Finding the right self-help book – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Customer: Do you have a copy of 'Achieve: The art of always getting exactly what you want'? Bookseller: It's out of stock, I'm afraid. Customer: How about 'Almost: Why second-best isn't the worst option'? Bookseller: I just sold the last copy. Customer: 'Accept: Coming to terms with life's many disappointments'? Bookseller: Yes! That'll be £18.99."
The Car by Bryan Appleyard: freedom on four wheels – review by Anthony Andrew in The Guardian. "As sharply as he draws portraits of the key players [including Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan], Appleyard, one of the liveliest minds in journalism, is at his most acute when musing on the cultural effects of the car. When four wheels replaced the horse as the main mode of transport, people were still severely restricted in their movements. Particularly in America, the world beyond major cities was not easily accessible. Paved road systems changed that. The roads were paved because that’s what cars required and, equally, cars were built to fill the paved roads. All of this circular activity brought city dwellers into contact with the great outdoors, the 'unspoilt' wilderness beyond city limits. But of course the building of roads, and the cars they bore, encroached on the wilderness, spoiling the very nature that drivers and their passengers wanted to savour. Part of the automobile’s attraction was the autonomy it offered to individuals, the sense of freedom of movement, of personal liberty, a freedom whose cost we are only now really counting."
Freedom to Think by Susie Alegre: the big tech threat to free thought – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ... defends rights to freedom of both 'thought' and 'opinion': some delegates understood 'thought' to mean religious belief, while others considered it superfluous as an addition to 'opinion'; it was the Soviets who insisted it remain, 'out of respect for the heroes and martyrs of science'. But if 'opinion' was merely a private, internal affair, why did its freedom need protecting at all? This was, Alegre explains, at the behest of the British, who 'insisted that "in totalitarian countries, opinions were definitely controlled by careful restriction of the sources of information", stressing that interference could happen even before an opinion was formed'.... If propaganda undermines the right to freedom of opinion, however, then we are all in trouble. And this is one of the main arguments that Alegre pursues. The modern online environment, polluted as it is by fake news, violates our freedom to form reliable thoughts... [But] If it should be impermissible ... for 'governments, companies or people' to seek to 'manipulate our opinions', on the grounds that this violates our right to freedom of thought, one wonders what kind of persuasive speech would still be allowed in such a brave new world. Aren’t arguments of all kinds – political, scientific, artistic – attempts to manipulate the opinions of others? How do we sort the good kind of manipulation from the bad?"
Contrarian kids: cartoon – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "When Billy was born, the doctor told us about his condition. Mother: 'What is it, doctor?' Doctor: 'It's a lovely, healthy contrarian commentator. " Even as a baby, you could tell he was a natural. Father: 'Emma! Billy has just made his first defence of a dominant power structure while simultaneously bleating about his victimhood!' Billy as a baby: 'Doggy chase cat... And I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Mother: 'Well done darling.' At school, his talent really blossomed. Billy as a child: 'You're gonna give me your lunch money... and I'll probably be cancelled for saying so.' Other boy: 'What.' Father: 'Nowadays we're always so proud of our strange, unpleasant son.' Newspaper headline: 'The Dominant Power Structure Should Remain - And I'll Probably Be Cancelled For Saying So'."
This Breathless Earth – sonnet by Malcom Guite. "We bolted every door but even so // We couldn’t catch our breath for very fear: // Fear of their knocking at the gate below, // Fear that they’d find and kill us even here. // Though Mary’s tale had quickened all our hearts // Each fleeting hope just deepens your despair: // The panic grips again, the gasping starts, // The drowning, and the coming up for air. // Then suddenly, a different atmosphere, // A clarity of light, a strange release, // And, all unlooked for, Christ himself was there // Love in his eyes and on his lips, our peace. // So now we breathe again, sent forth, forgiven, // To bring this breathless earth a breath of heaven."
The big idea: how to win the fight against disinformation – article by Eliot Higgins in The Guardian. “In recent years, the internet has become the venue for a general collapse in trust. Trolling, fake news and ‘doing your own research’ have become such a part of public discourse, it’s sometimes easy to imagine that all the online revolution has brought us is a myriad of new ways to be confused about the world…. Why do counterfactual communities form? A key factor is distrust in mainstream authority. For some, this is partly a reaction to the UK and US government’s fabrications in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sometimes, it stems from a sense of injustice around the Israel-Palestine conflict. These are of course legitimate positions, and are not by themselves indicative of a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. But a pervasive sense of distrust can make you more vulnerable to slipping down the rabbit hole.… as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues. These are the internet users who want to inform themselves while guarding against manipulation by others, or being misled by their own preconceptions. Once established, they will not only share and propagate factchecks in a way that lends them credibility, but often conduct the process of factchecking themselves…. . At Bellingcat, a collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists I founded in 2014, we’ve seen this play out in real time during the Russian invasion of Ukraine…. But there’s more to do than simply waiting for crowds of investigators to emerge and hoping they’re interested in the same things we are. We must take a broader approach. The answer lies in creating a society that’s not only resilient against disinformation, but has the tools to actively contribute to efforts towards transparency and accountability.… Teaching young people how to engage positively with issues they face and then expanding this work into online investigation is not only empowering, it gives them skills they can use throughout their lives.“
‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists – interview by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "In early 2017, Peter McIndoe, now 23, was studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, and visiting friends in Memphis, Tennessee.... It was the weekend of simultaneous Women’s Marches across the US (indeed, the world), and McIndoe looked out of the window and noticed 'counterprotesters, who were older, bigger white men'.... McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. 'It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: "I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on." An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.' That statement was 'birds aren’t real'. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The 'deep state' had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you. Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement."
‘Heat the human, not the home’: Martin Lewis guide for ‘desperate’ households – article by Patrick Butler in The Guardian. “The UK’s best-known consumer finance journalist, Martin Lewis, was uncharacteristically downbeat about the new edition of his newsletter, which went out to 8.4 million UK subscribers on Wednesday morning, writing: ‘This is a guide I really wish we needn’t be publishing.’ … As one respondent put it: ‘It’s a damning indictment of the depths to which this country has sunk when the cheerful guy who provided advice about the best savings, offers and phone deals is now tearfully providing advice on how not to die from cold or malnutrition. Thank you – I wish it wasn’t necessary.’”
Lost in La Mancha: landmark doc of Terry Gilliam’s cinematic nightmare – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “The creative heroism of Terry Gilliam is saluted once again in this 20-year-anniversary rerelease of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Gilliam’s incredible ordeal in the late 90s in trying to make a movie version of Don Quixote: a salutary warning about the physical and mental nightmare of independent film-making. Gilliam’s leading man, veteran French star Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc midway through shooting and was unable to carry on, dealing a death blow to an under-funded, over-ambitious production already traumatised by biblical floods that swept away their equipment in the Spanish desert, Nato jets overhead which ruined the soundtrack, and insurers who wouldn’t pay out on Rochefort’s illness and became the obstructive legal owners of the script by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni…. When I first saw this movie, I felt that there was a kind of perfect poignancy in Gilliam’s Quixote never getting made and existing only in his head – but Gilliam proved me and all other doubters wrong by finally getting it done in 2018 with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver in the leading roles. If it wasn’t quite the masterpiece we hoped for, it was still an entertaining and affecting piece of work.“
The vision collector: the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future – article by Sam Knight in The Guardian, extracted from his book The Premonitions Bureau. “In the days after his visit to Aberfan [following the 1966 disaster], [psychiatrist John Barker] came up with an idea for an unusual study. Given the singular nature of the disaster and its total penetration of the national consciousness, he decided to gather as many premonitions as possible of the event and to investigate the people who had them. Barker wrote to Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard newspaper, and asked him to publicise the idea…. The article described the kinds of vision that Barker was interested in: ‘a vivid dream’, ‘a vivid waking impression’, ‘telepathy at the time of the disaster (affecting someone miles away)’ and ‘clairvoyance’. … Of the 60 plausible premonitions, there was evidence that 22 were described before the mine tip began to move. The material convinced Barker that precognition was not unusual among the general population – he speculated that it might be as common as left-handedness. In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world. Wintour agreed to the experiment.”
Sunday, 1 May 2022
Friday, 8 April 2022
Seen and heard: January to March 2022
A Boy and a Girl, by Eric Whitacre, sung by Voces 8 – recorded in 2020 as part of their 'After Silence' concert and album project, and re-promoted now as a prelude to their Eric Whitacre collaboration 'The Sacred Veil'.
The Windemere Children – BBC drama, plus a documentary, on the children liberated from the Nazi death camps to be rehabilitated in the Lake District. A good example of what a drama can do, over a documentary. In the documentary, those still alive reminisced as you would expect about what a paradise it was and how it brought them to their new lives. The drama could show how it wasn't that simple: show us the fear and mistrust they brought with them, the night terrors, the conditioned response to take and hide any morsel of food they were given. Also an interesting early example of the use of art therapy.
Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction by Keith M. Johnston – very readable survey. Demolishes some critical old hat and popular myths, such as that the definition of the genre has some kind of objective reality, that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was "really" about fear of Communist infiltration, that SF films are all about spectacle rather than narrative and character, and that one can talk about SF films without reference to the rest of culture (even SF culture). I especially liked the chapters on cinema trailers and audience reception and participation, especially since the rise of the internet, and the useful history showing what SF films were called before the term was widely used. (Trick film. Comic short. Scientific romance Thriller. Romance. Scientific melodrama. Horror.)
When the Past Was Around – charming and touching wordless adventure game from an Indonesian studio, in which a young woman beset with grief recalls her lover. She used to call him Owl, and as he gradually takes form in her memory he appears as a man with an owl's head - slightly weird but also beautiful. The visual and musical motifs acquire meaning upon meaning as you play through their story: the musical symbols, the scarves, the music box, "their" tune which they hum and play on their violins and which provides the key to unlocking her healing memories. A beautiful romance; you feel for her, and for both of them.
'Words to avoid' – gov.uk style guide. "Agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead. Deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements). Key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’. Transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing. Utilise, use ‘use’. Going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions). One-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)."
