Gemini Rue - classic lo-fi point-and-click sci-fi noir adventure game. Just shows what can be done with simple technology, if you have really good story-telling, dialogue and voice-acting. (See this review.)
Middle England - Brexit novel from the clever and compassionate Jonathan Coe, ingeniously tracking characters first introduced in the 70s-set The Rotters Club through the events of the last seven years, and into the future. Frightening but convincing in its account of how Brexit has set neighbour against neighbour, as well as unleashing at the political level the hostilities previously confined to the Conservative Party.
The Children Act - Top performance (career best?) from Emma Thompson as a family court judge, presiding over a case of a nearly-but-not-quite adult Jehovah’s Witness refusing a life-saving blood transfusion, which brings up long-suppressed tensions in her own life and marriage. Great support from Stanley Tucci as her long-suffering husband.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off - lessons from life by Michael Caine: a fun and easy collection of stories from the veteran film actor, whose talents as a master raconteur were revealed for many of us in his BBC acting masterclass. Many men of posher background should be ashamed of their lack of the gentlemanly courtesy and respect shown here.
Grantchester / Call the Midwife / Endeavour – It’s very confusing switching between these three shows at the moment, because Grantchester is currently set around 1960, Midwife in 1964, and Endeavour in 1969: only a few years apart though significantly different in cultural historical terms. It’s also weird to watch historical dramas set in a period which I can remember – and to realise that probably none of the people involved in making them can.
Life is Strange - a milestone in adventure games, partly for its deep characterisation, continually surprising storyline and rich environments (to explore or not, as you choose) but mainly for its convincing portrayal of friendship between two teenage girls (entirely authentic, I am informed by a female reviewer) surely unprecedented in the history of video games. As an indicator of its power, the immersion in the high school setting, with its bullies and snobs and authoritarian staff or step-parents, was so vivid that I began to get genuinely frightened and alarmed at the prospect of confrontation; even though I’m now aged sixty and a senior manager, the game took me straight back to that age of relative powerlessness. The game is great to play, with echoes of the classic The Longest Journey (art student protagonist, opening in which a nightmare dream gives way to college reality, constant balancing of the mundane with the supernatural), but it's Max (Maxine) and Chloe who make the game sing.
Monty Don’s Japanese Gardens - a two-part (spring and autumn) visit to celebrated Japanese gardens and gardeners, from Monty Don whose own televisual style has a touch of the Zen master about it.
Travelling Blind - extraordinary documentary following the blind Amar Latif in his tour of Turkey, accompanied by (sighted) comedian Sara Pascoe. She has no experience in guiding or describing for blind people and is a risk-averse traveller, so there is a lot for her (and us) to learn.
Thursday, 18 April 2019
Sunday, 31 March 2019
Cuttings: March 2019
Power to the people: could a citizens’ assembly solve the Brexit crisis? - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1978, George Bishop and a team of researchers in Cincinnati, Ohio, conducted a poll on some of the big political topics of the day. One question went as follows: 'Some people say that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree with this idea?' It turned out that 16% did agree, and 18% didn’t. This was surprising. There should have been no controversy about the 1975 Public Affairs Act because it did not exist. The study, Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs, became a classic of political science. It has been rerun in different versions several times: in 1983, 1984, 1995 and 2013, always with similar results. Around a third of people will pretend to have an opinion, unless you make it easy to say 'don’t know'. If you say that 'President Obama' or 'the Republicans' want to repeal the Public Affairs Act, even more opinions appear, along partisan lines.... In November last year, Gordon Brown suggested that [a citizen's] assembly might resolve the Brexit crisis. Last month, Damon Albarn, Rowan Williams and a number of other public figures wrote an open letter to the Guardian in support, and the idea now has this newspaper’s backing. ... In 2016, for instance, when Ireland decided to reconsider its abortion laws, ... parliament established a citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly selected Irish citizens, who would reflect the national balance of age, gender, class and region. They would be chaired by a supreme court judge (now retired), Mary Laffoy. No politicians would be involved."
Actually, the rich pay lots of tax. But on income, not their wealth - article by Patrick Collinson in The Guardian. "In London, ... the city has 4.2 million income tax payers, but just 87,000 individuals earning over £200,000 a year paid nearly half the £43.8bn income tax raised in the capital.... Those London bankers, lawyers and their ilk paid more income tax in 2016-17 than the entire sum raised from every income tax payer in Scotland and Wales combined. None of this is a plea on behalf of the rich.... While as a country we tax the incomes of PAYE employees relatively heavily, we leave the enormous wealth of the truly rich, much of it accumulated through property gains, largely untouched. The great triumph of the rich is that they have persuaded the average person to vote against taxes on wealth, such as inheritance tax, and taxes on property – such as a land valuation tax or even a properly progressive council tax."
The artist in the machine – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, after an AI attempts to write as George Orwell and Jane Austen. "The novel-writing algorithm has not written a novel yet. But it has written a series of emails to its editor claiming to be 'nearly there' and promising to finish 'really soon'."
Philippa Perry: ‘Listen carefully, parents, and don’t despair’ - interview by Robyn Wilder in The Guardian. "I’ve come to talk to Perry about her new manual, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did).... Much of the book’s inspiration, she tells me, ... came from what she saw in her 20-plus-years of practising psychotherapy. 'Most of my clients did not have abusive parents. They had kind, nice, well-meaning parents who – because no one had told them it was important – couldn’t attune to their children. So their children felt lonely and the loneliness sort of grew into depression. And I thought: All this mirroring and validating of feelings that I’m doing in this relationship, now, to put this person back on track – wouldn’t it be great if the parents did it themselves? If parents could do this from the off, surely I could give up being a psychotherapist – and arrange flowers instead.' Would she like to arrange flowers? 'Oh God, no.'”
Four Words for Friend by Marek Kohn: why language matters more than ever - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Is the British disdain for foreign languages partly responsible for the cliff-bound clown car that is Brexit? 'Among the many asymmetries that worked to Britain’s disadvantage in its negotiations to leave the European Union,' this study suggests, 'was the 27 other nations’ fluent grasp of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, unmatched by any corresponding British familiarity with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Bild.'... To know another language is also to know more about how others think, since some weakened version of the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that different languages, because they carve up the world in different ways, cause speakers to perceive and think differently – is almost certainly true. Hence the book’s title: in Russian, one is obliged to specify one of four levels of closeness when referring to a friend. Other examples abound of subtle differences that influence thought: Turkish has 'evidential grammar', according to which one must mark whether the information one is conveying is first-hand or not. This might be useful if forcibly adopted on social media."
Road signs for a gothic novel - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Ghostly figures crossing. Tunnel closed due to ancient curse. Beware of low-flying monstrosities. No stopping on moonlit nights. Fog-shrouded castle ahead. Give way to headless horsemen."
Mary Warnock obituary in The Guardian - "A consummate chair, she was skilled at giving people rein in discussion ... , knowing exactly how long to let the members debate an issue and when to insist that the time had come to reach a conclusion. She also knew when to postpone troublesome issues so that, as one of the demurrers on the fertilisation report conceded: 'When you came back you’d be surprised at how far the block had melted away.' The human fertilisation committee (1982-84) [which she chaired] was one on which feelings ran high, above all on the issues of embryo research and surrogate motherhood. Warnock believed that morality involves the engagement of feeling and that those dealing with public morality should respect ordinary people’s moral intuitions. She somehow managed more or less to satisfy the conflicting claims of science and religion."
Actually, the rich pay lots of tax. But on income, not their wealth - article by Patrick Collinson in The Guardian. "In London, ... the city has 4.2 million income tax payers, but just 87,000 individuals earning over £200,000 a year paid nearly half the £43.8bn income tax raised in the capital.... Those London bankers, lawyers and their ilk paid more income tax in 2016-17 than the entire sum raised from every income tax payer in Scotland and Wales combined. None of this is a plea on behalf of the rich.... While as a country we tax the incomes of PAYE employees relatively heavily, we leave the enormous wealth of the truly rich, much of it accumulated through property gains, largely untouched. The great triumph of the rich is that they have persuaded the average person to vote against taxes on wealth, such as inheritance tax, and taxes on property – such as a land valuation tax or even a properly progressive council tax."
The artist in the machine – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, after an AI attempts to write as George Orwell and Jane Austen. "The novel-writing algorithm has not written a novel yet. But it has written a series of emails to its editor claiming to be 'nearly there' and promising to finish 'really soon'."
Philippa Perry: ‘Listen carefully, parents, and don’t despair’ - interview by Robyn Wilder in The Guardian. "I’ve come to talk to Perry about her new manual, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did).... Much of the book’s inspiration, she tells me, ... came from what she saw in her 20-plus-years of practising psychotherapy. 'Most of my clients did not have abusive parents. They had kind, nice, well-meaning parents who – because no one had told them it was important – couldn’t attune to their children. So their children felt lonely and the loneliness sort of grew into depression. And I thought: All this mirroring and validating of feelings that I’m doing in this relationship, now, to put this person back on track – wouldn’t it be great if the parents did it themselves? If parents could do this from the off, surely I could give up being a psychotherapist – and arrange flowers instead.' Would she like to arrange flowers? 'Oh God, no.'”
Four Words for Friend by Marek Kohn: why language matters more than ever - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Is the British disdain for foreign languages partly responsible for the cliff-bound clown car that is Brexit? 'Among the many asymmetries that worked to Britain’s disadvantage in its negotiations to leave the European Union,' this study suggests, 'was the 27 other nations’ fluent grasp of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, unmatched by any corresponding British familiarity with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Bild.'... To know another language is also to know more about how others think, since some weakened version of the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that different languages, because they carve up the world in different ways, cause speakers to perceive and think differently – is almost certainly true. Hence the book’s title: in Russian, one is obliged to specify one of four levels of closeness when referring to a friend. Other examples abound of subtle differences that influence thought: Turkish has 'evidential grammar', according to which one must mark whether the information one is conveying is first-hand or not. This might be useful if forcibly adopted on social media."
Road signs for a gothic novel - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Ghostly figures crossing. Tunnel closed due to ancient curse. Beware of low-flying monstrosities. No stopping on moonlit nights. Fog-shrouded castle ahead. Give way to headless horsemen."
