Cuttings: November 2019

If we’re serious about changing the world, we need a better kind of economics to do it – article by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, joint winners of the 2019 Nobel prize in economic science, in The Guardian. "We need to understand what undermines trust in economists. Part of the problem is that there is plenty of bad economics around. The self-proclaimed economists on TV and in the press – chief economist of Bank X or Firm Y – are, with important exceptions, primarily spokespeople for their firms’ economic interests, who often feel free to ignore the weight of the evidence.... Another part of the problem is that, especially in the UK and the US, a lot of the economics that has filtered into government thinking is the most beholden to orthodoxy, and the least able to pay attention to any fact that does not square with it.... But good economics is much less strident, and quite different. It is less like the hard sciences and more like engineering or plumbing: it breaks big problems into manageable chunks and tries to solve them with a pragmatic approach – a combination of intuition and theory, trial and acknowledged errors. ... We have spent our careers studying the poor, trying to apply this kind of experimental approach to the problems they face. Instead of relying on our intuition, or that of others, we set up large-scale, rigorous randomised controlled trials to understand what works, what does not work, and why. We are not alone: this movement has taken hold in economics. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the network we co-founded in 2013, has 400 affiliated or invited researchers, and together they have finished or are working on nearly a thousand projects on topics as different as the impact of sleep on productivity and happiness, and the role of incentives for tax collectors."

Now we have proof: the government used your money to lie about poor people – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Early this summer, a national newspaper published a string of curious articles. Under the logo Universal Credit Uncovered, the features promised readers of the Metro the truth about this most notorious of all benefits. The series began with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the paper, coupled with a four-page spread right in its centre, and continued week upon week for nine weeks.... Throughout its campaign, the DWP would summarise what it called 'Myths' about universal credit and then give readers the 'Facts'. The [Advertising Standards Authority] looked at three of the claims – and found they weren’t facts at all. They were lies, told by the government to its own taxpayers. In big letters, the DWP boasted that 'people move into work faster on Universal Credit than they did on the old system'. After poring over the statistics, the ASA has found this claim 'did not reflect the evidence … had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading'. 'If you need money,' readers were assured, 'your Jobcentre will urgently pay you an advance.' In its ruling, the ASA takes the government to task for not making it clear that this is only a loan and that the vast majority of claimants will have to wait five weeks for their first UC payment. Finally, the adverts’ claim that 'your Jobcentre can pay rent directly to landlords' was again found to be misleading because it only applies to a small number of claimants. It is no small thing for a watchdog to face down the government in such an uncompromising fashion. Yet at the end of its remarkable judgment, there is something even more startling. The DWP is told that in future it must have 'adequate evidence to substantiate the claims in their advertising, to include significant conditions [where the claims don’t apply], and to present significant conditions clearly'. The regulator has been forced to advise the Conservative government to tell the truth."

How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash – article by Rana Foroohar in The Guardian, extracted from her book Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech. See also review by John Naughton in The Observer. "[The economist] Zoltan Pozsar [in a report for Credit Suisse] forensically analysed the $1tn in corporate savings parked in offshore accounts, mostly by big tech firms. The largest and most intellectual-property-rich 10% of companies – Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) among them – controlled 80% of this hoard. According to Pozsar’s calculations, most of that money was held not in cash but in bonds – half of it in corporate bonds. The much-lauded overseas 'cash' pile held by the richest American companies ... was actually a giant bond portfolio. And it was owned not by banks or mutual funds, which typically have such large financial holdings, but by the world’s biggest technology firms. In addition to being the most profitable and least regulated industry on the planet, the Silicon Valley giants had also become systemically crucial within the marketplace, holding assets that – if sold or downgraded – could topple the markets themselves. Hiding in plain sight was an amazing new discovery: big tech, not big banks, was the new too-big-to-fail industry."

Quote of the day – John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, who had convinced them that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”

History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. ... A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These 'secular cycles' last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s... The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist. For the first few decades of his career, Peter Turchin had used sophisticated maths to show how the interactions of predators and prey produce oscillations in animal populations in the wild,... but by the late 1990s he ... found himself drawn to history instead: could the rise and fall of human societies also be captured by a handful of variables and some differential equations?... Turchin’s approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. [He also had the work of] Jack Goldstone, ... a mathematician-turned-historian... At the time Goldstone began his research, in the mid-70s, the prevailing view of revolution was best understood as a form of class conflict. But Goldstone made two observations that did not fit that view. First, individuals from the same classes, or even the same families, often ended up fighting on opposite sides. And second, revolutions had clustered in certain periods of history ... but there was no obvious reason why class tensions should have boiled over in those periods and not in others.... Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. ... It was a simple model, and Goldstone acknowledged as much. Although he could show that high Ψ predicted historical revolutions, he had no way of predicting what came next. That depended on the precise combination of the three components of Ψ, and on how they interacted with a given society’s institutions. Incomplete as they were, his efforts led him to see revolution in a depressing new light: not as a democratic correction to an inflexible and corrupt ancien regime, but as a response to an ecological crisis – the inability of a society to absorb rapid population growth – that rarely resolved that crisis."

Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig: an entertaining journey – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Toksvig comes across as a passionate enthusiast for many things: the theatre (early jobs included sweeping the stage and working on the electrics crew just to be in the building), for history, for her beloved father and for equality. She recalls recording a pilot episode as a potential host of Have I Got News for You in 1990. Angus Deayton also recorded one and afterwards she was told: 'We preferred yours, Sandi, but everyone has agreed you can’t have a woman in charge of making fun of the news.'... No one who has heard Toksvig speak will be surprised to find a bedrock of compassion and righteous anger underpinning the book. She rails against the airbrushing of women from history and talks about her reasons for co-founding the Women’s Equality party and her optimism for change, despite occasionally despairing at the next generation of feminists. When she hears Lena Dunham say being wolf-whistled by a man sometimes makes her feel 'validated', Toksvig splutters: 'Validated? What are we? Car park tickets?'"

For real change, Labour should ditch its top-down thinking – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Genuinely modern socialism would revolutionise Westminster and Whitehall and disperse their power – and so revive local government, which would be completely transformed. Labour wants to replace the Department for Work and Pensions with a new Department of Social Security: a better ambition would be to scrap a central ministry and hand the running of most benefits to councils. Much the same might apply to the local government department, and the administration of education, health and transport. Taxation could be thoroughly localised. The way places are run could start with something that the burgeoning localist movement, Flatpack Democracy, has made clear: the optimum population size for meaningful grassroots democracy is between 10,000 and 50,000. Once that point has been grasped, it opens the way to a whole world of participation (which, to state the blindingly obvious, would also depend on reforming our electoral system). Acknowledging this, and the way 'horizontal' local activity should be complemented by the help of the 'vertical' state, the left-inclined pressure group Compass calls the ideal model of modern politics '45° change'. It quotes the late environmentalist David Fleming, who said: 'Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.' The insight is so plainly put that you have to pause to absorb its radical implications. But this is the future, and until the British left thoroughly embraces it, its great revolution in thinking will remain incomplete."

'Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts': the secret life of the audiobook star – article by Tim Dowling in The Guardian. "The audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually."

The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter – blog post by Jason Kotke, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "In winter 2017-18, I was depressed, anxious, wasn’t getting out of bed in the morning, spent endless time on my phone doing nothing, and had trouble focusing on my work.... Last year I was so anxious that it would happen again that all that stuff was worse and started basically a week into fall. Nothing helped.... The plan for this fall was to try a SAD lamp, therapy, maybe drugs, and lots more warm travel. But then something interesting happened. Sometime this fall ... I decided that because I live in Vermont, there is nothing I can do about it being winter, so it was unhelpful for me to be upset about it. I stopped complaining about it getting cold and dark, I stopped dreading the arrival of snow. I told myself that I just wasn’t going to feel like I felt in the summer and that’s ok — winter is a time for different feelings. "

The highest number of CEOs graduated from this unexpected UK university – news article on Study International website. "Top recruitment firm [Forward Role] ... surveyed 260,000 LinkedIn profiles to find out which university the majority of company leaders, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Managing Directors (MDs), graduated from in the UK. Results for the Top 20 universities producing the most CEOs showed that the highest number of CEOs and MDs didn’t come from Oxford or the highly-ranked London School of Economics – but rather from the Open University."

How our home delivery habit reshaped the world – article by Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian. "The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about shipping – about how much it cost, or about how long it would take – and he relentlessly shredded delivery times to make shipping incidental to the purchasing experience. Amazon’s emphasis on speed compelled other retailers to hurry, too, and encouraged us to believe that if something cannot be had quickly, it is barely worth having at all. It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards us in ever-quicker time."

Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019 – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times.... In advance of the lexicographers’ big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates. (1) People. A pretty ordinary word – and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of 'the people' has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. ... (2) Prorogue.... (3) Femtech.... (4) Sadfishing. One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece – in Metro in January. 'Sadfishing,' wrote Rebecca Reid, 'is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet'.... (5) Opoid.... (6) Pronoun. Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun ... is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note 'pronouns: he/him' or 'she/her' alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles.... (7) Woke. Woke ... entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition 'alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice'. So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders ... argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials – so-called 'wokewashing' – and ultimately to a backlash.... (8) Nanoinfluencer.... (9) Cancelled.... (10) Crisis...."

‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian, extracted from her book Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up. "Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something: freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English. ... all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought all British teenagers attended elite boarding schools such as Eton, spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England. In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: 'So is this what the rich west is really like?' "

This election will be all about identity, not money. And the Tories know it – article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Why would anyone not vote Labour? If person A knocks on your door and offers you £1,000, no questions asked, and person B offers £100, why refuse A? The question has long puzzled experts. ... US academic Jonathan Haidt, in an attempt to understand why on earth poor people voted for George W Bush [(Why would they want a wider wealth gap, worse healthcare and more corporate greed?)] [answered] that these 'left behinds' saw politics as about more than money. It was about their families and collective safety, about local and group identity, about faith and a morality seen as personal, not ordained by the state. ... Analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell into who voted for Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in the US found the tribes remarkably similar, with support in both cases more widely spread across ages and classes than initially supposed. Indeed, average leave and Trump voters had above-average incomes. What they shared was a concern about the continuity of their identity and way of life. They feared outsiders and newcomers."

On the Farm – article by Daisy Hildyard in The London Review of Books 7 June 2018, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "The Lisbon Treaty currently guides policy creation in light of the fact that ‘animals are sentient beings.’ When the clause was pushed out of UK law by 18 votes, there was an angry and slightly bewildered public response (when any response was registered at all). Parliament, in turn, reacted with some confusion. Michael Gove issued an official statement from Defra saying that the government wasn’t necessarily saying that animals are not sentient, but that it was saying it won’t say that they are.... It is true that Britain has a long history of protecting animals... The Animal Welfare Act of 2006 is substantially committed, as Gove says it is, to high standards. However, its clauses do not have much to say about laboratory or farm animals, or many species in the wild. They largely relate to domestic animals, the category of nonhuman which, given that human-style consciousness is, if anything, over-attributed to most pets, is least in need of a law certifying sentience.... Teresa Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, also issued a statement on the issue, in which she pledges to hold Gove to his promises and accepts that, in the reality she occupies when she is not voting in Parliament, ‘animals are sentient, can feel pain, and have feelings.’ ... So, Villiers and Gove say that they are not anti-sentience, but anti-pro-sentience, and not in real life, and only for the time being. ... Their scrambled and scrambling statements suggest a sense of shame. You know the story: you cast your vote against animal sentience and you feel it’s reasonable to do so, but then you have to go home and undress in front of the cat."

Cuttings: October 2019

He, she, they … should we now clarify our preferred pronouns when we say hello? – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "Little attention used to be paid to pronouns. In recent years, however, they have become a cornerstone of the culture wars.... pronoun introductions have become an established feature of some progressive spaces and university campuses. Many view this as a positive step towards a more nuanced understanding of gender. As Darius Hickman, a 23-year-old non-binary poet in New York says, these introductions mean people who don’t conform to traditional views of binary gender don’t feel alienated. 'Relying on clocking people’s gender based on appearances is harmful, especially since some people – oftentimes non-binary folks – can happen to look strictly binary, and a simple pronoun check makes things easier for everyone, including folks whose gender isn’t easy to tell.' But when gender is so complex and personal, is there really any such thing as a 'simple' pronoun check? At this stage, I should probably note that although I identify as a Progressive Lesbian™, the pressure of pronoun introductions often makes me feel uncomfortable. Actively announcing myself as a she/her makes it seem like I’m making my entire identity about my gender, which feels regressive. Further, while pronoun introductions are supposed to be about recognizing that gender is complex, it sometimes seems as though they – paradoxically – reinforce gender binaries. ... Wouldn’t it be better if we just worked towards a future where 'he' and 'she' weren’t weighted with so much meaning? What if we worked to break those limitations down instead?"

Social experiments to fight poverty – TED talk by Esther Duflo, the youngest person to win the Nobel prize in economics and the second woman to do so. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "We have spent billions of dollars on aid. ... Has it done any good? ... Sadly, we don't know.
And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that -- take Africa for example.
Africans have already got a lot of aid. ... And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is.... So here are some other questions. ... Every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a 'last mile problem.' The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? And here's another question.... Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. ... Bed nets are very cheap... Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know? ... And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know? So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions...."