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro – classic Ishiguro novel: quietly powerful, very moving. Klara, who narrates the story in the first person, is an AF or Artificial Friend. Bought from a department store to be a companion to the teenage Josie, she becomes drawn into the individual hopes and plans of not only Josie but her mother, her friend Rick, and Rick's mother. Klara is very sophisticated in her perception of humans and understanding of emotions, but she has trouble navigating unfamiliar physical environments and her knowledge of the world is very limited. Her simple quasi-religious faith in the power of the sun (which has a direct physical basis - she is solar-powered) runs throughout the book, possibly naive, possibly profound. In the end, I was left with a sense of a life well-lived, reminded of that other great AI, HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who said, when being interviewed for TV: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Gavin Francis – nice booklet by a GP, essentially lamenting the demise of convalescence as a medical concept (let alone healthcare provision),and the consequent reluctance to see recovery as something which may (1) take time, a lot of time, and (2) not necessarily lead to a restoration of things as they were before. My favourite two quotes: "Don't plan anything within an hour of eating" (p. 22) and "It's a journey that changes the trajectory of your life, your priorities, your values, your hopes and ambitions, your sense of who you are in the world, and your relationship with those around you.... You are entering a new and unknown country, with an unfamiliar language and no map" (p. 90).
Encodya – sweet and beautiful cyberpunk adventure game (see review). Very well voice-acted and visually impressive. The setting is pure Bladerunner – the flying cars, the jangly giant advertising screens, the perpetual nightime – but the emotional heart of the game is the relationship between little nine-year-old orphaned Tina and her giant protective robot Sam. You guide Tina around the streets of Neo-Berlin as she discovers a hidden message from her father and sets out to reveal and complete his work. A very satisfying experience – or it would be, if only there weren't so many nearly-invisible crucial objects hidden on the ground and on the walls.
Index, a History of the: A Bookish Adventure, by Dennis Duncan – continuously interesting and amusing and scholarly. Like many readers I think, I was taken aback by aspects of the literary technology I had never before considered, such as the order of the alphabet (why that order? he doesn't really say, though he traces its early use) and the invention of page numbers - both essential pre-conditions for the index as we know it. Particularly revealing to see the laborious instructions-for-the-use-of which used to come with indices when they were new. (See review in The Guardian, review for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading.)
Content Design, by Sarah Richards – great little primer, from the woman whose team worked on the gov.uk website between 2010 and 2014 and turned it from the usual government information dump into a quiet triumph: quiet because when a website works properly you don't notice it. The principles are familiar to anyone who has worked in or with usability: you need to start your design with users, what they need and what journey they are on when they come to your material; everything else follows. But this covers the whole process very well, and very necessary it is too. As she says: "We don't need more content. We need smarter content." "Content design" was the term she came up with to describe what she and her team were doing, which included writing and editing but going far beyond that. (See also review on Medium, interview with Sarah Richards.)
The Ipcress File – classy ITV adaptation, which confirms my view that the way now for James Bond films is to make them period pieces, from a time when foreign travel was exotic, fashion was stylish, and technology was cool. Joe Cole as Harry Palmer is no Michael Caine, but he stands up to the toffs with agreeable working-class cheek, and Lucy Boynton is very believable in her fairly unbelievable role (for the 1960s) of a female senior intelligence officer. Both are outclassed, though by the excellent Tom Hollander.
Sunday, 3 April 2022
Cuttings: March 2022
The battle of the gauges – article by Patricia Fara in History Today, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "Stephenson’s narrow tracks had been introduced first. Originally designed to carry engines transporting coal for the northern mining industry, they were tailored to match the width needed for accommodating a horse between wagon shafts. Initially there were small local variations, but this animal-based dimension was perpetuated into the future when Stephenson decreed that it made sense for all his new trains to adopt the same gauge, 4 feet 8½ inches (1.435 metres). When the railway network began expanding, he recommended that this width should be adopted around the country, a deceptively arbitrary measurement still used by over half the world’s railways. Once the British network began expanding, Brunel came up with characteristically bold plans for improvement. Convinced that the country would eventually be divided into distinct zones operated privately and separately, he embarked on building faster, larger engines that ran smoothly along tracks of a far wider gauge – 7 feet ¼ inch (2.14 metres). The success of this innovation depended on Brunel’s unprecedented engineering triumphs in constructing long bridges and deep tunnels. Although his trains were more expensive to build, passengers appreciated the reduction in journey times and the luxurious comfort.... A Royal Commission was set up in 1845.... Although the Commission came down on the side of the narrow gauge contingent, the government prevaricated by opting for compromise and enacting some unsatisfactory legislation. The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended. Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat. Uniformity prevailed, just as Stephenson had first proposed."
Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama: a defence of liberalism… from a former neocon – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported [in The End of History and the Last Man], and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage.... The first difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.... Fukuyama contends ... liberalism ... has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business – although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost."
Social media ‘experts’ – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Dunning-Kruger University is a leading Doing-My-Own-Research centre. For 60 years our 10-minute Googling courses have been producing inexplicably confident graduates, who go on to slap ill-informed takes on Twitter about things they'd never heard of 10 minutes ago, and even argue with real experts online about their own subject. Dave, doctoral Doing-My-Own-Researcher: 'DKU is a great uni. I took a BSc and an MSc in Epidemiological Reckons last week... but this morning I barged into a conversation about Russian history. So I've switched to a PhD in Advanced Confirmation Bias. It really helped me to learn what I already thought."
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins: the brutal truth about Britain’s past – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "When Elkins’s book [on Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan Mau Mau movement] came out [in 2005], her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s 'enlightened' and 'benign empire'. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed [in 2011].... This book, a decade on, is [a] wider history [of the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war]. Partly resting on the [disclosed colonial] files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power. Her detailing of this reality involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record.... Elkins coins the term 'legalised lawlessness' to describe the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law and then viciously bent it to serve imperial ends. The first half of her book examines how this hypocrisy was rooted in the supremacist underpinnings of classical liberalism, the pervasive idea that 'backward' societies would be transformed by the violent application of free trade and religious education."
A pro-fossil fuel Disney ride voiced by Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye? Yes, it existed – article by Anita Little in The Guardian. “The ride purported to tell the story of energy. It was awe-inspiring and warm-hearted in the Disney mold… What went unsaid was the fact that, for a theme park, it had an unlikely corporate sponsor: the US oil giant Exxon. And the message directed at the often young minds of riders was brazen and, in the light of the climate emergency now unfolding, quite remarkable: fossil fuels are glorious and the climate crisis is not such a big deal. Yet somehow, even though it only shuttered in 2017, the ride has largely been lost to cultural history. But now, as Exxon and other oil firms face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for the climate crisis, grounded by charges that they sought to deceive the public about their role in it, the ride seems newly relevant as evidence of the kind of narrative big oil sought to promote.”
Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones' – article by Suzanne Bearne on BBC News. "Dumbphones are continuing to enjoy a revival. Google searches for them jumped by 89% between 2018 and 2021, according to a report by software firm SEMrush.... Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone. 'It appears fashion, nostalgia, and them appearing in TikTok videos, have a part to play in the dumbphone revival,' says Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at price comparison site Uswitch.com. 'Many of us had a dumbphone as our first mobile phone, so it's natural that we feel a sense of nostalgia towards these classic handsets.'"
The Guardian view on Middlemarch: a book for grownups – editorial in The Guardian. “The novel tells us, when we are asked to observe Dorothea weeping six weeks after her marriage, ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ So the novel deftly and wittily reminds us that we are surrounded by personal tragedy, which can be glimpsed only fleetingly by our coarse minds, when gently steered towards it, by a writer of Eliot’s capabilities.”
‘It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control’: the authors whose books are being banned in US schools – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "There is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the US’s libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported – more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year…. Maus [by Art Spiegelman] was removed on the basis of eight swearwords – mainly ‘God damn’ – and nudity: a bare-breasted, suicidal mouse representing Spiegelman’s mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old…. Many of the challenges centre on a moral hysteria about the protection of children. ‘They’re playing woke snowflakery back: “This might upset people”,’ says Margaret Atwood in an email to me. A graphic novel version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the books removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district in December, along with two other dystopian graphic novel classics: an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta…. Though the current censorship drive in the US is predominantly in Republican states, it has become a tit-for-tat controversy, with conservative commentators quick to point out that the left has its own form in censoring classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn for their perceived racist content…. ‘We do see increased resort to censoriousness on both the left and the right,’ says [Suzanne] Nossel [CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America,]. ‘On the left, it targets books that some people regard as racially offensive, sometimes because they originate from a different time period, when slurs were used more widely than is acceptable now. But it is the right that has invoked the machinery of government – including legislative proposals in dozens of states – to enforce these bans and prohibitions. In the hierarchy of infringements of free speech that must be recognised as more severe and alarming.’”
Into the metaverse: my plan to level up Britain with the 3D internet and a Blackpool ‘queercoaster’ –article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “This year, as well as working in television, I am engaged in StoryTrails, an initiative led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London. The new medium in which we are working is the metaverse – the 3D internet that uses virtual reality (VR) to create new worlds inside a headset, and augmented reality (AR), which adds layers of digital imagery to the real world, that can be seen through your smartphone…. the newness of these technologies means there is the potential to ensure that those who create the metaverse are not defined as being either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’. The original sins of Britain’s television and film industries – their exclusivity, their metropolitan focus, their tendency to privilege middle-class outlooks and their long histories of misogyny – should and potentially can be left behind, and prevented from infecting VR and AR and the employment cultures that will develop around them. This dream of inscribing a new and better creative culture is why our StoryTrails project is placing these new technologies into the hands of 50 creatives from across the country whose backgrounds reflect the diversity of UK talent. They are tasked with creating immersive stories that enable audiences to experience history, touch it, feel it and interact with it where it happened. Using film archive from the BFI, reimagined and transformed into stunning 3D, they will give audiences in Blackpool a chance to ride on the ‘Queercoaster’, an augmented reality journey through Blackpool’s LGBTQ+ history. People in Sheffield, meanwhile, will see how their city is becoming one of the greenest in the UK, thanks to large-screen immersive domes showing how it is throwing off its reputation for heavy industry and smokey skies.”