Mary Warnock obituary in The Guardian - "A consummate chair, she was skilled at giving people rein in discussion ... , knowing exactly how long to let the members debate an issue and when to insist that the time had come to reach a conclusion. She also knew when to postpone troublesome issues so that, as one of the demurrers on the fertilisation report conceded: 'When you came back you’d be surprised at how far the block had melted away.' The human fertilisation committee (1982-84) [which she chaired] was one on which feelings ran high, above all on the issues of embryo research and surrogate motherhood. Warnock believed that morality involves the engagement of feeling and that those dealing with public morality should respect ordinary people’s moral intuitions. She somehow managed more or less to satisfy the conflicting claims of science and religion."
Sunday, 3 March 2019
Cuttings: February 2019
What’s the best way to halt the march of urban decay? Playing SimCity - column by John Naughton in The Observer. "The only computer game I’ve ever played ... was called SimCity and involved developing a virtual city from a patch of undeveloped land. The game enabled you to determine where to place development zones, infrastructure (like roads and power plants), landmarks and public services such as schools, parks, hospitals and fire stations. You could decide the tax rate, budget and social policy for your city – populated by Sims (for “simulated persons”, I guess) who had to live and work in the three zones you created for them: residential had houses and apartment buildings, commercial had shops and offices and industrial had factories, warehouses, laboratories and (oddly) farms.... What you discovered early on ... was that your decisions had consequences. Forget a fire station and one day a fire would get out of control and raze a city block. Set taxes too high and the inhabitants might emigrate. What you were learning was your city was a dynamic system in which hidden feedback loops determined its behaviour and apparently innocuous policy ideas had unanticipated consequences.... It’s at least 20 years since I played the game and I had more or less forgotten about it. But last week, I stumbled on Model Metropolis, a remarkable essay by Kevin Baker, a science historian. Baker answers a question I’d sometimes thought about (but never answered) when playing SimCity: where did the theoretical model underpinning its feedback dynamics come from?... The answer is Jay Forrester, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology technocrat... Forrester called [his] model 'urban dynamics', declaring that he had reduced the problems of the city to a series of 150 equations and 200 parameters. ... Some of his simulations produced alarming conclusions, suggesting, for example, that the worst thing you can do for a city that is beginning to decay at its core is to build affordable public housing: that just attracts more poor people, erodes the tax base and sends the city into a death spiral... [It is not] clear how much of Forrester’s urban model was incorporated into SimCity. But with hindsight it’s suddenly clear why it often seemed impossible – at least to this player – to design planning policies that embodied social justice. In fact, the most successful policies always seemed to be ones that maximised economic growth. Perhaps this was a measure of my incompetence. Or was it just a reminder that the technological is now political too?"
Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Medieval idealists imagined a land of plenty – Cockaigne – where rivers ran with wine, everyone was equal and partied and drank all their lives. The trouble with today’s liberals – witness Hillary Clinton or any of Labour’s recent past or present leadership – is that they have lost any comparable vision, however far-fetched or unrealistic. Utopia has become the preserve of the right. It is Mr Trump and Mr Farage who dream of a world of America and Britain first, revelling in low taxes and little or no state, liberated from the dark forces of the UN, World Trade Organisation and the EU. The liberal left, declares Rutger Bregman, a 28-year-old Dutch historian, has no comparable vision. Working family tax credits or spending 0.7% of GDP on aid simply don’t cut it. Liberals can hardly inspire themselves, let alone the electorate. Gone is a belief in socialism, science, great international institutions or even a willingness to experiment with new ways of living. But if this is the book’s big insight, much of the rest fluctuates from the genuinely challenging to politically correct tosh. ... So what about other utopias if those offered by Bregman are pie in the sky? Why not try to inject some moral purpose into today’s capitalism? Couldn’t ordinary people band together into newly legitimate trade unions to insist on better and more rewarding work? And how about creating a union of neighbouring states on our continent? We could call it the European Union. You may not dream the same dreams as Bregman – but he invites you to take dreaming seriously. For that alone, this book is worth a read.
The Money Saving Expert: how Martin Lewis became the most trusted man in Britain - article by Daniel Cohen in The Guardian. "At a time when money has become the measure of everything – when people often think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens – Lewis has become the most trusted man in Britain. In 2015, seven months before the EU referendum, a poll found that 71% of people trusted him when he talked about Europe, putting him ahead of any other public figure. He has achieved that status through an unusual combination of journalism, campaigning and light entertainment, without falling victim to the public’s suspicion of journalists, campaigners and entertainers... Lewis’s success depends on the trust he has built with the public, and he tends to this like an anxious parent... Lewis applies that same care to his campaigns and public pronouncements. He has based his career on just about the last thing we all have in common: the wish to save money. And he tends not to weigh in on the most contentious issues of the day, for fear of dividing opinion and undermining his sway.... With his fiery rhetoric, his efforts to defend the little guy against vested interests, Lewis may look like a populist. But, at heart, he has a technocratic temperament: he identifies specific problems, and tries to solve them with tweaks. On the rare occasions when he does speak out, it’s because he has decided the system has stopped working properly. Lewis is, in short, a centrist – perhaps the only truly popular centrist in Britain. Instead of seeking structural change, his formula combines educating the public with campaigning for small adjustments to the system. But at a time of growing inequality, with politicians unwilling or unable to hold corporations to account, is this enough? What is needed, the economist John Kay told me, 'is not more information from the financial services industry, but actually an industry that is trustworthy and reliable'. The question remains whether Lewis’s approach is the best we can hope for, or a distraction from real change.
The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged - article by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison in The Guardian. "[The] idea of a 'following wind', a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort... Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. ... The key issue is that when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe they have earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.... Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make [the] mistake [of fixating on access], implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did 'middle-class' professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities."
The country I walked through deserves better than Brexit - article by Mike Carter in The Guardian. "In May 2016, a few weeks before the EU referendum, I walked 340 miles from Liverpool to London to see what was happening to my country.... People in those former industrial towns spoke of their anger and betrayal, of having being forgotten by Westminster politicians, of their communities having been destroyed as the manufacturing that had sustained them either folded or moved to low-wage economies. Nearly everyone I spoke to in those towns said they were going to vote for Brexit. There was a lot of talk of 'taking back control', and in the context of the industrial wastelands, that sentiment made a lot of sense. But the EU issue was, for a majority, a proxy for their pain.... In Nuneaton (66% leave), I met a man who reeled off the names of closed-down factories like you might your football team’s greatest all-time XI ... and told me he would be voting out in the EU referendum. But that might make the economy even more precarious, I said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. 'If the economy goes down the toilet,' he said, at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.' ... If you asked the vast majority of people what they want, they would say that essential services should be renationalised ... . They want properly funded health and education services, and to live in a country where they are not afraid to grow old or sick. They want jobs with meaning and value and security. They want to feel that politicians are in charge, not their corporate paymasters. And many, whether progressives like it or not, want a conversation about immigration. Brexit will deliver none of this. As driven by the right, it is the final part of the race to the bottom that started 40 years ago."
New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed 'deepfakes for text' – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.... The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next.... When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.... That quality, however, has also led OpenAI to go against its remit of pushing AI forward and keep GPT2 behind closed doors for the immediate future while it assesses what malicious users might be able to do with it.... OpenAI made one version of GPT2 with a few modest tweaks that can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. Spam and fake news are two other obvious potential downsides, as is the AI’s unfiltered nature . As it is trained on the internet, it is not hard to encourage it to generate bigoted text, conspiracy theories and so on."
Picture books for young billionaires - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The Very Wealthy Caterpiller. Spot's Offshore Trust. The Cat in the Private Jet. The Tax Consultant who Came to Tea. Frog and Toad are Rich."
Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian. "Medieval idealists imagined a land of plenty – Cockaigne – where rivers ran with wine, everyone was equal and partied and drank all their lives. The trouble with today’s liberals – witness Hillary Clinton or any of Labour’s recent past or present leadership – is that they have lost any comparable vision, however far-fetched or unrealistic. Utopia has become the preserve of the right. It is Mr Trump and Mr Farage who dream of a world of America and Britain first, revelling in low taxes and little or no state, liberated from the dark forces of the UN, World Trade Organisation and the EU. The liberal left, declares Rutger Bregman, a 28-year-old Dutch historian, has no comparable vision. Working family tax credits or spending 0.7% of GDP on aid simply don’t cut it. Liberals can hardly inspire themselves, let alone the electorate. Gone is a belief in socialism, science, great international institutions or even a willingness to experiment with new ways of living. But if this is the book’s big insight, much of the rest fluctuates from the genuinely challenging to politically correct tosh. ... So what about other utopias if those offered by Bregman are pie in the sky? Why not try to inject some moral purpose into today’s capitalism? Couldn’t ordinary people band together into newly legitimate trade unions to insist on better and more rewarding work? And how about creating a union of neighbouring states on our continent? We could call it the European Union. You may not dream the same dreams as Bregman – but he invites you to take dreaming seriously. For that alone, this book is worth a read.
The Money Saving Expert: how Martin Lewis became the most trusted man in Britain - article by Daniel Cohen in The Guardian. "At a time when money has become the measure of everything – when people often think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens – Lewis has become the most trusted man in Britain. In 2015, seven months before the EU referendum, a poll found that 71% of people trusted him when he talked about Europe, putting him ahead of any other public figure. He has achieved that status through an unusual combination of journalism, campaigning and light entertainment, without falling victim to the public’s suspicion of journalists, campaigners and entertainers... Lewis’s success depends on the trust he has built with the public, and he tends to this like an anxious parent... Lewis applies that same care to his campaigns and public pronouncements. He has based his career on just about the last thing we all have in common: the wish to save money. And he tends not to weigh in on the most contentious issues of the day, for fear of dividing opinion and undermining his sway.... With his fiery rhetoric, his efforts to defend the little guy against vested interests, Lewis may look like a populist. But, at heart, he has a technocratic temperament: he identifies specific problems, and tries to solve them with tweaks. On the rare occasions when he does speak out, it’s because he has decided the system has stopped working properly. Lewis is, in short, a centrist – perhaps the only truly popular centrist in Britain. Instead of seeking structural change, his formula combines educating the public with campaigning for small adjustments to the system. But at a time of growing inequality, with politicians unwilling or unable to hold corporations to account, is this enough? What is needed, the economist John Kay told me, 'is not more information from the financial services industry, but actually an industry that is trustworthy and reliable'. The question remains whether Lewis’s approach is the best we can hope for, or a distraction from real change.
The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged - article by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison in The Guardian. "[The] idea of a 'following wind', a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort... Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. ... The key issue is that when the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, the inequalities that result are legitimised. This leads those who have been fortunate to believe they have earned it on their own, and those who have been less fortunate to blame themselves.... Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make [the] mistake [of fixating on access], implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did 'middle-class' professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities."
