Cuttings: May 2020

'Stay out of my moist breath zone': Covid-19 anthem takes the drool out of school – "It is regularly cited as the most hated word in the English language... But now the word 'moist' is being deployed for good – in a song written by a New Zealand school principal that aims to helps children observe social distancing guidelines. Shirley Șerban of Lake Brunner school in the South Island penned the song Moist Breath Zone as a health and safety message for students returning to school after the Covid-19 lockdown. A three-and-a-half-minute music video posted on YouTube features two dogs, two hugging chimps, a yawning llama, a coughing kitten and a sleepy Staffordshire terrier among others."

The right cannot resist a culture war against the 'liberal elite', even now – article by Nick Cohen in The Guardian. "A shameful fact is undeniable. The highest Covid-19 casualties are in the US and the UK, where the mendacities of the populist right have deformed society. It turns out that being governed by Anglo-Saxon conservatives is a threat to the health of nations. Their rule kills the old and blights the futures of the young. To understand their ineptitude, think of how conservatism turned into a know-nothing culture in the past decade, and ask what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson would be doing in an alternative universe where they never came close to power. I don’t think you need a wild imagination to find the answer. Trump would be propagating corona conspiracy theories about 5G and Bill Gates as enthusiastically as he endorsed the straight lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as US president. Johnson would have been egging on his colleagues at the Telegraph as they insisted last week the lockdown was a 'pant-wetting' response to the virus from a government of 'nervous nellies'. When it was Johnson’s turn to offer his two pennies’ worth, he would repeat the Brexit right’s party line that the government had 'petrified the public' to the point where it was overwhelmingly against lifting the lockdown and going back to work as it jolly well should. My guess is he would remind readers, for they are never allowed to forget, that he managed a second-class classics degree from Oxford sometime in the 1980s by deadlifting a Latin phrase and announcing “aegrescit medendo' – the cure is worse than the disease. For that is what the world that provided his most loyal support believes. ... We are witnessing the Oxbridge arts graduate’s fear of expertise, particularly the expertise of scientists who cannot cut a good figure or turn a catchy phrase. In Johnson’s days at Oxford, they were dismissed as 'northern chemists' – chemist being a catch-all term covering everyone studying subjects the suave could not understand."

How to have fun during lockdown – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "What I think we probably ought to be doing, to whatever extent possible, is having more fun. Not meditation or gratitude journalling or jogging (unless you find those fun). Not things you think are supposed to be fun. I mean the things you actually find fun.... Ask yourself Carl Jung’s question: 'What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?' And, in fact, this doubles as useful parenting advice for those who find themselves spending much more time with small children at the moment: consider selecting activities based on what you – not the kids – would find most fun. ('You can only have fun helping other people have fun if you’re having fun doing it,' as De Koven put it.) Surprisingly frequently, it works."

The country is being run by a second-rate ad agency. No wonder we feel vulnerable – article by Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. "This exhortation to keep yourself fit in the middle of a pandemic ... is clearly about moving the narrative from collective to personal responsibility. And personal failure. We are told to 'stay alert', but if alertness could conquer this virus, we would all be fine.... We have to use the dread words 'common sense'. Whenever common sense is invoked, I shudder: all kinds of ideological posturing follows. Common sense may say 'I’m all right, Jack' or 'you get it from 5G' and 'you only live once'. Common sense may say keep calm and carry on. Dominic Raab spoke of common sense: you can meet your parents in a park. Then a government source had to announce that 'they can see both parents, but not at the same time – they would have to see them individually'. Common sense turns out to be remarkably like unpoliceable chaos. .... This is not surprising because what common sense never does well is risk assessment."

Coronavirus shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let's start with education – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "During the lockdown, I’ve been doing something I’ve long dreamed about: experimenting with an ecological education.... We started by constructing a giant painting, composed of 15 A4 panels. Each panel introduces a different habitat, from mountaintops to the deepest ocean, the forest canopy to the soil, on to which we stick pictures of the relevant wildlife. The painting becomes a platform for exploring the processes and relationships in every ecosystem, and across the Earth system as a whole. These, in turn, are keys that open other doors. For example, rainforest ecology leads to photosynthesis, that leads to organic chemistry, atoms and molecules, to the carbon cycle, fossil fuels, energy and power. Sea otters take us to food webs, keystone species and trophic cascades. We’ve done some fieldwork in soil ecology... We’re now making a model landscape, to demonstrate the water cycle, river dynamics, stratigraphy, erosion, soil formation and temperature gradients. ... Because of the circular nature of Earth systems, it doesn’t matter where you begin: eventually you go all the way round. As on many previous occasions, I’m struck by children’s natural affinity with the living world. The stories it has to tell are inherently fascinating."

Like the Open University, we now need an Open School for the whole country – article by Tim Brighouse and Bob Moon in The Guardian. "Open Schools of great repute exist around the world. In Canada, the Open School of British Columbia has existed since 1919, and offers a rich range of resources and courses for all school grades. In Australia, Victoria’s Virtual School also goes back more than a century. These open schools were created to serve isolated communities but now provide a service to the whole school sector. Any teacher, and anyone else, can access the support provided. If the UK had an Open School, what would it look like? We believe it needs to be a free-standing, independent institution offering high-quality self-learning, tutored courses and resources in every subject. It should explain how teachers in schools could incorporate these resources into their teaching. It could create a forum for networking for students of all ages, learner to learner, school to school, across districts, regions, nationally and internationally."

The comedian going viral for lip-syncing Trump: 'People really hate him' – interview with Sarah Cooper by Poppy Noor in The Guardian. "Sarah Cooper never expected to become internet famous during a pandemic, but now she is a viral TikTok celebrity who makes people laugh without saying anything. How? She lets Trump say it all for her: Cooper lip-syncs Trump’s worst comments from press conferences. ... her first viral moment came following that press conference, when Trump suggested Americans ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus. Within hours of the press conference Cooper had uploaded the TikTok video, simply captioned 'How to medical' and watched as millions of laughs and likes came rolling in. ... Cooper says a lot without words. Much of the comedy in her videos lies in the way she punctuates Trump’s remarks – a subtle facial expression that gives away just how clueless he is, or a gesture that reminds you of the broader context around what he is saying." See also: '"People still need to laugh": how lipsyncing spoofs saved lockdown'.