The Guardian view on Unboxed: so much for the ‘festival of Brexit’ – editorial in The Guardian. "The House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee has decided that it doesn’t like Unboxed – originally seen as a festival of Brexit.... The original notion was that the festival, the Queen’s platinum jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation.... Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying 'national traditions' that Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome. Such top-down impositions are doomed.... The Festival of Britain in 1951 worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but it didn’t encapsulate a culture.... Unboxed contends with enduring suspicion about its origins on one side, and scepticism about its results on the other. Its programme suggests it will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions. It will stand or fall on whether it can engage and enthuse the wider public."
Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama: a defence of liberalism… from a former neocon – review by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian. "Fukuyama has backed away from the American neoconservative agenda that he had initially supported [in The End of History and the Last Man], and has watched as authoritarian leaders such as Putin, China’s Xi and Turkey’s Erdoğan laid claim to the world stage.... The first difficulty when it comes to rousing the liberal spirit is that liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political groupings. A vital strength of this slim, elegant book is that it is crystalline in its definitions, even while acknowledging the complexities of practice. Although liberalism is under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge comes. Fukuyama recognises this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom has evolved rather conspicuous inequalities in each of those realms.... Fukuyama contends ... liberalism ... has a much larger social remit than simply economic efficiency. It’s not just a question of regulating and limiting big business – although Fukuyama argues for both – but of appreciating the social capital that attains from redistribution and narrowing of inequalities. At times the former adviser to the Reagan administration can sound like a Scandinavian social democrat. Almost."
Social media ‘experts’ – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Dunning-Kruger University is a leading Doing-My-Own-Research centre. For 60 years our 10-minute Googling courses have been producing inexplicably confident graduates, who go on to slap ill-informed takes on Twitter about things they'd never heard of 10 minutes ago, and even argue with real experts online about their own subject. Dave, doctoral Doing-My-Own-Researcher: 'DKU is a great uni. I took a BSc and an MSc in Epidemiological Reckons last week... but this morning I barged into a conversation about Russian history. So I've switched to a PhD in Advanced Confirmation Bias. It really helped me to learn what I already thought."
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins: the brutal truth about Britain’s past – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "When Elkins’s book [on Britain’s brutal suppression of the Kenyan Mau Mau movement] came out [in 2005], her findings – partly based on the testimony of Kikuyu survivors – were widely dismissed as, at best, exaggerations by a generation of historians wedded to stubborn ideas of Britain’s 'enlightened' and 'benign empire'. Her history was dramatically vindicated, however, when an unknown cache of 240,000 top secret colonial files, removed from Nairobi at the time of Kenyan independence in 1963, were disclosed [in 2011].... This book, a decade on, is [a] wider history [of the methods of British colonial governance in the years after the second world war]. Partly resting on the [disclosed colonial] files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power. Her detailing of this reality involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record.... Elkins coins the term 'legalised lawlessness' to describe the self-serving methods by which Britain spread the rule of law and then viciously bent it to serve imperial ends. The first half of her book examines how this hypocrisy was rooted in the supremacist underpinnings of classical liberalism, the pervasive idea that 'backward' societies would be transformed by the violent application of free trade and religious education."
A pro-fossil fuel Disney ride voiced by Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye? Yes, it existed – article by Anita Little in The Guardian. “The ride purported to tell the story of energy. It was awe-inspiring and warm-hearted in the Disney mold… What went unsaid was the fact that, for a theme park, it had an unlikely corporate sponsor: the US oil giant Exxon. And the message directed at the often young minds of riders was brazen and, in the light of the climate emergency now unfolding, quite remarkable: fossil fuels are glorious and the climate crisis is not such a big deal. Yet somehow, even though it only shuttered in 2017, the ride has largely been lost to cultural history. But now, as Exxon and other oil firms face a wave of lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for the climate crisis, grounded by charges that they sought to deceive the public about their role in it, the ride seems newly relevant as evidence of the kind of narrative big oil sought to promote.”
Not smart but clever? The return of 'dumbphones' – article by Suzanne Bearne on BBC News. "Dumbphones are continuing to enjoy a revival. Google searches for them jumped by 89% between 2018 and 2021, according to a report by software firm SEMrush.... Meanwhile, a 2021 study by accountancy group Deloitte said that one in 10 mobile phone users in the UK had a dumbphone. 'It appears fashion, nostalgia, and them appearing in TikTok videos, have a part to play in the dumbphone revival,' says Ernest Doku, mobiles expert at price comparison site Uswitch.com. 'Many of us had a dumbphone as our first mobile phone, so it's natural that we feel a sense of nostalgia towards these classic handsets.'"
The Guardian view on Middlemarch: a book for grownups – editorial in The Guardian. “The novel tells us, when we are asked to observe Dorothea weeping six weeks after her marriage, ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ So the novel deftly and wittily reminds us that we are surrounded by personal tragedy, which can be glimpsed only fleetingly by our coarse minds, when gently steered towards it, by a writer of Eliot’s capabilities.”
‘It’s a culture war that’s totally out of control’: the authors whose books are being banned in US schools – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. "There is an unprecedented rise in attempts to remove books from the US’s libraries and schools. The American Library Association (ALA) told the Guardian that in the period from 1 September to 30 November, more than 330 unique cases were reported – more than double the number for the whole of 2020, and nearing the total for the previous (pre-pandemic) year…. Maus [by Art Spiegelman] was removed on the basis of eight swearwords – mainly ‘God damn’ – and nudity: a bare-breasted, suicidal mouse representing Spiegelman’s mother, who killed herself when he was 20 years old…. Many of the challenges centre on a moral hysteria about the protection of children. ‘They’re playing woke snowflakery back: “This might upset people”,’ says Margaret Atwood in an email to me. A graphic novel version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the books removed from classroom libraries in a Texas school district in December, along with two other dystopian graphic novel classics: an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta…. Though the current censorship drive in the US is predominantly in Republican states, it has become a tit-for-tat controversy, with conservative commentators quick to point out that the left has its own form in censoring classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn for their perceived racist content…. ‘We do see increased resort to censoriousness on both the left and the right,’ says [Suzanne] Nossel [CEO of the free-speech organisation PEN America,]. ‘On the left, it targets books that some people regard as racially offensive, sometimes because they originate from a different time period, when slurs were used more widely than is acceptable now. But it is the right that has invoked the machinery of government – including legislative proposals in dozens of states – to enforce these bans and prohibitions. In the hierarchy of infringements of free speech that must be recognised as more severe and alarming.’”
Into the metaverse: my plan to level up Britain with the 3D internet and a Blackpool ‘queercoaster’ –article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “This year, as well as working in television, I am engaged in StoryTrails, an initiative led by StoryFutures Academy, the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London. The new medium in which we are working is the metaverse – the 3D internet that uses virtual reality (VR) to create new worlds inside a headset, and augmented reality (AR), which adds layers of digital imagery to the real world, that can be seen through your smartphone…. the newness of these technologies means there is the potential to ensure that those who create the metaverse are not defined as being either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’. The original sins of Britain’s television and film industries – their exclusivity, their metropolitan focus, their tendency to privilege middle-class outlooks and their long histories of misogyny – should and potentially can be left behind, and prevented from infecting VR and AR and the employment cultures that will develop around them. This dream of inscribing a new and better creative culture is why our StoryTrails project is placing these new technologies into the hands of 50 creatives from across the country whose backgrounds reflect the diversity of UK talent. They are tasked with creating immersive stories that enable audiences to experience history, touch it, feel it and interact with it where it happened. Using film archive from the BFI, reimagined and transformed into stunning 3D, they will give audiences in Blackpool a chance to ride on the ‘Queercoaster’, an augmented reality journey through Blackpool’s LGBTQ+ history. People in Sheffield, meanwhile, will see how their city is becoming one of the greenest in the UK, thanks to large-screen immersive domes showing how it is throwing off its reputation for heavy industry and smokey skies.”
The Guardian view on Unboxed: so much for the ‘festival of Brexit’ – editorial in The Guardian. "The House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee has decided that it doesn’t like Unboxed – originally seen as a festival of Brexit.... The original notion was that the festival, the Queen’s platinum jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation.... Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying 'national traditions' that Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome. Such top-down impositions are doomed.... The Festival of Britain in 1951 worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but it didn’t encapsulate a culture.... Unboxed contends with enduring suspicion about its origins on one side, and scepticism about its results on the other. Its programme suggests it will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions. It will stand or fall on whether it can engage and enthuse the wider public."
Wednesday, 2 March 2022
Cuttings: February 2022
The Wealth Gap – infographic by Susan Newman and Jamie Woodcock, linked to the BBC programme 'The decade the rich won'. "What is the wealth gap? Income used to be the key driver of inequality. However, the wealth gap is the difference between the amount of assets (savings, investments, housing, pension - assets are things you gain from and do not depreciate) between the wealthiest and the rest of society. For example, Jeff Bezos has a personal net worth of £140 billion. At £10/Hr, an Amazon warehouse worker would have to work 8 million years to accumulate the same wealth! Why is it growing? The wealth gap is growing faster than the income gap. The housing and stock markets continue to rise. A larger share is going to profit, not wages. At the lower end of the wealth gap, people don't have any assets. Many people have negative assets in the form of debt. Debt transfers from the poor to the rich. How does it affect me? Hard work and increased income no longer help in social mobility. It's assets that unlock it. Deposits are increasing, and mortgages are difficult to get, making it harder to build wealth. Owning a home has become a finish line in which the goal posts keep moving further away! Your parents' income is a big determinant of where you are in the gap. Economic inequality leads to problems for everyone: increased crime rate and prison sentencing, political polarisation and a breakdown of social cohesion, decline in health and life expectancy."
What Was the TED Talk? Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting" – article by Oscar Schwartz in The Drift. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "[Chris] Anderson [who purchased the TED franchise in 2001] insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED talk. I like to call this fusion 'the inspiresting.' Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism.... Perhaps the most incisive critique came, ironically, at a 2013 TEDx conference. In 'What’s Wrong with TED Talks?' media theorist Benjamin Bratton told a story about a friend of his, an astrophysicist, who gave a complex presentation on his research before a donor, hoping to secure funding. When he was finished, the donor decided to pass on the project. 'I’m just not inspired,' he told the astrophysicist. 'You should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.' Bratton was outraged. He felt that the rhetorical style TED helped popularize was 'middlebrow megachurch infotainment,' and had begun to directly influence the type of intellectual work that could be undertaken....'This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.'... The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years...."