The country I walked through deserves better than Brexit - article by Mike Carter in The Guardian. "In May 2016, a few weeks before the EU referendum, I walked 340 miles from Liverpool to London to see what was happening to my country.... People in those former industrial towns spoke of their anger and betrayal, of having being forgotten by Westminster politicians, of their communities having been destroyed as the manufacturing that had sustained them either folded or moved to low-wage economies. Nearly everyone I spoke to in those towns said they were going to vote for Brexit. There was a lot of talk of 'taking back control', and in the context of the industrial wastelands, that sentiment made a lot of sense. But the EU issue was, for a majority, a proxy for their pain.... In Nuneaton (66% leave), I met a man who reeled off the names of closed-down factories like you might your football team’s greatest all-time XI ... and told me he would be voting out in the EU referendum. But that might make the economy even more precarious, I said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. 'If the economy goes down the toilet,' he said, at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.' ... If you asked the vast majority of people what they want, they would say that essential services should be renationalised ... . They want properly funded health and education services, and to live in a country where they are not afraid to grow old or sick. They want jobs with meaning and value and security. They want to feel that politicians are in charge, not their corporate paymasters. And many, whether progressives like it or not, want a conversation about immigration. Brexit will deliver none of this. As driven by the right, it is the final part of the race to the bottom that started 40 years ago."
New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed 'deepfakes for text' – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.... The AI system is fed text, anything from a few words to a whole page, and asked to write the next few sentences based on its predictions of what should come next.... When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.... That quality, however, has also led OpenAI to go against its remit of pushing AI forward and keep GPT2 behind closed doors for the immediate future while it assesses what malicious users might be able to do with it.... OpenAI made one version of GPT2 with a few modest tweaks that can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. Spam and fake news are two other obvious potential downsides, as is the AI’s unfiltered nature . As it is trained on the internet, it is not hard to encourage it to generate bigoted text, conspiracy theories and so on."
Picture books for young billionaires - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "The Very Wealthy Caterpiller. Spot's Offshore Trust. The Cat in the Private Jet. The Tax Consultant who Came to Tea. Frog and Toad are Rich."
Cuttings: January 2019
The Love of the People - quotation from A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, p.26, by Brother John Maynard, in a homily given on the Feast of Christ the King, 25 November 2018. "From a letter of Queen Victoria to her granddaughter, the Empress Alexandra. 'There is no harder craft than our craft of ruling. I have ruled for more than fifty years in my own country, which I have known since childhood, and, nevertheless, every day I think about what I need to do to retain and strengthen the love of my subjects. You find yourself in a foreign country, a country which you do not know at all, the way of thinking and the people themselves are completely alien to you, and nevertheless, it is your first duty to win their love and respect.' The reply is not promising: 'You are mistaken my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tzars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.'"
Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it - article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "We rarely ask people what they want from the economy; if we did it more often, the answers might surprise us. The free-marketeers at the Legatum Institute did pose the question in a survey conducted in 2017. Top priorities for respondents were: food and water; emergency services; universal healthcare; a good house; a decent well-paying job; and compulsory and free education. At the bottom were owning a car and cheap air travel. HS2, a new runway at Heathrow or a garden bridge on the Thames didn’t even rank. After reporting the survey, the Legatum Institute concluded: 'Significant portions of the country … are vehemently anti-capitalist.' The report was co-authored by Matthew Elliott, former head of the Vote Leave campaign. Which just about sums up the Brexiteers’ politics: savvy enough to listen to what people want, cynical enough never to enact it."
Power to the people: could a citizens’ assembly solve the Brexit crisis? - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1978, George Bishop and a team of researchers in Cincinnati, Ohio, conducted a poll on some of the big political topics of the day. One question went as follows: 'Some people say that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree with this idea?' It turned out that 16% did agree, and 18% didn’t. This was surprising. There should have been no controversy about the 1975 Public Affairs Act because it did not exist. The study, Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs, became a classic of political science. It has been rerun in different versions several times: in 1983, 1984, 1995 and 2013, always with similar results. Around a third of people will pretend to have an opinion, unless you make it easy to say 'don’t know'. If you say that 'President Obama' or 'the Republicans' want to repeal the Public Affairs Act, even more opinions appear, along partisan lines.... In November last year, Gordon Brown suggested that [a citizen's] assembly might resolve the Brexit crisis. Last month, Damon Albarn, Rowan Williams and a number of other public figures wrote an open letter to the Guardian in support, and the idea now has this newspaper’s backing. ... In 2016, for instance, when Ireland decided to reconsider its abortion laws, ... parliament established a citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly selected Irish citizens, who would reflect the national balance of age, gender, class and region. They would be chaired by a supreme court judge (now retired), Mary Laffoy. No politicians would be involved."
Adam Curtis and Vice director Adam McKay on how Dick Cheney masterminded a rightwing revolution - interview by Paul MacInnes in The Guardian. "AM: Information warfare is where we’re living now. More specifically, it’s story warfare. There’s this battle in the US where our oligarchs are claiming they are the Joseph Campbell heroes. That they’re the ones who are going through the three-act structure of going into the unknown. Charles Koch is taking on the world. There’s this weird thing going on where these traditional story structures really play bogus now. AC: That’s because they have been appropriated by those people who really do have power. But that’s also because politicians have given up telling stories. They have nothing to say any longer."
Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out - article by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian. "[Lenny Pozner’s crime, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, is being the father of one of the 20 children who were gunned down in the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Noah was the youngest of all victims. He had just turned six. Within months, conspiracy theorists, egged on by Alex Jones and Infowars, went to work. They generated thousands of web posts and a 426-page book called 'Nobody Died at Sandy Hook'. Their thesis: the shooting at the elementary school never happened. The 20 kids who died were “crisis actors”. The tragedy was a con. Noah had never even existed, he was a construct of Photoshop.... By Pozner’s reckoning, one in five people around the world are suggestible to conspiracy theories, and their obsessions are amplified by the crude logic of digital algorithms. 'There is just no more truth, there is just what’s trending on Twitter,' he says. 'Used to be, you had to burn books to keep people from finding out the truth, now you just have to push it to page 20 of a Google search.'”
The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world, without changing anything - article by Anand Giriharadas in The Guardian, based on his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. "That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives. For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992."
Engines of Privilege: a challenge to Britain's private schools? - review by Kate Clanchy in The Guardian. "Private schools are smart institutions, and ... in the last 30 years they have grabbed every opportunity and anticipated every turn of fashion. As we became obsessed with school data, so they became more selective and academic and dominated the league tables. When a feminist agenda became more important, girls’ schools captured it:, turning into academic powerhouses, pushing girls into science, educating, they tell us, the female leaders of the future. As our attention turned to mental health, so private schools came to the forefront of mindfulness education and wellbeing counselling. As the state schools have been starved of funds and bullied by curriculum changes, so private schools have picked up the dropped agendas, persecuted subjects and displaced teachers: first classics, then history of art, then modern languages, now music, drama and, cruellest of all, special needs education. They have replaced bum-kicking with liberal lines on transgender pupils, colonial patronage with multiculturalism, dumb team sports with Olympic sailing... They have helped themselves annually to larger and larger slices of what we love and value most of the cultural capital pie, and all the time singing ... oh what a good (multicultural feminist artistic dyslexic-friendly) girl am I. They’ve boxed a terrific match and it would, sadly, take a much defter, subtler and better researched book than this to even lay a glove on them."
Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it - article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "We rarely ask people what they want from the economy; if we did it more often, the answers might surprise us. The free-marketeers at the Legatum Institute did pose the question in a survey conducted in 2017. Top priorities for respondents were: food and water; emergency services; universal healthcare; a good house; a decent well-paying job; and compulsory and free education. At the bottom were owning a car and cheap air travel. HS2, a new runway at Heathrow or a garden bridge on the Thames didn’t even rank. After reporting the survey, the Legatum Institute concluded: 'Significant portions of the country … are vehemently anti-capitalist.' The report was co-authored by Matthew Elliott, former head of the Vote Leave campaign. Which just about sums up the Brexiteers’ politics: savvy enough to listen to what people want, cynical enough never to enact it."
Power to the people: could a citizens’ assembly solve the Brexit crisis? - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "In the summer of 1978, George Bishop and a team of researchers in Cincinnati, Ohio, conducted a poll on some of the big political topics of the day. One question went as follows: 'Some people say that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree with this idea?' It turned out that 16% did agree, and 18% didn’t. This was surprising. There should have been no controversy about the 1975 Public Affairs Act because it did not exist. The study, Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs, became a classic of political science. It has been rerun in different versions several times: in 1983, 1984, 1995 and 2013, always with similar results. Around a third of people will pretend to have an opinion, unless you make it easy to say 'don’t know'. If you say that 'President Obama' or 'the Republicans' want to repeal the Public Affairs Act, even more opinions appear, along partisan lines.... In November last year, Gordon Brown suggested that [a citizen's] assembly might resolve the Brexit crisis. Last month, Damon Albarn, Rowan Williams and a number of other public figures wrote an open letter to the Guardian in support, and the idea now has this newspaper’s backing. ... In 2016, for instance, when Ireland decided to reconsider its abortion laws, ... parliament established a citizens’ assembly of 99 randomly selected Irish citizens, who would reflect the national balance of age, gender, class and region. They would be chaired by a supreme court judge (now retired), Mary Laffoy. No politicians would be involved."
Adam Curtis and Vice director Adam McKay on how Dick Cheney masterminded a rightwing revolution - interview by Paul MacInnes in The Guardian. "AM: Information warfare is where we’re living now. More specifically, it’s story warfare. There’s this battle in the US where our oligarchs are claiming they are the Joseph Campbell heroes. That they’re the ones who are going through the three-act structure of going into the unknown. Charles Koch is taking on the world. There’s this weird thing going on where these traditional story structures really play bogus now. AC: That’s because they have been appropriated by those people who really do have power. But that’s also because politicians have given up telling stories. They have nothing to say any longer."
Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out - article by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian. "[Lenny Pozner’s crime, in the eyes of conspiracy theorists, is being the father of one of the 20 children who were gunned down in the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Noah was the youngest of all victims. He had just turned six. Within months, conspiracy theorists, egged on by Alex Jones and Infowars, went to work. They generated thousands of web posts and a 426-page book called 'Nobody Died at Sandy Hook'. Their thesis: the shooting at the elementary school never happened. The 20 kids who died were “crisis actors”. The tragedy was a con. Noah had never even existed, he was a construct of Photoshop.... By Pozner’s reckoning, one in five people around the world are suggestible to conspiracy theories, and their obsessions are amplified by the crude logic of digital algorithms. 'There is just no more truth, there is just what’s trending on Twitter,' he says. 'Used to be, you had to burn books to keep people from finding out the truth, now you just have to push it to page 20 of a Google search.'”