Working methods – article by Keith Thomas in The London Review of Books, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Scholars have always made notes. The most primitive way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself. It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin – the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’. Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall.... The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you. My old tutor, Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention.... Another help to the memory is the pocketbook in which to enter stray thoughts and observations: what the Elizabethans called ‘tablets’. John Aubrey tells us that Hobbes ‘always carried a note booke in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entred it into his booke, or otherwise he might have lost it. He had drawn the designe of the book into chapters, etc., so he knew whereabout it would come in.’ ... In the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars tended to read books in an extrapolatory way, selecting passages to be memorised or copied into common-place books. Sometimes they kept their excerpts in the order in which they came across them. More usually, they tried to arrange them under predetermined headings: virtues and vices, perhaps, or branches of knowledge. Properly organised, a good collection of extracts provided a reserve of quotations and aphorisms which could be used to support an argument or adorn a literary composition.”

The Great British Battle: how the fight against coronavirus spread a new nationalism – article by William Davies in The Guardian. “The continuity between coronavirus Britain and Brexit Britain is greater than we might have imagined, and certainly greater than it appeared during those five weeks before Johnson’s hospitalisation. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Johnson – like Donald Trump – was elected to office on the back of an anti-metropolitan, anti-liberal cultural platform. Johnson’s core vote is predominantly outside of those Covid danger zones of the inner cities and clusters of prosperity. Johnson, like Donald Trump, represents people who believe in the value of hard work, but don’t do very much of the really unpleasant hard work themselves, either for reasons of wealth or age. They believe in ‘unleashing’ the economy, less in a macroeconomic sense, and more in the sense of ditching all the red tape and political correctness that comes from government administrators and universities.... The purpose of the economy, from this conservative perspective, is to inculcate independence, both at an individual and a national level. The national economy should be self-reliant, manufacture its own goods, and employ its own people. It’s this national economy that globalisation, Brussels and lockdown all inhibit, and therefore need overturning.”

What's the point of efficiency if you're in a rush to finish something trivial? – article from 2015 by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. “The premise of gamification ... makes a certain intuitive sense: millions of players find video games compelling, perhaps even to the point of addiction, and they’re highly motivated to complete the sequential challenges around which most games are built. What if we designed our work projects, our time at the gym or even our romantic lives so that they exploit the same psychological principles, featuring mini-challenges, systems for winning points, completing quests and moving upwards through levels, culminating in an ‘epic win’?... The constant hazard with the contemporary cult of productivity, though, is that productivity itself quickly starts to feel inherently virtuous – as if merely getting things done were a good thing, regardless of what those things are. An exhausting weekend spent crossing tasks off your household to-do list is nothing to be proud of, if they’re not the right tasks. ... Gamification risks making all this worse precisely because it works so well: when you’re psychologically enmeshed in scoring points by acing challenges, it’s even easier to forget to keep asking whether they’re the right challenges.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how' – interview by James Yeh in The Guardian. “In her debut collection of essays, Gathering Moss, she blended, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet’s oldest plants. For Braiding Sweetgrass, she broadened her scope with an array of object lessons braced by indigenous wisdom and culture. From cedars we can learn generosity (because of all they provide, from canoes to capes). From the creation story, which tells of Sky woman falling from the sky, we can learn about mutual aid. Sweetgrass teaches the value of sustainable harvesting, reciprocal care and ceremony. The Windigo mindset, on the other hand, is a warning against being ‘consumed by consumption’ (a windigo is a legendary monster from Anishinaabe lore, an ‘Ojibwe boogeyman’). Ideas of recovery and restoration are consistent themes, from the global to the personal. ‘Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us,’ Kimmerer explains, ‘so my act of reciprocity is, having been shown plants as gifts, as intelligences other than our own, as these amazing, creative beings – good lord, they can photosynthesise, that still blows my mind! – I want to help them become visible to people. People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.’”

'Transcendentally boring': the joy of job simulation games – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. “Over the last five years there has been a renaissance in serious job simulator games. Titles such as Euro Truck Simulator, Bus Simulator and Train Sim World have attracted huge fanbases and critical acclaim, each replicating its profession with unremitting attention to detail. In an entertainment sector where ludicrous power fantasies rule, where players get to be space marines, ancient warrior princesses and football superstars, it seems antithetical that 25 million people have bought Farming Simulator, a game in which your main challenge is to harvest a successful wheat crop.... It’s easy to think of hardcore sim fans as pernickety obsessives, but there is a quiet joy in interacting with these lovingly replicated systems of lights, switches and signals. In an unpredictable world, it is calming to open the doors of a bus at the right time, to give the correct change, to set the heating system correctly, to obey the traffic signs. It is gratifying to see a button, to press it and to know something will happen.“

'Milli Violini': I was a fake violinist in a world-class miming orchestra – interview of Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman by Sian Cain in The Guardian. "A young violinist joins an award-winning ensemble led by a famous composer, only to find out that all of the musicians aren’t actually playing their instruments but are simply miming along to a CD instead. It is an incredible premise for a memoir, and might even make a great Coen brothers film, but Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman says this astonishing story happened to her.... The Composer wanted the musicians to mime, Hindman says, because that way ‘we sounded perfect, never had to rehearse and he could switch us up like socks’. The musicians, some of whom had PhDs from Juilliard, accepted it because, like Hindman, they couldn’t find full-time work and needed the money....Dedicated to ‘those with average talents and above-average desires’, Sounds Like Titanic has its own darker undercurrent. The book is really about millennial work culture, US healthcare and many other things that would push a young woman to mime to a CD for four years.”

Out of My Skull by James Danckert and John D Eastwood: the psychology of boredom – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Our guides’ careful analysis leads to a detailed conception of boredom as a combination of being mentally unengaged, and wanting to engage with something, yet being unable to – what they call ‘a failure to launch’. It seems that some people experience this more often than others: those blessed with a strong sense of ‘intrinsic motivation’, who pursue projects for their own sake – whether it be extreme rock-climbing or learning a musical instrument – might be less prone to boredom, or might just be better at learning from its early signals. But others will experience boredom more often if they generally lack a feeling of agency and satisfaction in their lives: such factors can’t be remedied by simply telling them that only boring people get bored.... People who are more prone to boredom, the authors report, are more likely to be narcissistic or hostile, and ‘some forms of aggression could be viewed as attempts to redress the lack of meaning that is associated with boredom’. So they identify boredom – in its existential mode as a sense of the meaninglessness of life – as one possible driving force behind tribalism and xenophobia. Did boredom, after all, lead to Brexit? Certainly one plausible hypothesis for why so many people voted for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, I’d suggest, is that voters were profoundly bored with a world in which nothing very important ever seemed to happen, so why not vote for a leader who would at least be entertaining? The events of this year, of course, illustrate at least one problem with that reasoning.”

