because they had Phil and a TV crew on their case.
Diana, Our mother: Her Life and Legacy – probably the best of the slew of TV programmes around the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, because it had her sons talking about things that could never be said at the time: for example, how weird it was to be amongst the crowds, having not to cry themselves while surrounded by all these people in tears who didn’t know her. If they were angry about that, they didn’t show it. True greatness.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman – beautifully conceived and written, but I think from the storytelling point of view Jane Goldman’s screenplay for the film has a better shape for the final act, as well as introducing the character of the cross-dressing pirate (a star turn for Robert de Niro).
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman – gripping and truly scary in places, taking its setting from Gaiman’s childhood and reminding me powerfully in numerous small ways of my own which must have been contemporaneous, though such exciting and awful things never happened to me. Like Alan Garner (whom he surely also read at that age?) he has a tremendous skill for combining the fantastic and uncanny with the realistic and everyday.
Inception – high-concept thriller, with a Mission Impossible style twisting turning storyline in which you know deceptions are being perpetrated but only find out what they are after they happen, and the plausible-looking (though totally unrealistic) theme of shared dreaming.
Old People’s Home for Four-Year-Olds – we know the mutual benefits old people and young people get from spending time together, but this was an interesting experiment of basing a primary school in an elderly care home, with shared activities including a sports day. Before and after measurements showed not only cognitive but physical improvement in the elderly people. Touching encounters too.
The Brain with David Eagleman – BBC TV series about the brain’s role in shaping and constructing our lives. Nothing new or unfamiliar to anyone who’s been around psychology the last forty years, but it’s well-explained and some of the filmed case studies are great.
My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 – one of the BBC’s programmes as part of the 70th anniversary commemorations (celebrations would be the wrong word). Basically this was ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with extreme prejudice, literally, with several current British citizens recovering the stories of their Muslim, Hindu and white British forebears through those dreadful days. I knew that there had been massive inter-community violence, but I’d not appreciated before the terrible genocidal spirit which took hold. Scary to realise just how quickly and easily a society can fall apart, as we’ve more recently seen in Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.
Despicable Me 2 – great joy, great fun, with the return of Gru, his adopted orphans and of course his minions, and the introduction of the brilliantly manic Lucy as his romantic partner. Had to see this before getting to see Despicable Me 3.
Diana: 7 days – interesting BBC documentary, covering the same extraordinary week as the fictional The Queen between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral.
Inspector Montalbano, series 4 – a welcome return, and although Salvo, Mimi and Fazio are all noticeably older, and there’s a new Livia, the stories are top quality, perhaps even better than before.
Richard Rohr on The World, the Flesh and the Devil – from Day 2 of the Center for Action and Contemplation conference CONSPIRE 2017. He’s a great presenter with an easy accessible manner and his webcasts are always worth watching, but this time he was really on fire. The theology behind his talk is expounded in one of his Daily Meditations, but it's not nearly as much fun as his talk!
Autoloon ethics training – an example of a branching scenario created by instructional designer Cathy Moore using Twine. Not only a great demonstration of how to build a dialogue choice scenario, but also an interesting exercise in learning design. How quickly can you find the optimal pathway? (I took several wrong turns.)
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics, by Richard H. Thaler – autobiographical account of how economists have reluctantly abandoned their theoretical premise that people make economic choices as though they were perfectly rational. For example, real people (as distinct from homini economici) count losses more than gains, pay attention to sunk costs, and don’t necessarily have the willpower to carry out their best decision even if they can work out what it is. All this had practical application, in the US and with the UK’s “nudge unit”, devising policies to "influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves". I wonder if our distance learning teaching methods aren’t similarly based on a premise of ideal rational learners, and whether there are similar “nudges” we should be applying when presenting learners with choices?
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco – global trans-historical conspiracy novel involving the Knights Templar, originally published in English in 1988 and suffering now from eclipse by The Da Vinci Code which did much the same thing but in a more accessible way (less complex, fewer footnotes). Some touching moments, but I do find irritating Eco’s habit of downloading all his research onto the pages of the book (a feature of The Name of the Rose also).
The Keeper of Lost Things, by Ruth Hogan – starts like chicklit, but then becomes something richer, deeper and cleverer, with multiple interconnected plot strands.
Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? – fascinating exhibition at the Wellcome Museum for the History of Medicine, with examples ranging from health education (including the “AIDS – Don’t die of ignorance” campaign) to hospital signage. Spoiler alert: the answer is Yes.
Barley, sung by Lizz Wright – a simple, tender, defiant song, beautifully performed.