The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world, without changing anything - article by Anand Giriharadas in The Guardian, based on his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. "That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives. For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992."
Engines of Privilege: a challenge to Britain's private schools? - review by Kate Clanchy in The Guardian. "Private schools are smart institutions, and ... in the last 30 years they have grabbed every opportunity and anticipated every turn of fashion. As we became obsessed with school data, so they became more selective and academic and dominated the league tables. When a feminist agenda became more important, girls’ schools captured it:, turning into academic powerhouses, pushing girls into science, educating, they tell us, the female leaders of the future. As our attention turned to mental health, so private schools came to the forefront of mindfulness education and wellbeing counselling. As the state schools have been starved of funds and bullied by curriculum changes, so private schools have picked up the dropped agendas, persecuted subjects and displaced teachers: first classics, then history of art, then modern languages, now music, drama and, cruellest of all, special needs education. They have replaced bum-kicking with liberal lines on transgender pupils, colonial patronage with multiculturalism, dumb team sports with Olympic sailing... They have helped themselves annually to larger and larger slices of what we love and value most of the cultural capital pie, and all the time singing ... oh what a good (multicultural feminist artistic dyslexic-friendly) girl am I. They’ve boxed a terrific match and it would, sadly, take a much defter, subtler and better researched book than this to even lay a glove on them."
Tuesday, 8 January 2019
Seen and heard: October to December 2018
Stet by Diana Athill Рpithy autobiographical reflections from the celebrated editor at Andr̩ Deutsch, notable for its insight into the post-war publishing industry and for the skilful way she makes one interested in people of whom one has no previous interest. (Neat trick that, but one would expect nothing less from a master editor.)
Doctor Who, Series 11– with Jodie Whittaker very good as the new Doctor, though I’m even more impressed by the show's pruned-back stories, without the frequent internal references which had made the show intimidating for anyone who wasn't keeping up, and the reintroduction of an ensemble cast.
A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad – morbidly fascinating documentary(see review). Bashar al-Assad remains an enigma (is he lying? is he deceiving himself? how did this mild-mannered eye doctor become a brutal dictator?) but at least we can understand the powerful forces at work on him and on Syria (the legacy of his father, the continuing influence of his mother, the dominance of the military).
Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – characteristically witty reflections on how legendary figures (such as King Arthur and King Alfred), historical periods (such as the Middle Ages) or recurrent themes (such as the countryside) have been mythologised by different ages to suit their own needs.
The Little Drummer Girl – mini-series adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1983 thriller. Proper television: demanding (and deserving) commitment and attention through its snail-like progress, with occasional bursts of action as reminders of the terrible violence lying just under the surface the whole time. For me this is up there with the great TV adaptations of Le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People) and I’m sad that people found it boring. But at least they appreciated the vivid reconstruction of period styles and fashions.
Robot and Frank – funny, touching and clever SF-lite, in which an elderly former jewel thief (Frank Langella) is presented with a care robot by his concerned children. Initially he is resentful of the robot, but their relationship changes when he realises he can use it to help him in a heist, with which the robot is happy to assist since having a project is good for his wellbeing.
The History of Christianity - smarter-than-the-average-documentary series by Diarmaid MacCulloch, first transmitted in 2009 but still fresh. With a generosity of spirit towards all denominations, he avoids the clichéd and self-serving patterns of familiar histories, starting for example with the early forms of Christianity which spread East of Jerusalem as far as China, at a time when it was quite conceivable that its headquarters would be Baghdad and not Rome.
Mrs Wilson – Ruth Wilson excels playing her own grandmother, who discovered after her husband’s death that he was keeping at least two, if not three, other wives and families elsewhere, though to what extent as part of a secret service cover and to what extent his own fantasising run amok was and to this day remains unclear. Great period detail and superb dramatisation, flicking back and forth in time between their post-war life and her horrified investigations in the 1960s, cleverly preparing us for each stunning new revelation. A story well-worth telling, one that you would dismiss as implausible were it not true.
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema / Christmas Cinema Secrets – great illustrative clips, though I gather what he says about tropes and genre is pretty trivial stuff for series film academics. Illuminating for the rest of us, though, and also revealing about the conservatism of the Hollywood film industry.
The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand – much more than just a celebratory clip show, the best bits being when Brand sits down at his piano and takes apart the classic numbers. More proper television.
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Who am I? The best I’ve ever seen, with Professors Alice Roberts and Aoife McLysaght having an easy manner with the kids and skilfully addressing a wide range of ages and previous knowledge (typical trick: using the proper technical term but immediately glossing it in folk speech), with some great demonstrations using the full breadth and height of the lecture room. Helped also by more editing than previously, to shorten the scene shifting and the volunteers coming down from the audience, which keeps up the pace. A pointed celebration of diversity, which seemed to be welcomed by kids, to judge by the final sing-along of ‘This is me’.
Panmorphia – beautifully illustrated puzzle game, not too hard – assuming you set the Easy option and use the in-game hint system, as I did. (See review.)
Doctor Who, Series 11– with Jodie Whittaker very good as the new Doctor, though I’m even more impressed by the show's pruned-back stories, without the frequent internal references which had made the show intimidating for anyone who wasn't keeping up, and the reintroduction of an ensemble cast.
A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad – morbidly fascinating documentary(see review). Bashar al-Assad remains an enigma (is he lying? is he deceiving himself? how did this mild-mannered eye doctor become a brutal dictator?) but at least we can understand the powerful forces at work on him and on Syria (the legacy of his father, the continuing influence of his mother, the dominance of the military).
Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – characteristically witty reflections on how legendary figures (such as King Arthur and King Alfred), historical periods (such as the Middle Ages) or recurrent themes (such as the countryside) have been mythologised by different ages to suit their own needs.
The Little Drummer Girl – mini-series adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1983 thriller. Proper television: demanding (and deserving) commitment and attention through its snail-like progress, with occasional bursts of action as reminders of the terrible violence lying just under the surface the whole time. For me this is up there with the great TV adaptations of Le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People) and I’m sad that people found it boring. But at least they appreciated the vivid reconstruction of period styles and fashions.
Robot and Frank – funny, touching and clever SF-lite, in which an elderly former jewel thief (Frank Langella) is presented with a care robot by his concerned children. Initially he is resentful of the robot, but their relationship changes when he realises he can use it to help him in a heist, with which the robot is happy to assist since having a project is good for his wellbeing.
The History of Christianity - smarter-than-the-average-documentary series by Diarmaid MacCulloch, first transmitted in 2009 but still fresh. With a generosity of spirit towards all denominations, he avoids the clichéd and self-serving patterns of familiar histories, starting for example with the early forms of Christianity which spread East of Jerusalem as far as China, at a time when it was quite conceivable that its headquarters would be Baghdad and not Rome.
Mrs Wilson – Ruth Wilson excels playing her own grandmother, who discovered after her husband’s death that he was keeping at least two, if not three, other wives and families elsewhere, though to what extent as part of a secret service cover and to what extent his own fantasising run amok was and to this day remains unclear. Great period detail and superb dramatisation, flicking back and forth in time between their post-war life and her horrified investigations in the 1960s, cleverly preparing us for each stunning new revelation. A story well-worth telling, one that you would dismiss as implausible were it not true.
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema / Christmas Cinema Secrets – great illustrative clips, though I gather what he says about tropes and genre is pretty trivial stuff for series film academics. Illuminating for the rest of us, though, and also revealing about the conservatism of the Hollywood film industry.
The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand – much more than just a celebratory clip show, the best bits being when Brand sits down at his piano and takes apart the classic numbers. More proper television.
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Who am I? The best I’ve ever seen, with Professors Alice Roberts and Aoife McLysaght having an easy manner with the kids and skilfully addressing a wide range of ages and previous knowledge (typical trick: using the proper technical term but immediately glossing it in folk speech), with some great demonstrations using the full breadth and height of the lecture room. Helped also by more editing than previously, to shorten the scene shifting and the volunteers coming down from the audience, which keeps up the pace. A pointed celebration of diversity, which seemed to be welcomed by kids, to judge by the final sing-along of ‘This is me’.
Panmorphia – beautifully illustrated puzzle game, not too hard – assuming you set the Easy option and use the in-game hint system, as I did. (See review.)
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
Cuttings: December 2018
Creating a simple style guide - post by Kate Clark in her blog 'The View from my Kitchen Table'. "Three easy steps for creating your style guide: decide on your tone of voice; list formal titles (proper nouns) that you need to get right; decide how to express terms you use regularly."
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: how capitalism works - review by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. ... [Their] essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness.... The seven 'things' of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. ... One of the most persuasive aspects ...is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the 'real work' it makes possible. 'Writing a history of work without care work,' they write, 'would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water.'"
Rule by robots is easy to imagine: we’re already victims of superintelligent firms - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "What will it be like for humans to live with – or under – [super-intelligent] machines? Will they rapidly conclude that people are a waste of space? Does the superintelligent machine pose an existential risk for humanity? ... Nobody really knows. How could they? Surely we’d need to build the machines first and then we’d find out. Actually, that’s not quite right. It just so happens that history has provided us with some useful insights into what it’s like to live with – and under – superintelligent machines. They’re called corporations, and they’ve been around for a very long time – since about 1600, in fact. Although they are powered by human beings, they are in fact nonhuman entities to which our legal systems grant the status of legal personhood. We can therefore regard them as artificial superintelligences because they possess formidable capacities for rational behaviour, reasoning, perception and action. And they have free will: they can engage in purposeful behaviour aimed at achieving self-determined goals. They possess and deploy massive resources of financial capital and human expertise. And they are, in principle at least, immortal: they can have life spans that greatly exceed those of humans, and some are capable of surviving catastrophes that kill millions of people. ... On the positive side, such entities are capable of accomplishing astonishing things – from building a new city, road or rail network, to indexing the world wide web, connecting 2.24 billion people, scanning all the world’s books, launching heavy rockets into space (and bringing them back safely), etc. But these superintelligent entities have other characteristics too. The most disturbing one is that they are intrinsically sociopathic – they are AIs that stand apart from the rest of society, existing for themselves and only for themselves, caring nothing for the norms and rules of society, and obeying only the letter (as distinct from the spirit) of the law. ... The interesting thing about the tech companies is that, until recently, we failed to notice that they were just corporations too...."
