Syberia: The World Before – Oh how frustrating. I was able to play just enough of this third-sequel adventure game to confirm that it was just as great as the reviews suggested (sumptuous graphics, great voice acting, heart-rending plot moments) before it gave out on me. Turns out it’s not fully compatible with my laptop (a graphics card issue: needs to be NVidia or AMD, mine is Intel). I suppose this one will have to wait until I get my next laptop, which I wouldn’t expect to be for another five years or so.
Your Money Or Your Life – famous (apparently) American self-help guide “to transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence”. The basic idea is to treat money as the equivalent of time - the life energy you expend to earn it - and then track your outgoings, evaluating everything against the criteria of whether it gives sufficient fulfilment and satisfaction for the life energy it costs and whether the expenditure of life energy is in alignment with your values. Not so relevant to me now, surviving on a pension during a cost of living crisis and having already pretty much pared expenditure back to what gives fulfilment and satisfaction, but a decent system (if itself demanding of time to make the calculations) and a corrective to consumerism.
Worlds Apart: An Experiment – Interesting short (4’25”) film, posing the question of what happens if you take pairs of people with violently opposing views and build a connection between them before you reveal their disagreement. It turns out to be an advertisement for Heineken beer, but I can forgive them that for the hopeful message.
Kentucky Route Zero – sad and melancholy (though not depressing) game – if game is the right word, because there’s no challenge, no puzzles, not even any goal. Your choices make no difference at all to the story; what you choose are characters’ reactions. Once you adjust your expectations, it’s quite beautiful. Over five episodes, released between 2013 and 2020, you follow Conway, an old lorry driver, making one final delivery for a failing antiques business. His search for the elusive 5 Dogwood Drive takes him onto the mythical Route Zero and into a world of people damaged by debt, unemployment and corporate control. Along the way, he meets Shannon, whose hobby is repairing old television sets; Lula, a clerk in a government bureaucracy who has a sideline as a conceptual artist; a small boy either orphaned or abandoned (his parents went out one day and never came back), who seems to have a brother who is an eagle; the singer Junebug and keyboardist companion Jimmy. Many of these characters travel along with Conway, the viewpoint shifting from person to person. In the final episode, the remaining characters – without Conway, who has started drinking again and been forced to become a wage slave to a distillery company – emerge into the daylight (all previous episodes having taken place at night or underground) and find themselves in a dying company town, wrecked by storm and flood. The future for them, and the town’s inhabitants, is left open. You can suggest that they abandon the town and seek a living somewhere else, or that they stay and try to rebuild. But at the very end, you discover the newly-built and empty 5 Dogwood Drive, the perfect home for Conway’s antique furniture, which is a hopeful sign. (See reviews of Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 4 and Act 5, and discussion of the story and discussion of the ending.)
Lucy Dreaming – fun, witty and well-made indie adventure game, which I helped to Kickstart. Lucy is a small girl, with big specs and unfeasibly large pigtails, and a no-nonsense attitude. When she suffers from nightmares, she determines to get to their cause: first by detective investigation of the ten-year-old events which may have traumatised her, and second by taking control of her dreams (the title is a pun on "lucid dreaming") to obtain tools to deal with her nightmares. (A key game mechanic is that objects acquired in one dream are retained in her inventory for use in all other dreams.) I liked Lucy; she's a brassy northern lass with a keen eye and a blunt way of talking. (Example, when trying to check her email: "I'm buggered if I can remember me password.") I also found it nice to see a thoroughly British game, down to the village fete where it is permanently raining (everywhere else is dry), the grimy pub, and the charity shop selling worthless tat. I wonder what Americans make of it. (Here's one example; see also the developer interview.)
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson – very readable survey of the effects of “cognitive dissonance”: the way we all tend to minimise the effect of incompatible beliefs, in particular those that contradict our own sense of pride and self-worth. They call cognitive dissonance “the engine of self-justification”, and in numerous case studies they show how this works with prophets predicting the end of the world, business people involved in corruption and bribery, people expressing racist views while denying that they are racist, psychologists who recover memories of child abuse and who will not admit they might have constructed them, police officers and prosecutors who refuse to accept that they might have got the wrong guy, and partners, organisations and countries which put other parties down to justify their own anger and hurt. There’s a final chapter on how to get out of the psychological trap (“Letting go and owning up”), but it’s too brief.
The Secret Genius of Modern Life – very enjoyable BBC TV series with Hannah Fry, in which she has great fun taking apart pieces of high technology (a bank card, a fitness tracker, an electric car, a pair of trainers, a virtual assistant) to explain how they work and how and why the various components were developed. She really lets herself go in this series, and the production team indulge her wild and waky ways; I wonder if having survived her cervical cancer (see her Horizon documentary) she’s come to the conclusion that life is too short to waste.
If You Knew, poem by Ellen Bass – short, simple, powerful meditation on mortality.
The Soldier's Tale – great TV film of the Stravinsky pocket ballet, with Mark Elder conducting musicians of the Hallé Orchestra, in a zippy English translation by Jeremy Sams. A pity that the soldier and the devil aren’t dancing characters, though they act their way around contemporary Manchester locations very persuasively, but the sole remaining dancing character – the Princess – more than makes up for that with her one stupendous dance.
Masie Dobbs / Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear – well-written detective novels, set in the 1920s, our heroine being a bright independent woman with an East End ex-soldier sidekick and a formidable sense and understanding of psychology. Recommended by both Mary Beard and Hilary Clinton (when the former interviewed the latter, see partial transcript), these books make great reading - and we still have 15 more to go!
Br Herbert Kaden OSB: Some Memories of My Life – autobiography of Turvey Monastery’s venerable monk, who died in October aged 101. Fascinating details of his escape from Nazi Germany, internment as an “enemy alien” during the War, working as a gardener at St Edmund’s House in Cambridge, and becoming a monk first at Prinknash and then Turvey. All outward details, though, and not much about his inner life or how he became the great soul we knew and loved (as testified in his obituary by Br John Mayhead).
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – excellent but creepy sequence of puzzle games, each effectively a single escape room. Extraordinary how much challenge can be delivered through a very simple design and touch interface. I badly needed a walkthrough, until I got the hang of the puzzle-setter's thinking.
Monday, 9 January 2023
Wednesday, 4 January 2023
Cuttings: December 2022
‘No one had seen anything like it’: how video game Pong changed the world – article by Kyle MacNeill in The Guardian. “Its beauty stemmed from its clarity, easy enough to be explained in a heaving bar after a few beers. ‘It was the first time anyone had seen anything like it and they knew instantly how to play it,’ [Atari founder Nolan Bushnell] says. After some deliberation, a sticker was stuck on to the cabinet explaining the rules, just in case it was required. To retro game enthusiasts, they now read like holy commandments: ‘Insert quarter. Serves automatically. Avoid missing ball for high score,’ [game designer Al Alcorn] reels off automatically. ‘I want it on my tombstone,’ he laughs.”
‘There was an explosion, and I had to close my eyes’: how TV left 12,000 children needing a doctor – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “At precisely 6.51pm on 16 December 1997, hundreds of children across Japan experienced seizures. In total, 685 – 310 boys and 375 girls – were taken by ambulance to hospital. Within two days, 12,000 children had reported symptoms of illness. The common factor in this sudden mass outbreak was an unlikely culprit: an episode of the Pokémon cartoon series.... Twenty minutes into the cartoon, an explosion took place, illustrated by an animation technique known as paka paka, which broadcast alternating red and blue flashing lights at a rate of 12Hz for six seconds. Instantly, hundreds of children experienced photosensitive epileptic seizures – accounting for some, but far from all, of the hospitalisations.... The mystery persisted for four years, until it piqued the attention of Benjamin Radford, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in the US... Along with Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, he set about examining the timeline of events, and unearthed a key detail. ‘What people missed was that it wasn’t just a one-night event but instead unfolded over several days, and the contagion occurred in schools and over the news media.’ What Radford and Bartholomew discovered was that the vast majority of affected children had become ill after hearing about the programme’s effects.... The symptoms (headaches, dizziness, vomiting) were, says Radford, ‘much more characteristic of mass sociogenic illness [MSI] than photosensitive epilepsy’. MSI, also known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), and more colloquially as mass hysteria, is a well-documented phenomenon ... According to Radford: ‘MSI is complex and often misunderstood, but basically it’s when anxiety manifests itself in physical symptoms that can be spread through social contact. It is often found in closed social units such as factories and schools, where there is a strong social hierarchy. The symptoms are real – the victims are not faking or making them up – but the cause is misattributed.’ The condition is perhaps best understood as the placebo effect in reverse. People can make themselves ill from nothing more than an idea.”
Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup – article by Laura Preston in The Guardian. “Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off-script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realise the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. ... Before my first shift, I had imagined the operators were like ventriloquists. Brenda would carry on a conversation, and when she started to fail an operator would speak in her place. In reality, I rarely spoke for Brenda. Most of her missteps were errors of comprehension. She would seize on the wrong keyword and cue up a non-sequitur, or she would think she did not know how to answer when she actually had the right response on hand. In these situations, all I had to do was fiddle with the classifications – just a mouse click or two – and Brenda was moving along. In [other] cases, I softened her aggressive recitation of facts with line breaks and merry affirmations. I wasn’t so much taking over for her as I was turning cranks behind the curtain, nudging her this way and that. Our messages were little collaborations. We were a two-headed creature, neither of us speaking on our own, but passing the words between us. But there were moments when a full takeover was necessary. When Brenda did not understand a message, and knew she did not understand, she tagged the message with HUMAN_FALLBACK[:] Brenda ceded the conversation to me, and I had to assume her voice and manner.... Eventually I reached a level of virtuosity where I could clear the inbox without much mental effort. ... My eyes would apprehend the web of critical words – pets, rent, utilities – and my hands would hit keys like notes in a musical passage. I stopped worrying about Brenda’s tone and began letting any message through as long as it was factually accurate. I realised that when Brenda sounded odd and graceless, people were less likely to get intimate, which meant less HUMAN_FALLBACK, which meant less effort for me. Months of impersonating Brenda had depleted my emotional resources. I no longer delighted in those rambling, uninhibited messages, full of voice and human tragedy. All I wanted was to glide through my shifts in a stupor. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really training Brenda to think like a human, Brenda was training me to think like a bot, and perhaps that had been the point all along.”
Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson: the power and pitfalls of prediction – review by Felix Martin in The Guardian. “‘The only function of economic forecasting,’ wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘is to make astrology look respectable.’ It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modelling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. The medieval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section that embodies her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using models to guide policy.... The central common challenge is working out how much of what we learn in pristine but artificial models remains valid in messy but concrete real life. One way of figuring this out is quantitative: you compare the predictions of the model against new, incoming data. A critical obstacle here is that predictions based on modern mathematical models, no less than those based on medieval horoscopes, usually depend on an extensive hinterland of assumptions. That makes testing the validity of their forecasts intrinsically difficult: were the assumptions wrong, or was it just that not enough assumptions were included?... A second, qualitative way of determining the success of predictions is much more common: reliance on expert judgment. The pitfalls of this route were also well known to the medieval courts. Only those versed in the most cutting-edge mathematical knowledge were skilled enough to interpret medieval horoscopes. As such, it was in practice impossible for the client to come to their own conclusions. The result was that an exclusive guild, whose true competence remained unknown, ended up marking their own homework. The same could be said today.... It’s not all bad news. Thompson is a data scientist and mathematical modeller herself, and her book is far from an exercise in model-bashing. It is instead a nuanced and constructive critique of what remains an invaluable analytical method – just not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. For example, even though the astrologers’ models of natural forces and human behaviour were wrong, the practice of casting horoscopes could still be a useful aid to policymaking. They brought systematic thinkers into the orbit of otherwise impulsive rulers; it allowed the discussion of important, otherwise taboo subjects in the safe context of interpreting the stars; and it could give decision-makers the public narrative they needed in order to act. The same applies today. As Thompson shows, mathematical model-building can still be a constructive tool, even if the models themselves are flawed. As Dwight D Eisenhower said: ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’.”
Machine-learning language model fails Politics 101 – blog post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ChatGPT ... so I was interested that when Ben Thompson’s daughter was doing her homework on a politics course she requested that her Dad ask ChatGPT this question: ‘Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers?’ This was its reply: ‘Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book “Leviathan,” Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to maintain order and prevent conflict in society. However, he also believed that a single ruler or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having specific responsibilities and powers. ...’ The most polite thing one could say about this is that it is baloney. But it’s confident-sounding baloney. As Ben puts it: ‘Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.’” (For more on the alarming power of ChatGPT, and the prediction that it will lead to the death of the student essay, see references in John Naughton’s column and blog here, here, here and here.)
‘There was an explosion, and I had to close my eyes’: how TV left 12,000 children needing a doctor – article by Benjie Goodhart in The Guardian. “At precisely 6.51pm on 16 December 1997, hundreds of children across Japan experienced seizures. In total, 685 – 310 boys and 375 girls – were taken by ambulance to hospital. Within two days, 12,000 children had reported symptoms of illness. The common factor in this sudden mass outbreak was an unlikely culprit: an episode of the Pokémon cartoon series.... Twenty minutes into the cartoon, an explosion took place, illustrated by an animation technique known as paka paka, which broadcast alternating red and blue flashing lights at a rate of 12Hz for six seconds. Instantly, hundreds of children experienced photosensitive epileptic seizures – accounting for some, but far from all, of the hospitalisations.... The mystery persisted for four years, until it piqued the attention of Benjamin Radford, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in the US... Along with Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, he set about examining the timeline of events, and unearthed a key detail. ‘What people missed was that it wasn’t just a one-night event but instead unfolded over several days, and the contagion occurred in schools and over the news media.’ What Radford and Bartholomew discovered was that the vast majority of affected children had become ill after hearing about the programme’s effects.... The symptoms (headaches, dizziness, vomiting) were, says Radford, ‘much more characteristic of mass sociogenic illness [MSI] than photosensitive epilepsy’. MSI, also known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), and more colloquially as mass hysteria, is a well-documented phenomenon ... According to Radford: ‘MSI is complex and often misunderstood, but basically it’s when anxiety manifests itself in physical symptoms that can be spread through social contact. It is often found in closed social units such as factories and schools, where there is a strong social hierarchy. The symptoms are real – the victims are not faking or making them up – but the cause is misattributed.’ The condition is perhaps best understood as the placebo effect in reverse. People can make themselves ill from nothing more than an idea.”
Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup – article by Laura Preston in The Guardian. “Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda 24 hours a day. When Brenda went off-script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realise the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. ... Before my first shift, I had imagined the operators were like ventriloquists. Brenda would carry on a conversation, and when she started to fail an operator would speak in her place. In reality, I rarely spoke for Brenda. Most of her missteps were errors of comprehension. She would seize on the wrong keyword and cue up a non-sequitur, or she would think she did not know how to answer when she actually had the right response on hand. In these situations, all I had to do was fiddle with the classifications – just a mouse click or two – and Brenda was moving along. In [other] cases, I softened her aggressive recitation of facts with line breaks and merry affirmations. I wasn’t so much taking over for her as I was turning cranks behind the curtain, nudging her this way and that. Our messages were little collaborations. We were a two-headed creature, neither of us speaking on our own, but passing the words between us. But there were moments when a full takeover was necessary. When Brenda did not understand a message, and knew she did not understand, she tagged the message with HUMAN_FALLBACK[:] Brenda ceded the conversation to me, and I had to assume her voice and manner.... Eventually I reached a level of virtuosity where I could clear the inbox without much mental effort. ... My eyes would apprehend the web of critical words – pets, rent, utilities – and my hands would hit keys like notes in a musical passage. I stopped worrying about Brenda’s tone and began letting any message through as long as it was factually accurate. I realised that when Brenda sounded odd and graceless, people were less likely to get intimate, which meant less HUMAN_FALLBACK, which meant less effort for me. Months of impersonating Brenda had depleted my emotional resources. I no longer delighted in those rambling, uninhibited messages, full of voice and human tragedy. All I wanted was to glide through my shifts in a stupor. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really training Brenda to think like a human, Brenda was training me to think like a bot, and perhaps that had been the point all along.”
Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson: the power and pitfalls of prediction – review by Felix Martin in The Guardian. “‘The only function of economic forecasting,’ wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘is to make astrology look respectable.’ It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modelling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. The medieval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section that embodies her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using models to guide policy.... The central common challenge is working out how much of what we learn in pristine but artificial models remains valid in messy but concrete real life. One way of figuring this out is quantitative: you compare the predictions of the model against new, incoming data. A critical obstacle here is that predictions based on modern mathematical models, no less than those based on medieval horoscopes, usually depend on an extensive hinterland of assumptions. That makes testing the validity of their forecasts intrinsically difficult: were the assumptions wrong, or was it just that not enough assumptions were included?... A second, qualitative way of determining the success of predictions is much more common: reliance on expert judgment. The pitfalls of this route were also well known to the medieval courts. Only those versed in the most cutting-edge mathematical knowledge were skilled enough to interpret medieval horoscopes. As such, it was in practice impossible for the client to come to their own conclusions. The result was that an exclusive guild, whose true competence remained unknown, ended up marking their own homework. The same could be said today.... It’s not all bad news. Thompson is a data scientist and mathematical modeller herself, and her book is far from an exercise in model-bashing. It is instead a nuanced and constructive critique of what remains an invaluable analytical method – just not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. For example, even though the astrologers’ models of natural forces and human behaviour were wrong, the practice of casting horoscopes could still be a useful aid to policymaking. They brought systematic thinkers into the orbit of otherwise impulsive rulers; it allowed the discussion of important, otherwise taboo subjects in the safe context of interpreting the stars; and it could give decision-makers the public narrative they needed in order to act. The same applies today. As Thompson shows, mathematical model-building can still be a constructive tool, even if the models themselves are flawed. As Dwight D Eisenhower said: ‘Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable’.”
Machine-learning language model fails Politics 101 – blog post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been thinking a lot about ChatGPT ... so I was interested that when Ben Thompson’s daughter was doing her homework on a politics course she requested that her Dad ask ChatGPT this question: ‘Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers?’ This was its reply: ‘Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book “Leviathan,” Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to maintain order and prevent conflict in society. However, he also believed that a single ruler or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having specific responsibilities and powers. ...’ The most polite thing one could say about this is that it is baloney. But it’s confident-sounding baloney. As Ben puts it: ‘Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch.’” (For more on the alarming power of ChatGPT, and the prediction that it will lead to the death of the student essay, see references in John Naughton’s column and blog here, here, here and here.)
Friday, 2 December 2022
Cuttings: November 2022
The big idea: why we shouldn’t try to be happy – article by Kieran Setiya in The Guardian. “The problem, [argued John Stuart Mill,] is that you can’t achieve happiness by making it your primary end. 'Those only are happy,' Mill wrote, 'who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.'... But [Mill's] argument does not go far enough.... In fact, we’re happy when we believe our desires are met, when what we care about appears to go well. It doesn’t matter to our state of mind whether these beliefs are true or appearance is reality. But it matters to our lives.... Imagine Maya, submerged in sustaining fluid, electrodes plugged into her brain, being fed each day a stream of consciousness that simulates an ideal life, the only real inhabitant of a virtual world. Maya doesn’t know she’s being deceived – she is perfectly happy. But her life does not go well. She doesn’t do most of what she thinks she is doing, doesn’t know most of what she thinks she knows and doesn’t interact with anyone or anything but the machine. You wouldn’t wish it on someone you love – to be imprisoned in a vat, alone for ever, duped.... Contact with reality is key to living well, so living well is not the same as feeling happy. We don’t need science fiction to see this. The contrast is clear when we’re deceived by those we love: we may be happy, but life does not go well. And it’s clear in the suffering of grief, which is bound up with love. Grief may hurt, but it acknowledges reality; it isn’t something we’d be better off without. … What, then, should we strive for? Not happiness or an ideal life, but to find sufficient meaning in the world that we are glad to be alive, and to cope with grace when life is hard. We won’t achieve perfection, but our lives may be good enough. And not only ours. To live well is to treat not just ourselves but other people as we should. As Mill recognised, the first step in self-help is one that points beyond the self.”
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens – article by Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky and Ralph Hertwig in Current Directions in Psychological Science, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.”
Young, Black and Right-Wing: you’ll never believe who their heroes are – TV review by Leila Latif in The Guardian. “There is a quote attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster …: ‘If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the ******* window and find out which is true.’ We now live in a world of unprecedented misinformation, which puts programmes such as this in a more tricky position. It’s not enough to simply share a plethora of views with detached voyeurism and frame them all as equally valid; a TV documentary cannot hold that it is raining and dry at the same time.”
‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “At 7.59pm on Christmas Day 2019, a meme was posted to a Facebook page called Memory Lane UK…. In no fewer than three different fonts, and adorned with two union jack flags and a Facebook logo, it read as follows: ‘Memory lane UK WHO REMEMBERS proper binmen’… The proper binmen memes are a potent distillation of a sentiment common to contemporary British politics and culture, where politicians have all but given up offering a positive vision of the future, and where the idea of what constitutes progress is bitterly contested.… Binmenism, as this worldview could be called, is distinct from the common type of nostalgia we are all prone to as we get older – that things were ‘better in my day’. In fact, the memory lane memes and comment threads make clear that in terms of physical comfort, convenience, domestic labour, work, consumer goods and leisure choice, things used to be worse. But that is not the endpoint of the philosophy. If Binmenism had a motto to stitch on to its itchy old Boy Scout uniform, it would be: things were worse, therefore they were better. And once you see this, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.”
‘It’s complicated, but you can’t shy away from it’: everything you wanted to know about pronouns (but were afraid to ask) – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. “As a writer, reader and feminist who is also the parent of a transgender child, I come at this subject from several directions. Like many journalists, I’ve struggled to wrestle the singular pronouns ‘they/them’ into a sentence. As a mother, I sometimes feel like an explorer who has wandered off the edge of the map. The leg from ‘her’ to ‘him’ lost me some longstanding feminist friends, who have found the whole subject too hard to broach face to face, but was otherwise relatively straightforward. My ‘she’ was now ‘he’: those hard, binary pronouns signalled an altered reality and gave me the chance to avoid the subject if I didn’t want to explain it to everyone I met at the bus stop who wasn’t familiar with my family setup. The next leg, to ‘they/them’, was more exposing, and I still sometimes find myself floundering.”
Why is my baby crying? I used to Google for hours, then discovered the real answer – article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. “Having a baby who can’t tell you what’s going on with it means having to solve a mystery every single day. Say the baby is whingeing. First, you run through the usual checklist. Is the baby hungry? Is his nappy full? Is he sleepy? Does he have wind? Once you’ve ascertained which one it is, you go back to the start, because it’s probably something else by now…. It’s when you bring the whole internet into it that it becomes problematic, as I learned during one of my late-night Google sessions when the baby went through a phase of waking 45 minutes after being put down at bedtime… Not a single one of the reasons listed was wind. So, even though each time I picked the baby up he would do [an] almighty burp … I did not trust my instincts…. There is simply too much information out there. Too many people with agendas and opinions. Why would a thread of Mumsnet users know the reason for your baby’s rash?… The internet is also killing parental instinct. Millennials are so used to being able to instantly receive the answer to any minuscule bit of trivia that when we can’t solve a mystery such as why our baby is crying, it drives us insane.”
The age of social media is ending – article by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts ... you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts.... The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide. That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, ... [offering] platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). ... The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops. [For another,] social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.... When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing. That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. ... If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts.... Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation .... The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.”
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens – article by Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky and Ralph Hertwig in Current Directions in Psychological Science, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.”
Young, Black and Right-Wing: you’ll never believe who their heroes are – TV review by Leila Latif in The Guardian. “There is a quote attributed to journalism professor Jonathan Foster …: ‘If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the ******* window and find out which is true.’ We now live in a world of unprecedented misinformation, which puts programmes such as this in a more tricky position. It’s not enough to simply share a plethora of views with detached voyeurism and frame them all as equally valid; a TV documentary cannot hold that it is raining and dry at the same time.”
‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today – article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “At 7.59pm on Christmas Day 2019, a meme was posted to a Facebook page called Memory Lane UK…. In no fewer than three different fonts, and adorned with two union jack flags and a Facebook logo, it read as follows: ‘Memory lane UK WHO REMEMBERS proper binmen’… The proper binmen memes are a potent distillation of a sentiment common to contemporary British politics and culture, where politicians have all but given up offering a positive vision of the future, and where the idea of what constitutes progress is bitterly contested.… Binmenism, as this worldview could be called, is distinct from the common type of nostalgia we are all prone to as we get older – that things were ‘better in my day’. In fact, the memory lane memes and comment threads make clear that in terms of physical comfort, convenience, domestic labour, work, consumer goods and leisure choice, things used to be worse. But that is not the endpoint of the philosophy. If Binmenism had a motto to stitch on to its itchy old Boy Scout uniform, it would be: things were worse, therefore they were better. And once you see this, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.”
‘It’s complicated, but you can’t shy away from it’: everything you wanted to know about pronouns (but were afraid to ask) – article by Claire Armistead in The Guardian. “As a writer, reader and feminist who is also the parent of a transgender child, I come at this subject from several directions. Like many journalists, I’ve struggled to wrestle the singular pronouns ‘they/them’ into a sentence. As a mother, I sometimes feel like an explorer who has wandered off the edge of the map. The leg from ‘her’ to ‘him’ lost me some longstanding feminist friends, who have found the whole subject too hard to broach face to face, but was otherwise relatively straightforward. My ‘she’ was now ‘he’: those hard, binary pronouns signalled an altered reality and gave me the chance to avoid the subject if I didn’t want to explain it to everyone I met at the bus stop who wasn’t familiar with my family setup. The next leg, to ‘they/them’, was more exposing, and I still sometimes find myself floundering.”
Why is my baby crying? I used to Google for hours, then discovered the real answer – article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian. “Having a baby who can’t tell you what’s going on with it means having to solve a mystery every single day. Say the baby is whingeing. First, you run through the usual checklist. Is the baby hungry? Is his nappy full? Is he sleepy? Does he have wind? Once you’ve ascertained which one it is, you go back to the start, because it’s probably something else by now…. It’s when you bring the whole internet into it that it becomes problematic, as I learned during one of my late-night Google sessions when the baby went through a phase of waking 45 minutes after being put down at bedtime… Not a single one of the reasons listed was wind. So, even though each time I picked the baby up he would do [an] almighty burp … I did not trust my instincts…. There is simply too much information out there. Too many people with agendas and opinions. Why would a thread of Mumsnet users know the reason for your baby’s rash?… The internet is also killing parental instinct. Millennials are so used to being able to instantly receive the answer to any minuscule bit of trivia that when we can’t solve a mystery such as why our baby is crying, it drives us insane.”
The age of social media is ending – article by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts ... you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts.... The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide. That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, ... [offering] platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). ... The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops. [For another,] social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.... When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing. That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. ... If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts.... Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation .... The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.”
Friday, 4 November 2022
Cuttings: October 2022
Social media firms face a safety reckoning after the Molly Russell inquest – Guardian Techscape newsletter by Dan Milmo. “Molly, from north-west London, died in 2017 after viewing extensive amounts of online content related to suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety. In what the NSPCC described as a global first, the senior coroner said social media had contributed to Molly’s death, ruling that that Molly had died from 'an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content'.... If there was one point during the two-week hearing when the case for tougher online regulation became overwhelming, it was during Meta executive Elizabeth Lagone’s testimony. The head of health and wellbeing policy at Mark Zuckerberg’s company was taken through a selection of the Instagram posts the teenager had viewed in the six months before her death – deeming many of them to be 'safe' for children to view. It was not an opinion shared by many in the room at North London coroner’s court.... Molly’s father, Ian, was scathing about the 'safe' assessment. Speaking at the end of the two-week hearing, he said: 'If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive and instead of being a bereaved family of four, there would be five of us looking forward to a life full of purpose and promise that lay ahead for our adorable Molly.'... The impact of Lagone’s two-day appearance, and of what happened to Molly, was to damage faith that a major social media platform could be relied on to police its content and systems without a wider regulatory framework to ensure it is done properly.”
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins: anecdotes, elephants and ‘an embuggerance’ –review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Observer. “Caring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before; here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia.... After hearing Jilly Cooper talk about her invaluable PA, Pratchett was filled with staff envy and hired Wilkins as an assistant. Over the years, the role grew into that of amanuensis and 'keeper of the anecdotes'. The first half of this book is Wilkins curating these stories.... As Pratchett needed more and more assistance, his personal assistant became more important to him. ...Towards the end, Wilkins had to hold Pratchett’s hand and guide him through his last explorations of the Discworld. Outside family, Wilkins probably knew Pratchett better than anyone else and it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer’s working life, with its arguments and doubts, naps and negotiations. This is not a hagiography. The Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain, and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him.”
Britain is learning a painful lesson: what happens in ‘emerging markets’ could also happen here - article by Kojo Koram in The Guardian. "It has become fashionable among experts to compare Britain’s economy, once a global superpower, to that of an 'emerging market'.... For those who live in Britain, it can be shocking to hear such labels applied to a 'developed' country like our own. It runs counter to the history we were taught and the belief we were raised with: that as Britain was the birthplace of industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, it sits at the forefront of a linear path of development.... But what does it mean to be described in the language of an emerging market?... On face value, the descriptor of being an emerging market seems to be a compliment – you are emerging, realising your potential, one for the future. In reality, the label of 'emerging' is a shorthand for volatility and political instability. Ten years ago, emerging markets were 'developing' nations; 30 years before that, they were 'third world' nations. Now, instead of talking about civilisational hierarchies, different countries have instead been grouped together and rechristened by economists in the bloodless language of 'emerging markets'. It provides a hopeful narrative of history as a one-way road for all of humanity towards a happy destination.... These assumptions have been upturned of late. Across the country, communities have seen their living standards collapse beyond the point they assumed was possible in a 'developed' country like Britain. In the midst of this economic crisis, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng embarked on a fiscal gamble that rested on their belief that Britain still possessed an inherent trustworthiness in the eyes of global investors.”
‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive – article by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. “The BBC’s attitude towards preserving and using its broadcasts has transformed in the 100 years since it was formed in October 1922. The technology didn’t exist to record the earliest programmes, which were all broadcast live. When recording television became possible, starting in 1947 with a variety show at Alexandra Palace, the cost of tape made keeping programmes too expensive. Most tapes were overwritten and eventually binned. Where it happened, archiving could be haphazard. Some recordings were kept only long enough for repeats to be aired in the days when film reels were used to play out recorded programmes. ... As the cost of archiving came down with new technology in the 1970s, the BBC also came to realise the value of preserving more. In 1981, the corporation added to its charter a requirement to keep everything. Digital archiving began with all radio in 2007, and all TV from 2015. Today, thousands of hours of TV and radio are constantly – and automatically – uploaded and preserved.... But the real value in the digitisation process has been the capacity to mine the archive for treasures that had become lost within it. Major recent advances in automated transcription technology have been vital. Machine learning – the practice of teaching computers to make improvements by themselves – is helping the speech-to-text system identify speakers and cope with accents and obscure words. Until recently, you couldn’t search the archive for much more than programme names. Now it can be searched for anything.”
Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works - article by Catherine Taylor in The Guardian. "For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature .... The Years covers six decades of social and personal history, from Ernaux’s working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy – where she was born in 1940 – through the 1968 student uprisings, initial joy and later disillusionment during the long presidency of François Mitterand in the 1980s and 90s and on into the new millennium. It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans – all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word 'I'. The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as 'uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.'”
A Locus of Care: Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022) – post by Justin E.H. Smith, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “If we had had the sad task of writing an elegy for Bruno Latour in, say, 1985, he would indeed have been principally distinguished for his role in the emergence of 'science and technology studies'... This tendency generally took the scientific discovery of new truths to be largely narrative, and took all the other stuff that goes on in the course of scientific discovery —competition, infighting, networks, ideology— to be just as relevant to our understanding of what science is as are the discoveries on which the scientists themselves would invariably prefer that we focus.... Latour, in any case, certainly understood that construction is not the same thing as deconstruction, that to explain the social dimensions of a given object of our scientific ontology is not to explain that object away. In this light, Latour’s much-discussed 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, easily appears not so much as a road-to-Damascus moment, or as a radical conversion away from everything he had promoted before, but rather simply as a refinement, an honest update to a general and consistent approach in light of lessons learned from a changing world.... it is not so hard to see why, around 2004, it could easily have seemed to an honest and lucid theorist such as Latour that this was a very good moment indeed to take a break from warning about the danger of premature naturalization of what an institutionally elite class of people uses its power to anoint as 'facts', and instead to start to think, but really hard, about how facts and values might be brought together again, or perhaps not again, but for the first time, in such a way as to contribute to human flourishing. This then is where we start to see the full significance of the second part of the 2004 article’s title: 'From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern'. ... We are left with the surprising realization that 'things' are, in their original and most archaic sense, political.... So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern).... In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of 'objectivity' has led us ... it might be better to retrain our focus on 'things'. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal.”
Bruno Latour – obituary by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “For many years, [Latour] was treated as a typically irresponsible French postmodern theorist, scandalously arguing that science did not discover truths, but constructed them. He was one of the French philosophers indicted for intellectual charlatanism in the physicist Alan Sokal’s 1997 book Intellectual Impostures. Sokal charged that Latour was a pernicious anything-goes relativist who believed that facts were social constructions.... Latour denied he was a relativist, but rather that he was drawing attention to how day-to-day lab research worked. It was hardly a progression towards unveiling facts or truth but a disorderly mass of observations, inconclusive results and fledgling theories that were systematically erased when research results were presented as facts. What Sokal failed to grasp, Latour argued, is that 'facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media'. With the rise of alternative facts, he argued, whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” – that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible. Latour did not produce our post-truth age, but foresaw how it could arise."
‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: how stories teach empathy – article by George Saunders in The Guardian. “I once wrote a story called The Barber’s Unhappiness. In the town where we were living, there was a barber who spent a lot of time out front of his shop, smoking and ogling women. He ogled in an obnoxious but egalitarian way: old women, young women, women whose faces were passing by on the sides of buses – it didn’t matter. I was a new husband, the father of two baby daughters, and a freshly minted feminist, so decided to, in prose, crucify him... But soon the humour started wearing thin and the story flatlined. I kept writing different versions (hundreds of pages’ worth) of the same scene, in which my barber (once again, still, over and over) kept being wrong in exactly the same way.... The problem was, I’d made my barber a concept: The Terrible Sexist. It was as if I’d built a robot and trained it to walk only in a straight line, then was unhappy because it never went around corners. Also, I noted, I didn’t like him. Why would I? It’s hard to like a robot as he keeps robotically doing the obnoxious thing you’ve programmed him to do.... One way to make a character more likable is to make him more vulnerable. (Give the robot a bad wheel.)... For my barber, ... I lopped off all the toes on one of his feet. He was still a jerk (still harsh, still sexist, still went around rejecting women for not being attractive enough, although, even factoring out the foot thing, he wasn’t all that attractive himself) but now he had no toes on that foot, poor bastard. And was self-conscious about his feet in his private moments, like I’d been, and, as I’d done, he dreaded going to the beach, which of course, in the story, I immediately made him do. Before this, I’d known what I thought of him. Now I wasn’t sure. I’d confused myself. Did I like this guy or not? Was I for him or against him? ... I didn’t know what to think of him and neither did the reader. What resulted was increased dramatic tension. The reader found herself doing a sort of mental squinting, wondering whether I meant for her to like this barber or not, walking forward into the mist of the story alongside me, trying to figure it out.”
‘Unlike anything you’ve ever played’: Immortality, the video game that’s actually three movies – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. “The first thing you see when you load up Immortality is a talkshow clip from the late 1960s, in which a bright-eyed, red-haired young actor is being interviewed about her recent starring role in a film called Ambrosio, an adaptation of a 1796 novel about a devil temptress who draws a monk down the path of sin. This is Marissa Marcel, who was at this point on the brink of stardom – but this film she appears in, with an eminent but slimy director, is never released. Her next picture, an erotic thriller about art and murder, also never makes it into theatres. She retreats into obscurity for a long time, before emerging for a comeback in the 1990s in a Lynchian thriller about artifice and celebrity – but that film, too, is lost, and after that she disappears entirely. The question of what happened to Marissa is an irresistible mystery – and you, the player, now have access to a full archive of clips, rushes and behind-the-scenes footage from her career. Somewhere within these segments, you can find the answer. Freezing the footage and zooming in on any detail – a plant, a mug, a director’s slate – will transport you to another clip in which that same thing appears. You time-travel through the decades, jumping between all three films, following motifs or particular actors, slowly piecing together not just what happens in the movies, but what happens to the people who are making them. Put together, these three films tell a story about film-making, about the price of art, and about Hollywood’s exploitation of women. But it is in the way that you experience them – recreating them piecemeal by following your intuition, noticing something in an actor’s face or an off-camera comment, diving down rabbit holes and discovering that they are deep and branching – that the true story of Immortality is told. It is a delicate and multilayered mystery that you unravel yourself, scrubbing through these scenes and searching for clues. As a player, you reach a turning point after maybe an hour, maybe two, when you’ll be watching a scene and think, wait – did I just see what I thought I saw? You’ll wind it back. Watch again. Follow the thread. And an extraordinary mystery starts to reveal itself at the centre.”
The big idea: is cooperation always a force for good? – article by Nichola Raihani in The Guardian. “We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. ... Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering.... But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. ... Cooperation is, at heart, a means by which entities – be they genes, cells or individuals – improve their own position in the world. It’s important to note that this doesn’t imply that all cooperation is strategic and calculated. But cooperation is essentially a form of competition and, therefore, frequently has victims.... Oil and gas giants, for example, work together via powerful trade associations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on lobbying aimed at watering down or blocking climate crisis policies. Cooperation of this sort wields the potential for destruction on a planetary scale.... Cooperation has carried us this far in our journey, but if we don’t find ways to be better at it – to scale it to the global problems we face – we risk becoming the victims of our own success.”
The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas: why it pays to talk in a polarised world – review by Emma Brocks in The Guardian. “The Persuaders [identifies] strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause.... Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: 'Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.'... By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning.... 'Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to "Boy, have I got a problem for you!”' – proven to be a big downer at the polls. 'You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.'”
My small, doomed stand against Thatcher’s war on truth – article by Simon Petherick in The Guardian. “Six years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called the Central Office Of Information.... The department’s role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party.... Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government was doing. I liked that.... By the time I left, seven years later, the COI was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t 'objective information'. During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Advertising and public relations and lobbying agencies now clustered around Number 10 like flies over treacle, and the idea of truth had evaporated. Something got lost in those years. It is difficult to imagine the administrations of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss without the preparatory demolition of the foundations that Thatcher carried out. Never again would our governments allow us the dignity of knowing the facts and drawing our own conclusions from them.”
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen review: damning account of deregulation – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. “A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned.... Apps traces the tale of deregulation back to the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary Michael Heseltine, citing builders’ complaints of 'delays and costs', made 'radical changes' to the building regulations. This and successive administrations would then progressively loosen the system. Prescriptive rules were replaced by 'performance-based' guidance. Builders gained the right to 'self-certify', which means that they themselves can determine whether they are meeting regulations rather than ask a publicly appointed inspector. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.”
What’s the shortest joke? What’s the smallest possible ratio of words to laughter? – readers' replies to 'Notes and Queries' in The Guardian. “Free briefcase, no catches.... Budgies, going cheap.... What's brown and sticky? A stick.... Two elephants fall off a cliff. Boom! Boom!... Cork man drowns.... Truss.”
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins: anecdotes, elephants and ‘an embuggerance’ –review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Observer. “Caring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before; here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia.... After hearing Jilly Cooper talk about her invaluable PA, Pratchett was filled with staff envy and hired Wilkins as an assistant. Over the years, the role grew into that of amanuensis and 'keeper of the anecdotes'. The first half of this book is Wilkins curating these stories.... As Pratchett needed more and more assistance, his personal assistant became more important to him. ...Towards the end, Wilkins had to hold Pratchett’s hand and guide him through his last explorations of the Discworld. Outside family, Wilkins probably knew Pratchett better than anyone else and it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer’s working life, with its arguments and doubts, naps and negotiations. This is not a hagiography. The Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain, and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him.”