Tuesday, 3 October 2017
Cuttings: September 2017
Active learning and teaching in online spaces - blog post from the University of Northampton learning technology team. "There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students. (1) Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ... (2) Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ... (3) Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Managing the complexity of branching scenarios - blog post by Christy Tucker. "One of the issues with branching scenarios is that you can get exponential growth. If each choice has 3 options, you end up with 9 slides after just 2 choices, and 27 after 3 choices. This is 40 pages total with only 3 decisions per path. For most projects, that’s more complexity than you want or need. So how do you manage this complexity? (1) Use Twine.... Twine makes it very easy to draft scenarios and check how all the connections flow together.... Cathy Moore has an example of a scenario she built in Twine. This scenario has 57 total decision points, but it only took her 8 hours to create. (2) Planning a scenario. ... I usually have an idea of how long the ideal or perfect path will be. If you have a multi-step process, that’s your ideal path. If there’s going to be 4 decision points on the shortest path, I know what those are before I start writing. I also usually know at least some of the decision points based on errors or mistakes I need to address. (3) Allow opportunities to fix mistakes. One trick for managing the potentially exponential growth is by giving learners a chance to get back on the right path if they make a minor error. If they make 2 or 3 errors in a row, they get to an ending and have to restart the whole thing.... (4) Make some paths shorter.... (5) Gook, OK and bad. In branching scenarios, not everything is as black and white as a clear-cut right or wrong answer. You can have good, OK, and bad choices and endings...."
Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway’ - interview by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "Did he get the impression these positions [such as climate change denial] were held partly as a way to punish condescending liberals? 'Well, I do think there’s some of that; this idea that the elite is now the educated class, rather than the wealthy class, so you’ve got a government with more billionaires in it than ever in history, but we’re the elite – journalists and college professors and novelists, not the ones with private planes and beach front properties in the Bahamas. It’s a weird time.' "
I’m like a happy four-year-old with a picture - article by Coralie Bickford-Smith in The Guardian, in the series 'My Writing Day'. "I was making The Worm and The Bird, and had taken a sabbatical from Penguin for three months to finish what I had started.... But all I dreamed about was finishing, and my time was evaporating into nothing. I had lost all my joy from the process of creating. The child in me was constantly asking 'are we there yet?' I became anxious. My sister Abigail called to quell my rising panic; she had read an article about Seneca and I recalled a biography of his for which I’d recently designed a cover. Something clicked. The error of my ways became obvious. I was not in the moment, far away from the present. ... I found the joy of creating again and I forgot about the finish line. It became apparent that I was making the same mistakes in living my daily life as I was in the process of creating a book. I made a choice to be more present in the moment, not just at work but in my life as a whole."
Laugh a minute: six short plays by Michael Frayn - from his Pocket Playhouse. "Hymns Ancient and Modern. From the Morning Post, 23 November 1893. Cable and telegraph offices were overwhelmed last night by the flood of tributes pouring in from fans all over the world to the Reverend Francis Giffard Smith, the legendary creator of some of the best loved and most groundbreaking hymns of the 19th century, who died yesterday aged 57 after a long battle with depression and incense addiction. His 1861 hit 'God’s Gas' was the first Church of England hymn to sell a million copies worldwide. Its words – 'Lord, fill us with Thy heaven’ly gas, / Like street-lights in the dark, / Then like the lamp-lighter supply / The municipal spark!' – spoke to people of all classes and none."
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud: innocence and loss - review by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian. "Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally, as it was in 2013 for middle-class white kids of the electronic age in America. The shining goals are wealth and success, but the jobs offered to the young are nanny, barista, waitress, janitor. Work is seldom presented to them as something to be done for its own sake; purpose doesn’t mean much. These kids are likely to see their lives not as a continuity of being with an imaginable past and an imaginable future, but as a rapid succession of unrelated events without history and without promise. And therefore without hope.... Painful as it may be, this is a hard book to stop reading. Messud is a story teller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of the art of novel-writing, but it’s the beginning and the end of it.... When I was about 15, an excellent teacher put in my hands Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s lyrical novel of doomed adolescence. At that age of course I swallowed all the romanticism of Meaulnes’ mysterious domain and wanted only more. More than 70 years later, I hopefully followed these two girls seeking their own mysterious domain in an abandoned mental hospital, even if I knew only too well that all the romance was imagined, and that any attempt to return to it would end in tragedy."
How do we get out of this mess? - article by George Moniot in The Guardian, based on his book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. "Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. ... You cannot take away someone’s story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace one story with another."
Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, Review, 9 September 2017, p 12. "TL:DR - Too long: didn't read. VS: SDR - Very short: still didn't read. SR:PW - Should read: probably won't. RB:GB - Read a bit: got bored. SR:MP - Skim-read: missed point. RH:PAC - Read headline - posted angry comments."
Bread for All: how Britain is regressing to the early 19th century - review by Stefan Collinin in The Guardian. "The story of Beveridge and his report and Aneurin Bevan and his National Health Service is by now a familiar and impressive one, and Renwick retells it well. There is, however, a deeper level that can be excavated, which is to explore how the practical concern to alleviate or prevent the sufferings of the poor came to be bound up with – and, intellectually, to depend on – two conceptual breakthroughs that are among the salient achievements of the age. The first hugely consequential intellectual advance was the development of macro-economics and the idea that the state was in some sense responsible for managing the economy as a whole.... The second crucial conceptual achievement was the working out of the rationale for progressive taxation. This, too, was essentially a New Liberal not a socialist idea. Socialism was focused on achieving social justice through nationalisation of the means of production and the redistribution, or even confiscation, of large concentrations of wealth. The argument about progressive taxation, by contrast, rested on the insight that the achievements of individuals, including their financial rewards, were always dependent on the collective operation of society and social experience, whether in the form of infrastructure, public order and the legal system, or shared knowledge, cultural resources and moral attitudes.... One enormously valuable effect of the New Liberal argument was to cast doubt on the absoluteness of the everyday distinction between public and private money. We now get in a great lather when individuals are paid sums of “'public money', while we tacitly accept the vastly greater rewards of executives and financiers because that is 'private money'. But it’s not. All such wealth is in part socially created, and there is no intellectually reputable defence for the astronomical 'rents' that figures in the corporate and banking worlds extract from their advantageous positions."
Monday, 4 September 2017
Re-blog: active learning and teaching in online spaces
I know what a re-tweet is, but is there such a thing as a re-blog? Well, here's one anyway.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
I've just read a very thoughtful and practical blog post by the learning design team at the University of Northampton, which they kindly make publicly available although it is clearly primarily intended for their own immediate academic colleagues. Here are the key points; read the original post for the full version.
There are some tips that can help you think about how to ... make online learning a rewarding experience for you and your students.
Transparent pedagogy and clear expectations. Recent research with our students highlighted that they don’t always feel prepared for independent study, and often come to university expecting to ‘be taught’ rather than to have to work things out for themselves (the full report can be downloaded here). ... So how do you avoid students feeling like they’ve been ‘palmed off’ with online activities, when national level research tells us that many applicants expect to get more class time than they had at school? It’s worth setting time aside early on to have frank conversations about how learning works at university level, and about how the module will work, but also about why those choices have been made. ...
Building relationships. A key element of success in any learning environment is trust. This doesn’t just mean students trusting in you as the subject expert, and trusting that the work you’re asking them to do is purposeful and worthwhile (see above). It also means trusting that your classroom (whether physical or online) is a safe space to ask questions, and that feedback from peers as well as from you will be constructive and respectful. ...
Clarity, guidance, instructions, modelling. Last but by no means least, with online learning it helps to remember that students need to learn the method as well as the matter. A well-organised NILE site, clear instructions and links to further help will go a long way, but nothing beats modelling. Setting aside time in your face to face sessions to walk through online activities and address questions will save you lots of time in the long run....(Read more)
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Cuttings: August 2017
The Fear and the Freedom by Keith Lowe: the moral surprises of the second world war - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As a historian of the modern era, Lowe enjoys an enormous advantage over scholars who write about more distant epochs: he is able – for the moment at least – to draw into his writing the experiences of those who lived through the conflict. Perhaps no historian since Gitta Sereny, in The German Trauma, has grasped that opportunity as firmly as Lowe, or done so much with it. As every journalist knows, the art of the interview rests on two principles: asking the right questions and putting them to the right people. With journalistic nous, Lowe has assembled a remarkable chorus of voices and asks the most probing of questions. Their testimony, combined with the author’s pointed analysis, elevates a laudable volume into a very readable and startling book.... It has been said that the most impressive and worrying features of human behaviour is our capacity to adapt to the most terrible of circumstances.... Yet the testimony in these pages demonstrates that adaptation to the extremes and horrors of war was made possible only by the forging of myth. Both combatants and civilians came to define the war as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, or as a conflict that would save future generations from the abyss. This myth was an essential tool of survival. Now it is an obstacle to a proper understanding of how this most terrible of all wars continues to shape our lives."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
Labour is right: social mobility is not a good goal for education - article by Selina Todd in The Guardian. "In the postwar years, opportunities in the professions and other well-paid, secure jobs expanded, benefiting huge numbers of people. But today, social mobility means a scramble for the few jobs that offer security.... social mobility reinforces social inequality. Policymakers inaccurately equate the two, but the social mobility agenda assumes we’re stuck with a hierarchical society. Its supporters uncritically accept that there are 'top' universities – the Russell Group – and 'leading professions', defined by Greening as law, medicine and banking (notably, education, meant to deliver so much, isn’t a sector that the talented are encouraged to enter)."