Populism and the internet: a toxic mix shaping the age of conspiracy theories - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "For the last five years, ... academic colleagues ... have been leading a team of researchers studying the history, nature and significance of conspiracy theories with a particular emphasis on their implications for democracy. ... How has the internet affected all this? Our research showed that conspiracy theorists were early adopters, in that they perceived the unique usefulness of the early (pre-social media) web for people who believed propositions that would never get past the editorial gatekeepers of mainstream media. ... Many people who thought about these things initially dismissed online conspiracism as a politically irrelevant phenomenon. ... Two developments changed that. The first was the arrival of global social media platforms such as Facebook whose automated advertising engines could be weaponised by political agents and entrepreneurial conspiracists. The second was the arrival of Donald Trump and the rise of populism across the western world. Trump, a paradigmatic conspiracy theorist, proved to be a masterful exploiter of social media, which he deployed to bring conspiracist thinking out from the shadows and into the mainstream. And conspiracy theorising ... is part of the inner logic of populism. Populism, remember, is based on the claim that society is divided between “the people” and the illegitimate elites who rule and exploit them. This is useful not only for campaigning, but for when populists get into power and discover that governing is more difficult than they thought. Why? Because others are conspiring against them, of course."
The teachers asking pupils to make the case for Christmas have a lesson for us all - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "[At] a secondary school in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, ... its religious education teacher told students that unless they could make a persuasive argument as to why it was worth bothering with cards, parties, presents and Christmas trees then the whole thing would be binned and celebrations in school strictly confined to the baby Jesus. The inevitable parental furore, not to mention newspaper stories about stealing Christmas, followed.... [The school] seems to have hit on an ingenious way of teaching children how to defend ideas they didn’t imagine they would ever have to defend. In the current political climate, that seems like an extraordinarily useful skill."
Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? - article by Raluca Budiu on the Nielsen Normal Group website. "Machine-learning algorithms rely on user knowledge and patterns observed in the data to make inferences and suggestions about what we may like or be interested in.... Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually not transparent to the end users. People are not sure which of their actions are taken into account by these algorithms, and their outputs are not always easy to make sense of. Suggestions and recommendations may be right on spot or apparently random and nonsensical. Often, these algorithms sort their output according to invisible criteria or group it into ad-hoc categories that are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we examine some of the challenges that users encounter when interacting with machine-learning algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Google News, Netflix, and Uber Driver. Our discussion is based on a week-long diary study in which 14 existing users of these systems video-logged their interactions with them."
Love can thrive if we leave our comfort zones, even in the age of Brexit and Trump - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Arguing the toss with someone you love – whether that’s a partner, friend or family member – means being forced to think harder, disagree better, play the ideological ball rather than the person. Rows within a family or a friendship circle have consequences and while that makes them uncomfortable, in an ideal world it’s also what makes them capable of teaching us to argue with some restraint. It’s the polar opposite of the hit-and-run way we have learned to fight with strangers on social media, where everything goes nuclear in seconds because you’re never going to find yourselves having to stack the dishwasher together in awkward silence later."
Degrees for the rich, apprenticeships for the poor: that’s not a world of parity - article by Laura McInerney in The Guardian. "Somewhere, right now, a 17-year-old is afraid to tell her family she wants to go to university. At £9,000-plus a year it feels like a luxury, a thing for other people. Even though she achieved the highest results in her school, and has spent her whole life wanting to be an engineer, she knows her parents are terrified of university debt and that attending the best institutions, in far-flung cities, would mean moving away. Now imagine this 17-year-old was listening earlier this year as the education secretary – the guardian of aspiration – announced that poorer young people would be better off studying near to home through a 'commuter degree' in order to save pennies.... Oh well, thinks the 17-year-old, studying engineering at Durham was a nice thought but it will be cheaper to do an apprenticeship with the local factory.... Across town there’s another 17-year-old, with wealthy parents, studying in a private school that pumps children into top universities, with a sense that his future shouldn’t depend on a single employer because one day he intends to be the employer. Let’s be serious: this kid won’t be taking the apprenticeship route – and [the education secretary] knows it."
Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld: the roots of our current predicament -review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Rosenfeld’s model of democratic truth as always contingent, arising through endless discussion, in a world in which people accepted that differences of opinion were inevitable, captures something distinctively new and valuable about Enlightenment approaches to knowledge. But it largely ignores a powerful alternative presumption, at least as prevalent in the 18th century as it is today – that truth, in politics as in other spheres, was simple, self-evident and unitary. It needed only to be revealed: if some people couldn’t yet see it, that was only because they were deluded, or acting in bad faith. To early advocates of this strain of thought, the point of freedom of speech was not to encourage pluralism, but simply to allow the truth to break free from bondage and superstition. In such circumstances, the judgment or will of the people, they believed, was always bound to be united: divergence of opinion was a sign of error, conspiracy or worse."
Dream job: the writer paid to send millions to sleep - interview with Phoebe Smith, by Alison Flood, in The Guardian. "Smith was a travel writer and journalist when she was approached last year by Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of the sleep app Calm. She’d written an article about the Trans-Siberian Railway and he asked her if she’d like to rewrite it for him, 'as a story to send people to sleep'. ... A year on, she has written 15 pieces for Calm, whose catalogue of “sleep stories” has been listened to 100m times. ... 'With most kinds of writing I’m trying to build the tension – here, I’m doing the opposite. Anything exciting needs to go right at the beginning and then it’s all about winding people down, while also encouraging their imagination to play,' she says. ... She is careful with her word choices, avoiding any disruptive sounds that might cause someone to wake up. There’s lots of immersive description, lots of onomatopoeia, lots of soothing, sonorous language."
Why Michelle Obama’s memoir should have demanded more of us - review by Yiyun Li in The Guardian. "Two years ago I drove my son and a friend of his to an event. They were 15, and discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest at her school. She had read the previous winners’ poems, she said. They were composed of words such as injustice, inequality, empowerment, action and descriptions of police brutality, of which, the girl pointed out, none of the poets would have direct knowledge. (She was right: she goes to one of the most preppy high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.) 'What I don’t understand is –' the girl said, 'why can’t we write about flowers any more.'... This awareness of the audience may mean that their need becomes the priority. It is perhaps unavoidable in a memoir by a public figure. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, delivers what it promises: her triumphant life journey from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, with intimate moments to connect with readers, and stirring passages to inspire. But one wishes that someone of her calibre could have defied that convention. ... What if she had chosen to forgo the vocabularies of empowerment and inspiration and patriotism? After all, she is a person who can make herself heard. The language she chooses to use will be incorporated into hundreds of thousands of minds and become infallible truth."
Posh is so passé: today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Education ... has come to be a marker of the values one holds and the place one possesses in society. One of the key signifiers of attitudes to Donald Trump and to Brexit is education. Today, we simultaneously deride poshness and want to be seen as having the common touch (hence Dimbleby’s outrage at being called posh), while also showing contempt for those who are deemed too common and whose commonness exhibits itself in the refusal to accept the wisdom of expertise and in being in possession of the wrong social values. Trump supporters, wrote David Rothkopf, ... regard knowledge as 'not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman'. Much the same has been said about Brexit supporters."
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: how capitalism works - review by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "Raj Patel and Jason W Moore ask us to consider the McNugget as the reigning symbol of the modern era. ... [Their] essential argument is that the history of capitalism, and therefore of our current mess, can be usefully viewed through the lens of cheapness.... The seven 'things' of their misleadingly clickbaity title are not objects or consumer products, so much as conceptual categories: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. They present these categories as reliant on each other for their cheapness, as enmeshed in a kind of ecosystem. ... One of the most persuasive aspects ...is their demonstration of the extent to which capitalism’s reliance on cheap labour is itself reliant on what they call cheap care – the domestic work mostly performed for nothing, and mostly by women, that is rarely factored into the cost of labour. Capitalism has created a binary opposition between this care work and the 'real work' it makes possible. 'Writing a history of work without care work,' they write, 'would be like writing an ecology of fish without mentioning the water.'"
Rule by robots is easy to imagine: we’re already victims of superintelligent firms - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "What will it be like for humans to live with – or under – [super-intelligent] machines? Will they rapidly conclude that people are a waste of space? Does the superintelligent machine pose an existential risk for humanity? ... Nobody really knows. How could they? Surely we’d need to build the machines first and then we’d find out. Actually, that’s not quite right. It just so happens that history has provided us with some useful insights into what it’s like to live with – and under – superintelligent machines. They’re called corporations, and they’ve been around for a very long time – since about 1600, in fact. Although they are powered by human beings, they are in fact nonhuman entities to which our legal systems grant the status of legal personhood. We can therefore regard them as artificial superintelligences because they possess formidable capacities for rational behaviour, reasoning, perception and action. And they have free will: they can engage in purposeful behaviour aimed at achieving self-determined goals. They possess and deploy massive resources of financial capital and human expertise. And they are, in principle at least, immortal: they can have life spans that greatly exceed those of humans, and some are capable of surviving catastrophes that kill millions of people. ... On the positive side, such entities are capable of accomplishing astonishing things – from building a new city, road or rail network, to indexing the world wide web, connecting 2.24 billion people, scanning all the world’s books, launching heavy rockets into space (and bringing them back safely), etc. But these superintelligent entities have other characteristics too. The most disturbing one is that they are intrinsically sociopathic – they are AIs that stand apart from the rest of society, existing for themselves and only for themselves, caring nothing for the norms and rules of society, and obeying only the letter (as distinct from the spirit) of the law. ... The interesting thing about the tech companies is that, until recently, we failed to notice that they were just corporations too...."
Populism and the internet: a toxic mix shaping the age of conspiracy theories - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "For the last five years, ... academic colleagues ... have been leading a team of researchers studying the history, nature and significance of conspiracy theories with a particular emphasis on their implications for democracy. ... How has the internet affected all this? Our research showed that conspiracy theorists were early adopters, in that they perceived the unique usefulness of the early (pre-social media) web for people who believed propositions that would never get past the editorial gatekeepers of mainstream media. ... Many people who thought about these things initially dismissed online conspiracism as a politically irrelevant phenomenon. ... Two developments changed that. The first was the arrival of global social media platforms such as Facebook whose automated advertising engines could be weaponised by political agents and entrepreneurial conspiracists. The second was the arrival of Donald Trump and the rise of populism across the western world. Trump, a paradigmatic conspiracy theorist, proved to be a masterful exploiter of social media, which he deployed to bring conspiracist thinking out from the shadows and into the mainstream. And conspiracy theorising ... is part of the inner logic of populism. Populism, remember, is based on the claim that society is divided between “the people” and the illegitimate elites who rule and exploit them. This is useful not only for campaigning, but for when populists get into power and discover that governing is more difficult than they thought. Why? Because others are conspiring against them, of course."