Crossing Divides: How a social network could save democracy from deadlock –  article by Carl Miller for BBC Click.  Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "There is one thing that practically everyone can agree on: politics has become bitterly divided.... Yet what if it doesn't need to be this way? What if new ways can be found to break deadlocks and bring electorates back together?... For the last five years, Taiwan has been blending technology with politics to create a new way of making decisions. ... Their creation ... works by first seeking to crowdsource objective facts from those involved. Then users communicate with each other via a dedicated social media network called Pol.is, which lets them draft statements about how a matter should be solved, and respond to others' suggestions by either agreeing or disagreeing with them.... Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It churned through the many axes of agreements and disagreements and drew a map to show everyone exactly where they were in the debate. A number of different groups, with different attitudes, emerged.... There was no reply button, so people couldn't troll each other's posts. And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them."

How liberalism became ‘the god that failed’ in eastern Europe – article by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in The Guardian, based on their book The Light that Failed: A Reckoning. "In the spring of 1990, John Feffer, a 26-year-old American, spent several months criss-crossing eastern Europe in hope of unlocking the mystery of its post-communist future and writing a book about the historical transformation unfolding before his eyes.... East Europeans were optimistic but apprehensive. Many of those he interviewed at the time expected to be living like Viennese or Londoners within five years, 10 years at the most.... 25 years later, he decided to revisit the region and to seek out those with whom he had spoken in 1990. This time round, eastern Europe was richer but roiled by resentment. The capitalist future had arrived, but its benefits and burdens were unevenly, even crassly distributed. After reminding us that 'For the World War II generation in eastern Europe, communism was the "god that failed"', Feffer writes that 'For the current generation in the region, liberalism is the god that failed.'... Resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has played a decisive role. This lack of alternatives, rather than the gravitational pull of an authoritarian past or historically ingrained hostility to liberalism, is what best explains the anti-western ethos dominating post-communist societies today. The very conceit that 'there is no other way' provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world."

Seen and heard: July to September 2019

Edinburgh Photographic Society, 157th international exhibition of photography 2019. The doorkeeper took pains to explain to me that the only criterion for inclusion was that there had to have been a photograph somewhere in the history of each finished image. When I saw the exhibition, I understood why he had given me the warning: most of the images were obviously processed to a greater or lesser degree: some to create surreal effects, such as a man riding a mechanical fish through the sky, and a surprising number to make the image look as though it had been produced by pen and ink drawing. But my favourites were classic photographic pieces, especially the Movement Series of Fiona Spence.

Scottish national portrait gallery. Lovely building, family-sized rather than cathedral-sized gothic, including a beautiful library with an upper gallery. I wasn’t so struck by the paintings and busts, but perhaps I’d have been more impressed if I were Scottish.

Scottish national gallery. I shouldn’t have been surprised, this being a national collection, but as I walked around I kept on thinking: hey, this place is full of really famous paintings! My favourites were the Velázquez ‘Old woman cooking eggs’, notable for its elegant depiction of just-congealing egg whites, and a Botticelli Madonna and child, unusual in the Madonna not being face-on but in full eye-contact with her baby, the very image of empathic mirroring (as the therapists say). A really good café / restaurant too.

Philip Glass: Minimalism at the Organ. Concert by Mark Spalding at St Andrew’s and St George’s West, Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe Festival. Two pieces having their 50th anniversary (Two Pages, Music in Fifths) and one having its 40th (Fourth Series, Part 4, aka Mad Rush). A video camera in the organ loft gave us visual contact with the performer, and as a consequence, we were able to see him doing stretches in the pauses between pieces: it never occurred to me before that performing minimalist music could run the risk of repetitive strain injury. A great hour of immersive minimalism.

Star Trek: Beyond. perhaps the best of the three films since the reboot, being less dependent on stories or tropes from the “prime” cast. Still a huge emphasis on visual spectacle, which I guess is what the movie-going public now expects, though it was never part of the original series. (They didn’t have the budget, so had to rely on damn-fine storytelling.)

What three words (app). BBC news featured this great idea, to map the entire world in 3x3 metre squares, each bearing a three word name; useful for emergency services location finding, for example. But it depends on lots of people using it. And someone will probably think of an anti-social application.

Rise of the Nazis. Really informative documentary, the three parts following how Hitler successively became Chancellor, suspended parliamentary democracy, and finally usurped the power of the President. Quite scary to watch in a month when Boris Johnson suspended Parliament for five weeks because he didn’t want it to get in his way; had the Supreme Court not ruled it illegal, there would have been the precedent for a Prime Minister to suspend Parliament for however long he wanted, for any reason at all.

Raiders of the Lost Past – nice three-part series with Janina Ramirez cheerfully and enthusiastically illuminating three massively significant archaeological discoveries in the months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

We has tribbles and also troubles. Very funny rendering of a classic original series Star Trek episode in “kitty pidgen”: the distinctive grammar in which captions are added to LOLcats photos. Sample: Captain Kirk frowning, with the caption “OMG THIS SUX”.

J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars. Well-reviewed intriguing puzzle-adventure game, in which you play the sole survivor of a deep space expedition, revived from hibernation, trying to find out what happened to the rest of the crew, with the assistance of the ship’s computer J.U.L.I.A. and the remote exploration Mobot who does the actually travelling and action in the game. Creative use of a simple interface – basically it’s static scene pictures with hotspots, plus the occasional animation or cut-scene – and some decent mini-games. Didn’t really grab me emotionally, despite the increasingly sinister storyline, but an enjoyable game nonetheless.

Cathy Moore's scenario-based training headquarters. Cathy Moore is one of the best bloggers around for incisive and insightful thinking on learning design for training, and recently she’s been sharing her ideas and experience around branching scenarios or simulations. This page collects together her various writing, including this page of links to example scenarios by herself and others, with comments reflecting on the design.

Cuttings: September 2019

Strike 2.0: how gig economy workers are using tech to fight back – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian, based on his book Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the People. "An unlikely movement is currently under way to rewire the economy from within.... Organised resistance by digitally outsourced workers has erupted repeatedly on the streets of major cities in recent years, usually beginning in the back alley spots where delivery riders are encouraged by their apps to congregate and then fanning out rapidly through WhatsApp networks, word of mouth and some technological trickery. In 2016, for example, an announcement by Deliveroo that it would soon be unilaterally altering its rider payment structure prompted a six-day 'strike' in which riders acted en masse to make themselves unavailable for orders. ... In the words of one Deliveroo rider, the very technology that was designed to control workers was now being turned against their managers, allowing riders to 'occupy the system in a way'. Not unlike the assembly line of the last century, and the auto strikes in Flint that subverted it, a tool engineered for capital was being hacked by the labour force.... This struggle is global. It is not a coincidence that participants in the McStrike protests used chants adapted from the US 'Fight for $15' movement against low pay. The strikes by Deliveroo riders in British cities have been inspired and replicated by colleagues in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong, to name but a few. Historian Eric Hobsbawm once described surges in labour militancy as 'accumulations of inflammable materials which only ignite periodically, as it were under compressions'. Throughout the post-crash world, such compressions are piling up at pace."