The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you, and the planet, healthier? – article by Tim Spector in The Guardian. “I have two issues with Veganuary. First, dietary change should aim for a long-term, sustainable change rather than a one-month quick fix. Second, there is no clear evidence that strict veganism is better for health than vegetarianism, pescatarianism or flexitarianism (a diet where you’re allowed to eat occasional meat or fish). Second, it fuels the perception that all plant-based foods are healthier than all animal-derived ones, which is not always true. If people replace fish, meat, eggs and cheese with plant-based ultra-processed foods, it might actually do us – and the planet – more harm than good.”
Wordle: simplicity that works like a charm – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “The game has the elegance of a daily newspaper puzzle – a five-minute conundrum that slots pleasingly into even the most harried routine: guess the five-letter word. You have six attempts…. The simplicity is the charm. One Wordle is released each day, and it’s the same one for everyone around the world. There are no advertisements, no niggling notifications begging you to return each morning, no novelty skins with which to alter the appearance of your letters, and no offer coupons in exchange for recommending the game to friends. With so much traffic, the incentive to profit from Wordle’s success is considerable. But the game’s rejection of the capitalistic systems that define so many video games today has a refreshing, innocent quality. Long may Wordle remain so pure.“
How to win at Wordle using linguistic theory – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s helpful to understand what Wordle is mainly testing, and I think there are a couple of things: first, your knowledge of the frequency of individual letters in the English language… More interestingly, though, it probes your instinct for how letters can be combined.“
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia by Wendy Mitchell: a book of hope – review by Nicci Gerrard in The Guardian. “One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her.… Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.… People with dementia (and people who live with and care for them) know that much of the suffering and havoc that the illness can bring comes not from the condition itself, but from the way the world treats people who live with it. Mitchell learned this the hard way: her life, and her sense of who she was in that life, was demolished when she first got the diagnosis of early onset dementia and it took her many years to work out strategies that enabled her to ‘live well with dementia’ (though she dislikes that phrase for its implication that some people fail to live well). Her book, which she wrote with the help of Anna Wharton and which includes the comments of friends who also live with dementia, is a compilation of these strategies: a kind of how-to manual for people with the condition and those who support them. It proceeds by a practical and calming formula: take a difficulty and find a way to overcome it.“
‘They had their own cameras trained on me’: Louis Theroux on his showdowns with US extremists –article by Louis Theroux in The Guardian. “On Sunday, I have a new series going out on BBC Two. Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America is squarely in the sweet spot of problematic content. White nationalists, trigger-happy rappers and figures in the porn world accused of sexual misconduct – they all make appearances. … In the context of everything that’s happened in the last couple of years, the decision to put out a series chockful of troubling individuals giving expression to upsetting and extreme opinions might seem odd…. The term is ‘platforming’: the idea that it is irresponsible to amplify hateful voices and that in doing so one is contributing to their power and their harm…. At its simplest, this is a view so uncontroversial as to be almost banal. … Making it even more pressing nowadays is the demonstrable harm caused by the spread of false information online and the way this has empowered formerly marginal figures such as conspiracy theorists and nativists.… In this new landscape, every day seems to bring a new test case of whether some influencer or high-profile person should be deplatformed, or whether tech companies and media outlets are throttling free expression by deciding what we can and can’t see and hear.… I do understand how, viewed in this context, my decision to put some potentially dangerous and inflammatory figures on BBC Two primetime might appear flat-out weird and irresponsible…. And yet I believe I was right to make a programme about them. There are several reasons why. The most obvious one is the nature of the project. I make immersive documentaries, researching, shooting and editing over the course of months or even years. It is very far from the ‘here’s your mic, have at it’ atmosphere of a conventional debate or TV appearance…. I believe I can be trusted to tell these stories in a responsible way. By being informed, by doing the research, by spending time in the field – for hours or days or weeks even – questioning, challenging and revealing the reality of the people we are reporting on, and doing responsible journalism…. ‘But why do we need to hear from these people?’ you may ask. Well, you might not need to. But the reason you might choose to is because of what their existence says about the world we are living in, and because of the very real power they represent…. So the choice we are faced with is whether to be curious about that phenomenon, try to figure out why it’s growing, what it’s feeding on, how it can be challenged, or whether to ignore it and hope it goes away.”
BBC pulls another episode of We Are England current affairs show – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “The BBC has retracted another episode of its new regional current affairs programme amid concerns about editorial standards and low staffing levels on the series…. which has been made on a tight budget due to cuts after many experienced reporters took redundancy from newsrooms across England ahead of its launch…. Last week, the BBC pulled an episode of We Are England about a Birmingham man called Hanad Hassan at the last minute after the Guardian pointed out that his cryptocurrency had shut down in October, leaving behind many unhappy customers. The BBC has now retracted a second episode of We Are England, which praised a dance school attended by former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack for its work improving the mental health of children. The programme failed to mention a recent critical Ofsted report, accessible online, which found that staff had bodyshamed students, leaving them reluctant to eat after lessons, and told them to get ‘the desired physique’ if they wanted to be successful in auditions.”
‘At 6pm every evening the screen went blank’: the outlandish tale of the UK’s TV blackout – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “Abolished 65 years ago on Wednesday, the break in programming between 6pm and 7pm every night was a government policy, known colloquially as the toddlers’ truce.… This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to ‘wring out their moppets and put them to bed’. … Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. The rules, laid out by the postmaster general as the post office oversaw telecommunications and broadcasting, stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm."
Playing with fire: Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’ – interview by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. … When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back…. It’s a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as [her latest collection of essays] Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing.”
I don’t like how my female colleagues are treated. How can I support them without being targeted? – advice by Eleanor Gordon-Smith in The Guardian. “I’m starting to notice that my female peers aren’t treated as nicely as us men and I don’t know what to do…. I’ve witnessed my female colleagues being put in a position where they had to justify their actions that were the same as other male colleagues. Female managers have to put extra effort into putting their point across and the HR is barely existent. I’d gladly speak to the CEO, but he acts like a bully. … I’m not feeling safe enough to discuss this in the office. I’m afraid I’ll be seen as weak and inconvenient.” Reply : “We know the people responsible for this are bad at responding to evidence (otherwise they wouldn’t have this attitude towards women); we know they’re bad at handling conflict (otherwise they wouldn’t pick on people in these petty ways); we know they’re uninterested in the possibility of improving (otherwise there’d be a feedback system or an avenue for anonymous reporting). With those as our data points for the psychology of the culprits, I’m pessimistic that you’d be able to talk – or confront – them into changing.… Here’s a lesson many people learn when they have to band together under an oppressive eye: you don’t have to announce what you’re doing for it to be an effective form of resistance…. Are there tasks you can take off [the women’s] plate; private ways you can give credit for work well done? Are there moments you can increase airtime for women in an interaction – ‘I think Sandra mentioned this earlier, but …?’ … You could start by trying to minimise [the] impact [of the unfairness] on particular people. It takes very little to privately signal to someone ‘I saw that too’, but to that person, the sense of being seen is anything but small.In time, these small acts of solidarity might embolden you to do more.”
The addictive qualities of Wordle – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Therapist: "So, if I understand correctly: you’ve become so obsessed with Wordle that you can only use five-letter words?" Client: "Quite right, sadly." Therapist: "How long has this been going on?" Client: "About three weeks." Therapist: "And does it affect your daily life?" Client: "Makes basic tasks quite tough." Therapist: "One answer would be to stop playing." Client: "Never!" Therapist: "Or, try something with a larger vocabulary: Scrabble, crosswords?" Client: "Smart! Enjoy other games, learn extra words… Heard worse ideas." Therapist: "Come back and see me in two weeks." Client: "Great. Adieu!"
What Do Men Want? by Nina Power – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "The need for men to be vulnerable, to open up about their insecurities – to become, in cliched terms, more like women – is certainly one antidote to what has become widely understood as the current crisis in masculinity.... But what about that generation of young men who already feel marginalised from a consumer society, who have been denied most of the markers that traditionally help boys become men: decent jobs, responsible dads, stable homes of their own and, often in consequence, meaningful adult relationships. Would opening up about doubt and vulnerability in itself allow them to achieve self-worth and purpose? Nina Power’s provocative and rigorous book addresses some of those questions from a traditional feminist perspective [and] examines some of the extreme manifestations of the broken relationship between the sexes. She looks at the economic and cultural circumstances as well as the disturbingly warped psychology that produce 'incel' (involuntary celibate) groups, or the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) movement. In addressing this damaged thinking she refuses easy essentialist answers about toxic masculinity or any simplistic notions of patriarchy. ... If men are to reclaim an idea of 'virility' – in its original Greek sense of acting with virtue, of living with grace and due responsibility – it will, she argues, not be done by hashtags alone."
What Was the TED Talk? Some Thoughts on the "Inspiresting" – article by Oscar Schwartz in The Drift. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "[Chris] Anderson [who purchased the TED franchise in 2001] insists anyone is capable of giving a TED-esque talk. You just need an interesting topic and then you need to attach that topic to an inspirational story. Robots are interesting. Using them to eat trash in Nairobi is inspiring. Put the two together, and you have a TED talk. I like to call this fusion 'the inspiresting.' Stylistically, the inspiresting is earnest and contrived. It is smart but not quite intellectual, personal but not sincere, jokey but not funny. It is an aesthetic of populist elitism.... Perhaps the most incisive critique came, ironically, at a 2013 TEDx conference. In 'What’s Wrong with TED Talks?' media theorist Benjamin Bratton told a story about a friend of his, an astrophysicist, who gave a complex presentation on his research before a donor, hoping to secure funding. When he was finished, the donor decided to pass on the project. 'I’m just not inspired,' he told the astrophysicist. 'You should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.' Bratton was outraged. He felt that the rhetorical style TED helped popularize was 'middlebrow megachurch infotainment,' and had begun to directly influence the type of intellectual work that could be undertaken....'This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.'... The criticism leveled at TED foreshadowed a backlash against the technocratic elite that would continue to pick up steam in the following years...."