Rulers, Religion and Riches by Jared Rubin: why the west got rich - review by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian. "500 years ago the west was no richer than the far east, while 1,000 years ago, the Islamic world was more developed than Christian Europe in everything from mathematics to philosophy, engineering to technology, agriculture to medicine... By 1600, however, the Islamic world had fallen behind western Europe, and for centuries the Middle East has been beset by slow growth, persistent poverty and seemingly intractable social problems. North-western Europe, by contrast, became the richest corner of the world, the hub of industrialisation and globalisation. In this sweeping and provocative book, the economic historian Jared Rubin asks how such a dramatic reversal of fortunes came about. Rubin has no time for those who see the answer in any supposed 'backwardness' of the Muslim faith. The successes of medieval Islam alone show that there is nothing against progress in its religious doctrine... By getting 'religion out of politics', Europe made space at the political 'bargaining table' for economic interests, creating a virtuous cycle of 'pro-growth' policy-making. Islamic rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and military elites who backed them. The source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in ideas and authority spread by ... the printing press.... Rubin argues that the Dutch revolt against Catholic Spain and the English crown’s 'search for alternative sources of legitimacy' after breaking with Rome empowered the Dutch and English parliaments: by the 1600s both countries were ruled by parliamentary governments that included economic elites. Their policies – such as promoting trade and protecting property rights – were conducive to broader economic progress. Decoupling religion from politics had created space for 'pro-commerce' interests."
Lone Echo - review in Adventure Gamers. "Virtual reality has forced developers to learn to walk all over again – often literally, as they rethink concepts as simple as basic movement. ... Lone Echo is set aboard a space station, letting players move freely, unbound by gravity. But instead of spinning around with thrusters (a mechanic that left many feeling dizzy and sick), Lone Echo lets you reach out and touch the world. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, you can grab walls, pull yourself along, and push off to float free though space. You can finesse your trajectory with wrist-mounted boosters, but even here, everything is in your hands. This simple mechanic manages to reconcile the biggest conflict facing VR design, providing both incredible freedom and a high degree of comfort.... Lone Echo casts you as 'Jack,' a service android aboard the Kronos II mining station orbiting Saturn, [and] de-facto companion to the station’s sole human, Captain Olivia Rhodes. ... After an unexplained anomaly knocks out several of the station’s systems, Jack and Olivia scramble to repair the damage and investigate the mysterious phenomenon.... You’ll interact with the world using a basic set of tools: a data scanner, a plasma cutter, and, of course, your hands. ... Jack’s relationship with Captain Rhodes is at the heart of this tale, and it’s clear that Ready At Dawn has put in a tremendous amount of effort to ensure players bond with her. ... Immersive mechanics; an intimate, character-driven story; and a detailed, believable world all come together to create an experience I could genuinely lose myself in. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for a sequel before another game gets VR this right.
‘When a man is tired of Milton Keynes, he is tired of life’ says my dad - article by Richard Macer in The Guardian. "The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to. One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town.... Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London. The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names. ... When I left Milton Keynes at 18, I felt I had somehow outgrown the place but I see now that I was lucky to have been part of such a remarkable project. Not for one minute had it occurred to me that my hometown was arguably the greatest feat of social engineering ever undertaken."
Historical myopia is to blame for the attacks on Mary Beard - article by Christopher Kissane in The Guardian's 'Reformation 2017' series. "Historical research and analysis is a seditious rejection of those who seek to control the past in order to shape the future, and a vital antidote to a world without a perspective to match its challenges. History is too important to be antiquarian window-dressing, nationalist mythology or populist propaganda. We need a reformation of our relationship with the past, a radical shift to place understanding history at the heart of how we think about our world."