The myth of the free speech crisis – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself 'has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or "fighting" words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.'”

From sex to money: the eight deep discussions that can save a dying relationship – interview by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "[John] Gottman, the renowned relationships researcher known for his work on divorce predictors, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, a psychologist, have been married for 32 years.... Their latest book, which they wrote as a couple, is Eight Dates. It guides couples through eight conversations – to have on dedicated dates.... The [topics]– trust, conflict, sex, money, family, fun, spirituality and dreams – came out of the Gottmans’ years of observing the flashpoints in relationships.... Might disagreement be a danger for readers of the book? 'It’s possible, but what we like to do is give people preparation in case conflict arises, so each chapter includes a bit of that,' says Julie. 'But also we very carefully tailored the questions so that people were encouraged to self-disclose as opposed to comment on each other’s thoughts. And when you self-disclose, that’s really the antidote to creating conflict as opposed to judging the other person for their point of view.'”

The return of parliament – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Back to Parliament - It's that time of year again! Here's our pick of the must-have kit for your little MPs... Water bottle full of wine: prep them for the worst term of their lives with a whole litre of rosé. ERG lunchbox: this is THE lunchbox to have, featuring the hugely popular team of heroes. Scientific calculator: remember to look for a Brexit function to calculate how screwed the economy is. Corrective fluid: essential for getting rid of details you don't like in economic forecasts. Dominic Cummings backpack: the Prince of Darkness's trendy dome-like head of evil is both capacious and sturdy. Antisemitism-cancelling headphones: Help them concentrate on Brexit homework by cancelling out distracting racism in their party. Multicolour pen: make their resignation letters really pop on Twitter!"

Will AI replace university lecturers? Not if we make it clear why humans matter – article by Mark Haw in The Guardian. "So far the best AI can manage is classroom assistance to human teachers. But AI edtech developers are nothing if not ambitious: this month, UK company Century Tech will partner the Flemish regional government to launch AI assistants in schools across half of Belgium. ... A large dataset now exists for student behaviour, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of students who have followed MOOCs (massive online open courses) over the past decade. The big question mark around MOOCs was how they could survive by giving away course content for free. With uncomfortable echoes of recent data controversies, it may turn out that building the training database for AI teaching was the MOOC business plan all along.... Universities, lecturers and students urgently need to identify and share what is really important about being taught by an actual human."

How to Review a Novel – article from 1980 by Mary-Kay Wilmers, reproduced in Literary Hub, referenced in article by John Naughton in The Observer. "How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: 'Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys.' 'For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, 1939 was a red-letter day.'... It looks as though the writers of these reviews have set out not to summarize the plot but to tell the story, with the drawback, from the novelist’s point of view, that readers may content themselves with the reviewer’s version. Other reviews begin with a different sort of story—the reviewer’s: 'Halfway through Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel I found I was laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks.' ... Different openings suggest different attitudes, both to the novel and to the practice of reviewing novels. There are ideologies of the novel and ideologies of the novel review, fictional conventions and reviewing conventions. They don’t necessarily overlap. A regular reviewer, confident of his own constituency, may describe a novel in terms of his own responses to it: he wouldn’t for that reason applaud a novelist for writing in a similarly personal vein. What reviews have in common is that they must all in some degree be re-creations: reshapings of what the novelist has already shaped. The writer’s fortunes depend on the reviews he gets but the reviewer depends on the book to see that his account of it—his “story,” to use the language of the newspaper composing room—is interesting. Dull novels don’t elicit interesting reviews: not unless a reviewer decides to be amusing at the novel’s expense or tactfully confines himself to some incidental aspect of it. A generous reviewer may also invent for the novel the qualities it might have had but hasn’t got."

We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job? – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "A recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random. My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for.... Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead?"

She Said: an inside look at the story that brought down Harvey Weinstein – interview by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "She Said goes much deeper than a compelling play-by-play of nailing the first Weinstein story. The immediate aftermath of publication, when the dam broke on story after story of sexual indignity, workplace harassment, or assault, 'only made us feel greater responsibility', Kantor told the Guardian. 'We said to ourselves: we’ve got to try to finally answer some of these lingering questions from the Weinstein story. How can a company become so complicit in predation? What are the systems that enable this kind of abuse?' In the face of a 'staggering' wave of personal and institutional responses, said Twohey, 'We just decided that the most important thing we could do was keep reporting.' .... In the preface, Kantor and Twohey explicitly pose the question: did the cultural change go too far? Or not far enough? It’s less the reporters’ paradigm than 'the question we saw play out in the world', said Kantor. 'We experienced the power of the post-Weinstein reckoning and this feeling of buried truth pouring out – this display of mass accountability without precedent.'"

Thousands demand Oxford dictionaries 'eliminate sexist definitions' – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for Oxford University Press to change the 'sexist' definitions of the word 'woman' in some of its dictionaries.... In response, OUP’s head of lexical content strategy Katherine Connor Martin has said... : 'If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory.' 'Nonetheless, part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear in the dictionary’s treatment. For instance, the phrase "the little woman" is defined as "a condescending way of referring to one’s wife", and the use of "bit" as a synonym for woman is labelled as "derogatory" in the thesaurus,' said Martin. 'Sensibilities regarding language are constantly changing, and our editorial team is always grateful for feedback to ensure that the status of offensive or denigrating terms is clear to our readers.'"

Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. ... Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.... The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties. The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged 'important' to be captured.... This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply 'speak for itself'. ... This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.... One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers.'Pics or it didn’t happen' is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience.... What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.... What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to 'truth... But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years. What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? ...Then the key question is not whether [reporting] is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. ... let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it."

The Guardian view on machine learning: a computer cleverer than you? – editorial in The Guardian. "It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires.... They can recognise a face, a voice, be trained to judge people’s motivations or beat a computer game. But we cannot say exactly how. This is the genius and madness behind the technology. The promise of AI is that it will imbue machines with the ability to spot patterns from data, and make decisions faster and better than humans do. What happens if they make worse decisions faster? Governments need to pause and take stock of the societal repercussions of allowing machines over a few decades to replicate human skills that have been evolving for millions of years. But individuals and companies must take responsibility too."

The writer's emergency supplies shelf – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Liquid ideas. Spray-on sexual tension. Plot twist in a can. Powdered thrills (4 sachets). Bottled Zeitgeist. Instant poetry. Assorted subplots. Prose polish. Minor characters (just add water). Eau de mystery. Concentrated romance, Tinned profundity, industrial strength."