Britain is learning a painful lesson: what happens in ‘emerging markets’ could also happen here - article by Kojo Koram in The Guardian. "It has become fashionable among experts to compare Britain’s economy, once a global superpower, to that of an 'emerging market'.... For those who live in Britain, it can be shocking to hear such labels applied to a 'developed' country like our own. It runs counter to the history we were taught and the belief we were raised with: that as Britain was the birthplace of industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, it sits at the forefront of a linear path of development.... But what does it mean to be described in the language of an emerging market?... On face value, the descriptor of being an emerging market seems to be a compliment – you are emerging, realising your potential, one for the future. In reality, the label of 'emerging' is a shorthand for volatility and political instability. Ten years ago, emerging markets were 'developing' nations; 30 years before that, they were 'third world' nations. Now, instead of talking about civilisational hierarchies, different countries have instead been grouped together and rechristened by economists in the bloodless language of 'emerging markets'. It provides a hopeful narrative of history as a one-way road for all of humanity towards a happy destination.... These assumptions have been upturned of late. Across the country, communities have seen their living standards collapse beyond the point they assumed was possible in a 'developed' country like Britain. In the midst of this economic crisis, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng embarked on a fiscal gamble that rested on their belief that Britain still possessed an inherent trustworthiness in the eyes of global investors.”
‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive – article by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. “The BBC’s attitude towards preserving and using its broadcasts has transformed in the 100 years since it was formed in October 1922. The technology didn’t exist to record the earliest programmes, which were all broadcast live. When recording television became possible, starting in 1947 with a variety show at Alexandra Palace, the cost of tape made keeping programmes too expensive. Most tapes were overwritten and eventually binned. Where it happened, archiving could be haphazard. Some recordings were kept only long enough for repeats to be aired in the days when film reels were used to play out recorded programmes. ... As the cost of archiving came down with new technology in the 1970s, the BBC also came to realise the value of preserving more. In 1981, the corporation added to its charter a requirement to keep everything. Digital archiving began with all radio in 2007, and all TV from 2015. Today, thousands of hours of TV and radio are constantly – and automatically – uploaded and preserved.... But the real value in the digitisation process has been the capacity to mine the archive for treasures that had become lost within it. Major recent advances in automated transcription technology have been vital. Machine learning – the practice of teaching computers to make improvements by themselves – is helping the speech-to-text system identify speakers and cope with accents and obscure words. Until recently, you couldn’t search the archive for much more than programme names. Now it can be searched for anything.”
Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works - article by Catherine Taylor in The Guardian. "For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature .... The Years covers six decades of social and personal history, from Ernaux’s working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy – where she was born in 1940 – through the 1968 student uprisings, initial joy and later disillusionment during the long presidency of François Mitterand in the 1980s and 90s and on into the new millennium. It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans – all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word 'I'. The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as 'uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.'”
A Locus of Care: Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022) – post by Justin E.H. Smith, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “If we had had the sad task of writing an elegy for Bruno Latour in, say, 1985, he would indeed have been principally distinguished for his role in the emergence of 'science and technology studies'... This tendency generally took the scientific discovery of new truths to be largely narrative, and took all the other stuff that goes on in the course of scientific discovery —competition, infighting, networks, ideology— to be just as relevant to our understanding of what science is as are the discoveries on which the scientists themselves would invariably prefer that we focus.... Latour, in any case, certainly understood that construction is not the same thing as deconstruction, that to explain the social dimensions of a given object of our scientific ontology is not to explain that object away. In this light, Latour’s much-discussed 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, easily appears not so much as a road-to-Damascus moment, or as a radical conversion away from everything he had promoted before, but rather simply as a refinement, an honest update to a general and consistent approach in light of lessons learned from a changing world.... it is not so hard to see why, around 2004, it could easily have seemed to an honest and lucid theorist such as Latour that this was a very good moment indeed to take a break from warning about the danger of premature naturalization of what an institutionally elite class of people uses its power to anoint as 'facts', and instead to start to think, but really hard, about how facts and values might be brought together again, or perhaps not again, but for the first time, in such a way as to contribute to human flourishing. This then is where we start to see the full significance of the second part of the 2004 article’s title: 'From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern'. ... We are left with the surprising realization that 'things' are, in their original and most archaic sense, political.... So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern).... In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of 'objectivity' has led us ... it might be better to retrain our focus on 'things'. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal.”
Bruno Latour – obituary by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “For many years, [Latour] was treated as a typically irresponsible French postmodern theorist, scandalously arguing that science did not discover truths, but constructed them. He was one of the French philosophers indicted for intellectual charlatanism in the physicist Alan Sokal’s 1997 book Intellectual Impostures. Sokal charged that Latour was a pernicious anything-goes relativist who believed that facts were social constructions.... Latour denied he was a relativist, but rather that he was drawing attention to how day-to-day lab research worked. It was hardly a progression towards unveiling facts or truth but a disorderly mass of observations, inconclusive results and fledgling theories that were systematically erased when research results were presented as facts. What Sokal failed to grasp, Latour argued, is that 'facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media'. With the rise of alternative facts, he argued, whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” – that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible. Latour did not produce our post-truth age, but foresaw how it could arise."
‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: how stories teach empathy – article by George Saunders in The Guardian. “I once wrote a story called The Barber’s Unhappiness. In the town where we were living, there was a barber who spent a lot of time out front of his shop, smoking and ogling women. He ogled in an obnoxious but egalitarian way: old women, young women, women whose faces were passing by on the sides of buses – it didn’t matter. I was a new husband, the father of two baby daughters, and a freshly minted feminist, so decided to, in prose, crucify him... But soon the humour started wearing thin and the story flatlined. I kept writing different versions (hundreds of pages’ worth) of the same scene, in which my barber (once again, still, over and over) kept being wrong in exactly the same way.... The problem was, I’d made my barber a concept: The Terrible Sexist. It was as if I’d built a robot and trained it to walk only in a straight line, then was unhappy because it never went around corners. Also, I noted, I didn’t like him. Why would I? It’s hard to like a robot as he keeps robotically doing the obnoxious thing you’ve programmed him to do.... One way to make a character more likable is to make him more vulnerable. (Give the robot a bad wheel.)... For my barber, ... I lopped off all the toes on one of his feet. He was still a jerk (still harsh, still sexist, still went around rejecting women for not being attractive enough, although, even factoring out the foot thing, he wasn’t all that attractive himself) but now he had no toes on that foot, poor bastard. And was self-conscious about his feet in his private moments, like I’d been, and, as I’d done, he dreaded going to the beach, which of course, in the story, I immediately made him do. Before this, I’d known what I thought of him. Now I wasn’t sure. I’d confused myself. Did I like this guy or not? Was I for him or against him? ... I didn’t know what to think of him and neither did the reader. What resulted was increased dramatic tension. The reader found herself doing a sort of mental squinting, wondering whether I meant for her to like this barber or not, walking forward into the mist of the story alongside me, trying to figure it out.”
‘Unlike anything you’ve ever played’: Immortality, the video game that’s actually three movies – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. “The first thing you see when you load up Immortality is a talkshow clip from the late 1960s, in which a bright-eyed, red-haired young actor is being interviewed about her recent starring role in a film called Ambrosio, an adaptation of a 1796 novel about a devil temptress who draws a monk down the path of sin. This is Marissa Marcel, who was at this point on the brink of stardom – but this film she appears in, with an eminent but slimy director, is never released. Her next picture, an erotic thriller about art and murder, also never makes it into theatres. She retreats into obscurity for a long time, before emerging for a comeback in the 1990s in a Lynchian thriller about artifice and celebrity – but that film, too, is lost, and after that she disappears entirely. The question of what happened to Marissa is an irresistible mystery – and you, the player, now have access to a full archive of clips, rushes and behind-the-scenes footage from her career. Somewhere within these segments, you can find the answer. Freezing the footage and zooming in on any detail – a plant, a mug, a director’s slate – will transport you to another clip in which that same thing appears. You time-travel through the decades, jumping between all three films, following motifs or particular actors, slowly piecing together not just what happens in the movies, but what happens to the people who are making them. Put together, these three films tell a story about film-making, about the price of art, and about Hollywood’s exploitation of women. But it is in the way that you experience them – recreating them piecemeal by following your intuition, noticing something in an actor’s face or an off-camera comment, diving down rabbit holes and discovering that they are deep and branching – that the true story of Immortality is told. It is a delicate and multilayered mystery that you unravel yourself, scrubbing through these scenes and searching for clues. As a player, you reach a turning point after maybe an hour, maybe two, when you’ll be watching a scene and think, wait – did I just see what I thought I saw? You’ll wind it back. Watch again. Follow the thread. And an extraordinary mystery starts to reveal itself at the centre.”
The big idea: is cooperation always a force for good? – article by Nichola Raihani in The Guardian. “We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. ... Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering.... But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. ... Cooperation is, at heart, a means by which entities – be they genes, cells or individuals – improve their own position in the world. It’s important to note that this doesn’t imply that all cooperation is strategic and calculated. But cooperation is essentially a form of competition and, therefore, frequently has victims.... Oil and gas giants, for example, work together via powerful trade associations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on lobbying aimed at watering down or blocking climate crisis policies. Cooperation of this sort wields the potential for destruction on a planetary scale.... Cooperation has carried us this far in our journey, but if we don’t find ways to be better at it – to scale it to the global problems we face – we risk becoming the victims of our own success.”
The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas: why it pays to talk in a polarised world – review by Emma Brocks in The Guardian. “The Persuaders [identifies] strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause.... Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: 'Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.'... By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning.... 'Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to "Boy, have I got a problem for you!”' – proven to be a big downer at the polls. 'You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.'”
My small, doomed stand against Thatcher’s war on truth – article by Simon Petherick in The Guardian. “Six years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called the Central Office Of Information.... The department’s role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party.... Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government was doing. I liked that.... By the time I left, seven years later, the COI was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t 'objective information'. During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Advertising and public relations and lobbying agencies now clustered around Number 10 like flies over treacle, and the idea of truth had evaporated. Something got lost in those years. It is difficult to imagine the administrations of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss without the preparatory demolition of the foundations that Thatcher carried out. Never again would our governments allow us the dignity of knowing the facts and drawing our own conclusions from them.”
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen review: damning account of deregulation – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. “A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned.... Apps traces the tale of deregulation back to the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary Michael Heseltine, citing builders’ complaints of 'delays and costs', made 'radical changes' to the building regulations. This and successive administrations would then progressively loosen the system. Prescriptive rules were replaced by 'performance-based' guidance. Builders gained the right to 'self-certify', which means that they themselves can determine whether they are meeting regulations rather than ask a publicly appointed inspector. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.”