Friday, 4 August 2017
Cuttings: July 2017
Do not adjust your set: 50 years of colour TV: from tennis and ties to petals and plumage - article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "What’s distinctive about the history of British colour TV is that the switchover was directly responsible for the creation of certain genres that dominate the medium to this day. As the technology was experimental, the corporation decided to trial it on the newcomer, BBC2, which in 1967 was run by David Attenborough. He embraced the new palette, not least because he understood at once its possibilities for his type of broadcasting. Life on Earth, Paradise Birds and The Private Life of Plants would hardly have been worth making if viewers were unable to see the glories of plumage, pelts and petals. It is no coincidence that Gardeners’ World will celebrate its 50th birthday in January next year either... But Attenborough, one of the true visionaries of early TV, was not just looking out for his own genre. He saw at once that two types of content – arts and sport – could now be fully born through the coming of colour.... green seems to have been the primary colour of Britain’s early efforts in the new technology: the grass of Centre Court and Percy Thrower’s garden, the baize of snooker tables, lush French nature in the paintings of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir."
‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."
Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."
Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."
The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "
Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."
Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"
‘Fear of Looking Stupid’: Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods - article by David Matthews for Times Higher Education. "Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.... Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews....One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that 'a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.' But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their 'personal identity affirmation' -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ 'No. 1 challenge' was to make sure that they were 'not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.' Herckis also found that many academics clung to a 'very strong' idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975." (Search for Global Learning Council Summit 2017 "lauren herckis" for more.)
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal – review by Matthew Cobb in The Guardian. "Virtually every characteristic that has been claimed to be uniquely human has eventually turned out to have some kind of a precursor in a close relative. As De Waal explains in a series of engaging accounts, language, self-recognition, tool making, empathy, co-operative behaviour, mental time-travel, culture and many other traits and abilities have turned out not to be exclusively human. This is hardly surprising, given that we evolved from an ape ancestor not so long ago: we share behaviour with our relatives, just as we share anatomy.... De Waal does not explore the underlying processes producing the complex and intriguing behaviours described here: we know very little about them. Instead, he focuses on observations and behavioural experiments from the growing field of evolutionary cognition. These allow us to peer into the minds of non-human animals – mainly social animals such as primates and corvids (crows and their relatives), but also dolphins, elephants and one invertebrate, which differs from the others not only in its anatomy but also in its solitary behaviour: the octopus."
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil: trouble with algorithms - review by P D Smith in The Guardian. "Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives."
Whose Speech Is Chilled by Surveillance? - article by Jonathon W. Penney, on Slate. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "My findings suggested that once people were made aware of different online threats, they were less willing to engage in a range of activities online. For example, when made aware of online surveillance by the government, noteworthy percentages of respondents were less likely to speak or write about certain things online, less likely to share personally created content, less likely to engage with social media, and more cautious in their internet speech or search. In other words, there was a clear chilling effect.... My statistical findings also suggest a greater chilling effect on women and younger internet users. In every scenario examined, I found a statistically significant age effect: The younger the participant, the greater the chilling effect. This association was strongest in the scenario involving government surveillance.... I also found female internet users in the study were more likely to be chilled in scenarios involving surveillance and personal legal threats for content posted online, with the statistical association strongest in the latter scenario. Besides being more often the victims of online harassment, my findings suggest women may also be more negatively affected when targeted with legal and regulatory threats."
Emmanuel Macron’s official portrait is a symbolic celebration of centrism - article by Anne Quito and David Yanofsky in Quartz, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "With a two-word tweet, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his official portrait yesterday. Taken in his office at the Élysée Palace 46 days after being sworn into office, the 39-year-old centrist’s striking portrait is a masterclass in soft-power symbolism.... Working with his official photographer, Soazig De La Moissonnière, Macron carefully planned the location, pose, props, and publicity for the portrait, which will decorate the walls some 50,000 French government outposts around the world. In the tradition of power portraiture in art history, the so-called 'Jupiterian president' carefully chose props that hint at his personality and underscore his centrist politics. Every detail matters."