Cuttings: August 2019

Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari: the truth about language – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining.... Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life.... This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English. Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre. ... Shariatmadari borrows from Iris Murdoch’s idea of language as a net cast over the mind, constraining our thoughts according to how its knots and threads land... Shariatmadari’s general approach to language is pro-diversity and anti-pedantry. No linguist would disagree with his argument that a word’s meaning depends not on its etymology but on how it is used.... But he fleshes out this argument usefully, offering ammunition against the tiresome hairsplitter who, for example, insists that 'decimate' comes from the Roman practice of executing every tenth soldier as a collective punishment. (It doesn’t.)" See an extract from the book.

Britain’s infrastructure is breaking down. And here’s why no one’s fixing it – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Politicians bemoan the loss of community, but that resonant word is not precise enough. A large part of what’s missing is social infrastructure. It can be public or private. It is often slightly dog-eared and usually overlooked. But when it vanishes, the social damage can be huge.... When it comes to transport or energy or sewage, Britain has a National Infrastructure Commission that monitors the country’s needs and guides parliament on where to direct spending. After all, the quality of such hard infrastructure influences where multinationals set up shop: it is money-making. But parks and libraries don’t generate cash. Social infrastructure has no lobby, no registry of assets and certainly no government agency. No Whitehall official monitors how much of it has closed or withered away – that relies on civil society groups to file freedom of information requests or badger town halls with survey. Everyone knows we need it, yet just as our economic model prizes shareholder returns over investment in the National Grid, so our politics relies on drawing in the voters with unfeasibly low taxes. Until one day, something breaks and all hell breaks loose."

This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev: quietly frightening – review by Steve Bloomfield in The Guardian. "Part memoir, part investigation, part cry for help, This Is Not Propaganda tours the world and delves into archives, telling the stories of the new information wars, interwoven with passages about Pomerantsev’s parents’ lives. Igor and Lina were Soviet dissidents, harassed by the KGB and eventually deported, for 'the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted'. Those rights now exist almost everywhere, but more information has not necessarily meant more freedom. While autocratic regimes once controlled the narrative by silencing opponents, they now seek to confuse their populations by bombarding them with false information, half truths and competing narratives. It’s a strategy that Pomerantsev describes as 'censorship through noise', or as one of his interviewees, law professor Tim Wu, puts it, states have moved from 'an ideology of information scarcity to one of information abundance'."

Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell – quote from a software engineer in a New Yorker article by Anna Wiener, reproduced in this blog post by John Naughton."These are people who spend their lives trying to identify all the ways they can extract money from others without quite going to jail. They’re people who are convinced that they are too special for rules, and too smart for education. They don’t regard themselves as inhabiting the world the way other people do; they’re secret royalty, detached from society’s expectations and unfailingly outraged when faced with normal consequences for bad decisions. Society, and especially economics, is a logic puzzle where you just have to find the right set of loopholes to win the game. Rules are made to be slipped past, never stopping to consider why someone might have made those rules to start with."

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour: our descent into a digital dystopia – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Technology, as Richard Seymour says, always boasts of possessing superhuman powers, which is why it arouses our wary paranoia.... The twittering machine, as Seymour calls it, has no innate morality, but it preys on our weaknesses to monopolise our attention and modify our behaviour.... The title of Seymour’s inflamed polemic comes from a painting by Paul Klee, in which a row of avian predators 'squawk discordantly', enticing victims into a bloody pit." See an extract from the book.

There’s an idea that could transform Britain, but Brexit won’t let it be heard – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "An idea that would utterly transform the public services we rely on from cradle to grave[,] an idea so bold and innovative it is winning admirers all over the world, its author summoned to address governments from Scandinavia to Latin America, [is] all but ignored by the national government of the author’s home country, whose bandwidth is consumed entirely by Brexit. It comes from a social entrepreneur by the name of Hilary Cottam.... In Radical Help – a book that’s been published from Denmark to South Korea – she describes five “experiments” in different areas of public provision, touching on every stage of life: adolescence, work, healthcare, social care for the elderly and social work for so-called troubled families. ... Take Circle, a scheme aimed at the elderly. Much of the current discussion about elderly care focuses on budgets and structures, imagining a new multibillion-pound institution on a par with the NHS. But Cottam started with the most fundamental unit of all: a single human being. ... Circle connected older people with each other in similar ways, seeing the elderly not as a burden to be managed but as a vast potential resource: one might help another with the shopping, someone else might do a bit in the garden or just pop by for a chat. ... The core insight of Radical Help [is] that what can turn lives around is not a hulking bureaucracy of targets and tick-boxes, but simple, human relationships. ... Some will hear this as a David Cameron-style, 'big society' shift away from state provision. But Cottam is clear. The state is essential, both as a financial provider and to set a lead. It’s just that it needs to do its work differently. This, she insists, is not a project of the right but the left. Not for nothing did one Scandinavian newspaper ask if Cottam’s vision was 'the antidote to neoliberalism'."

The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk – interview by Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian. "What if the spread of hate is less like the spread of cancer through the proverbial body politic and more like … the formation of bubbles in a boiling pot of water? That is the contention of Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University and the lead author on a study published this week in Nature analyzing the spread of online hate. ... Johnson’s unusual approach has resulted in some surprising conclusions – he says all online hate globally originates from just 1,000 online 'clusters' – as well as counterintuitive policy proposals. ... 'We looked at the behavior of the data, of the numbers, and saw that it is similar [to chemical bonding].... If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, you’re getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities.... [The first policy proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones – and we showed this mathematically – rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply. Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart."

Can too much bad TV lead to populism? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "Researchers studied the growth of the Italian broadcaster Mediaset, and found that those heavily exposed as children to its pabulum of cartoons, soap operas and quiz shows were almost 10% more likely to support populists, because poorer cognitive skills left them more susceptible to politicians peddling simplistic arguments.... it’s crucial to grasp that this sort of 'dumbing down' doesn’t happen because bad TV somehow injects stupidity into people’s heads. It’s about the opportunity cost: every hour you’re sitting in front of a rubbish cartoon is an hour you’re not reading, exploring the physical world, or watching educational programming. The same is true of video games, social media and so on. They don’t have to be bad to be bad; they just have to get in the way of your doing something better.... [Media theorist] Neil Postman’s most famous book, Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985), is unsettlingly prescient on the modern attention economy, which, far from keeping us informed, 'leads [us] away from knowing'."