The teachers asking pupils to make the case for Christmas have a lesson for us all - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "[At] a secondary school in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, ... its religious education teacher told students that unless they could make a persuasive argument as to why it was worth bothering with cards, parties, presents and Christmas trees then the whole thing would be binned and celebrations in school strictly confined to the baby Jesus. The inevitable parental furore, not to mention newspaper stories about stealing Christmas, followed.... [The school] seems to have hit on an ingenious way of teaching children how to defend ideas they didn’t imagine they would ever have to defend. In the current political climate, that seems like an extraordinarily useful skill."
Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? - article by Raluca Budiu on the Nielsen Normal Group website. "Machine-learning algorithms rely on user knowledge and patterns observed in the data to make inferences and suggestions about what we may like or be interested in.... Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually not transparent to the end users. People are not sure which of their actions are taken into account by these algorithms, and their outputs are not always easy to make sense of. Suggestions and recommendations may be right on spot or apparently random and nonsensical. Often, these algorithms sort their output according to invisible criteria or group it into ad-hoc categories that are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we examine some of the challenges that users encounter when interacting with machine-learning algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, Google News, Netflix, and Uber Driver. Our discussion is based on a week-long diary study in which 14 existing users of these systems video-logged their interactions with them."
Love can thrive if we leave our comfort zones, even in the age of Brexit and Trump - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Arguing the toss with someone you love – whether that’s a partner, friend or family member – means being forced to think harder, disagree better, play the ideological ball rather than the person. Rows within a family or a friendship circle have consequences and while that makes them uncomfortable, in an ideal world it’s also what makes them capable of teaching us to argue with some restraint. It’s the polar opposite of the hit-and-run way we have learned to fight with strangers on social media, where everything goes nuclear in seconds because you’re never going to find yourselves having to stack the dishwasher together in awkward silence later."
Degrees for the rich, apprenticeships for the poor: that’s not a world of parity - article by Laura McInerney in The Guardian. "Somewhere, right now, a 17-year-old is afraid to tell her family she wants to go to university. At £9,000-plus a year it feels like a luxury, a thing for other people. Even though she achieved the highest results in her school, and has spent her whole life wanting to be an engineer, she knows her parents are terrified of university debt and that attending the best institutions, in far-flung cities, would mean moving away. Now imagine this 17-year-old was listening earlier this year as the education secretary – the guardian of aspiration – announced that poorer young people would be better off studying near to home through a 'commuter degree' in order to save pennies.... Oh well, thinks the 17-year-old, studying engineering at Durham was a nice thought but it will be cheaper to do an apprenticeship with the local factory.... Across town there’s another 17-year-old, with wealthy parents, studying in a private school that pumps children into top universities, with a sense that his future shouldn’t depend on a single employer because one day he intends to be the employer. Let’s be serious: this kid won’t be taking the apprenticeship route – and [the education secretary] knows it."
Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld: the roots of our current predicament -review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. "Rosenfeld’s model of democratic truth as always contingent, arising through endless discussion, in a world in which people accepted that differences of opinion were inevitable, captures something distinctively new and valuable about Enlightenment approaches to knowledge. But it largely ignores a powerful alternative presumption, at least as prevalent in the 18th century as it is today – that truth, in politics as in other spheres, was simple, self-evident and unitary. It needed only to be revealed: if some people couldn’t yet see it, that was only because they were deluded, or acting in bad faith. To early advocates of this strain of thought, the point of freedom of speech was not to encourage pluralism, but simply to allow the truth to break free from bondage and superstition. In such circumstances, the judgment or will of the people, they believed, was always bound to be united: divergence of opinion was a sign of error, conspiracy or worse."
Dream job: the writer paid to send millions to sleep - interview with Phoebe Smith, by Alison Flood, in The Guardian. "Smith was a travel writer and journalist when she was approached last year by Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of the sleep app Calm. She’d written an article about the Trans-Siberian Railway and he asked her if she’d like to rewrite it for him, 'as a story to send people to sleep'. ... A year on, she has written 15 pieces for Calm, whose catalogue of “sleep stories” has been listened to 100m times. ... 'With most kinds of writing I’m trying to build the tension – here, I’m doing the opposite. Anything exciting needs to go right at the beginning and then it’s all about winding people down, while also encouraging their imagination to play,' she says. ... She is careful with her word choices, avoiding any disruptive sounds that might cause someone to wake up. There’s lots of immersive description, lots of onomatopoeia, lots of soothing, sonorous language."
Why Michelle Obama’s memoir should have demanded more of us - review by Yiyun Li in The Guardian. "Two years ago I drove my son and a friend of his to an event. They were 15, and discussing the girl’s decision not to participate in a poetry contest at her school. She had read the previous winners’ poems, she said. They were composed of words such as injustice, inequality, empowerment, action and descriptions of police brutality, of which, the girl pointed out, none of the poets would have direct knowledge. (She was right: she goes to one of the most preppy high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.) 'What I don’t understand is –' the girl said, 'why can’t we write about flowers any more.'... This awareness of the audience may mean that their need becomes the priority. It is perhaps unavoidable in a memoir by a public figure. Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, delivers what it promises: her triumphant life journey from Chicago’s South Side to the White House, with intimate moments to connect with readers, and stirring passages to inspire. But one wishes that someone of her calibre could have defied that convention. ... What if she had chosen to forgo the vocabularies of empowerment and inspiration and patriotism? After all, she is a person who can make herself heard. The language she chooses to use will be incorporated into hundreds of thousands of minds and become infallible truth."
Posh is so passé: today’s elite prefers the myth of the meritocracy - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Education ... has come to be a marker of the values one holds and the place one possesses in society. One of the key signifiers of attitudes to Donald Trump and to Brexit is education. Today, we simultaneously deride poshness and want to be seen as having the common touch (hence Dimbleby’s outrage at being called posh), while also showing contempt for those who are deemed too common and whose commonness exhibits itself in the refusal to accept the wisdom of expertise and in being in possession of the wrong social values. Trump supporters, wrote David Rothkopf, ... regard knowledge as 'not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman'. Much the same has been said about Brexit supporters."
Sunday, 2 December 2018
Cuttings: November 2018
Carol Ann Duffy: ‘With the evil twins of Trump and Brexit … There was no way of not writing about that, it is just in the air’ - interview by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. "She is an ideal laureate in that she is happy to accept a wide range of commissions, a willingness I can vouch for having asked her to write poems for this paper on events including the Scottish referendum, the 2012 Olympics and the Manchester Arena bombing last year.... It’s a question of 'trying to keep your finger on the pulse of what people might be interested in, or where the voice or the language of poetry might be worth adding to the kind of national babble and blether and jabber,' she says."
Frankenstein and the gory gang: how the novel blazed a trail for high art horrors - article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The mad experimenters of the Romantic age, the people who really did seem able to create life from dead things, were not scientists. They were artists. Braving the anatomy theatre and the mortuary to study the human body, they transformed this dark knowledge into throbbingly vital art. The year Frankenstein was published, a young French painter named Théodore Géricault started a stupendously ambitious work ['The Raft of the Medusa'] that he planned to unveil at the Paris Salon the following year. ... Like Stubbs [who had dissected horses, hanging their carcasses from the roof of a barn in Horkstow, Lincolnshire], Géricault reasoned that to paint a truly extraordinary work of art, he had to delve deep into anatomy.... But can any of this compete with the terrifying masterpieces of Francisco Goya? ... Begun in 1819, Goya’s 14 horrifyingly brutal Black Paintings defiantly assert the freedom of art to think what it likes, to be what it likes, however dismal and despairing. It’s an assertion as bold as that of Frankenstein sculpting with the dead."
Sans Forgetica... hmmm - blog post by Rob Waller in The Simplification Centre, on the font Sans Forgetica, designed to improve reading retention by introducing “desirable difficulty”.
“I can understand that it can be desirable to slow the reader down, or at least for the reader to slow themselves down – that’s at the heart of higher order reading skills. Skilled readers change pace, re-read passages, make notes, stop and think, but they do it in a self-aware, deliberate way using metacognitive skills. But it appears the RMIT researchers are deliberately diverting the reader’s working memory away from grappling with content towards grappling with the font. This seems odd and counter intuitive, so I would have like to see some other conditions in the research – other strategies for slowing people down or encouraging metacognition and self-directed learning.
Classically these would include inserted test questions, activities or even just writing well… Or telling people to stop and think – the Open University in the 1970s used ‘student stoppers’ – bars across the page that signalled this was a good point to stop and reflect on what you’ve just read.
In fact, based admittedly only on its Wikipedia entry, ‘desirable difficulty’ as a teaching strategy appears to be much more akin to these techniques – test questions and flashcards are mentioned.”
Brexit is Suez 2.0 - blog post by John Naughton. "The Suez adventure was an epochal event that was widely seen in some parts of British society as a humiliation. But to detached observers it was the moment when it became clear that a UK that had been exhausted and effectively bankrupted by WW2 was no longer a global power.... However, in some sections of the British establishment — not to mention in its tabloid media and in the psyche of many of its older citizens — subliminal imperial delusions lingered. Which brings us to Brexit. This is — as Jo Johnson implies — another Suez moment. One of the (many) astonishing aspects of the Referendum campaign was that the question of the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland was never mentioned, despite the fact that — in the event of a decision by the UK to leave — that border would automatically become the western frontier of the EU (and therefore, of the Single Market). When the realisation dawned on people after the vote that there might be a problem here ... the old imperial delusions returned. It was surely inconceivable, the Brexiteers fumed, that a puny state like the Irish Republic (which was determined not to return to a hard border) could be allowed to frustrate the will of the great British nation. ... It was ... seen as inconceivable that the EU would, in the end, allow such a piffling matter to get in the way of an agreement with the mighty UK. Now, however, the penny has dropped: people in the UK are beginning to realise that this cavalier disregard of the ‘Irish problem’ was in fact another manifestation of imperial delusion."