The party’s over: how tuition fees ruined university life - article by Paula Cocozza in The Guardian. "It seems very strange that students should be seen as both demanding consumers and timid thinkers. But perhaps one leads to the other. Certainly [one] English literature tutor believes that 'there is a customer entitlement that erodes students’ sense of personal entitlement'. So even as they demand more of the service, they are 'more submissive to the institution'. There is 'an alliance of subjugation', he says, in which 'they feel they have got to do what’s asked of them, and we feel we have to help them achieve what’s asked of them. It makes me quite sad. I want a student who says: ‘Are you sure about that? Why do you think that?’ But those are fewer and further apart.' "
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield: luxury communism, anyone? - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, 'time has been diced into the segments between notifications') with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. It’s about what Greenfield calls 'the colonisation of everyday life by information processing', and this new colonialism, in the author’s view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokémon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhone’s operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or the world of increasingly networked objects... What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures – just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk.... Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warn progressives against technological utopianism. 'Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hype is couched in superficially appealing language.' "
Drama queens: why it’s all about women and power on screen right now - "Superhero movies are conspicuously fables about power: they are preoccupied with its sources, how to control it, how to justify it. They are the fantasies of superpowers. What made Wonder Woman seem so different, and such a pleasure to so many viewers, was that its story remained focused throughout on the question of women’s relationship to power. Made by and starring women, the film has been a global blockbuster, giving the franchise commercial power, which is the only kind Hollywood pays attention to; but the film itself has provoked a debate over what this allegory of female power is actually saying. Meanwhile, one of the year’s most-discussed television series was also about women and power, albeit in a far less celebratory mode. The Handmaid’s Tale asks explicit questions about what happens in a totalitarian patriarchal society that denies women access to all economic, legal and political rights. And now Game of Thrones, which is equally interested in women and power, has finally premiered its seventh series to its tenterhooked fans.... Countless words of journalism have debated whether Game of Thrones is feminist or misogynist; that either supposedly mutually exclusive position can be persuasively argued should suggest something of the show’s complexity. ... Watching Game of Thrones play out the storylines of all its varied, fascinating women, in other words, is like watching the culture do battle with its own ideas about women: overt misogyny, internalised misogyny, at least three waves of feminism and post-feminism are all fighting it out before our eyes. It is by no means clear who, or what, will win. What we see is what the struggle over women and power looks like.... While there is a tiny bit of hocus-pocus, most of the supernatural power in Game of Thrones is prosthetic, rather than symbolic. Women don’t have internal magical power, because they operate in a recognisably realistic political world – but they can acquire power externally (from dragons, potions, weapons or gods). And any power will do. In one of the best moments of the entire six series so far, Cersei is informed by an enemy that knowledge is power. With a signal, she has her guards put a sword to his throat before correcting him: 'Power is power.' Game of Thrones is not a story about dragons. It is a story about power."
Cast adrift - article by Ellen E. Jones in The Guardian Guide (29.7.17, pp 14-17). "The Handmaid's Tale, a bracingly up-to-date screen adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel, has been praised for its cinematic visuals and compelling central performance from Elisabth Moss as handmaid Offred, but one element remains controversial: the inclusion of race without the depiction of racism. It's this that New York Magazine has described as the show's 'greatest failing'. ... 'The reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies,' wrote actor and rapper Riz Ahmed in the Guardian last year. 'Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth it exports is of a racial melting-pot, everyone solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.'"
Monday, 3 July 2017
Seen and heard: April to June 2017
The Sense of an Ending – lovely, compassionate (but not cosy) film, from a Julian Barnes novel, played with down-to-earth style by Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter and Charlotte Rampling, and excellently suitable for anyone of advancing years given to looking back at their life.
How To Be Both – novel by Ali Smith, notable for its two halves being readable in either order. My order seemed perfectly natural, and I can’t imagine it working so well in reverse – but I gather than people who read them the other way round feel like that too. There’s supposed to be a point here about apparently distinct times, for example 'before' and 'after', being more entangled and simultaneous than we usually credit. I’m not sure I came away more aware of that than I was already, but it was certainly an enjoyable excursion.
Madonnas and miracles – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, cleverly dressing a gallery to evoke rooms in a renaissance house, so that the artworks could be displayed in a setting at least suggestive of their original context. Unfortunately – as I heard a Benedictine monk comment – what was missing was the faith context, which was only described in objective terms, and how meaningful can that be unless you at least temporarily and imaginatively enter into the relevant spiritual world in which a rosary, say, has actual and living power?
Patience – Gilbert and Sullivan performed by English Touring Opera. Good clean fun for all the family. I’d forgotten the bit where the male chorus of soldiers have to get themselves up like artistic ponces to woo their girlfriends, who’ve entirely gone over to the aesthetic movement. Troubled by the female grotesque character, though, who I realise is a sexist recurrence in the G&S operas.
Rogue One – entertaining Star Wars prequel. I particularly liked the way (spoiler) everyone gets killed at the end, like in Blackadder. Except for Darth Vader, of course, he just carries on and on and on.
Their Finest – amusing, touching and understated very British film, rather like the WW2 morale-boosting film whose making it depicts. Class acts from Bill Nighy and Gemma Aterton.