What’s the shortest joke? What’s the smallest possible ratio of words to laughter? – readers' replies to 'Notes and Queries' in The Guardian. “Free briefcase, no catches.... Budgies, going cheap.... What's brown and sticky? A stick.... Two elephants fall off a cliff. Boom! Boom!... Cork man drowns.... Truss.”
Thursday, 6 October 2022
Seen and Heard: July to September 2022
The Darkside Detective – really fun and funny (I mean LOL funny) adventure game, with a small town detective and his idiot sidekick solving paranormal / occult mysteries. (See review.) No voice acting and super-chunky pixel graphics, which work surprisingly well. Solutions to puzzles are often bizarre but well-cued, making the playing a very enjoyable experience. A well-deserved winner of the 2017 Aggie awards for Best comedy writing, and a runner up for the readers’ choice Best adventure of 2017.
The Age of the Image – repeat of BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, taking a trip through twentieth-century image-making and image-use, part history of technology, part semiotics and cultural studies – nothing revolutionary, but just very, very well told. What also struck me on this re-viewing was the effort the production team put into getting Fox constantly into the frame: handling unique works of art and craft such as a matte painting used in Star Wars, walking round gallery installations, standing in the actual street locations of classic photos. Contrast this continual presence with the style of Adam Curtis, who is only ever a voiceover in his documentaries.
‘Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and "Star Trek”’ by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins – proper academic book from Routledge freely available as a PDF. Slightly dated (1995), but some observations which are still interesting, for example how the original Star Trek self-consciously merged three genres (the technological utopianism of ‘hard’ SF, the social utopianism of 1960s ‘soft’ SF and the action adventure of space opera). An interesting chapter on MIT students who see Star Trek as an embodiment and validation of their scientific technical outlook, much interested in reconciling scientific inaccuracies and in the quality of special effects, and misogynist in their humour. And two interesting chapters on how female and gay fans, far from the passive consumers of classic literary theory, have wrestled with the many respects in which the show did not live up to its progressive social values, not by rejecting the show but seeking to resolve these tensions within the fictional world: first by fan fiction, focusing on female characters marginalised in the television series, and second by agitating for the inclusion of a gay character in The Next Generation cast, not just an “issue” show about homosexuality (such as ‘The Host’ or ‘The Outcast’).
Syberia 3 – a decent game, as I was pleasantly surprised to find, given the poor reviews, though perhaps not up to the quality of the first two. The weaknesses are the non-player characters, especially the clichéd villains and the infantalised generic members of the Yukol tribe. Its strengths are what they always were: the graphic design and the mechanical puzzles, now with a simple but satisfying twist in that you have to accomplish tasks physically: you have to use the joystick (or mouse) to rotate keys, turn handles, pull levers, instead of just clicking on them. The story is perhaps a bit linear with the next step spelled out in a list of objectives, but I have no objections to an easier game. Well, I’m up to date now, and ready for the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4: The World Before.
Proofreading Theses and Dissertations, by Stephen Cashmore – a CIEP guide for editors working with university students. Very good on establishing with the student exactly which aspects of their work you will check and which you won’t, and on ethical aspects such as dealing with plagiarism (including unmarked and unacknowledged quotations, which is its most common form) and querying facts (as distinct from checking facts, which you should definitely not do).
Heaven’s Vault – two-volume novel by Jon Ingold, based on his well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. Although I liked the game, I enjoyed the novel more. The game is quite emotionally flat, whereas the novel has peril, tension and tender resolution, and I’m sure there are entire sequences which have no equivalent in the game, such as Alysia’s childhood in Elboreth and the origins of her friendship with Oroi which is a major theme in the book. There are also many things which I didn’t understand properly, such as that the robots were not made in Alysia’s time but were a product of an earlier civilisation, unearthed on Iox and reactivated. Perhaps these were things I was supposed to infer or work out for myself in the game? In which case there was a great deal that I missed. Perhaps I’d better play it again…
Dear Esther – classic game, the original “walking simulator”. There are no dangers, no puzzles, no objects to pick up and use; just a Hebridean island, with a flashing tower-top light in the distance and a path to follow, and an occasional man’s voice – yours? someone else’s? – reading out letters to the titular Esther, or perhaps thinking aloud. There is a back-story of some kind, though the authors left it deliberately unclear so that all you have is suggestions, hints, clues. The island is really beautifully realised; I found myself repeatedly stopping just to watch the waves breaking on the shore, the plants waving in the wind, the mist rolling across the sea, the flickering of lighted candles as the night slowly falls. A true classic, which paved the way for later walking simulators such as Gone Home and Firewatch (played by me in February 2015, with discussion, and April-June 2019). See review on Adventure Gamers, the story of its development, and various attempts at explaining the story, see especially the post by Prismfalcon (Sept 17 2018).
Live from London Summer – another fine series of livestreamed concerts from those nice people and most excellent singers Voces8.,though I have to say the knock-out performances were their own single-piece videos, recorded at various locations around the world while on tour. The best were Giovanni Croce’s double choir ‘Buccinate in neomenia tuba’ and a clever mash-up of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’; those videos are unfortunately not on YouTube, but their beautiful rendering of Grieg’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ happily is.
Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works, by David Crystal – lovely, accessible but academically-founded book by everyone’s favourite linguist on the pragmatics of how conversations are started, maintained and ended. Some nice points, such as that interruptions, fuzziness and imprecision, and parenthetical comment clauses (such as “you know”) are not only normal but actually critical to keeping a conversation going. Great examples, lots of fun.
The Age of the Image – repeat of BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, taking a trip through twentieth-century image-making and image-use, part history of technology, part semiotics and cultural studies – nothing revolutionary, but just very, very well told. What also struck me on this re-viewing was the effort the production team put into getting Fox constantly into the frame: handling unique works of art and craft such as a matte painting used in Star Wars, walking round gallery installations, standing in the actual street locations of classic photos. Contrast this continual presence with the style of Adam Curtis, who is only ever a voiceover in his documentaries.
‘Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and "Star Trek”’ by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins – proper academic book from Routledge freely available as a PDF. Slightly dated (1995), but some observations which are still interesting, for example how the original Star Trek self-consciously merged three genres (the technological utopianism of ‘hard’ SF, the social utopianism of 1960s ‘soft’ SF and the action adventure of space opera). An interesting chapter on MIT students who see Star Trek as an embodiment and validation of their scientific technical outlook, much interested in reconciling scientific inaccuracies and in the quality of special effects, and misogynist in their humour. And two interesting chapters on how female and gay fans, far from the passive consumers of classic literary theory, have wrestled with the many respects in which the show did not live up to its progressive social values, not by rejecting the show but seeking to resolve these tensions within the fictional world: first by fan fiction, focusing on female characters marginalised in the television series, and second by agitating for the inclusion of a gay character in The Next Generation cast, not just an “issue” show about homosexuality (such as ‘The Host’ or ‘The Outcast’).
Syberia 3 – a decent game, as I was pleasantly surprised to find, given the poor reviews, though perhaps not up to the quality of the first two. The weaknesses are the non-player characters, especially the clichéd villains and the infantalised generic members of the Yukol tribe. Its strengths are what they always were: the graphic design and the mechanical puzzles, now with a simple but satisfying twist in that you have to accomplish tasks physically: you have to use the joystick (or mouse) to rotate keys, turn handles, pull levers, instead of just clicking on them. The story is perhaps a bit linear with the next step spelled out in a list of objectives, but I have no objections to an easier game. Well, I’m up to date now, and ready for the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4: The World Before.
Proofreading Theses and Dissertations, by Stephen Cashmore – a CIEP guide for editors working with university students. Very good on establishing with the student exactly which aspects of their work you will check and which you won’t, and on ethical aspects such as dealing with plagiarism (including unmarked and unacknowledged quotations, which is its most common form) and querying facts (as distinct from checking facts, which you should definitely not do).
Heaven’s Vault – two-volume novel by Jon Ingold, based on his well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. Although I liked the game, I enjoyed the novel more. The game is quite emotionally flat, whereas the novel has peril, tension and tender resolution, and I’m sure there are entire sequences which have no equivalent in the game, such as Alysia’s childhood in Elboreth and the origins of her friendship with Oroi which is a major theme in the book. There are also many things which I didn’t understand properly, such as that the robots were not made in Alysia’s time but were a product of an earlier civilisation, unearthed on Iox and reactivated. Perhaps these were things I was supposed to infer or work out for myself in the game? In which case there was a great deal that I missed. Perhaps I’d better play it again…
Dear Esther – classic game, the original “walking simulator”. There are no dangers, no puzzles, no objects to pick up and use; just a Hebridean island, with a flashing tower-top light in the distance and a path to follow, and an occasional man’s voice – yours? someone else’s? – reading out letters to the titular Esther, or perhaps thinking aloud. There is a back-story of some kind, though the authors left it deliberately unclear so that all you have is suggestions, hints, clues. The island is really beautifully realised; I found myself repeatedly stopping just to watch the waves breaking on the shore, the plants waving in the wind, the mist rolling across the sea, the flickering of lighted candles as the night slowly falls. A true classic, which paved the way for later walking simulators such as Gone Home and Firewatch (played by me in February 2015, with discussion, and April-June 2019). See review on Adventure Gamers, the story of its development, and various attempts at explaining the story, see especially the post by Prismfalcon (Sept 17 2018).
Live from London Summer – another fine series of livestreamed concerts from those nice people and most excellent singers Voces8.,though I have to say the knock-out performances were their own single-piece videos, recorded at various locations around the world while on tour. The best were Giovanni Croce’s double choir ‘Buccinate in neomenia tuba’ and a clever mash-up of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’; those videos are unfortunately not on YouTube, but their beautiful rendering of Grieg’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ happily is.
Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works, by David Crystal – lovely, accessible but academically-founded book by everyone’s favourite linguist on the pragmatics of how conversations are started, maintained and ended. Some nice points, such as that interruptions, fuzziness and imprecision, and parenthetical comment clauses (such as “you know”) are not only normal but actually critical to keeping a conversation going. Great examples, lots of fun.