Cuttings: April 2020

How the telephone failed its big test during 1918's Spanish flu pandemic – article by Harry McCracken on Fast Company, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "For a time, it looked like the telephone might help people carry on their lives with minimal disruption. In Holton, Kansas, the local Red Cross distributed placards that local merchants could place in their windows, encouraging customers—especially those who might be ill—to call rather than enter the premises. (Even before the epidemic, telephone ordering was becoming a popular form of commerce—grocery stores, for instance, offered Instacart-like delivery services.)... [But] phone-company infrastructure depended upon the operators (mostly young women) who manually made each connection between the person placing a call and an intended recipient.... Telephone operators were just as vulnerable to the Spanish flu as anyone else; maybe even more so than some, since they sat at banks of switchboards in tight quarters, elbow to elbow with any infected coworkers. ... Instead of running ads touting the telephone’s usefulness in times of quarantine, AT&T’s Bell System companies and their rivals were reduced to beseeching customers to stay off the phone if at all possible."

The UK will change after coronavirus. But we have to fight to make it a change for the better – article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "The voters who delivered Johnson his majority in 2019 in the so-called red wall areas – either by voting Tory or staying at home – are often socially conservative, but committed to economic interventionism. The Tories, therefore, have no electoral mandate for a renewed bout of austerity. Now with even middle-class people sucked into the welfare state is a renewed onslaught against social security really politically palatable?... Much of the left mistakenly believed that they would become the obvious beneficiaries of the 2008 financial crash, even though previous crises of capitalism – in the 1930s and 1970s – principally benefited the right. As free market economist Milton Friedman aptly put it: 'Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.' But his caveat was important: 'When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.' When Lehman Brothers imploded, the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare.... Beveridge was right: these moments are times for revolutions, not for patching, and a looming danger is that the new populist right may understand this better than Labour or the US Democrats. It has taken the horror of a pandemic to expose deliberately ignored social ills. What comes next must cure them for good."

'Is my nan going to die?': how kids' TV is responding to the coronavirus - article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. "The BBC’s long-running Newsround programme has seen its audience rise substantially for its three daily broadcasts on the CBBC channel and its dedicated website, with its reporters trying to find ways to provide optimistic takes on the news without sugarcoating the situation. 'So many kids now have anxiety issues,' said Ricky Boleto, a presenter on the programme. 'We’re letting kids know that we focus on what’s happening in their homes and gardens without making them feel they have to sort out the world’s problems … They’re sending questions such as "Is my grandmother going to die"? We’ve been trying to put them at ease.' He said children 'have a very good moral compass, probably better than most adults' and Newsround aims to cover stories without patronising audiences: 'The most important thing for us is to tell stories in a way that doesn’t presume knowledge, doesn’t patronise, and makes young people feel that this is their programme.'”

Appalled Graphic Designer Shows Girls’ Life Magazine What Their Cover Should Look Like – September 2016 post on Women You Should Know website, referenced in The Female Lead. " A couple of weeks ago we ran a piece about an image that was posted on social media and went viral. It was a side-by-side shot of [a] Girls’ Life magazine cover ... next to the cover of Boys’ Life magazine that served as a harsh reminder of the stereotyped messages that, even in the year 2016, are STILL marketing to girls. We weren’t the only ones ticked-off by the image. After seeing it posted on her Facebook feed, Katherine Young, a graphic designer, took matters into her own hands and decided to show Girls’ Life what their cover SHOULD look like."

What will the transition to a new normal look like? – article by Matthew Taylor on the RSA website, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "[My assumption is] we will enter an extended period of transitional arrangements – between normal life and lockdown. The government will assert its need to tighten or loosen the rules depending on infection rates and the capacity of health systems. This transitional period may last for an extended period, perhaps a year or more. ... In an extended transition we need processes and principles to guide policy decisions and shape organisational and individual responsibilities. ...What might some of these principles and processes be? Here are five to start with. (1) The public should have direct input to decision making.... (2) No one should be either forced or incentivised to behave in ways that are dangerous to their health and the health of others....(3) Rules will need to be flexible, but transparency should be mandatory.... (4) The needs of the most vulnerable should take priority.... (5) Policy should be devolved where possible."

No campus lectures and shut student bars: UK universities' £1bn struggle to move online - article by David Batty and Rachel Hall in The Guardian. "UK universities need to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to deliver degrees online, with warnings that many are unprepared to deal with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on students’ education.Only around 20 universities are in a good position to provide a range of high-quality online courses by the start of the new academic year in September, according to Prof Sir Tim O’Shea, the former vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University.... His stark assessment came as Durham University stalled controversial plans to provide online-only degrees and significantly reduce face-to-face lecturing next year. The proposals, drawn up by senior managers and private provider Cambridge Education Group Digital, said lecturers would only need six hours of training, and could create online degree modules in six to 12 weeks.... O’Shea divided the UK universities into four categories: those with the capacity and will to develop high-quality online education, including the Open University, King’s College London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds and Coventry; those with the capacity but not the will, such as Oxford and Cambridge; those with the will but not the capacity, such as Durham; and those with neither the will nor the capacity, such as art schools and music conservatoires."

Show but don’t tell: why silent Zooms are golden for focusing the mind – article by Nosheen Iqbal in The Guardian. "On paper, the practice of logging on to a video-conferencing site to sit with strangers for an hour without communicating may hold limited appeal. In practice, silent Zooms have become a lifeline in lockdown for users trying to focus on writing, reading, meditation and more.... Anecdotally, concentration seems more difficult to harness in corona times; research shows that, during periods of stress, we see significant decline in our ability to hold information and focus. But having accountability partners is a proven way to boost success, be it in weight loss or curbing an alcohol addiction. The difference with silent Zooms is that the accountability partners are often strangers, and always silent."