Pina – beautiful film by Wim Wenders, watched on video, featuring the stunning and imaginative choreography of Pina Bausch.
Naturally 7, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ - performing on Later with Jools Holland. Amazing a capella.
The Journey – bold imagining of the conversations through which Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley went from being mortal enemies to the best of buddies, here compressed into a single long car journey together. Very convincing performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, and agreeable comic relief from Toby Stephens who plays Tony Blair like Hugh Grant.
The Conversations – transcripts of four long conversations between master film editor Walter Murch and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. Illuminating and inspirational on all kinds of issues to do with film editing and sound design, with stories from The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.
Broken – TV drama by Jimmy McGovern. Misery television at its finest: completely depressing subject matter, poverty and social conflict in a northern town, made into totally compelling viewing because of the vivid and compassionate portrayal of the characters, all anchored by Sean Bean’s humane and decent Catholic priest.
Old Man’s Journey – beautiful, meditative top-rated iPad game, in which you lead the titular old man across a sequence of landscapes towards a destination which is initially unknown, though the reminiscences which appear every time he sits down to rest gradually build up a picture of his life story.
The Art of Japanese Life –BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, as beautiful and ennobling as you’d expect, but so meditative that I don’t think I got through a single episode without falling asleep.
How To Be Both – novel by Ali Smith, notable for its two halves being readable in either order. My order seemed perfectly natural, and I can’t imagine it working so well in reverse – but I gather than people who read them the other way round feel like that too. There’s supposed to be a point here about apparently distinct times, for example 'before' and 'after', being more entangled and simultaneous than we usually credit. I’m not sure I came away more aware of that than I was already, but it was certainly an enjoyable excursion.
Madonnas and miracles – exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, cleverly dressing a gallery to evoke rooms in a renaissance house, so that the artworks could be displayed in a setting at least suggestive of their original context. Unfortunately – as I heard a Benedictine monk comment – what was missing was the faith context, which was only described in objective terms, and how meaningful can that be unless you at least temporarily and imaginatively enter into the relevant spiritual world in which a rosary, say, has actual and living power?
Patience – Gilbert and Sullivan performed by English Touring Opera. Good clean fun for all the family. I’d forgotten the bit where the male chorus of soldiers have to get themselves up like artistic ponces to woo their girlfriends, who’ve entirely gone over to the aesthetic movement. Troubled by the female grotesque character, though, who I realise is a sexist recurrence in the G&S operas.
Rogue One – entertaining Star Wars prequel. I particularly liked the way (spoiler) everyone gets killed at the end, like in Blackadder. Except for Darth Vader, of course, he just carries on and on and on.
Their Finest – amusing, touching and understated very British film, rather like the WW2 morale-boosting film whose making it depicts. Class acts from Bill Nighy and Gemma Aterton.
Pina – beautiful film by Wim Wenders, watched on video, featuring the stunning and imaginative choreography of Pina Bausch.
Naturally 7, ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’ - performing on Later with Jools Holland. Amazing a capella.
The Journey – bold imagining of the conversations through which Martin McGuiness and Ian Paisley went from being mortal enemies to the best of buddies, here compressed into a single long car journey together. Very convincing performances from Colm Meaney and Timothy Spall, and agreeable comic relief from Toby Stephens who plays Tony Blair like Hugh Grant.
The Conversations – transcripts of four long conversations between master film editor Walter Murch and novelist, Michael Ondaatje. Illuminating and inspirational on all kinds of issues to do with film editing and sound design, with stories from The Godfather, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient.
Broken – TV drama by Jimmy McGovern. Misery television at its finest: completely depressing subject matter, poverty and social conflict in a northern town, made into totally compelling viewing because of the vivid and compassionate portrayal of the characters, all anchored by Sean Bean’s humane and decent Catholic priest.
Old Man’s Journey – beautiful, meditative top-rated iPad game, in which you lead the titular old man across a sequence of landscapes towards a destination which is initially unknown, though the reminiscences which appear every time he sits down to rest gradually build up a picture of his life story.
The Art of Japanese Life –BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, as beautiful and ennobling as you’d expect, but so meditative that I don’t think I got through a single episode without falling asleep.
Cuttings: June 2017
Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins: ‘People really thought that only men loved action movies’ -
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"
Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."
Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."
Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."
Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)
Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."
Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."
interview by Hermione Hoby in The Guardian. "In one scene, Diana annihilates an enemy sniper, and takes out the better part of an ancient church. After a suitably suspenseful pause, our heroine emerges, straddles the wreckage, and patiently grants the camera some adoring seconds on her immaculate face. Watching this, I was overcome with the perfection of her liquid eyeliner. I tell Jenkins as much and she laughs uproariously. Was it important to her that Diana look gorgeous at all times? 'Absolutely. As I always say, it would be more practical if Batman were built like a very small rock climber, it would be much easier to get into spaces, to do all kinds of things. Well, that’s not your fantasy. Your fantasy is he’s unreasonably big and built. Good. My fantasy is that I could wake up looking amazing, that I could be strong and stop the bully but that everybody would love me too. I think that’s intrinsic to fantasy – fantasy is fantasy.'"
Jeremy Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war against the ruling elite - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "The British ruling elite and the business class are not the same entity. They have different interests. The British elite are in fact quite detached from the interests of people who do business here. They have become middle men for a global elite of hedge fund managers, property speculators, kleptocrats, oil sheikhs and crooks. It was in the interests of the latter that Theresa May turned the Conservatives from liberal globalists to die-hard Brexiteers.... When most socialists treated the working class as a kind of bee colony – pre-programmed to perform its historical role – Gramsci said: everyone is an intellectual. Even if a man is treated as 'trained gorilla' at work, outside work 'he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste ... has a conscious line of moral conduct'. [Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks] On this premise, Gramsci told the socialists of the 1930s to stop obsessing about the state – and to conduct a long, patient trench warfare against the ideology of the ruling elite."
Baileys prize winner Naomi Alderman on fame, Trump and Wonder Woman - interview by Alex Clark in The Guardian. "Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC.... The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel... A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. ... In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that 'my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.' She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept."
Being Wagner by Simon Callow: what makes Wagner so controversial? - review by Thomas Laqueur in The Guardian. "This book grew out of the research Simon Callow did for a play, Inside Wagner’s Head, which he wrote for the composer’s bicentenary in 2012. What was it about this man, he asked himself, that made him so controversial – in his day and since? It is an actor’s book and he came up with an actor’s answer: his subject’s 'demiurgic personality'.... In this book, as in the 2012 play, Callow is still engaged with what was going on inside Wagner’s head – 'What was it like to be Richard Wagner?' But he expands on that question here: 'What was it like to be with Richard Wagner?' And, more revealing, 'What was it like to become Richard Wagner?' It is a book about the production of a man for whom 'self-dramatisation was his essential mode' and who, in his autobiography My Life, set the standard."
Tiananmen Square: the silences left by the massacre - article by Madeleine Thien in The Guardian. "Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.... The poet Bei Dao wrote: 'Life’s only a promise / Don’t grieve for it / We knocked down midnight’s door / alone like a match polished into light.' Today, 27 years later, even the words yesterday and tomorrow are so politically charged, they disappear." (Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien was shortlisted for the Baileys prize.)
Blooming marvellous: the world's first female photographer and her botanical beauties - "Anna Atkins is considered to have been the first female photographer. She was born in Kent in 1799, and she made her most significant contribution across 10 years in the mid-19th century in which she created at least 10,000 images by hand. But it was what she did with those pictures that gave her a place in art history. Atkins realised what millions of social media users know today: that images are for sharing. She created the first book to contain photographs, and she paved the way for photography’s power to connect people.... It was Atkins’s interest in the study of algae that prompted her book. She was so disappointed by the lack of illustrations in a guide to British algae published in 1841 that she decided to do something about it. In the autumn of 1843 she began work on creating images of hundreds of different types, using Herschel’s cyanotype method. It was a meticulous task whose skill rested in working quickly to assemble the dried algae arrangement, before leaving the paper exposed to sunlight for precisely the right amount of time."
Essayism by Brian Dillon: pure creativity on the page - "Dillon himself is a superbly varied essayist; the author of a range of books about photography, hypochondriacs, the great explosion at a munitions factory in Faversham, Kent, in 1916, and another written in 24 hours called I Am Sitting in a Room, his lines of inquiry are the body and its afflictions, contemporary art and literature, the history of place and ruins. He has a natural affinity for the essay 'as a kind of conglomerate: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things'. Lists are a wonderful tactic of essayism – consider Georges Perec’s astonishing lists in Species of Spaces, from the food and drink he consumed in 1974 to the objects on his desk. Dillon helps us see, via Joan Didion in The White Album, the list as incomplete, the very act of making a list a gesture at what cannot be listed or will always be left out: 'the list, if it’s doing its job, always leaves something to be invented or recalled, something forgotten in the moment of its making'."
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