Trust no one: how Le Carré's Little Drummer Girl predicted our dangerous world - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "When his plotting is at its best, as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) or The Perfect Spy (1986), it is a rare literary achievement. These stories feel distant from the adventures of The Night Manager, especially when reimagined for television with more than a touch of James Bond. In Tinker Tailor, Smiley spends most of his time either reading through old files or interviewing old agents.... In The Little Drummer Girl, the shift back to a time without mobile phones or the internet – and with almost nothing in the way of video surveillance – emphasises the need for narrative and psychological ingenuity. The TV drama, like the novel, relies on operatives with binoculars and large cameras, gnomic calls from public telephones, coded messages scribbled on pieces of paper.... Like The Night Manager, The Little Drummer Girl is a story of infiltration. Charlie (AKA Charmian), a young would-be actor, has been picked by Martin Kurtz, a wise and wily Mossad spymaster, to infiltrate bomb-maker Khalil’s tightly controlled network.... In 1983, someone reading The Little Drummer Girl must have wondered where the book’s sympathies lay – or rather, where the reader’s sympathies were being directed. Even more so now.... The even-handedness is decisive and is built into the plot. The Mossad agents instruct their recruits for undercover work using the best arguments of the terrorists. They have to understand how it feels to believe in their enemies’ cause.... The moral failures of western intelligence agencies were always essential to the stories le Carré told, the cynicism of spymasters being a firm convention of the genre. But since 1989, the western spooks have begun looking like villains too. ... You become a spy because of something in your past. The idea is alive in The Little Drummer Girl too. Charlie has been driven by her own unhappiness into rebellion and excess, and, before the spooks ever get to her, has already constructed a fiction about her past to justify her bohemian life. She is entirely ready to adopt a new set of lies. ... The spy-turned‑novelist learned early and painfully about secretiveness – and made it his gift to the British novel."
Armistice Day: victory and beyond - article by Neal Ascherson in The Guardian. "When the armistice came, ... Cambridge undergrads made for Bertrand Russell’s rooms on Trinity Street and smashed them up. He had said the war was wrong. They said it had been right, and anyway we won it.... The general revulsion to the war, imagining it as a pointless mass murder conducted by bone-headed brass hats, really began some 10 years later. It was then that the memoirs and poetry of soldier-authors ... were published or republished in editions large enough to reach a wide public... It was different in the immediate wake of the armistice. War propaganda, much more crude and hate-filled than in the second world war, left many – perhaps most – happily certain that Britain had won a moral victory of good over evil. 'Hang the Kaiser' and 'Make Germany Pay' were the popular slogans.... Lloyd George had agreed that this had been 'the war to end wars', which meant British engagement in a European peace. ... He astonished the other allied leaders ... by arguing for a just peace that did not inflict intolerable punishment on Germany. The harsh option, he prophesied, would mean that 'we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years at three times the cost'. But the others thought he was mad. Lloyd George subsided. The terms Versailles imposed on Germany were even harsher than he feared, and his predictions came true."
A mission for journalism in a time of crisis - article by editor Katharine Viner in The Guardian. "Our moral conviction, as exemplified by [founder John Edward] Taylor and codified by [editor C.P.] Scott [in his centenary essay of 1921], rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair. ... But the past three decades – since the invention of the world wide web in 1989 – have transformed our idea of the public in ways that [they] could not have imagined.... Trust in all kinds of established institutions – including the media – is at an historic low. This is not a blip, and it should not be a surprise, when so many institutions have failed the people who trusted them and responded to criticism with contempt. As a result, people feel outraged but powerless – nothing they do seems to stop these things happening, and nobody seems to be listening to their stories. This has created a crisis for public life, and particularly for the press, which risks becoming wholly part of the same establishment that the public no longer trusts. At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation. 'If mistrust in institutions is changing how people participate in civics, news organisations might need to change as well,' the MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has argued. 'We could rethink our role as journalists as helping people … find the places where they, individually and collectively, can be the most effective and powerful.' To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent."
Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories - article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Sixty per cent of British people believe at least one conspiracy theory about how the country is run or the veracity of information they have been given, a major new study has found, part of a pattern of deep distrust of authority that has become widespread across Europe and the US.... Almost half (47%) of leave voters believed the government had deliberately concealed the truth about how many immigrants live in the UK, versus 14% of remain voters. A striking 31% of leave voters believed that Muslim immigration was part of a wider plot to make Muslims the majority in Britain, a conspiracy theory that originated in French far-right circles that was known as the 'great replacement'. The comparable figure for remain voters was 6%."
From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "When left populists rail against elites they are generally referring to economic and political power. Their target is the richest 1% that owns half the world’s wealth: the newspaper moguls, bankers, political donors and corporate lobbyists... But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, 'globalists', spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley.... They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on 'ordinary people' as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth.... The left could do worse than admit that it has given the right considerable material to work with.... Whenever liberal commentators insist they are in a better position to understand what working-class people’s best interests are than working-class people themselves, they should be called out on their arrogance. ... There is a paternalist streak in liberalism that is more comfortable in providing for the poor than listening to and empowering them, which is not only morally wrong but strategically self-defeating. 'How long do you think you can call people stupid and deplorable before they get mad?' asked ... a Trump voter I met ... in 2016."
Mary Poppins: why we need a spoonful of sugar more than ever - article by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "After many years of not watching or thinking about the movie, I have been forced to re-engage with it as my children work their way through the Disney back catalogue... What strikes me is how devastating the original film was. Poppins is a cypher at the heart of the movie who exerts influence not, as Mr Banks specifies in his advert in the Times, by being a 'nanny who can give commands', but in accordance with the principle that one changes others by changing one’s behaviour around them – in the case of Poppins – through a combination of beady observation and strategic obliviousness.... While she is sent to the Banks household to comfort sad children, it is also her mission to critique the English: coldness as a vehicle for stability; blind adherence to tradition and emotional detachment as modes mistaken for virtue, all of which, over the course of the movie, Poppins smartly dismantles. There might have been a question of warmth with the character, were Julie Andrews not such a nuanced performer and there is real pathos in her Poppins, not just in the sadness when she says goodbye to the children, but in ... Feed the Birds.... Scepticism is her greatest asset; a stand against credulousness and therefore systems, social and political, which would have the children mindlessly repeat what came before simply because it is familiar. And then she buggers off, truly a shocking moment of childhood. I remember the first time I saw this and could not believe a film was allowed to behave this way, break one’s heart so insistently then pretend the reunification of the Banks family was, in fact, a happy ending. No child I know bought into this. Poppins’ departure presages death and even as eight-year-olds, at some level, we knew it."
Liberals must learn the politics of emotion to beat rightwing populist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Probably the best short definition of neoliberalism as a system rather than an ideology [is] 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'. By this, [Will Davies] means the introduction of market logic into all forms of social life by force, which has severely limited the scope for political choice. If I want to save Port Talbot steelworks, for instance, I cannot legally do so on grounds of national security, or preference for British goods, or sentiment, or because the town will die without the blast furnaces. I can only do so if I present a chop-logic argument that meets various national, European and global rules on trade and investment. If I just want to save it because I feel good driving past a giant piece of human ingenuity on the way to the surfing beach, the emotion is effectively blocked by the rules-based coercion states have signed up to. Another way of phrasing Davies’s definition, then, could be the evisceration of politics by economics, or more simply the surgical removal of emotional reasoning from political decision-making. At the most basic level – and this explains the rise of both the left and right opponents of neoliberalism – people understood that emotion, and with it feelings of identity, place, nation and class, could only reinsert itself into decision-making if the system were disrupted."
Why we stopped trusting elites - article by William Davies in The Guardian. “The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.... When trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham. This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy. It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost credibility... The problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks, whistleblowing and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.”
The far right will try to exploit any Brexit outcome. We can’t let it happen - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "On 9 December a convicted fraudster and thug named Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – or 'Tommy Robinson', as he styles himself – will lead a so-called Great Brexit Betrayal protest in London. The Tory Brexiteers ran a referendum of impossible promises in 2016; the consequent disillusionment is an unmissable opportunity for the far right.... The classic hard-right trope is the 'stab in the back' myth, of a great national project – normally going to war – betrayed by internal subversion and a lack of fight. Whether May’s plan passes or fails, a narrative will be woven of a true, pure Brexit betrayed by elites. Yaxley-Lennon wishes to present himself as the leader of the 52% who opted for leave in the referendum. He must not be gifted this mantle.... Little plays into the far right’s hands more than the portrayal of leave voters as a bloc of bigots and brainwashed dupes, or a remain campaign with an image of establishment entitlement. ... It may well be that a second referendum becomes the only option. But such a campaign will be far more vicious than the last, with a leave campaign offered a megaphone for several months to whip up bigotry and bitterness. ... It is when the far right are able to deceitfully dress themselves in the garb of anti-establishment rebellion that they thrive: we must not let them."
Why it’s wise to give people advice - article by Oliver Burkeman in his 'This column will change your life' column in The Guardian. "[Here's a message for] parents, teachers, managers and anyone else who finds themselves in the position of needing to motivate others: far better than giving them advice is to give them the opportunity to give advice. That’s the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, who found that American middle-school pupils were much more enthusiastic about doing their homework after dispensing advice on the topic to younger children, as compared with after receiving advice from teachers. This motivational effect lasted weeks, and was also observed among adults who were attempting to lose weight, save money, control their temper or find a job. Teach a man to fish and he’ll know how to fish – but get him to teach others how to fish, and he might actually get on with some damned fishing. ... Faced with a challenge, we tend to assume we need to seek advice in order to obtain more knowledge about how to proceed; yet the truth, very often, is that we know exactly what we need to do – we just lack the confidence to do it. The act of giving advice reacquaints us with the knowledge we already possess, which instils confidence, which motivates action."
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Frankenstein and the gory gang: how the novel blazed a trail for high art horrors - article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. "The mad experimenters of the Romantic age, the people who really did seem able to create life from dead things, were not scientists. They were artists. Braving the anatomy theatre and the mortuary to study the human body, they transformed this dark knowledge into throbbingly vital art. The year Frankenstein was published, a young French painter named Théodore Géricault started a stupendously ambitious work ['The Raft of the Medusa'] that he planned to unveil at the Paris Salon the following year. ... Like Stubbs [who had dissected horses, hanging their carcasses from the roof of a barn in Horkstow, Lincolnshire], Géricault reasoned that to paint a truly extraordinary work of art, he had to delve deep into anatomy.... But can any of this compete with the terrifying masterpieces of Francisco Goya? ... Begun in 1819, Goya’s 14 horrifyingly brutal Black Paintings defiantly assert the freedom of art to think what it likes, to be what it likes, however dismal and despairing. It’s an assertion as bold as that of Frankenstein sculpting with the dead."