'They were forgotten': the great female cartoonists who have been overlooked – article by Nadja Sayej in The Guardian. Women in Comics: Looking Forward and Back is a group exhibition at the Society of Illustrators featuring more than 50 female cartoonists, from the early 20th century trailblazers to plus-size superheroes, queer graphic novels, wartime romances and flapper-era cartoons, all of which go outside your typical superhero format.... The first part of the exhibition looks at roughly 80 artworks from the historic collection of California-based cartoonist and collector Trina Robbins. Her collection includes cartoons by women in the flapper era, the second world war and 1950s romance comics, among others. Robbins has single-handedly rediscovered an entire generation of artists, some of whom are only now being recognized.... Robbins started in the San Francisco underground comics scene in 1966. 'I didn’t know about the women who preceded me,' she said. In the early 1980s, she and fellow artist Catherine Yronwode collaborated on an idea: 'I decided we needed to produce a history of women cartoonists,' said Robbins. 'We made a book in 1985.'”

We Are Living in a Failed State – article by George Packer in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. ... The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state."

Seen and heard: January to March 2020

The Crown – At last I get what the fuss was about, having binge-watched Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD over the Christmas break. Truly excellent television, each hour-long episode feeling you drained and washed out like a full-length feature film. Great performances from top-deck actors, with high production values and powerful scripting from Peter Morgan who after The Queen and The Audience seems to have this genre of imagined history down pat. For my money, the best episodes are in the first season, especially the early ones, when Queen Mary is explaining the demands of The Crown, and where the main theme is the conflict between the Crown and the people who inhabit it. Significantly, the title is The Crown, not The Queen, “the Crown takes precedence” being the key line. Hans Zimmer’s theme music, elaborated by Rupert Gregson-Williams (who also did Wonder Woman), does critical work in establishing the feeling of a remorseless, inexorable, slow-grinding trans-historical force. (Based I think on Purcell’s Frost Scene music, which is actually used in one of the episodes, but here extended and amped up with full symphonic orchestra to tremendous effect, worth the price of the soundtrack album on its own.) Interesting tie-in books too, by Robert Lacey, giving the historical facts behind Season 1 and Seasons 2-3, making it clear just which scenes have been invented to convey (hopefully) an emotional, if not factual, truth.

The Subversive Copyeditor, by Carol Fischer Saller – Wise words from the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s online Q&A, and actually not all that subversive, the point being that what an author and a publisher wants (or should want) is not a copyeditor who slavishly follows rules but one who knows what the rules are, why they’re there, and when and how to bend or break them. So not so much use to the thousands of people who email the Q&A with variants of: “please will you tell my boss / wife / husband / teacher that they’re wrong and I’m right.” The most useful aspect of the book is the sage advice on how to work and get on with your colleagues in the production process. A book to dip into and re-read periodically.

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse – Now this is a proper Broken Sword adventure game, after the poor showing of the fourth entry in the series: George and Nico sparking off each other again, travelling all over Europe and the Middle-East in pursuit of a gnostic mystery. Nice to have some puzzles which are actually solvable by ordinary people, and clever plotting so that the customary clues-hidden-in-the-painting trope is spread over several scenes throughout the game, instead of being delivered in one big indigestible lump.

Snowflakes are Dancing, by  Isao Tomita– A favourite album of mine in the 1970s, when electro-classical based on Moog and other synthesisers was a thing, the trend having been kicked off by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos with Switched On Bach. I still like it; the rich electronic sound palate, like a good orchestration, skilfully brings colour to the Debussy piano originals.

Good Omens – Intermittently hilarious TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s collaboration, a serious rival to the Dirk Maggs-produced radio version of 2014, the great joy being Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon respectively, who combine forces to sabotage the imminent apocalypse because they’ve grown accustomed to living in the world and basically rather like it and don’t want it to end. The other elements aren’t as strong, so the middle episodes drag a little where the complicated plot gets very difficult to follow, but the ending is a blast.

The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath – interesting psychological design book, of which the basic claim – backed up by numerous case studies – is that emotional, impactful and transformative experiences are something which you can arrange and design, and not simply leave to happen if you’re lucky. Many of the examples are from customer service, but it has great implications for learning design.

Pet Shop Boys Ultimate – the soundtrack of the 1980s, rather as Abba was of the 1970s, and like Abba – as Stephen Fry observed – songs which are somehow just much better than pop songs need to be. And some, like ‘It’s a Sin’, are blisteringly powerful in their defiance.

Design for how people learn, by Julie Dirksen – really useful, practical and accessible handbook for learning design, considering each aspect (learning need, motivation, attention, memory, skill development etc) in terms of what’s known from psychology.

Chuchel – clever and amusing puzzle game from the much-respected Amanita Design company, who also produced Samorost and its sequels, Botanicula and Machinarium. I’m not sure I liked it as much as some reviewers, though; Chuchel’s personality is too bad-tempered and greedy to be really funny for me.

Star Trek: Discovery. Season 1 – Yes, well. Much anticipated, and some appealing aspects (anything with Michelle Yeoh in it has to be worth consideration, plus my son designed the space suit used in the opening episode), yet somehow… I just don’t care about the characters very much, except perhaps Michael Burnham played by the very good Sonequa Martin-Green. The manic pace, as in the recent ‘reboot’ movies, doesn’t help; there’s no time to get to know anybody before they're killed, or unmasked as someone else in disguise, or turn out to really be their counterpart from the mirror universe. It’s better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the pre-reboot shows, but it sounds as though Star Trek: Picard may be having the same problem. I want to watch Deep Space Nine again!

Endeavour, Series 7 – a short (three episodes) but excellent series, and if this turns out to be the final one it’ll have gone out on a high.

Age of the Image – Very perceptive four-part documentary series by James Fox. I’m not sure there’s really any overall thesis, but it’s a splendid tour through the histories of photography, film, advertising and manufactured image, featuring great examples – just the ones you’d want them to have bought the rights for.

Wanderlust: Travel Stories – Highly atmospheric portmanteau game or interactive novel, in which travellers meeting on Easter Island tell their stories of journeys past. One reviewer at least loved it, but I’m not entirely happy about the game aspect, because nothing you do seems to be capable of disrupting the overall storyline, which makes one wonder just how meaningful the choices are. Also it’s a bit weird to be playing a game with people journeying all over the place when in real life the world is in coronavirus lockdown.