This reckless confrontation with parliament is just what millions of voters want – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament is outrageous are beyond doubt. But ... too much of the country remains uninterested, and plenty of other people have concluded that Johnson has done the right thing.... In the 21st century, representative democracy is a very tough sell. When people spend half their lives online and can experience at least the sensation of agency and instant gratification, the idea that we elect MPs to exercise their own judgment and then eventually submit their record for approval or rejection can easily seem woefully old-fashioned. I have lost count of the number of people I have met over the last few years who have angrily told me that the function of the Commons was to simply 'do our bidding'.... It is no accident that, like so many populist forces, Nigel Farage’s Brexit party claims to be in favour of direct democracy. ... In contrast to the forces on the other side who are currently running rampant, so far, we have neither the ideas nor the language to even start – so, in the meantime, politics is going to carry on channelling awful division and opening up profound dangers.... Their opportunity lies in the chasm between this week’s protests and the millions of people who either avert their eyes or see them as so much liberal, remainer nonsense; it is also our side’s greatest challenge, whose urgency, even now, has yet to sink in."

Cuttings: July 2019

'I feel terrified, betrayed': messages show strain on Jack Letts' parents – article by Caroline Davies in The Guardian. A letter to his parents from Jack Letts, who left the UK to join ISIS: "You lot brought me up without faith. You taught me and indoctrinated me to look down on religious people as brainwashed idiots [you know you did]. You taught me that life had no true purpose … that there’s no afterlife and therefore no final justice. You taught me disbelief and darkness. Why should I be grateful for that?"

Oliver Twiss and Martin Guzzlewit: the fan fiction that ripped off Dickens – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian, about Edward Lloyd and His World, eds Rohan McWilliam and Sarah Louise Lill. "Oliver Twiss was one of many plagiarisms of Dickens published by the press baron Edward Lloyd, with Barnaby Budge, Martin Guzzlewit, The Penny Pickwick and Nickelas Nickelbery also hitting shelves in the mid-19th century.... The imitations were much cheaper than the originals – The Penny Pickwick cost a penny, compared with a shilling for Dickens’ story. 'It’s very likely that, given these things saturated the market for a while, from about 1837 to 1845, many working-class readers first encountered Dickens not through his original works but in these weird doppelgangers that were going around,' says McWilliam.... After publishing The Penny Pickwick, Lloyd went on to build a publishing empire. He told the illustrators of his 'penny dreadfuls' – grisly horror novels that included the first appearance of the demon barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd, and Varney the Vampire – 'There must be blood … much more blood!' 'When we think of the 1840s, we think of the publication of major novels such as Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair,” says McWilliam. “The reality is that many readers were as likely to be consuming shockers issued by Lloyd, such as Ada the Betrayed.' "

Hello World by Hannah Fry: AI and why we over-trust what we don’t understand – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. "Fry makes a convincing case for 'the urgent need for algorithmic regulation', and wants the public to understand the compromises we are making. And, in the case of Facebook and users’ data, 'how cheaply we were bought'. This book illustrates why good science writers are essential. 'We have a tendency to overtrust anything we don’t understand,' Fry says. And if we don’t understand it, those difficult questions will be answered by those who do – pharmaceutical companies, malign governments and the like. It’s time to pull back the curtain on the algorithms that shape our lives. Because, as Fry says, 'the future doesn’t just happen. We create it.'"

Britain’s story of empire is based on myth. We need to know the truth – article by Privamvada Gopal in The Guardian. "These days we’ve become wearily accustomed to depictions of Brexit Britain as oppressed by a villainously imperial Europe.... In a particularly far-fetched comparison, Ann Widdecombe MEP has compared Brexit with the resistance of 'slaves against their owners' and 'colonies against empires'. Prime ministerial frontrunner Boris Johnson too has spoken of Britain’s supposed 'colony status' in the EU though, with a familiar double standard, he also believes that it would be good if Britain was still 'in charge' of Africa. These bizarre comparisons can be made and go unchallenged because the stark fact remains that most Britons know very little about the history of the empire itself, still less the way in which its long afterlife profoundly shapes both Britain and the wider world today. This great amnesia or 'shocking lack of understanding' has led a respected race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust, to call this week for the teaching of the intertwined histories of empire and migration to be made compulsory in secondary schools. Migration and empire are 'not marginal events', its report rightly notes, but 'central to our national story'."

Guy Gunaratne: ‘In London, you learn to code-switch ... I’ve always thought of that as a superpower’ – interview by Claire Armitstead in The Guardian. "A lightly fictionalised version of the murder [of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby] opens the novel, and is all the more shocking for the reaction it provokes on the street. 'The black younger had stopped soldier-boy and struck him down with a cleaver,' we are told. 'He called himself the hand of Allah but to us he looked as if he had just rolled out the same school gates as us. He had the same trainers we wore. Spoke the same road slang we used. The blood was not what shocked us. For us it was his face like a mirror, reflecting our own confused and frightened thoughts.' Most of the novel is written in a pungent first-person patois, which the author calls 'road dialect' (while conceding that it’s officially known as Multicultural London English or MLE). But this opening rings out like an omniscient chorus. So how closely does it reflect his own feelings? Gunaratne was in Finland when the news of the murder broke but watched the endlessly repeated film footage. 'The thing that shocked me was one of the killers: the way he expressed himself really did remind me of the kind of people I grew up with. There was a perverse identification which disturbed me to the extent that I knew it was something I needed to navigate for myself.'"

Literary fiction nursery rhymes – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Tom, Tom, the piper's son, stole a pig and away did run, but he cannot run from the traumatic relationship with his overbearing father. (2) Hickety Pickety, my black hen, she lays eggs for gentlemen, then a chance encounter leads her to ask whether there could be more to life. (3) Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub, and each, in his own way, coming to terms with loss, failure and mortality."

Margaret Hamilton: ‘They worried that the men might rebel. They didn’t’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. "Margaret Hamilton, [MIT] computer programmer and working mother[,] led the team that created the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11. The computer system was the most sophisticated of its day. Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions... 'Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter, Lauren, into work with me. One day, she was with me when I was doing a simulation of a mission to the moon. ... She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon. The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission. I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake. Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. ... After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.'"

Listen up: why we can't get enough of audiobooks – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Are audiobooks the new… books? It was recently revealed that audiobook sales rocketed by 43% in 2018, while those of print books declined (by 5%) for the first time in five years. Can people no longer be bothered to read for themselves? Is this, rather than the ebook, the harbinger of the slow death of print, about which we have been warned for so long? And if so, what does that mean for literary culture? Let us first retain some historical perspective by noting that Homer’s Iliad was essentially an audiobook before it was ever written down. Oral literary culture long precedes the book and there are many reasons for its rising popularity.... But is there really a measurable difference between reading with the eyes and “reading” with the ears? According to an oft-cited 2016 study (Beth A Rogowsky et al), 91 subjects were found to display no significant difference in either comprehension or recall after two weeks whether they had read a non‑fiction passage or listened to it, or done both simultaneously. However, this investigation used ebooks for the reading part, and other studies have suggested that reading comprehension and recall is lower for reading on screens versus print.... Books have the advantage that you can rapidly re‑scan a sentence visually if you didn’t take it in the first time... The mood in publishing seems to be that audiobooks are not cannibalising print sales to any large degree yet; more likely they are competing with podcasts, music and television as a more passive but still semi-highbrow entertainment experience."