The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you, and the planet, healthier? – article by Tim Spector in The Guardian. “I have two issues with Veganuary. First, dietary change should aim for a long-term, sustainable change rather than a one-month quick fix. Second, there is no clear evidence that strict veganism is better for health than vegetarianism, pescatarianism or flexitarianism (a diet where you’re allowed to eat occasional meat or fish). Second, it fuels the perception that all plant-based foods are healthier than all animal-derived ones, which is not always true. If people replace fish, meat, eggs and cheese with plant-based ultra-processed foods, it might actually do us – and the planet – more harm than good.”
Wordle: simplicity that works like a charm – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “The game has the elegance of a daily newspaper puzzle – a five-minute conundrum that slots pleasingly into even the most harried routine: guess the five-letter word. You have six attempts…. The simplicity is the charm. One Wordle is released each day, and it’s the same one for everyone around the world. There are no advertisements, no niggling notifications begging you to return each morning, no novelty skins with which to alter the appearance of your letters, and no offer coupons in exchange for recommending the game to friends. With so much traffic, the incentive to profit from Wordle’s success is considerable. But the game’s rejection of the capitalistic systems that define so many video games today has a refreshing, innocent quality. Long may Wordle remain so pure.“
How to win at Wordle using linguistic theory – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s helpful to understand what Wordle is mainly testing, and I think there are a couple of things: first, your knowledge of the frequency of individual letters in the English language… More interestingly, though, it probes your instinct for how letters can be combined.“
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia by Wendy Mitchell: a book of hope – review by Nicci Gerrard in The Guardian. “One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her.… Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.… People with dementia (and people who live with and care for them) know that much of the suffering and havoc that the illness can bring comes not from the condition itself, but from the way the world treats people who live with it. Mitchell learned this the hard way: her life, and her sense of who she was in that life, was demolished when she first got the diagnosis of early onset dementia and it took her many years to work out strategies that enabled her to ‘live well with dementia’ (though she dislikes that phrase for its implication that some people fail to live well). Her book, which she wrote with the help of Anna Wharton and which includes the comments of friends who also live with dementia, is a compilation of these strategies: a kind of how-to manual for people with the condition and those who support them. It proceeds by a practical and calming formula: take a difficulty and find a way to overcome it.“
‘They had their own cameras trained on me’: Louis Theroux on his showdowns with US extremists –article by Louis Theroux in The Guardian. “On Sunday, I have a new series going out on BBC Two. Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America is squarely in the sweet spot of problematic content. White nationalists, trigger-happy rappers and figures in the porn world accused of sexual misconduct – they all make appearances. … In the context of everything that’s happened in the last couple of years, the decision to put out a series chockful of troubling individuals giving expression to upsetting and extreme opinions might seem odd…. The term is ‘platforming’: the idea that it is irresponsible to amplify hateful voices and that in doing so one is contributing to their power and their harm…. At its simplest, this is a view so uncontroversial as to be almost banal. … Making it even more pressing nowadays is the demonstrable harm caused by the spread of false information online and the way this has empowered formerly marginal figures such as conspiracy theorists and nativists.… In this new landscape, every day seems to bring a new test case of whether some influencer or high-profile person should be deplatformed, or whether tech companies and media outlets are throttling free expression by deciding what we can and can’t see and hear.… I do understand how, viewed in this context, my decision to put some potentially dangerous and inflammatory figures on BBC Two primetime might appear flat-out weird and irresponsible…. And yet I believe I was right to make a programme about them. There are several reasons why. The most obvious one is the nature of the project. I make immersive documentaries, researching, shooting and editing over the course of months or even years. It is very far from the ‘here’s your mic, have at it’ atmosphere of a conventional debate or TV appearance…. I believe I can be trusted to tell these stories in a responsible way. By being informed, by doing the research, by spending time in the field – for hours or days or weeks even – questioning, challenging and revealing the reality of the people we are reporting on, and doing responsible journalism…. ‘But why do we need to hear from these people?’ you may ask. Well, you might not need to. But the reason you might choose to is because of what their existence says about the world we are living in, and because of the very real power they represent…. So the choice we are faced with is whether to be curious about that phenomenon, try to figure out why it’s growing, what it’s feeding on, how it can be challenged, or whether to ignore it and hope it goes away.”
BBC pulls another episode of We Are England current affairs show – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “The BBC has retracted another episode of its new regional current affairs programme amid concerns about editorial standards and low staffing levels on the series…. which has been made on a tight budget due to cuts after many experienced reporters took redundancy from newsrooms across England ahead of its launch…. Last week, the BBC pulled an episode of We Are England about a Birmingham man called Hanad Hassan at the last minute after the Guardian pointed out that his cryptocurrency had shut down in October, leaving behind many unhappy customers. The BBC has now retracted a second episode of We Are England, which praised a dance school attended by former Love Island presenter Caroline Flack for its work improving the mental health of children. The programme failed to mention a recent critical Ofsted report, accessible online, which found that staff had bodyshamed students, leaving them reluctant to eat after lessons, and told them to get ‘the desired physique’ if they wanted to be successful in auditions.”
‘At 6pm every evening the screen went blank’: the outlandish tale of the UK’s TV blackout – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “Abolished 65 years ago on Wednesday, the break in programming between 6pm and 7pm every night was a government policy, known colloquially as the toddlers’ truce.… This paternalistic approach to broadcasting was seen at the time as being socially responsible, with the idea being that a TV-free hour would, as Time magazine put it, allow parents to ‘wring out their moppets and put them to bed’. … Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of TV that was broadcast for less than 12 hours every day. The rules, laid out by the postmaster general as the post office oversaw telecommunications and broadcasting, stated that the BBC (and later ITV) could broadcast between 9am and 11pm, but with only two hours shown before 1pm."
Playing with fire: Margaret Atwood on feminism, culture wars and speaking her mind: ‘I’m very willing to listen, but not to be scammed’ – interview by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “Atwood’s writing is – unfailingly – a pleasure to read. She is one of the all-time great storytellers, a truth sometimes obscured by her highbrow reputation. … When it comes to making you want to know what happens next, Atwood is up there with Stephen King and JK Rowling. She has written in every literary genre, from poetry to sci-fi to mystery. But there is one connecting thread: many of her novels are told using a retrospective narrative, with a character looking back on their former life while trying to make sense of their current one. It is a device that winks at Atwood’s love of Victorian literature, but it’s also how she thinks, always looking forward, but also looking back…. It’s a mystery how she does get it done, considering how deeply involved she is with the world around her, as [her latest collection of essays] Burning Questions proves, with its clear-eyed essays about the climate, feminism and the future. By now, Atwood has more than earned the right to lock herself away in an ivory tower, but she keeps jumping into the mud. She has been involved in multiple controversies, due partly, but by no means solely, to her fearlessness in addressing hot-button issues in her writing.”
I don’t like how my female colleagues are treated. How can I support them without being targeted? – advice by Eleanor Gordon-Smith in The Guardian. “I’m starting to notice that my female peers aren’t treated as nicely as us men and I don’t know what to do…. I’ve witnessed my female colleagues being put in a position where they had to justify their actions that were the same as other male colleagues. Female managers have to put extra effort into putting their point across and the HR is barely existent. I’d gladly speak to the CEO, but he acts like a bully. … I’m not feeling safe enough to discuss this in the office. I’m afraid I’ll be seen as weak and inconvenient.” Reply : “We know the people responsible for this are bad at responding to evidence (otherwise they wouldn’t have this attitude towards women); we know they’re bad at handling conflict (otherwise they wouldn’t pick on people in these petty ways); we know they’re uninterested in the possibility of improving (otherwise there’d be a feedback system or an avenue for anonymous reporting). With those as our data points for the psychology of the culprits, I’m pessimistic that you’d be able to talk – or confront – them into changing.… Here’s a lesson many people learn when they have to band together under an oppressive eye: you don’t have to announce what you’re doing for it to be an effective form of resistance…. Are there tasks you can take off [the women’s] plate; private ways you can give credit for work well done? Are there moments you can increase airtime for women in an interaction – ‘I think Sandra mentioned this earlier, but …?’ … You could start by trying to minimise [the] impact [of the unfairness] on particular people. It takes very little to privately signal to someone ‘I saw that too’, but to that person, the sense of being seen is anything but small.In time, these small acts of solidarity might embolden you to do more.”
The addictive qualities of Wordle – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. Therapist: "So, if I understand correctly: you’ve become so obsessed with Wordle that you can only use five-letter words?" Client: "Quite right, sadly." Therapist: "How long has this been going on?" Client: "About three weeks." Therapist: "And does it affect your daily life?" Client: "Makes basic tasks quite tough." Therapist: "One answer would be to stop playing." Client: "Never!" Therapist: "Or, try something with a larger vocabulary: Scrabble, crosswords?" Client: "Smart! Enjoy other games, learn extra words… Heard worse ideas." Therapist: "Come back and see me in two weeks." Client: "Great. Adieu!"
Thursday, 3 February 2022
Cuttings: January 2022
Can "distraction-free" devices change the way we write? – article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.... I tried 'distraction-free' writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die).... Then, in the late twenty-teens, focussed writing tools started cropping up everywhere.... The movement seemed to crest in the first months of the pandemic, as writers newly intimate with the routines of spouses and roommates—or with their own restlessness—sought peace with newfound desperation."
'Words to avoid' – from the .GOV style guide. Includes: "agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead"; "deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements)"; "key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’"; "transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing"; "utilise, use ‘use’"; "going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions)"; "one-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)".
Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow: the new thinking about feelings – review by Alison Gopnik in The Guardian. "Emotions are evolutionarily ancient, rooted in genes and brain structures we share with insects. And at the same time they are embedded in complex and sophisticated cultural scripts and schemas.... [Mlodinow] chronicles many of the disparate neural, evolutionary, social, cultural, cognitive and phenomenological aspects of emotion within what has become something like the received form for popular science books – the equivalent of the sonnet rhyme scheme. Instead of A, B, C and D, Mlodinow alternates between study summaries, illustrative stories and self-help tips.... What’s missing from the book, and the standard popular science form in general, are theories and explanations – the heart of science.... There is often an inverse relationship between how much psychological phenomena lend themselves to stories – how compelling they are – and how much they lend themselves to scientific explanations."
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter: sounding the alarm – review by H W Brands in The Guardian. "The key concept is that of 'anocracy', a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.... She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: 'Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.'... So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college.... And social media must be regulated."