Doctor Who: emergency transmission – A brilliantly conceived message to fearful children, and the fearful children in all of us if we’re honest. Highly appropriate, because of course Doctor Who is precisely about fear and overcoming fear – and The Doctor always comes through. I think this is the best thing Jodie Whittaker has done as The Doctor.

Cuttings: March 2020

Can computers ever replace the classroom? – article by Alex Beard in The Guardian. "In China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, ...in 2018 alone, [Derek Haoyang] Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups....
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to Li five years earlier.... He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand.... The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach.... Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher.... In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word 'hurry'. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word 'hurry' and related phrases.... Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as 'nuggets'. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs."

The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski: outbreaks of all kinds – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells the story of the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, about which we have heard so much lately. The book’s hero is Ronald Ross, the British doctor who in the late 19th century discovered that mosquitoes spread malaria and was rewarded with the 1902 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Ross wasn’t the first to describe an epidemic mathematically, but he was the first to do so armed with a thorough understanding of the biological and social processes that shape it, and this made all the difference. ... It’s partly thanks to Ross that we have the concept of herd immunity – hopeful because it means that not every mosquito has to be squashed, not every person has to be vaccinated, for a population to be protected against a disease.... A century on, ideas have changed. Now the thinking is that many of the things that Hudson and Ross might have considered independent – obesity, smoking, even loneliness – are catching, too. We talk about financial contagion and epidemics of knife crime, and methods borrowed from public health are being applied to try to nip these problems in the bud, or at least slow their spread. ... One of the most interesting and topical parts of the book is about the mathematical modelling of fake news."

Coming soon! Classic novels with added positivity – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian.  "Christie, Merriment on the Orient Express. Mann, Life in Venice. Rose, Twelve Agreeable Men. Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spa. Roth, Portnoy's Compliment. Joyce, Finnegan''s Birthday Party."

The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem – editorial in The Guardian. "Tim Lang in his new book, Feeding Britain, [warns that] our food system is 'stretched, open to disruption and far from resilient'. It is easy to castigate panic buyers for empty shelves. But while shopping responsibly will help others to get the food they need, only a few people are squirrelling away vast stocks. Research firm Kantar says the average spend per supermarket trip has risen by 16% to £22.13 month on month – not surprising when households realised they were likely to need lunches at home, including for children no longer in school, and could have to self-isolate for a fortnight. The underlying problem is that just-in-time supply chains can struggle to cope with even relatively small shifts, and that a handful of retailers dominate the market....The efficiencies that have kept food prices low, and the long and complex global chains that bring us such variety, come at a price."

Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies – article by Jordan Kisner.  "Consider the scene at the end of No Country For Old Men when Javier Bardem’s character has a car accident. After the crunch of impact, there are a few moments of what might be mistaken for stillness. The two cars rest smoking and crumpled in the middle of a suburban intersection. Nothing moves – but the soundscape is deceptively layered. There is the sound of engines hissing and crackling, which have been mixed to seem as near to the ear as the camera was to the cars; there is a mostly unnoticeable rustle of leaves in the trees; periodically, so faintly that almost no one would register it consciously, there is the sound of a car rolling through an intersection a block or two over, off camera; a dog barks somewhere far away. The faint sound of a breeze was taken from ambient sounds on a street like the one depicted in the scene. ... None of these sounds are there because some microphone picked them up. They’re there because [Skip] Lievsay chose them and put them there, as he did for every other sound in the film. The moment lasts about 20 seconds. No Country For Old Men is 123 minutes long.... The impact a tiny aural cue can have on the brain’s understanding of narrative is astonishing. On the third day of the mix, Lievsay and Larry were breezing through a scene of Miles [Davies] dropping in on one of his wife’s dance rehearsals when [director and star Don] Cheadle ...paused them. The scene sounded a little too dreamy. Cheadle wanted a more matter-of-fact sound.... Lievsay nodded and fiddled for a moment. When he replayed the scene, something small but extraordinary happened. I had watched this scene somewhere between one and two dozen times but this time I noticed something I’d never seen before: a young woman passing behind Frances with a stack of papers in her hand. Lievsay had given her footsteps. Without the footsteps, I’d somehow never seen her; now, I saw her, and her presence – along with a few other tweaks by Lievsay – suggested bustling in the room, people at work, things happening outside the eye contact forged between Miles and Frances. I didn’t exactly hear the difference: I just saw the scene differently."

Cuttings: February 2020

Alternative orthodoxy: a minority position – Daily Meditations post by Fr Richard Rohr. "Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition. ... Francis’ starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness and God’s identification with that suffering in Jesus. ... Since Jesus himself was humble and poor, then the pure and simple imitation of Jesus became Francis’ life agenda. ... He knew intuitively what many educators have now proven—that humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living .... The lecture method changes very few people at any deep or long-lasting level. It normally does not touch the unconscious, where all our hurts and motives lie hidden and disguised."

Magic moments: the indestructible appeal of easy listening radio – article by Simon Akram in The Guardian. "Looking back on the tectonic changes that have hit the music and media landscape in the past two decades, it seems a minor miracle that Magic, and music radio in general, still manages to pull in millions of listeners each week. Smartphones and streaming mean that anyone can instantly find just about any song ever recorded. And where, once upon a time, a favourite DJ might have been the person to introduce a listener to their new favourite song, nowadays streaming services such as Spotify can serve up endless personalised recommendations, based on your previous listening taste.
All this makes it hard not to wonder why, when you can just listen to what you want to listen to, would you want to listen to a radio station that may play songs you don’t like, punctuated by adverts for Great Western Railway and Mr Kipling, traffic updates about the M25, and, in between the songs, chitchat of dubious interest? ... What, in short, makes Magic magic? ... There is some data to suggest that in troubled times, consumers turn to music radio for comfort.... Even if you have heard a song a thousand times, there is something special about hearing it on the radio."

Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings - article by Stefan Collini in The Guardian. "As some twisted equivalent of a new year resolution, I decided I would sacrifice myself for the common good in January by spending the greater part of the month reading The Complete Blogs of Dominic Cummings. ... Cummings is knowledgeable about an impressive variety of disciplines, and from this formidable if eclectic reading he has attempted to synthesise ideas he believes would transform the way the world is run (lack of ambition is not a defect of his thinking). ... And there are any number of things he is right about, or anyway right-ish. One is the foolishness of diverting funding away from basic 'blue skies' scientific research in order to promote more applied work.... In his ambitious intellectual and educational synthesis there are some obvious, and rather predictable, lacunae. He is dismissive of most of the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, precisely because they purport to explore the distinctive power of 'the social': their practitioners are mostly 'charlatans'. Here he sounds like a souped-up version of Margaret Thatcher: there is no such thing as 'society', just the patterned interaction of evolutionarily moulded individuals. ... However, there is another omission that is less predictable, yet, in its way, more revealing. Cummings is practically silent about jurisprudence and the law. Great leaders, revolutionaries, 'men of action' and over-confident mavericks of all types always want to sweep the law aside, seeing only its negative character as a slow-moving body of outdated constraints on freedom of action – but that, of course, suggests why it is so precious. ... In Cummings’s ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. Human progress depends on giving those with the highest IQ (he’s very keen on the notion of IQ) the education that will allow them fully to develop their talents and then the freedom to apply them.... Politics is, by definition, the terrain of conflicting convictions, and although in principle Cummings lauds the idea of 'feedback' and the correction of error, in practice he seems to struggle with the idea of genuine intellectual disagreement. In a curious way, there is very little politics in Cummings’s political thinking: it’s largely about the operational process, not about the substantive aims, and there does not seem to be much feel for the irresolvable conflicts over fundamental values that are at the heart of political life."

A publisher's helpful 'suggestions' – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "We are all so excited to be publishing your new manuscript! We'd just like to suggest a few tweaks and a slight change of emphasis. Of course, by 'suggest' we mean 'insist on'. And by 'tweaks' we mean 'fundamental revisions'. And by 'a slight change of emphasis' we mean 'writing a completely different book'."

Common mistakes made by the inexperienced romantic novelist – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Too easy. 'I'll lose my allowance if I marry you!' 'That's ok: I'm immensely wealthy.' (2) Too many characters. 'Let me introduce my sisters: Jane, Beth, Jo, Emily, Anne, Lucy, Amy, Laura, Esther, Mary, Fanny, Emma, Kitty, Georgiana and Nell.' (3) Too prim. 'He unbuttoned his overcoat and used my Christian name!' 'Scandalous!' (4) Too many obstacles. 'I love you, but I'm dying and secretly married to your twin brother.' 'I must go to the North Pole and I'm a vampire.'"

How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. "Utra-processed foods (or UPF) now account for more than half of all the calories eaten in the UK and US, and other countries are fast catching up.... Evidence now suggests that diets heavy in UPFs can cause overeating and obesity. Consumers may blame themselves for overindulging in these foods, but what if it is in the nature of these products to be overeaten? In 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising its citizens to avoid UPFs outright. ... The concept of UPFs was born in the early years of this millennium when a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro [created] the Nova system (meaning a new star) [of classifying foods:] 'unprocessed and minimally processed foods'[,]... 'processed culinary ingredients' [such as] butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour[,]... 'processed foods' [such as] canned tomatoes and pulses, pickles, traditionally made bread (such as sourdough), smoked fish and cured meats.... Group 4 foods tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, but instead of being used sparingly to make fresh food more delicious, these ingredients are now transformed through colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to become more palatable. They contain ingredients unfamiliar to domestic kitchens... At the end of 2018, [nutritionist Kevin] Hall and his colleagues became the first scientists to test – in randomised controlled conditions – whether diets high in ultra-processed foods could actually cause overeating and weight gain.... For two weeks, Hall’s participants ate mostly ultra-processed meals such as turkey sandwiches with crisps, and for another two weeks they ate mostly unprocessed food such as spinach omelette with sweet potato hash. ... It turned out that, during the weeks of the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an extra 500 calories a day, equivalent to a whole quarter pounder with cheese. Blood tests showed that the hormones in the body responsible for hunger remained elevated on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet. ... Now that we have evidence of a link between diets high in UPFs and obesity, it seems clear that a healthy diet should be based on fresh, home-cooked food. "

My Very Own Crystal Ball: Four Must-Have Writing Skills for Customer Service Agents of the Future – blog post by Leslie O'Flavhavan on e-write. "Over the last decade, as companies added one written channel after another, I’ve observed (and helped) frontline customer service agents acquire the writing skills they need to respond to customers. First came email, then came chat, then social media, then SMS. Then there were customer forums. Then we added team messaging channels like Slack. With this growth in mind, I’d like to offer my crystal ball prognostications about the four writing skills agents will need in coming years. (Truth be told, it’d be great if most agents had these writing skills right now!) (1) The ability – and willingness – to contribute to stored knowledge sources. ... (2) The maturity to use tools that check spelling, punctuation, and grammar.... (3) The mental focus to create a through-line in omnichannel conversations with customers.... (4) The ability to express sincere empathy.... In the future, frontline customer service agents must have the emotional intelligence to understand why 'We regret any inconvenience this may have caused' is highly unsatisfying wording and why 'I understand why this delivery delay is so frustrating for you, and I’m ready to make things right' is so much better.... My crystal ball tells me the future of customer service writing is 'the same but more.' Customers’ need for quick, correct, helpful service—delivered with heart—will be the same, but the changes in the technologies we use for customer service will cause customers to expect more."

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty: if inequality is illegitimate, why not reduce it? – review by William Davies in The Guardian. "His premise in Capital and Ideology is a moral one: inequality is illegitimate, and therefore requires ideologies in order to be justified and moderated. 'All history shows that the search for a distribution of wealth acceptable to the majority of people is a recurrent theme in all periods and all cultures,' he reports boldly. As societies distribute income, wealth and education more widely, so they become more prosperous. The overturning of regressive ideologies is therefore the main condition of economic progress.... The result of .... postwar trends is that western democracies are now dominated by two rival elites, reflected in many two-party electoral systems: a financial elite (or 'merchant right') that favours open markets, and an educational elite (or 'Brahmin left') that stands for cultural diversity, but has lost faith in progressive taxation as a basis for social justice. With these as the principal democratic options, nativist parties prosper, opposing educational and economic inequality, but only on the basis of tighter national borders. There is a vacancy for parties willing to defend internationalism and redistribution simultaneously. Piketty concludes with a tentative policy programme aimed at meeting the nativist challenge along such lines. This includes some bold ideas (such as an equal education budget for every citizen, to be invested as they choose), but mostly rests on ideas of participatory governance, progressive taxation, democratisation of the EU and income guarantees that have been circulating on the radical liberal left for decades. Suffice to say that naming such policies is considerably easier than executing them. He might be right that, given the climate crisis among other factors, current levels of inequality cannot long be maintained and new policies will be introduced: he prefers to take an optimistic position, based on the assumption that 'inequality regimes' never last for ever."