Sunday, 2 October 2022
Cuttings: September 2022
What Big History Misses – article by Ian Hesketh in Aeon, referenced by John Naughton in his Observer column. “Big History burst on to the scene 30 years ago, promising to reinvigorate a stale and overspecialised academic discipline by situating the human past within a holistic account at a cosmic scale. The goal was to produce a story of life that could be discerned by synthesising cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. This universal story, in turn, would provide students with a basic framework for their subsequent studies – and for life itself. Big History also promised to fill the existential void left by the ostensible erosion of religious beliefs…. David Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991.... Big History was in fact at the forefront of a broader shift to large-scale, scientific history.... [such as] the recent work of the medieval historian-turned-public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, [with] his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) ... [and] a subsequent bestselling work, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)... What accounts for Big History’s attraction for popular audiences and educators? For Christian and other big historians, the answer is built right in to the premise of writing Big History in the first place. By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that have dismantled the holistic narratives that were provided by traditional religious systems....There are similarities with more recent forms of large-scale history as well, such as the positivist histories of the 19th century, which sought to explain the development of civilised society as the product of a progressive scientism, or the evolutionary epics of the 19th and 20th centuries, which sought to tell the story of life from an overarching evolutionary perspective. What these forms of history all share with Big History is the desire to synthesise contemporary science to tell a story of humanity and to reduce its development to a set of laws or stages leading to the present and future....However, in Christian’s Origin Story humans are never really presented as more than passive observers when it comes to the major developments of the period in history that we are supposedly shaping. Industrialisation, globalisation, colonisations and more all seem rote responses to the demand for new sources of energy flows and increasing complexity.... This speaks to the difficulty of integrating a sense of human agency into the Big History narrative, a problem that becomes particularly important at the end of the story.”
Why the Tory Project is Bust – article by David Hare in The Guardian, 8 March 2016, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In [my] play [Knuckle] father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast. The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. ... The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher....If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism... Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: 'Now feel British!' There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it?”
The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias or perpetuating it? – article by Wilfred Chan in The Guardian. “‘Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.’ I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. ‘Now I have enabled the accent translation,’ he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word ‘technology’ with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed…. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to ‘use your white voice’…. His sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling…. A Aneesh … has spent years studying call centers and accent neutralization. In 2007, as part of his research, the scholar – who has a mix of an Indian and American accent – got himself hired as a telemarketer in India, an experience he detailed in his 2015 book Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global. At the call center, he witnessed how his colleagues were put through a taxing process to change their accents. … The danger, Aneesh said, was that artificially neutralizing accents represented a kind of ‘indifference to difference’, which diminishes the humanity of the person on the other end of the phone. ‘It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.’”
A moment that changed me: a maths puzzle taught me to use my brain and helped me cope with losing my daughter – article by Paul Tonner in The Guardian. “When I was 15, I was talkative and outgoing, and more interested in being sociable than in working hard. It was 1969, and I was at high school in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. I never paid much attention, doing the bare minimum and often betting that nobody else would do their homework, so I needn’t either.… I did not enjoy geometry, although I liked the philosophical approach of our teacher, Mrs Trenholm... We were all struggling and I was probably the most vocal in class about it. Mrs Trenholm set us homework, asking us to try to solve a problem … She pulled me aside as we were leaving class and said: ‘Don’t talk your way out of this.’ … I went home, worked on it for 20 minutes, thought, ‘I can’t do this and no one else in the class will be able to do it either’ and gave up. I went to bed about 10pm – and woke up a couple of hours later, which was unusual. My first thought was, ‘I’ve done exactly what she said I was going to do.’ Then I decided to try again. I sat at my desk and started…. At about 5am, … I got it. I could remember every failed attempt and where I had gone wrong, and I knew that it was right. At that moment I felt like my brain had been rewired. … It was exciting and I felt really proud. I thought: ‘I can be somebody different. I don’t have to be somebody who walks around avoiding things; I can work things out.’ I handed it in the next day. Mrs Trenholm … came to me and handed me the paper. I could see it had a little check mark in the corner. She looked right at me and asked: ‘Did you do this?’ When I said yes, she nodded and went back to the front of the class and said: ‘One of you now understands Euclidean geometry. Let’s keep going so everybody gets it.’”
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes: what Putin sees in the past – review by Bridget Kendall in The Guardian. “Prominent among [Russia’s] iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. … Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: ‘Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,’ he tells us in the introduction. ‘Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.’ Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present.”
I’m a psychologist and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – article by Sanah Ahsan in The Guardian. “As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf: big ideas from a small town – review by Adam Sisman in The Guardian. “A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together. Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. … It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls ‘the Jena set’.”
Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya: philosophical self-help – review by Anil Gomes in The Guardian. “Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on…. Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience. This kind of progress is not won by logic. It requires careful attention, precise thinking and the ability to draw distinctions that cast light on that which is of value. … And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.”
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher: how social media rewired our world – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Inevitably, [Facebook] – and [other companies] like it – claims the patterns of radicalisation and abuse predate social media. Technology, they argue, has merely reduced ‘friction’ in communication, allowing messages to propagate more widely. Clearly a propensity to make snap judgments based on incomplete data, and to join like-minded mobs when pricked by outrage are general human flaws. But this is something else. Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design ‘deliberately shape our experiences’, exerting ‘such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another’. He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying ‘our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, leveraging that flaw to ‘gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that ‘supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict’ – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum. In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity.”
Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’ – article by Zadie Smith in The Guardian. “The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? ... In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from [Gretchen Gerzina's] Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of 'progress'. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called 'The Right Side of History' – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. ... My high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.”
Anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of Proms staple Jerusalem – article by Jason Whittaker in The Guardian. “By the time Parry set Blake’s lyrics to music, it was increasingly assumed that the poem referred to the legend that Jesus visited Roman Britain. However, there is no reference to this myth before the 1890s, when Victorians sought to emphasise supposed British exceptionalism. Instead, Blake was drawing on an older story, repeated in Milton’s History of Britain, that it was Joseph of Arimathea who travelled west after the death of Jesus and first preached to the ancient Britons. Milton himself had no truck with what he viewed as Papist nonsense, but Blake repeatedly referred to Joseph, lonely and vulnerable on the shores of Albion. To him, Joseph’s primitive Christianity was a rebuke to the organised religion of the Roman and British empires – one where Jerusalem, simply meaning a heavenly city on earth, could be built anywhere.... Joseph preached alone a gospel that matched Blake’s own heretical religious views, one in which Jesus recognised that all deities reside in the human breast. The traditional view of an “out there” God meant, for Blake, the ruler of this world – or Urizen, most famously represented by his image of The Ancient of Days, who imposed his worship by force. As such, for all its martial metaphors, Blake’s fight in Jerusalem was a mental one against the establishment of his day, which was creating an empire built on slavery and warfare in the name of Christianity. By the time of his death in 1827, Blake’s pacifist poem had fallen into obscurity. When it was set to music in 1916, it was transformed into the symbol of a British imperialism that the poet had spent much of his life opposing.”
The library’s new cataloguing system – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A guide to the categories of books in our library. Blue: may be read by anyone. Red: may be read under the stern eye of a watchful librarian. Green: may be read from a great distance through a powerful telescope. Buff: may be read on completion of the relevant forms. Blue-green: may be read on completion of a Mission Impossible-style heist. Orange: may be read upon correctly answering three riddles. Purple: may be read under a full moon in the company of the author's ghost. Brown: May be read but never spoken of.”
Why the Tory Project is Bust – article by David Hare in The Guardian, 8 March 2016, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In [my] play [Knuckle] father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast. The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. ... The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher....If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism... Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: 'Now feel British!' There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it?”
The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias or perpetuating it? – article by Wilfred Chan in The Guardian. “‘Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.’ I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. ‘Now I have enabled the accent translation,’ he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word ‘technology’ with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed…. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to ‘use your white voice’…. His sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling…. A Aneesh … has spent years studying call centers and accent neutralization. In 2007, as part of his research, the scholar – who has a mix of an Indian and American accent – got himself hired as a telemarketer in India, an experience he detailed in his 2015 book Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global. At the call center, he witnessed how his colleagues were put through a taxing process to change their accents. … The danger, Aneesh said, was that artificially neutralizing accents represented a kind of ‘indifference to difference’, which diminishes the humanity of the person on the other end of the phone. ‘It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.’”
A moment that changed me: a maths puzzle taught me to use my brain and helped me cope with losing my daughter – article by Paul Tonner in The Guardian. “When I was 15, I was talkative and outgoing, and more interested in being sociable than in working hard. It was 1969, and I was at high school in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. I never paid much attention, doing the bare minimum and often betting that nobody else would do their homework, so I needn’t either.… I did not enjoy geometry, although I liked the philosophical approach of our teacher, Mrs Trenholm... We were all struggling and I was probably the most vocal in class about it. Mrs Trenholm set us homework, asking us to try to solve a problem … She pulled me aside as we were leaving class and said: ‘Don’t talk your way out of this.’ … I went home, worked on it for 20 minutes, thought, ‘I can’t do this and no one else in the class will be able to do it either’ and gave up. I went to bed about 10pm – and woke up a couple of hours later, which was unusual. My first thought was, ‘I’ve done exactly what she said I was going to do.’ Then I decided to try again. I sat at my desk and started…. At about 5am, … I got it. I could remember every failed attempt and where I had gone wrong, and I knew that it was right. At that moment I felt like my brain had been rewired. … It was exciting and I felt really proud. I thought: ‘I can be somebody different. I don’t have to be somebody who walks around avoiding things; I can work things out.’ I handed it in the next day. Mrs Trenholm … came to me and handed me the paper. I could see it had a little check mark in the corner. She looked right at me and asked: ‘Did you do this?’ When I said yes, she nodded and went back to the front of the class and said: ‘One of you now understands Euclidean geometry. Let’s keep going so everybody gets it.’”
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes: what Putin sees in the past – review by Bridget Kendall in The Guardian. “Prominent among [Russia’s] iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. … Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: ‘Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,’ he tells us in the introduction. ‘Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.’ Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present.”
I’m a psychologist and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – article by Sanah Ahsan in The Guardian. “As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf: big ideas from a small town – review by Adam Sisman in The Guardian. “A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together. Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. … It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls ‘the Jena set’.”
Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya: philosophical self-help – review by Anil Gomes in The Guardian. “Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on…. Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience. This kind of progress is not won by logic. It requires careful attention, precise thinking and the ability to draw distinctions that cast light on that which is of value. … And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.”