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser: a panoramic history of getting dressed – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "People have always dressed above their station, and other people have always minded terribly.... Worn, though, consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads – linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool – she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that 'there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.'... Thanhauser, who lives in New York, travels to Texas where America’s modern cotton industry is based. At first sight there may no longer be slave labour of the kind that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on two centuries ago, but the underlying patterns have not changed greatly."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis: the art of getting better – review by Emily Mayhew in The Guardian. "Francis’s book explains recovery as a discrete therapeutic entity that deserves our full attention and why we should never give up trying to get better, even when it seems we couldn’t get much worse. Recovery is a difficult but essential part of what makes us human. In his characteristically deft case studies, he shows how it’s the time that recovery takes that is, over and over again, the greatest challenge to patient and care-giver... Francis recalls the rich history of slow-paced recovery and of the places and people who enabled it..... The underlying recognition of taking our time to rebuild ourselves is a profound insight into human regenerative capabilities. We used to know this, but somewhere in the white heat of changing medical technologies, we forgot and came instead to expect the instant and the effortless."
Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the 'Vimes Boots Index' as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the 'insidiously creeping prices' of basic food products. The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner.... 'The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,' wrote Pratchett [in the Discworld novel Men at Arms]. 'Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.'"
'Words to avoid' – from the .GOV style guide. Includes: "agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead"; "deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements)"; "key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’"; "transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing"; "utilise, use ‘use’"; "going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions)"; "one-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)".
Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow: the new thinking about feelings – review by Alison Gopnik in The Guardian. "Emotions are evolutionarily ancient, rooted in genes and brain structures we share with insects. And at the same time they are embedded in complex and sophisticated cultural scripts and schemas.... [Mlodinow] chronicles many of the disparate neural, evolutionary, social, cultural, cognitive and phenomenological aspects of emotion within what has become something like the received form for popular science books – the equivalent of the sonnet rhyme scheme. Instead of A, B, C and D, Mlodinow alternates between study summaries, illustrative stories and self-help tips.... What’s missing from the book, and the standard popular science form in general, are theories and explanations – the heart of science.... There is often an inverse relationship between how much psychological phenomena lend themselves to stories – how compelling they are – and how much they lend themselves to scientific explanations."
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter: sounding the alarm – review by H W Brands in The Guardian. "The key concept is that of 'anocracy', a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.... She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: 'Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.'... So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college.... And social media must be regulated."
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser: a panoramic history of getting dressed – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "People have always dressed above their station, and other people have always minded terribly.... Worn, though, consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads – linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool – she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that 'there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.'... Thanhauser, who lives in New York, travels to Texas where America’s modern cotton industry is based. At first sight there may no longer be slave labour of the kind that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on two centuries ago, but the underlying patterns have not changed greatly."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis: the art of getting better – review by Emily Mayhew in The Guardian. "Francis’s book explains recovery as a discrete therapeutic entity that deserves our full attention and why we should never give up trying to get better, even when it seems we couldn’t get much worse. Recovery is a difficult but essential part of what makes us human. In his characteristically deft case studies, he shows how it’s the time that recovery takes that is, over and over again, the greatest challenge to patient and care-giver... Francis recalls the rich history of slow-paced recovery and of the places and people who enabled it..... The underlying recognition of taking our time to rebuild ourselves is a profound insight into human regenerative capabilities. We used to know this, but somewhere in the white heat of changing medical technologies, we forgot and came instead to expect the instant and the effortless."
Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the 'Vimes Boots Index' as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the 'insidiously creeping prices' of basic food products. The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner.... 'The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,' wrote Pratchett [in the Discworld novel Men at Arms]. 'Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.'"
Sunday, 16 January 2022
Seen and heard: July to December 2021
One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, by Musa Okwonga – memories of his schooldays, by an ordinary black kid from Staines, unusual only in that he won a scholarship to Eton. Interesting, but I wish he had been as detailed in his accounts of the perpetuation of class culture as in his accounts of casual and not-so-casual racism. Sample: "Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes. While so many other people in the country are hamstrung by the deference and social embarrassment they have been taught since birth, the upper classes calmly parade on through the streets and boardrooms to claim the spoils. They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it." I think he's probably right, but precisely HOW this happens is still a mystery. (See interview and longer extract in The Guardian and further extracts on Unbound.
Tell Me Why – another good (but not great) adventure game from the producers of Life is Strange. Powerful setting (small-town Alaska) and setup (twins reunite as adults to clear out their single-parent mother's house, having been separated after her shocking death many years ago), with a sensitively explored sub-theme of transexuality (the boy twin was born a girl). I wasn't entirely happy with either of the two alternative endings, but it was definitely worth the journey. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)
Live from London Summer – more livestreamed concerts from Voces8 and their friends, some of them excellent, notably 'Angel of the Apocalypse' (Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, led by violinist Jack Liebeck), and Handel arias and duets sung by Mary Bevan and Barnaby Smith (see their new CD, with a YouTube sample of Barnaby singing 'Ombra Mai Fu'). Also a beautiful encore to the King's Singers concert, in which they formed a supergroup with Voces8: 'Lullabye', by Billy Joel.
Several classic films, which I saw for the first time on TV: Laura (powerful noir), The Innocents (really, really creepy, especially when vile insults spring out of the mouth of the sweet little boy), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (odd but successful genre mashup). But the one that has stayed with me is Went the Day Well? (imagined German takeover of an English village during the early years of World War 2), especially after seeing again on TV the recent Their Finest (2016), about a WW2 film unit's making of a morale boosting Dunkirk drama. This made me think about how the film was put together and why, and how it would have been seen by audiences in 1942, with the events being set that very same year, a prologue and epilogue establishing a narrative perspective in the future, from after the end of the war, "when old Hitler got what was coming to him".
Professor T – sharply written and produced detective show, with Ben Miller excellent as the academic criminologist with OCD and Frances de la Tour as the (not unsympathetic) mother from hell. Proper plots too, with solutions which actually make sense, not a killer picked at random by the scriptwriter. Disappointed not to see more shots of Cambridge though, unlike Morse or Lewis where you can play the game of trying to be the first to spot the Sheldonian each time it turns up.
Write Around the World with Richard E Grant – short BBC series, exploring connections between famous works and the places they were written. In other words, an excuse to see around some exotic locations. Richard E Grant is a good travel companion, making this a superior documentary of its kind.
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, Sam Peters, Secret Files 3 – decent adventure games, on the model of the original Secret Files: Tunguska, which means ridiculously large inventories and numerous locations making the puzzles challenging. The translations from the German have improved, though, so that the voiceovers flow more naturally. I was actually getting fond of Nina and Max by the end, though I still think she sounds too American for a Russian brought up in Germany.
The Mandalorian, Seasons 1 and 2 – binge-watched at a time when I needed some good distraction. Really confirms the thesis that science fiction has taken over the tropes of the Western, re-setting them with spaceships for horses and blasters for Colt 45s. One can certainly imagine the strong, silent hero being played by Clint Eastwood in his heyday.
A House Though Time, Season 4 – more slices of British lives, this time in Leeds, featuring stories of rags to riches and back to rags, exploitative capitalists and social campaigners, war and disease and journalism. Most moving was the reunion of former university students who had shared the house at the turn of the Millenium.
Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies – excellent TV series on Sky Arts, with good clips illustrating the evolving techniques composers used to achieve great film effects.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – fascinating detail in this rapidly-produced collaboration with (ghost-writer?) "writer/editor" Deborah Crewe. But the most striking bit for me was Cath Green’s account of how she decided to write the book. In August 2020, during a lull in the vaccine work and while lockdown was lifted, she was on holiday with her daughter and friends at a campsite in Wales, and got into conversation with another camper while waiting for dinner from the pizza van. From talk about the poor mobile phone signal, the other woman voiced her concerns about 5G, and then went on to vaccines. "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth." At which point Cath Green came clean on what she did for a living, and that she was one of "them" and knew precisely what was in the vaccine because she was making it, and offered to answer any questions she had. They talked for about 15 minutes, though somehow I doubt that the other woman changed her mind. But at least the rest of us got this book out of it.
Listening through the Lens: The Christopher Nupen Films – BBC programme about a film maker who pioneered classical music documentaries on TV, using his privileged access to Daniel Barenboim and other performers of that generation to get an intimate behind-the-scenes view.
Jonny Quest documentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) – excellent and thorough (over 2 hours long) fan-film about the 1960s TV cartoon series, the first action adventure show from Hanna-Barbera, then most for comedy cartoons such as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat and The Flintstones. It was hugely important to boys of my generation, and it still stands up well, though the representation of tribal peoples is very much of its time. More troubling to me now is its complete masculinity, with no regular female characters at all; Jonny's father is the government scientist, whose missions provide the basis for each episode, but we never even hear what happened to his mother. I still love it that Jonny's best friend Haji is Asian, even though it's remarkably unclear what kind of Asian he is. And I was delighted to discover that 'The Invisible Monster' is other fans' favourite episode also; it's definitely the most scary.
Shetland series 6 – top-notch BBC crime drama. We love it, though we have trouble remembering the story from one week to the next. Typical scene: Tosh is taking a call in the police headquarters, and puts down the phone looking aghast. "It's Sharon!" she gasps, and everyone looks stunned. And we think: "Who the hell is Sharon?" Maybe we need to take notes. But it's a testimony to the power of the writing, acting and filming that it keeps us gripped, even though we can't follow what's going on. God help us, there are unresolved plotlines at the end of this series which are being carried over to the next; they’d better give us a pretty good catch-up.
The Moment of Silence – German adventure game from 2004, resembling in some ways the wonderful Norwegian The Longest Journey (1999), especially in the extensive and well-written dialogues, but alas not in the quality of its characterisation or its storytelling. I don’t think it deserved its 4-star Adventure Gamers review.
Back to work video – funny and charming Belgian video, which did the rounds when people who'd been working from home during lockdown were starting to go back. (See the original, without English subtitles.)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway – extraordinary documentary presented by Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald about the wildlife around the edges of the M25. She's a great guide; we should see more of her.
Drummers playing the BBC News theme – led by BBC weather presenter Owain Wyn Evans, finishing his 24-hour drum-athon for Children in Need live on the local news.