What caused Britain’s national nervous breakdown? – article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "When did our country lose grip of its senses? ... Researching my new novel, which focuses on the period between millennium eve and the financial crash of 2008, I was left in very little doubt about when it all started.... many of the forces I discovered were technological – but found their expression psychologically.... Most significantly there was the sudden growth of the internet, the unleashing of social media, and the accompanying change in our consciousness, which had at least as many negative effects as it had positive ones.... Instead of having a national conversation, we began to indulge in mass national bickering and mudslinging – in real time. The irony is that just as we were showing signs of collective derangement, our understanding of mental health was growing exponentially. "

The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan: a strange sliver of history – review by Clare Clark in The Guardian, "A few years ago, ... Alix Nathan came across a curious entry [in a 1797 reference work]. In a single short paragraph, it described what appeared to be some kind of scientific experiment, conducted by a Mr Powyss of Moreham in Lancashire. Some years earlier Mr Powyss had published an advertisement offering a reward of £50 a year for life to any man willing to live for seven years underground without seeing another human face.... His conditions would be comfortable, even luxurious: his 'commodious apartments' would include meals served from Mr Powyss’s own table, a bathtub with cold running water, a chamber-organ, and 'as many books as the occupier should desire'. According to the Register, a labouring man with a large family had accepted the post. He was, by 1797, in the 'fourth year of his probation'. Intrigued, Nathan tried to discover more about Powyss and the outcome of his experiment, but without success. Nothing of either remained. Instead she turned to fiction, writing a pair of short stories that imagined the peculiar undertaking, the first from Powyss’s point of view, 'An Experiment: Above', and then, in 'An Experiment: Below', from the solitary subterranean perspective of his confined subject. Both were included in her excellent 2014 collection, His Last Fire, which attracted acclaim from, among others, Hilary Mantel, who praised Nathan as 'an original, with a virtuoso touch'."

Pearson shifts to Netflix-style subscription model for textbooks – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. "[Pearson] has for years profited from the demand for specialist textbooks at US universities, which students can be required to purchase despite them sometimes costing hundreds of dollars, [but they have] been badly affected by the growth in secondhand sales and falling revenues. The company has come to accept consumer behaviour has changed and, as a result, it is shifting to a model where material is rented, not owned – similar to the change that has taken place in the music and television industry. John Fallon, the chief executive of Pearson, announced on Tuesday that the company would focus on convincing students to subscribe to access online publications. 'Our digital-first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues,' he said.... The print editions of its 1,500 academic textbooks – which have traditionally been refreshed on a three-year cycle – will now only be updated infrequently. Students who want up-to-date teaching materials will instead have to subscribe to the electronic versions, which will be updated on a regular basis to reflect recent developments in academic fields."

Exhalation by Ted Chiang: stories from an SF master – review by Adam Roberts in The Guardian. "[Ted Chiang] has never published a novel, yet his 15 stories have won all the genre’s most prestigious awards: Hugos and Nebulas, Sturgeons, Tiptrees and BSFAs galore – more than two dozen prizes in all.... [This] collection’s two finest stories both achieve this expert balance of the emotional and the cerebral. 'The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate' is an intricate and delightful Arabian Nights-style yarn about a time gate; and the title story ['Exhalation'] deftly creates an alien world, bounded by solid chromium, in which live touchingly thoughtful robotic creatures. One dissects its own head in an attempt to understand how the myriad flaps of gold leaf inside its brain generate its consciousness and in doing so discovers a profound truth about the strange cosmos it inhabits. Chiang makes this entropic revelation ring like a bell, and his quaint world suddenly focuses a truth about all existence. It’s Chiang at his best, and worth the price of admission on its own."

Cressida Cowell: ‘Books are better than films at teaching children creativity and intelligence' –interview by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "When she was announced as the latest [Children's Laureate] on Tuesday, she unveiled her Laureate Charter, a 'giant to-do list' which asserts every child’s right to 'own their own book', to 'be read aloud to' and to 'see themselves reflected in a book'. ' Reading is a medium we cannot lose. I love films and telly [but] they get magically beamed into kids’ heads, whereas with books it’s much more of an effort. Books can easily represent something that makes kids feel stupid, and how can you love something that makes you feel stupid?' Her ultimate aim is to get children 'as excited about reading and books as they are about films and telly'. 'Because – I’ll just hit you with it,' she says, leaning forward in her armchair in excitement, 'because books are a kind of transformative magic that offer magical things that films aren’t as good at creating in children: empathy, creativity and intelligence. With a film, things happen out there, in a book it’s happening inside your head, so that’s empathy. Creativity – a book is partly what I say and partly what a reader imagines, whereas films are very bossy, they tell you how things would look and how they would sound. Intelligence is words. Those are the three magical powers, that’s why books have to survive – because, my goodness, we need empathetic intelligent creative people today.'"

The comma touch: Jacob Rees-Mogg's aides send language rules to staff – article by Kevin Rawlinson in The Guardian. "A list of rules has been sent to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s staff ... demanding that they use only imperial measurements and give all non-titled males the suffix Esq. ... Among the words and phrases considered unacceptable were: 'very', 'due to' and “ongoing”, as well as 'equal', 'yourself' and 'unacceptable'. Rees-Mogg’s aides also barred the use of 'lot', 'got' and 'I am pleased to learn'.... In a call for accuracy contained in his list, staff were told: 'CHECK your work.' Other directions include a call for a double space after full stops and no comma after the word 'and'.... Moreover, the phrase 'no longer fit for purpose' has been deemed no longer fit for purpose."

Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Directives from the Department of Getting Back to the Good Old Days. Always commence documents with a huge letter in a decorative box. Never use the words listed in the Books of Heresy! Women to be addressed thus: Maiden, Spinster, Goodwife. Preferred units of measurement: furlong, rood, barleycorn, tod, bovate, firkin, hogshead. Ask your chaplain, steward, or local witchfinder to check your text before giving it to the Town Crier."

Seen and heard: April to June 2019

First you write a sentence by Joe Moran – practical reflections on the nuts and bolts of language and how effects are created (see adapted extract). All good sense, though less impressive than I expected given the glowing review. I think I prefer Tom Gauld’s cartoon on the subject.

A House through Time – another tremendous TV series from David Olusoga, this time focusing on a house in Newcastle. Once again, a single building becomes a microcosm for the history of the city, and of Britain, with a surprising variety of occupants and uses over the years, and alarmingly abrupt changes of fortune. No doubt there were uncredited researchers who sourced a lot of the material, but Olusoga is a tremendous story-teller who gets straight to the heart of his tales. Proper history.