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher: how social media rewired our world – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Inevitably, [Facebook] – and [other companies] like it – claims the patterns of radicalisation and abuse predate social media. Technology, they argue, has merely reduced ‘friction’ in communication, allowing messages to propagate more widely. Clearly a propensity to make snap judgments based on incomplete data, and to join like-minded mobs when pricked by outrage are general human flaws. But this is something else. Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design ‘deliberately shape our experiences’, exerting ‘such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another’. He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying ‘our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, leveraging that flaw to ‘gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that ‘supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict’ – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum. In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity.”
Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’ – article by Zadie Smith in The Guardian. “The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? ... In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from [Gretchen Gerzina's] Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of 'progress'. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called 'The Right Side of History' – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. ... My high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.”
Anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of Proms staple Jerusalem – article by Jason Whittaker in The Guardian. “By the time Parry set Blake’s lyrics to music, it was increasingly assumed that the poem referred to the legend that Jesus visited Roman Britain. However, there is no reference to this myth before the 1890s, when Victorians sought to emphasise supposed British exceptionalism. Instead, Blake was drawing on an older story, repeated in Milton’s History of Britain, that it was Joseph of Arimathea who travelled west after the death of Jesus and first preached to the ancient Britons. Milton himself had no truck with what he viewed as Papist nonsense, but Blake repeatedly referred to Joseph, lonely and vulnerable on the shores of Albion. To him, Joseph’s primitive Christianity was a rebuke to the organised religion of the Roman and British empires – one where Jerusalem, simply meaning a heavenly city on earth, could be built anywhere.... Joseph preached alone a gospel that matched Blake’s own heretical religious views, one in which Jesus recognised that all deities reside in the human breast. The traditional view of an “out there” God meant, for Blake, the ruler of this world – or Urizen, most famously represented by his image of The Ancient of Days, who imposed his worship by force. As such, for all its martial metaphors, Blake’s fight in Jerusalem was a mental one against the establishment of his day, which was creating an empire built on slavery and warfare in the name of Christianity. By the time of his death in 1827, Blake’s pacifist poem had fallen into obscurity. When it was set to music in 1916, it was transformed into the symbol of a British imperialism that the poet had spent much of his life opposing.”
The library’s new cataloguing system – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A guide to the categories of books in our library. Blue: may be read by anyone. Red: may be read under the stern eye of a watchful librarian. Green: may be read from a great distance through a powerful telescope. Buff: may be read on completion of the relevant forms. Blue-green: may be read on completion of a Mission Impossible-style heist. Orange: may be read upon correctly answering three riddles. Purple: may be read under a full moon in the company of the author's ghost. Brown: May be read but never spoken of.”
Sunday, 4 September 2022
Cuttings: August 2022
Why the medium really is the message – post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “It was from [Harold] Innis that [Marshall] McLuhan picked up the germ of the idea that later made him famous. This was the proposition that the form of a dominant communications medium is far more important than any messages that the medium carries. The significant thing about media, he maintained, is not the information they carry but what they do to us in terms of shaping our behaviour, the way we think and even the way our brains are structured. McLuhan argued that this had been demonstrated by the media that had dominated society up to the 1960s – starting with print and culminating with broadcast television – and added the twist that TV was restoring the ‘sensory balance’ that had been disrupted by print. In Understanding Media (1964), the book that made him a global celebrity of sufficient status to appear in a Woody Allen film, he encapsulated this thought in one of the most celebrated – and misunderstood – aphorisms of all time: the medium is the message…. What McLuhan didn’t know (couldn’t have known), of course, was what neuroscience subsequently revealed about the amazing plasticity of the human brain – its ability to change its structure in response to different conditions. As Maryanne Wolf pointed out in Proust and the Squid, her riveting study of the reading brain, humans were not born to read — we evolved to cope with the task…. That’s why the brains of literate people are differently structured from those of illiterates. And it illuminates McLuhan’s other famous aphorism: ‘we shape our tools, and afterwards they shape us’…. In a strange way, McLuhan’s insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s. The past few years, for example, have seen a series of angry and sometimes anguished debates about what our comprehensively networked digital ecosystem is doing to our children, our politics, our economies — and our brains.”
Younger viewers shun traditional TV channels as 90% opt for streaming services – article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. “Watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, with 90% of 18- to 24-year-olds heading straight to their favourite streaming service, according to a report by the media regulator Ofcom…. Viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV – a fall of two-thirds over the last decade – seven times less than those aged 65 and over. Those aged 65+ still spend about a third of their waking day, almost six hours, watching broadcast TV – slightly higher than a decade ago.”
12 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe – “Eryn Tett: A spiritual guidance teacher playing hide and seek with kids: ‘All right, well, you guys go hide. And find yourselves.’ // Ignacio Lopez: I come from a long line of immigrants. No, seriously, the queue was massive – the first thing they teach you when you move to the UK is queuing…. // Ari Eldjárn: I never wanted a beard. But then it grew on me.”
Femina by Janina Ramirez: a revelatory study of medieval women’s lives – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In 1878 a pile of ancient bones was pulled from the ground at Birka, near Stockholm, and confidently identified as the remains of a 10th-century Norse warrior. After all, the skeleton, known as ‘Bj 581’, was going into the next life surrounded by every kind of death-dealing instrument: spears, axes, arrows and swords, and a couple of strapping war horses.… Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting…. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship.”
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.... [After installation of a new system at his hospital in 2015,] many of the angriest complaints ... were due to problems rooted in what [I call] 'the Revenge of the Ancillaries.' In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—... administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. ... Now the staff had a say ... they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with 'field required' alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.... [A primary care physician] gave me an example of another difficulty. Each patient has a 'problem list' with his or her active medical issues... The list is intended to tell clinicians at a glance what they have to consider when seeing a patient. [She] used to keep the list carefully updated—deleting problems that were no longer relevant, adding details about ones that were. But now everyone across the organization can modify the list, and, she said, 'it has become utterly useless.' Three people will list the same diagnosis three different ways. Or an orthopedist will list the same generic symptom for every patient ('pain in leg'), which is sufficient for billing purposes but not useful to colleagues who need to know the specific diagnosis ... Or someone will add 'anemia' to the problem list but not have the expertise to record the relevant details... The problem lists have become a hoarder’s stash.... 'Now ... I have to go read through their past notes'... And piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when she had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters. Multiply that by twenty-some patients a day, and you can see her problem.... One of the fastest-growing occupations in health care has been ... medical scribes[:] trained assistants who work alongside physicians to take computer-related tasks off their hands. This fix is, admittedly, a little ridiculous. We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans.”
Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a radical analysis of cooking – review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman, referenced in The Guardian First Edition. “In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: ‘the slavish one who complies’ to a recipe and ‘gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority’, and the ‘original one’ who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity. Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that ‘in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe’. A recipe, she argues, ‘demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only’. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact ‘the paradox of a constraint that liberates’. Small Fires is a radical and lively critical analysis of what it really means to cook… released at a time when writing about food feels exciting, largely thanks to a group of UK-based writers enjoying the flexibility that internet publishing allows. Food writing doesn’t simply comprise cookbook recipes and stuffy broadsheet restaurant reviews anymore – these writers insist that it is just as much about politics, culture, language, memory, place, who gets to eat what, and who doesn’t.”
Younger viewers shun traditional TV channels as 90% opt for streaming services – article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. “Watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, with 90% of 18- to 24-year-olds heading straight to their favourite streaming service, according to a report by the media regulator Ofcom…. Viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV – a fall of two-thirds over the last decade – seven times less than those aged 65 and over. Those aged 65+ still spend about a third of their waking day, almost six hours, watching broadcast TV – slightly higher than a decade ago.”
12 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe – “Eryn Tett: A spiritual guidance teacher playing hide and seek with kids: ‘All right, well, you guys go hide. And find yourselves.’ // Ignacio Lopez: I come from a long line of immigrants. No, seriously, the queue was massive – the first thing they teach you when you move to the UK is queuing…. // Ari Eldjárn: I never wanted a beard. But then it grew on me.”
Femina by Janina Ramirez: a revelatory study of medieval women’s lives – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In 1878 a pile of ancient bones was pulled from the ground at Birka, near Stockholm, and confidently identified as the remains of a 10th-century Norse warrior. After all, the skeleton, known as ‘Bj 581’, was going into the next life surrounded by every kind of death-dealing instrument: spears, axes, arrows and swords, and a couple of strapping war horses.… Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting…. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship.”
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.... [After installation of a new system at his hospital in 2015,] many of the angriest complaints ... were due to problems rooted in what [I call] 'the Revenge of the Ancillaries.' In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—... administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. ... Now the staff had a say ... they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with 'field required' alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.... [A primary care physician] gave me an example of another difficulty. Each patient has a 'problem list' with his or her active medical issues... The list is intended to tell clinicians at a glance what they have to consider when seeing a patient. [She] used to keep the list carefully updated—deleting problems that were no longer relevant, adding details about ones that were. But now everyone across the organization can modify the list, and, she said, 'it has become utterly useless.' Three people will list the same diagnosis three different ways. Or an orthopedist will list the same generic symptom for every patient ('pain in leg'), which is sufficient for billing purposes but not useful to colleagues who need to know the specific diagnosis ... Or someone will add 'anemia' to the problem list but not have the expertise to record the relevant details... The problem lists have become a hoarder’s stash.... 'Now ... I have to go read through their past notes'... And piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when she had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters. Multiply that by twenty-some patients a day, and you can see her problem.... One of the fastest-growing occupations in health care has been ... medical scribes[:] trained assistants who work alongside physicians to take computer-related tasks off their hands. This fix is, admittedly, a little ridiculous. We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans.”
Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a radical analysis of cooking – review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman, referenced in The Guardian First Edition. “In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: ‘the slavish one who complies’ to a recipe and ‘gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority’, and the ‘original one’ who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity. Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that ‘in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe’. A recipe, she argues, ‘demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only’. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact ‘the paradox of a constraint that liberates’. Small Fires is a radical and lively critical analysis of what it really means to cook… released at a time when writing about food feels exciting, largely thanks to a group of UK-based writers enjoying the flexibility that internet publishing allows. Food writing doesn’t simply comprise cookbook recipes and stuffy broadsheet restaurant reviews anymore – these writers insist that it is just as much about politics, culture, language, memory, place, who gets to eat what, and who doesn’t.”
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