When the bus ride to your destination is just a click away – article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "When my dad moved into residential care near my home in Liverpool last autumn, my first consideration – as a non-driver and not-very-good cyclist – was how often I’d be able to visit him. The best home we found for him was a 45-minute walk or a £5 cab ride away, with no direct bus since the hourly council-subsidised service was cut in 2017. There was a solution at hand: ArrivaClick, a form of 'demand-responsive' public transport that I describe to perplexed friends as a cross between an Uber and a bus, and has been running across south Liverpool since mid-2018. You download an app, enter your card details, location and destination, and a few seconds later you’re informed whether there’s a minibus within a five- to 15-minute timescale that can pick you up a few yards from where you’re standing. The driver follows a route, shown on a GPS-connected tablet, which can deviate slightly to make extra pick-ups of people who are going the same way. Depending on the time of day, I usually find myself travelling with three or four others who have summoned the app at the same time, paying an average of £2 or less per journey. It has enabled me to see my dad every other day and to take him on day trips and to GP appointments at a surgery where the nearest bus stop is a good 10-minute walk away. ArrivaClick currently runs 25 minibuses around south Liverpool, with plans to add more as the service gains in popularity: downloads of the app are running at 1,000 a week."

Antisocial by Andrew Marantz: America's online extremists – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "Antisocial scrutinises the online firestarters who see Trump as their avatar. Even if you don’t know their names, members of the 'alt-right' (far right) and the less overtly racist 'alt-light' have influenced media narratives, popularised abusive buzzwords, confected news stories and helped create the cultural context for the Trump presidency.... Marantz is knee-deep in the stuff. Obviously these people are awful but he takes pains to explain exactly what kind of awful, and why – like the Linnaeus of internet villainy.... Running like a mantra through the book is an aphorism inspired by the philosopher Richard Rorty: 'To change how we talk is to change who we are.'... Who changed the way we talk? Antisocial charts the death of the Silicon Valley dream of better living through communication. Committed to free speech (and to avoiding the cost of policing content), tech companies have been slow to accept responsibility for what appears on their platforms.... Though curious and humane... , [Marantz] is firmly sceptical and increasingly demoralised by his subjects’ company. While repurposing material from his New Yorker profiles, he uses digressions and footnotes to craft a metanarrative about the role of journalism in general and his own reporting in particular. Is he giving these narcissists and nihilists too much attention or not enough? He errs on the side of 'know your enemy' but understands that he cannot win. Trolls set 'an ingenious trap', he writes. 'By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet, and perhaps the world.'”

Cuttings: January 2020

How we gave Oxford University applicants a level playing field – article by Marchella Ward in The Guardian. "A huge range of factors are known to affect performance in the application process, including school type, access to experiences beyond the curriculum, opportunities to develop particular kinds of cultural capital and familiarity with higher education. Expecting all applicants to perform in similar ways was disadvantaging those who had not had the privilege of being taught how to make their abilities legible against the kinds of metrics used in university admissions processes. Once we had begun to think critically about our expectations of applicants – and to admit to ourselves that it was not fair to expect potential to look the same in applicants who had had vastly different opportunities – something changed. We looked at the kinds of questions we were asking and the kinds of answers we were expecting, we interrogated our own and each others’ assumptions about different forms potential might take in an applicant, and asked our admitting tutors to come together for a conversation about how to use contextual data to recognise diverse potential. As we sought to uncouple privilege from the assessment of potential, the most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged. This kind of statistic sometimes draws accusations of 'social engineering' but bear with me: all of our offer-holders, regardless of background, are expected to achieve similar A-level grades. It is obvious why those who have achieved these against a background of disadvantage should have a higher rate of success."

When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian.  "It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men.... The fight-or-flight response is just one provoked by a complex cocktail of hormones our brain releases in extreme danger. There’s cortisol, for energy, but also natural opiates, which act to dull physical and emotional pain, corticosteroids, which reduce energy, and oxytocin, which increases positive feelings. When a woman experiences sexual assault, she may fight or flee, but as a self-protection mechanism her body may also render her physically immobile – scientists refer to this as 'tonic immobility' or 'rape-induced paralysis' – and appear emotionless. It is the evolutionary equivalent to playing dead. Research suggests that up to 50% of survivors experience this during sexual assault. Additionally, the natural opiates inhibit survivors from encoding what happened into their memory, which makes it easy for legal defence teams to question their reliability as a witness.... Last August, Robin Tolson, a male judge in his 60s, issued a family court judgment in a child custody case that suggested a woman had not been raped by her partner because she hadn’t physically fought back. She appealed, and her case was heard by high court judge Alison Russell. ... Russell’s judgment ... is excoriating about her colleague, describing his approach to consent as 'manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence'. She says: 'The logical conclusion of this judge’s approach is it is both lawful and acceptable for a man to have sex with his partner regardless of their… willingness to participate.' Yes, you read that right: Tolson falls into the quarter of the population who think it’s OK for a man to rape his partner."

No history, no languages… the end of humanities only deepens divides – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Sunderland University wants to become more 'career-focused'. So it is to shut down all its language, politics and history courses and promote instead degrees that 'align with particular employment sectors'. It’s an illustration of what happens when universities turn into businesses, and their ethos is defined by the market. It’s also symbolic of the divisions that now rend Britain’s social fabric.... [It] seems to suggest that the study of the humanities should be reserved for the children of the rich, who can afford to move, while local working-class students should be confined to 'vocational' subjects. Existing divisions will only deepen."

Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece? Three million coins bearing the slogan 'Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations' are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union. However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation.'The "Brexit" 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,' wrote the novelist on Twitter."

A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders: the curious history of alphabetical order – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters.... The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.... It may be a good moment to tell the hidden history of alphabetical order, when computer algorithms seem ready to do away with it. Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed 'invisible through its eight centuries of active duty', in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance."

Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left – article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Walter Ong, a linguist and Jesuit priest who died at 91 in 2003[,] ... spent his life trying to understand the revolutionary technologies, such as the television and radio, unleashed during his lifetime. ... He did so by ... studying the difference between human cultures rooted in orality and those rooted in literacy. His topic matters for Twitter more than you may think.... For oral cultures, words are primarily vibrations in the air, Ong argued. Words must therefore be memorable, few in number, and tied to the concrete reality of day-to-day life. But after the advent of writing, words become more than invisible sounds. They become permanent symbols that exist outside their utterance and can be read long after the speaker has died. Words can also divorce from the physical world and start to reference ideas, concepts, and abstract states. And instead of words needing to aid memory, as they do in oral cultures (by using a repeated epithet, such as Homer’s 'wine-dark sea'), written words can suddenly act as a form of memory themselves. ... As I once wrote: 'Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.'... By 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. 'The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,' she said, 'where the collective "we" treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.' ... Twitter has been a mess of speech-like tweets interpreted as print and print-like tweets interpreted as speech for as long as most users can remember. [But recently] I’ve wondered if that instability presents a political problem—particularly for the left in the United States. The word that sticks out to me now from Stewart’s post is identity."

Seen and heard: October to December 2019

Beneath a Steel Sky – classic 1994 adventure by Charles Cecil, before he made the ground-breaking Broken Sword. Low resolution graphics and a basic point-and-click interface, but a great story with great characters and great voice acting (nice to hear British characters for a change) earns this game its place in adventure history.

Richard Alston Dance Company: Final Edition tour – seen at Northampton Derngate. As always, lovely light and beautiful dance, to evocative music (Monteverdi, Chopin, Elgar, Brahms). Sad to think that this is the last time we’ll see this fine company, which is disbanding because of the difficulties of operating in the current financial climate.

World on Fire – tremendous WW2 TV drama series. I loved the multiple international characters and inter-connecting storylines, but I was rather hoping for closure rather than a second series.

We must deliver: Brexit, Johnson and the robots of Milton Keynes – video by John Harris for The Guardian. During the conference season, with Parliament still stuck in Brexit debate, the Guardian ran an ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series, to explore life outside the Westminster bubble. This episode was from Milton Keynes, “a town evenly split between leave and remain, and hurtling into the future. Robots are delivering people’s shopping, but there’s also homelessness and glaring inequality, and clear signs that most people want no part of all the Brexit madness.” Our delivery robots really are cute, and I’m happy to see them getting a national profile. (See also the text version ‘Britain is less polarised than the media would have us believe’.)

The rise and fall of social media platforms 2003-2019 – Impressive and informative animated graphic, noted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.

Downton Abbey (film) – how good the splendour and period detail of the locations and large-scale set pieces look on the big screen, unlike say Dad’s Army with which the charm was largely in its tatty war-economy settings and confinement to a half-hour TV show.

Enneagram Rhapsody – perceptive and very funny, but only if you know the Enneagram. The large audience who get all the jokes turns out to be a US church where it’s been part of their ministry.

Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death – another adventure game in the Broken Sword series, but not one of the best. (See the review in Adventure Gamers.) George is as amusing as ever, especially when he’s trying to get into the Vatican by pretending to be a stupid American tourist, but Nico’s absence for the first half if the game is keenly felt, and her replacement is no substitute (even if there turns out to be a plot reason why she reveals nothing about herself). And many of the puzzles are just too hard.

Mythos – retelling of the ancient Greek myths by Stephen Fry. I was disappointed; some parts were boring, where Fry was trying to be scholarly and felt the need to tell us the names and relationships of obscure deities about whom nothing further is known; other parts were just silly, where he was trying to be a comedian and make the gods talk in 21st century colloquialisms. It is possible to tell myths in a way which is accessible and relatable and yet delivers their ancient power; Neil Gaiman did it with the Norse myths, for example.

His Dark Materials – excellent BBC dramatisation of the Philip Pullman novel series, with a very powerful Lyra in Dafne Keen, who was so good in Logan. Her reactions are particularly strong, the hallmark of a good actor, which locks the narrative around her and makes us see the fantastical places and events through her eyes. And a splendidly creepy turn from Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter.

Official Secrets – excellent film telling the story of GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, who in 2003 leaked US/UK efforts to blackmail UN representatives into supporting a war with Iraq. Kiera Knightly as Gun is particularly effective in showing the emotional toll of the investigation and subsequent prosecution. There’s also a neat reminder for all copy editors and proofreaders about the times when you shouldn’t change US to UK spelling. The archive footage of mass street protests against the war brought back memories and reminded us that governmental lies and efforts to circumvent or suppress the institutions of democracy did not originate with the Johnson administration.

Wyrd Sisters – decent local amateur production of the stage play derived from Terry Pratchett’s Shakespeare / Macbeth Discworld spoof. An interesting programme note that Pratchett anticipated the internet’s potential for spreading fake news in his 1995 interview of Bill Gates.

Akhnaten live from New York Met – my favourite Philip Glass opera. Great to see it staged and on a big screen, with top singers belting it out in close up.

Anna’s Quest – proper fairy tale adventure game, with a decidedly Germanic and Grimm (or grim) feel (the producer is German). Nicely scripted and voice-acted characters, including an innocent (but not dull) heroine, and well-integrated puzzles.

The Scarecrow’s Wedding – the Christmas show at The Stables. The performers, Scamp Theatre, really know their craft, in their interactions with the audience coming across like mature professionals rather than students just out of drama school. Skilled musicians too, singing some really great songs, including a blues number (sung by Betty O'Barley while keeping the crows at bay) worth the price of admission on its own.

Star Trek: Discovery – recent addition to the franchise, now available on Freeview. Interesting, though rather violent, and suffering from the absence of any likeable or even relatable characters; the principal character, Michael, is the strongest but for plot reasons she is necessarily remote. Still better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the classic shows. We’ll see how it develops.

Paddington 2 – fun sequel, with much more of the authentic trope of Paddington trying to help but getting into difficulties. Best sight gag: when he accidentally leaves a red sock in the prison washing machine, so that all the inmate’s uniforms are dyed pink. And a stirring speech by Mr Brown when he denounces Mr Curry’s bigoted anti-immigrant stance.

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – prequel to His Dark Materials. Compelling writing, with a very vivid sense of place – in this case, mainly the Thames above Oxford – and a persistent atmosphere of menace, which makes the actual violence when it does occur all the more shocking.