Reviews of Life is Strange 2 and The Walking Dead final season – the reviews, not the games themselves. Very interesting signs of how video games are growing up: in both of these games, you play a young adult looking after a smaller child, and you’re made very aware of how they’re learning behaviour and attitudes from you, so that your choices, even if they don’t massively change the storyline, play back at you later through what the child does and says. Responsible adulthood in video games? Who’d have thought it! (Postscript 12 November 2019: the video Daniel's Education Explained goes into detail about how the younger child learns from your choices in Life is Strange 2. Postscript 30 December 2019: this full review of Life is Strange 2 on Adventure Gamers relates a player's experience of the choices and the emotional impact of the game.)

The Ballad of the Judas Tree – powerful little poem by Ruth Etchells. read as part of the King's College Cambridge Easter service, and reproduced in her obituary.

Lyra McKee’s TEDx Stormont Women talk and her ‘A Letter to my 14-year-old Self’ – excerpted on Channel 4 News after her shooting during Northern Ireland protests. Compassionate and outspoken, and a lesson to us all.

Victoria – ballet by Northern Ballet. Not stunning like some of their productions, but no Northern Ballet show is ever money wasted. A nice conception: Victoria’s youngest daughter Beatrice reads her mother’s journals after her death, and sees the queen’s past life in flashback. The most emotionally powerful parts were where she enters the scene that she’s seeing: trying to tear her mother and John Brown apart, or clinging to her younger self and her future husband (now dead) as they share their first embrace.

Alastair Campbell: Depression and Me – surprisingly moving TV documentary, with Campbell’s video diaries for the programme revealing a side to him far removed from his public image.

Deep Space Nine: What We Left Behind – Deep Space Nine was the unpopular middle child of the Star Trek franchise, despised and rejected by many Trekkies, but it was always my favourite, as the most grown-up and complex of the shows, without the sunny optimism which characterised most of the others. This celebratory 25th anniversary documentary, which I helped crowdfund, not only does the usual interviews with the cast and producers, but reunites the writing team to plan out an opening episode of an imagined eighth season – and it’s a blinder. Oh what we left behind!

Telling True Stories – collection of teaching stories and sound advice from Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, by the best in the business. Some of it is narrowly journalism-focused, but much of it applies to non-fiction writing of any kind. Much cheaper than going to journalism school.

Firewatch – well-reviewed adventure game, essentially a “walking simulator” with the neat USP that you’re walking in a US National park, because your character has taken a summer job as a firewatcher and the storyline sends him all over the terrain to investigate this, that and the other. Or – as I did – you can just walk around and admire the varied and stunning scenery, without breaking a sweat.

Summer of Rockets – this year’s Stephen Poliakoff drama, and a beauty too: striking characters and vivid locations, with distinctive period features (it’s set in 1958) and neat recurring themes (secrets kept and revealed, searching for a lost loved one). The plot constantly moves on and keeps you watching, even as it meanders to the point where you wonder whether all the storylines can possibly be resolved – and then they are. Poliakoff’s father – an engineer and manufacturer of hearing aids, like the lead character – would have been very proud.

Gentleman Jack – costume romp inspired by the diaries of celebrated 18th century lesbian Anne Lister. I’d love to know just how much was historical and how much was invented, but certainly Sally Wainwright gave us a cracking story which Suranne Jones and a stellar cast realised with wit and style. The earwormingly catchy faux folk title music, though surely historically inappropriate for someone of Lister’s social class, precisely set the tone, capturing her jaunty swagger. I know some people thought there was too much about the coal-mining, but I think it was important: we needed to see Lister cutting a dash in business and estate management, otherwise it would just have been lesbian Jane Austen.

Burghley House – a lovely day out with the grandchildren, the elder fascinated by the opulence of the house, which she conceded was “cool”, the younger by the mirrors and water jets of the Garden of Surprises.

A History of Music and Technology – excellent BBC / OU radio co-production, with great archive recordings and great insights in each episode. My most important take-away: that when recording technology was first developed many musicians either couldn’t cope with the demands of recreating their performance in a studio or maintained that recorded music could never replace the live connection between performer and audience – very real issues which parallel those I continue to encounter when getting university teachers to write online distance learning materials.

Arrival / The Story of Your Life – Watching the film again on TV prompted me to read the short story on which it's based, in which the main theme – the alien writing system in which all parts of a sentence are written simultaneously, through which the protagonist comes to perceive past present and future all together – is much clearer, shorn of the thriller-like elements necessary for a Hollywood movie. The short story also contains the powerful metaphor, not in the film, of the principle of least time: a refracting beam of light travels along the path which minimises the time to its destination, which on a cause-and-effect view makes no sense because the light can’t have advance knowledge of where it’s going to end up. The film is much more comprehensible on second viewing, when you know that what you first think are flashbacks (to the protagonist’s daughter growing up and dying of a congenital illness) are in fact flashforwards, but the story is much better in taking one some way towards acquiring that simultaneity perspective oneself and much clearer about what you have to abandon: “What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know.” I seem to be encountering references to this kind of time-collapsed vision a lot right now; it’s either a sign of wisdom, or just of getting old.

Heaven’s Vault – ground-breaking game from Inkle Studios, who also produced the excellent 80 Days. It’s an archaeology simulator which has actually won the approval of archaeologists. as well as great reviews from gamers (see Adventure Gamers and The Guardian). You play Alisa, who with her risk-averse robot companion searches for artefacts and deciphers inscriptions across a fantasy universe of river-connected moons. There’s an overall investigation plotline which advances slowly, though you have a great deal of choice in which sub-investigations you pursue and how, so the situations and dialogues are highly responsive. Overall I think I prefer more tightly structured narratives – I find Heaven’s Vault intriguing rather than compelling – but I’ll definitely play it through to the end. Blow me down, though, if there isn’t a cyclical time theme to the game: most of the inhabitants of this universe believe in The Loop – that everything that has happened will happen again – and although Alisa is sceptical we can anticipate that her character arc will have come to appreciate The Loop by the end of the game. (Postscript: see this discussion of the "end" – or is it? – and replayability of Heaven's Vault.)

The Tower of Babylon – And then I start to read another short story by Ted Chiang, who wrote ‘Story of your life’, and find that it’s about the vault of heaven. It’s a closely realised imagination of the building of the Tower of Babel, or Babylon, with detailed discussion of the engineering problems – for example how their construction techniques had to be modified when building past the orbits of the moon and sun. The protagonist is one of a team of miners who ascend the tower as it nears heaven’s vault, in order to tunnel into the firmament. He nearly drowns, when they break through into the waters above the firmament, and then emerges ...  on the surface of the earth, not far from the base of the tower. So the universe is a loop. (There's that loop again, this time in space, not in time. What's going on?)