A Woman's Guide to Heart Disease, by Carolyn Thomas – important and useful book for women who have had heart attacks, chiefly for normalising their experience and letting them know that it’s quite usual for women, rather than falling to the floor grasping their chest (as is the cliché for men) to try to continue with their regular activities, thinking “blimey my heartburn / asthma / angina is bad today." Also that it’s usual to be frustrated at how long it takes to recover any amount of strength, depressed at the new kind of person one has become, and to have people say “you’re looking really well” when you know you’re going to be in a state of collapse in an hour’s time.
Strictly Come Dancing 2021 – a very strong set of celebrities this year, with no absolutely plonkers and a lot who with no previous background turned out to be really quite good, though not necessarily consistently. Rose and Giovanni fully deserved their win, with a beautiful Couple’s choice (including silent interlude), but I wish we’d seen AJ and Kai in the final too (she had to withdraw due to injury), because they did a tremendous Quickstep the previous week, or alternatively that Rhys and Nancy (who were eliminated at Semi-final stage) could have been promoted to take part, because they did some tremendous dances, such as their Argentine tango.
Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing, by Gretchen McCulloch – really good analysis of internet language, by a linguist not a technologist, so delightfully free of techno-hype. Also great that it's historical, so she distinguishes several groups of internet people: (1) old internet people, who used bulletin boards before the World Wide Web, and are probably the most technically skilled; (2) full internet people, who went online in the second wave around 2000 and used it as a medium for their social lives; (3) semi-internet people, who went online in the same wave but used it for work or functional purposes; (4) pre-internet people, who went online in a third wave, when use of it became unavoidable, but whose lives were largely lived before it; (5) post-internet people, who have never known a time without the internet, who came to it when their parents were already on Facebook. All these groups use language on the internet in a different way. It's not just about emojis.
The Truth – clever and moving French film, with Catherine Deneuve as a film actor who has just published her autobiography and Juliette Binoche as her daughter who disputes her account of events. We get hints: is the mother's memory playing tricks (could she perhaps be in early stage dementia), or is she being manipulative - or is the real truth that all storytelling, all acting involves placing a construction on the world? The questions are explored, as she takes a part in a science fiction film, playing the elderly daughter of a space traveller who remains eternally young. A good watch.
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by Jonathan Van-Tam – now this is what we pay our licence fee for: JVT (as everyone calls him), familiar as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health on the podium but here appearing as a scientist and virologist, giving school kids the lowdown on just what viruses are, how they spread, and how vaccines work against them. Best bit was in the demonstration of mathematical modelling, by one of his guest presenters, which had the kids holding up their phones while a wirelessly connected connected app changed the screen colour: blue or yellow, depending on their R number or infection rate, and red if they were infected. In the first few runs, the infection petered out after a few iterations. But with just a small change to the starting conditions, you heard the kids giving out little squeaks of fright as phone after phone went red, spreading the disease across the lecture hall.
Tell Me Why – another good (but not great) adventure game from the producers of Life is Strange. Powerful setting (small-town Alaska) and setup (twins reunite as adults to clear out their single-parent mother's house, having been separated after her shocking death many years ago), with a sensitively explored sub-theme of transexuality (the boy twin was born a girl). I wasn't entirely happy with either of the two alternative endings, but it was definitely worth the journey. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)
Live from London Summer – more livestreamed concerts from Voces8 and their friends, some of them excellent, notably 'Angel of the Apocalypse' (Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, led by violinist Jack Liebeck), and Handel arias and duets sung by Mary Bevan and Barnaby Smith (see their new CD, with a YouTube sample of Barnaby singing 'Ombra Mai Fu'). Also a beautiful encore to the King's Singers concert, in which they formed a supergroup with Voces8: 'Lullabye', by Billy Joel.
Several classic films, which I saw for the first time on TV: Laura (powerful noir), The Innocents (really, really creepy, especially when vile insults spring out of the mouth of the sweet little boy), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (odd but successful genre mashup). But the one that has stayed with me is Went the Day Well? (imagined German takeover of an English village during the early years of World War 2), especially after seeing again on TV the recent Their Finest (2016), about a WW2 film unit's making of a morale boosting Dunkirk drama. This made me think about how the film was put together and why, and how it would have been seen by audiences in 1942, with the events being set that very same year, a prologue and epilogue establishing a narrative perspective in the future, from after the end of the war, "when old Hitler got what was coming to him".
Professor T – sharply written and produced detective show, with Ben Miller excellent as the academic criminologist with OCD and Frances de la Tour as the (not unsympathetic) mother from hell. Proper plots too, with solutions which actually make sense, not a killer picked at random by the scriptwriter. Disappointed not to see more shots of Cambridge though, unlike Morse or Lewis where you can play the game of trying to be the first to spot the Sheldonian each time it turns up.
Write Around the World with Richard E Grant – short BBC series, exploring connections between famous works and the places they were written. In other words, an excuse to see around some exotic locations. Richard E Grant is a good travel companion, making this a superior documentary of its kind.
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, Sam Peters, Secret Files 3 – decent adventure games, on the model of the original Secret Files: Tunguska, which means ridiculously large inventories and numerous locations making the puzzles challenging. The translations from the German have improved, though, so that the voiceovers flow more naturally. I was actually getting fond of Nina and Max by the end, though I still think she sounds too American for a Russian brought up in Germany.
The Mandalorian, Seasons 1 and 2 – binge-watched at a time when I needed some good distraction. Really confirms the thesis that science fiction has taken over the tropes of the Western, re-setting them with spaceships for horses and blasters for Colt 45s. One can certainly imagine the strong, silent hero being played by Clint Eastwood in his heyday.
John Eliot Gardiner, conducting Handel and Bach at the Proms – one of the most thrilling concerts I've heard in a long time, this 78-year-old bringing zip and punch to some great Baroque tunes.
A House Though Time, Season 4 – more slices of British lives, this time in Leeds, featuring stories of rags to riches and back to rags, exploitative capitalists and social campaigners, war and disease and journalism. Most moving was the reunion of former university students who had shared the house at the turn of the Millenium.
Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies – excellent TV series on Sky Arts, with good clips illustrating the evolving techniques composers used to achieve great film effects.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – fascinating detail in this rapidly-produced collaboration with (ghost-writer?) "writer/editor" Deborah Crewe. But the most striking bit for me was Cath Green’s account of how she decided to write the book. In August 2020, during a lull in the vaccine work and while lockdown was lifted, she was on holiday with her daughter and friends at a campsite in Wales, and got into conversation with another camper while waiting for dinner from the pizza van. From talk about the poor mobile phone signal, the other woman voiced her concerns about 5G, and then went on to vaccines. "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth." At which point Cath Green came clean on what she did for a living, and that she was one of "them" and knew precisely what was in the vaccine because she was making it, and offered to answer any questions she had. They talked for about 15 minutes, though somehow I doubt that the other woman changed her mind. But at least the rest of us got this book out of it.
Listening through the Lens: The Christopher Nupen Films – BBC programme about a film maker who pioneered classical music documentaries on TV, using his privileged access to Daniel Barenboim and other performers of that generation to get an intimate behind-the-scenes view.
Jonny Quest documentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) – excellent and thorough (over 2 hours long) fan-film about the 1960s TV cartoon series, the first action adventure show from Hanna-Barbera, then most for comedy cartoons such as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat and The Flintstones. It was hugely important to boys of my generation, and it still stands up well, though the representation of tribal peoples is very much of its time. More troubling to me now is its complete masculinity, with no regular female characters at all; Jonny's father is the government scientist, whose missions provide the basis for each episode, but we never even hear what happened to his mother. I still love it that Jonny's best friend Haji is Asian, even though it's remarkably unclear what kind of Asian he is. And I was delighted to discover that 'The Invisible Monster' is other fans' favourite episode also; it's definitely the most scary.
Shetland series 6 – top-notch BBC crime drama. We love it, though we have trouble remembering the story from one week to the next. Typical scene: Tosh is taking a call in the police headquarters, and puts down the phone looking aghast. "It's Sharon!" she gasps, and everyone looks stunned. And we think: "Who the hell is Sharon?" Maybe we need to take notes. But it's a testimony to the power of the writing, acting and filming that it keeps us gripped, even though we can't follow what's going on. God help us, there are unresolved plotlines at the end of this series which are being carried over to the next; they’d better give us a pretty good catch-up.
The Moment of Silence – German adventure game from 2004, resembling in some ways the wonderful Norwegian The Longest Journey (1999), especially in the extensive and well-written dialogues, but alas not in the quality of its characterisation or its storytelling. I don’t think it deserved its 4-star Adventure Gamers review.
Back to work video – funny and charming Belgian video, which did the rounds when people who'd been working from home during lockdown were starting to go back. (See the original, without English subtitles.)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway – extraordinary documentary presented by Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald about the wildlife around the edges of the M25. She's a great guide; we should see more of her.
Drummers playing the BBC News theme – led by BBC weather presenter Owain Wyn Evans, finishing his 24-hour drum-athon for Children in Need live on the local news.
A Woman's Guide to Heart Disease, by Carolyn Thomas – important and useful book for women who have had heart attacks, chiefly for normalising their experience and letting them know that it’s quite usual for women, rather than falling to the floor grasping their chest (as is the cliché for men) to try to continue with their regular activities, thinking “blimey my heartburn / asthma / angina is bad today." Also that it’s usual to be frustrated at how long it takes to recover any amount of strength, depressed at the new kind of person one has become, and to have people say “you’re looking really well” when you know you’re going to be in a state of collapse in an hour’s time.
Strictly Come Dancing 2021 – a very strong set of celebrities this year, with no absolutely plonkers and a lot who with no previous background turned out to be really quite good, though not necessarily consistently. Rose and Giovanni fully deserved their win, with a beautiful Couple’s choice (including silent interlude), but I wish we’d seen AJ and Kai in the final too (she had to withdraw due to injury), because they did a tremendous Quickstep the previous week, or alternatively that Rhys and Nancy (who were eliminated at Semi-final stage) could have been promoted to take part, because they did some tremendous dances, such as their Argentine tango.
Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing, by Gretchen McCulloch – really good analysis of internet language, by a linguist not a technologist, so delightfully free of techno-hype. Also great that it's historical, so she distinguishes several groups of internet people: (1) old internet people, who used bulletin boards before the World Wide Web, and are probably the most technically skilled; (2) full internet people, who went online in the second wave around 2000 and used it as a medium for their social lives; (3) semi-internet people, who went online in the same wave but used it for work or functional purposes; (4) pre-internet people, who went online in a third wave, when use of it became unavoidable, but whose lives were largely lived before it; (5) post-internet people, who have never known a time without the internet, who came to it when their parents were already on Facebook. All these groups use language on the internet in a different way. It's not just about emojis.
The Truth – clever and moving French film, with Catherine Deneuve as a film actor who has just published her autobiography and Juliette Binoche as her daughter who disputes her account of events. We get hints: is the mother's memory playing tricks (could she perhaps be in early stage dementia), or is she being manipulative - or is the real truth that all storytelling, all acting involves placing a construction on the world? The questions are explored, as she takes a part in a science fiction film, playing the elderly daughter of a space traveller who remains eternally young. A good watch.
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by Jonathan Van-Tam – now this is what we pay our licence fee for: JVT (as everyone calls him), familiar as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health on the podium but here appearing as a scientist and virologist, giving school kids the lowdown on just what viruses are, how they spread, and how vaccines work against them. Best bit was in the demonstration of mathematical modelling, by one of his guest presenters, which had the kids holding up their phones while a wirelessly connected connected app changed the screen colour: blue or yellow, depending on their R number or infection rate, and red if they were infected. In the first few runs, the infection petered out after a few iterations. But with just a small change to the starting conditions, you heard the kids giving out little squeaks of fright as phone after phone went red, spreading the disease across the lecture hall.
Saturday, 1 January 2022
Cuttings: December 2021
The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next? – article by Rutrger Bregman in The Correspondent, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Where the neoliberals had spent years preparing for the crises of the 1970s, [in the financial crash of 2008] their challengers now stood empty-handed. Mostly, they just knew what they were against. Against the cutbacks. Against the establishment. But a programme? It wasn’t clear enough what they were for…. Now, 12 years later, crisis strikes again. One that’s more devastating, more shocking, and more deadly… But the most important distinction between 2008 and now? The intellectual groundwork. The ideas that are lying around. … [Gabriel] Zucman [has become] one of the world’s leading tax experts. In his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), he worked out that $7.6tn of the world’s wealth is hidden in tax havens. … His mentor [Thomas] Piketty released another doorstopper in 2020 … but Zucman and Saez’s book can be read in a day. Concisely subtitled ‘How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay,’ it reads like a to-do list for the next US president…. [And] where is wealth actually created? Media like the Financial Times have often claimed – like their neoliberal originators, Friedman and Hayek – that wealth is made by entrepreneurs, not by states. Governments are at most facilitators. … But in 2011, after hearing the umpteenth politician sneeringly call government workers ‘enemies of enterprise', [Mariana Mazzucato] decided to do some research. Two years later, she’d written a book that sent shockwaves through the policymaking world. Title: The Entrepreneurial State. In her book, Mazzucato demonstrates that not only education and healthcare and garbage collection and mail delivery start with the government, but also real, bankable innovations. Take the iPhone. Every sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone (internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition) was developed by researchers on a government payroll…. When government subsidises a major innovation, she says industry is welcome to it. What’s more, that’s the whole idea! But then the government should get its initial outlay back – with interest. It’s maddening that right now the corporations getting the biggest handouts are also the biggest tax evaders. Corporations like Apple, Google, and Pfizer, which have tens of billions tucked away in tax havens around the world.”
4 Easy Steps to Take Back Control Of Your Privacy in 2022 – "1. Email provider: Fastmail..... 2. Password Manager: 1Password.... 3. Search Engine: DuckDuckGo.. 4. Web Browser: Get Off Google Chrome."
All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic – article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.… Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up. Yet, as the forthcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-produced biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain relates, these popular pussycats didn’t give him a happy life. Tragedy and financial ruin soured the milk. He started to believe there was something sinister about electricity, and that his sisters were stealing his money. After attacking them, he was certified insane in 1924 and spent the rest of his life in asylums.”
When meditation turns toxic: the woman exposing spiritual sexism – article by Rachel Mabe in The Guardian. “[After] she … lost a pregnancy and [was] abused by her spiritual teacher in front of her community, [Tara Brach] came to the realization that the world of meditation had a serious problem with sexism and patriarchal practices. [Thirty-eight years later,] Brach has become a spiritual leader… She releases one guided meditation and one dharma talk weekly; more than 2.5 million people listen every month. … While some types of meditation require practitioners to completely detach from earthly concerns,… Brach’s brand of meditation focuses on compassion towards emotions during meditation.… Brach’s ‘little acronym’ Rain … moves through four steps – recognizing difficult emotions, allowing them to be there, investigating them with curiosity and nurturing them with love.”
How to Fix Social Media – article by Nicholas Carr in The New Atlantis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation.... By once again making [the distinctions between different forms of communication that guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era], particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.... The postal system remained the sole technology for long-distance personal communication until the construction of the telegraph system in the middle of the nineteenth century.... Despite the legislative and judicial wrangling, the public never had any doubt that messages sent over wires should be as secure as letters carried in pouches.... Radio broadcasting had no such precedent. For the first time, a large, dispersed audience could receive the same information simultaneously and without delay from a single source.... Amateurs ... played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and ... some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem.... The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs."
Rewritten history – article by Richard J, Evans in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2018 the [National Trust] launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that ‘British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, … less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered.’ Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’.… In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’.… There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway). Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalised British citizenship are examined as part of their admission process. In July 2020, the Historical Association posted a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing the document as ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’ in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonisation.“
Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country – article by Richard Beard in The Guardian, extracted from his book Sad Little Men, referenced in Guardian Letters. “March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.… One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were…In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up ‘the right habits for life’. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip…. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the ‘hardness of heart of the educated’, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class. … According to [Lucille] Iremonger [in her book Fiery Chariot, describing ‘the Phaeton complex’], a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.”
Auld Lang Syne arm-linking at new year connected to Freemasons, book finds – article by PA Media in The Guardian. “Dr Morag Grant, a musicologist at the University of Edinburgh – who has published a book about the song – spotted the masonic link while sifting through the archives of Glasgow’s Mitchell library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge’s Burns supper in 1879 describes the song being sung as members formed ‘the circle of unity’– a common masonic ritual also called the ‘chain of union’.… Burns was a Freemason all his adult life and the organisation was instrumental in promoting his work during his lifetime and after his death…. Grant’s study shows Auld Lang Syne’s global fame preceded the invention of sound recording and radio, despite many commentators having previously linked its rise to the dawn of the broadcast era.“
How one writer’s new year resolution got complicated – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “First draft: write a book. Second draft revised by editor: write a GOOD book. Third draft with publisher’s input: write a good book THAT SELLS. Final draft, approved by editor, publisher and downstairs neighbour Marco: write a good book that sells WITHOUT PACING AROUND QUITE SO MUCH.”
4 Easy Steps to Take Back Control Of Your Privacy in 2022 – "1. Email provider: Fastmail..... 2. Password Manager: 1Password.... 3. Search Engine: DuckDuckGo.. 4. Web Browser: Get Off Google Chrome."
All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic – article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.… Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up. Yet, as the forthcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-produced biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain relates, these popular pussycats didn’t give him a happy life. Tragedy and financial ruin soured the milk. He started to believe there was something sinister about electricity, and that his sisters were stealing his money. After attacking them, he was certified insane in 1924 and spent the rest of his life in asylums.”
When meditation turns toxic: the woman exposing spiritual sexism – article by Rachel Mabe in The Guardian. “[After] she … lost a pregnancy and [was] abused by her spiritual teacher in front of her community, [Tara Brach] came to the realization that the world of meditation had a serious problem with sexism and patriarchal practices. [Thirty-eight years later,] Brach has become a spiritual leader… She releases one guided meditation and one dharma talk weekly; more than 2.5 million people listen every month. … While some types of meditation require practitioners to completely detach from earthly concerns,… Brach’s brand of meditation focuses on compassion towards emotions during meditation.… Brach’s ‘little acronym’ Rain … moves through four steps – recognizing difficult emotions, allowing them to be there, investigating them with curiosity and nurturing them with love.”
How to Fix Social Media – article by Nicholas Carr in The New Atlantis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation.... By once again making [the distinctions between different forms of communication that guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era], particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.... The postal system remained the sole technology for long-distance personal communication until the construction of the telegraph system in the middle of the nineteenth century.... Despite the legislative and judicial wrangling, the public never had any doubt that messages sent over wires should be as secure as letters carried in pouches.... Radio broadcasting had no such precedent. For the first time, a large, dispersed audience could receive the same information simultaneously and without delay from a single source.... Amateurs ... played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and ... some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem.... The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs."
Rewritten history – article by Richard J, Evans in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2018 the [National Trust] launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that ‘British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, … less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered.’ Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’.… In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’.… There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway). Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalised British citizenship are examined as part of their admission process. In July 2020, the Historical Association posted a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing the document as ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’ in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonisation.“
Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country – article by Richard Beard in The Guardian, extracted from his book Sad Little Men, referenced in Guardian Letters. “March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.… One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were…In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up ‘the right habits for life’. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip…. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the ‘hardness of heart of the educated’, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class. … According to [Lucille] Iremonger [in her book Fiery Chariot, describing ‘the Phaeton complex’], a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.”
Auld Lang Syne arm-linking at new year connected to Freemasons, book finds – article by PA Media in The Guardian. “Dr Morag Grant, a musicologist at the University of Edinburgh – who has published a book about the song – spotted the masonic link while sifting through the archives of Glasgow’s Mitchell library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge’s Burns supper in 1879 describes the song being sung as members formed ‘the circle of unity’– a common masonic ritual also called the ‘chain of union’.… Burns was a Freemason all his adult life and the organisation was instrumental in promoting his work during his lifetime and after his death…. Grant’s study shows Auld Lang Syne’s global fame preceded the invention of sound recording and radio, despite many commentators having previously linked its rise to the dawn of the broadcast era.“
How one writer’s new year resolution got complicated – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “First draft: write a book. Second draft revised by editor: write a GOOD book. Third draft with publisher’s input: write a good book THAT SELLS. Final draft, approved by editor, publisher and downstairs neighbour Marco: write a good book that sells WITHOUT PACING AROUND QUITE SO MUCH.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)