Sans Forgetica... hmmm - blog post by Rob Waller in The Simplification Centre, on the font Sans Forgetica, designed to improve reading retention by introducing “desirable difficulty”.
“I can understand that it can be desirable to slow the reader down, or at least for the reader to slow themselves down – that’s at the heart of higher order reading skills. Skilled readers change pace, re-read passages, make notes, stop and think, but they do it in a self-aware, deliberate way using metacognitive skills. But it appears the RMIT researchers are deliberately diverting the reader’s working memory away from grappling with content towards grappling with the font. This seems odd and counter intuitive, so I would have like to see some other conditions in the research – other strategies for slowing people down or encouraging metacognition and self-directed learning.
Classically these would include inserted test questions, activities or even just writing well… Or telling people to stop and think – the Open University in the 1970s used ‘student stoppers’ – bars across the page that signalled this was a good point to stop and reflect on what you’ve just read.
In fact, based admittedly only on its Wikipedia entry, ‘desirable difficulty’ as a teaching strategy appears to be much more akin to these techniques – test questions and flashcards are mentioned.”
Brexit is Suez 2.0 - blog post by John Naughton. "The Suez adventure was an epochal event that was widely seen in some parts of British society as a humiliation. But to detached observers it was the moment when it became clear that a UK that had been exhausted and effectively bankrupted by WW2 was no longer a global power.... However, in some sections of the British establishment — not to mention in its tabloid media and in the psyche of many of its older citizens — subliminal imperial delusions lingered. Which brings us to Brexit. This is — as Jo Johnson implies — another Suez moment. One of the (many) astonishing aspects of the Referendum campaign was that the question of the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland was never mentioned, despite the fact that — in the event of a decision by the UK to leave — that border would automatically become the western frontier of the EU (and therefore, of the Single Market). When the realisation dawned on people after the vote that there might be a problem here ... the old imperial delusions returned. It was surely inconceivable, the Brexiteers fumed, that a puny state like the Irish Republic (which was determined not to return to a hard border) could be allowed to frustrate the will of the great British nation. ... It was ... seen as inconceivable that the EU would, in the end, allow such a piffling matter to get in the way of an agreement with the mighty UK. Now, however, the penny has dropped: people in the UK are beginning to realise that this cavalier disregard of the ‘Irish problem’ was in fact another manifestation of imperial delusion."
Trust no one: how Le Carré's Little Drummer Girl predicted our dangerous world - article by John Mullan in The Guardian. "When his plotting is at its best, as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) or The Perfect Spy (1986), it is a rare literary achievement. These stories feel distant from the adventures of The Night Manager, especially when reimagined for television with more than a touch of James Bond. In Tinker Tailor, Smiley spends most of his time either reading through old files or interviewing old agents.... In The Little Drummer Girl, the shift back to a time without mobile phones or the internet – and with almost nothing in the way of video surveillance – emphasises the need for narrative and psychological ingenuity. The TV drama, like the novel, relies on operatives with binoculars and large cameras, gnomic calls from public telephones, coded messages scribbled on pieces of paper.... Like The Night Manager, The Little Drummer Girl is a story of infiltration. Charlie (AKA Charmian), a young would-be actor, has been picked by Martin Kurtz, a wise and wily Mossad spymaster, to infiltrate bomb-maker Khalil’s tightly controlled network.... In 1983, someone reading The Little Drummer Girl must have wondered where the book’s sympathies lay – or rather, where the reader’s sympathies were being directed. Even more so now.... The even-handedness is decisive and is built into the plot. The Mossad agents instruct their recruits for undercover work using the best arguments of the terrorists. They have to understand how it feels to believe in their enemies’ cause.... The moral failures of western intelligence agencies were always essential to the stories le Carré told, the cynicism of spymasters being a firm convention of the genre. But since 1989, the western spooks have begun looking like villains too. ... You become a spy because of something in your past. The idea is alive in The Little Drummer Girl too. Charlie has been driven by her own unhappiness into rebellion and excess, and, before the spooks ever get to her, has already constructed a fiction about her past to justify her bohemian life. She is entirely ready to adopt a new set of lies. ... The spy-turned‑novelist learned early and painfully about secretiveness – and made it his gift to the British novel."
Armistice Day: victory and beyond - article by Neal Ascherson in The Guardian. "When the armistice came, ... Cambridge undergrads made for Bertrand Russell’s rooms on Trinity Street and smashed them up. He had said the war was wrong. They said it had been right, and anyway we won it.... The general revulsion to the war, imagining it as a pointless mass murder conducted by bone-headed brass hats, really began some 10 years later. It was then that the memoirs and poetry of soldier-authors ... were published or republished in editions large enough to reach a wide public... It was different in the immediate wake of the armistice. War propaganda, much more crude and hate-filled than in the second world war, left many – perhaps most – happily certain that Britain had won a moral victory of good over evil. 'Hang the Kaiser' and 'Make Germany Pay' were the popular slogans.... Lloyd George had agreed that this had been 'the war to end wars', which meant British engagement in a European peace. ... He astonished the other allied leaders ... by arguing for a just peace that did not inflict intolerable punishment on Germany. The harsh option, he prophesied, would mean that 'we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years at three times the cost'. But the others thought he was mad. Lloyd George subsided. The terms Versailles imposed on Germany were even harsher than he feared, and his predictions came true."
A mission for journalism in a time of crisis - article by editor Katharine Viner in The Guardian. "Our moral conviction, as exemplified by [founder John Edward] Taylor and codified by [editor C.P.] Scott [in his centenary essay of 1921], rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair. ... But the past three decades – since the invention of the world wide web in 1989 – have transformed our idea of the public in ways that [they] could not have imagined.... Trust in all kinds of established institutions – including the media – is at an historic low. This is not a blip, and it should not be a surprise, when so many institutions have failed the people who trusted them and responded to criticism with contempt. As a result, people feel outraged but powerless – nothing they do seems to stop these things happening, and nobody seems to be listening to their stories. This has created a crisis for public life, and particularly for the press, which risks becoming wholly part of the same establishment that the public no longer trusts. At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation. 'If mistrust in institutions is changing how people participate in civics, news organisations might need to change as well,' the MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman has argued. 'We could rethink our role as journalists as helping people … find the places where they, individually and collectively, can be the most effective and powerful.' To do this well, journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent."
Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories - article by Esther Addley in The Guardian. "Sixty per cent of British people believe at least one conspiracy theory about how the country is run or the veracity of information they have been given, a major new study has found, part of a pattern of deep distrust of authority that has become widespread across Europe and the US.... Almost half (47%) of leave voters believed the government had deliberately concealed the truth about how many immigrants live in the UK, versus 14% of remain voters. A striking 31% of leave voters believed that Muslim immigration was part of a wider plot to make Muslims the majority in Britain, a conspiracy theory that originated in French far-right circles that was known as the 'great replacement'. The comparable figure for remain voters was 6%."
From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "When left populists rail against elites they are generally referring to economic and political power. Their target is the richest 1% that owns half the world’s wealth: the newspaper moguls, bankers, political donors and corporate lobbyists... But when rightwing populists focus on elites they are mostly referring to culture. Their targets are filmmakers, actors, lecturers, journalists, 'globalists', spiritualists, scientists and vegans; the Clintons, Hollywood, Londoners, New Yorkers, Silicon Valley, Sussex and Berkeley.... They pillory opinion-formers for looking down on 'ordinary people' as being ignorant, bigoted and uncouth.... The left could do worse than admit that it has given the right considerable material to work with.... Whenever liberal commentators insist they are in a better position to understand what working-class people’s best interests are than working-class people themselves, they should be called out on their arrogance. ... There is a paternalist streak in liberalism that is more comfortable in providing for the poor than listening to and empowering them, which is not only morally wrong but strategically self-defeating. 'How long do you think you can call people stupid and deplorable before they get mad?' asked ... a Trump voter I met ... in 2016."
Mary Poppins: why we need a spoonful of sugar more than ever - article by Emma Brockes in The Guardian. "After many years of not watching or thinking about the movie, I have been forced to re-engage with it as my children work their way through the Disney back catalogue... What strikes me is how devastating the original film was. Poppins is a cypher at the heart of the movie who exerts influence not, as Mr Banks specifies in his advert in the Times, by being a 'nanny who can give commands', but in accordance with the principle that one changes others by changing one’s behaviour around them – in the case of Poppins – through a combination of beady observation and strategic obliviousness.... While she is sent to the Banks household to comfort sad children, it is also her mission to critique the English: coldness as a vehicle for stability; blind adherence to tradition and emotional detachment as modes mistaken for virtue, all of which, over the course of the movie, Poppins smartly dismantles. There might have been a question of warmth with the character, were Julie Andrews not such a nuanced performer and there is real pathos in her Poppins, not just in the sadness when she says goodbye to the children, but in ... Feed the Birds.... Scepticism is her greatest asset; a stand against credulousness and therefore systems, social and political, which would have the children mindlessly repeat what came before simply because it is familiar. And then she buggers off, truly a shocking moment of childhood. I remember the first time I saw this and could not believe a film was allowed to behave this way, break one’s heart so insistently then pretend the reunification of the Banks family was, in fact, a happy ending. No child I know bought into this. Poppins’ departure presages death and even as eight-year-olds, at some level, we knew it."
Liberals must learn the politics of emotion to beat rightwing populist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "Probably the best short definition of neoliberalism as a system rather than an ideology [is] 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'. By this, [Will Davies] means the introduction of market logic into all forms of social life by force, which has severely limited the scope for political choice. If I want to save Port Talbot steelworks, for instance, I cannot legally do so on grounds of national security, or preference for British goods, or sentiment, or because the town will die without the blast furnaces. I can only do so if I present a chop-logic argument that meets various national, European and global rules on trade and investment. If I just want to save it because I feel good driving past a giant piece of human ingenuity on the way to the surfing beach, the emotion is effectively blocked by the rules-based coercion states have signed up to. Another way of phrasing Davies’s definition, then, could be the evisceration of politics by economics, or more simply the surgical removal of emotional reasoning from political decision-making. At the most basic level – and this explains the rise of both the left and right opponents of neoliberalism – people understood that emotion, and with it feelings of identity, place, nation and class, could only reinsert itself into decision-making if the system were disrupted."
Why we stopped trusting elites - article by William Davies in The Guardian. “The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.... When trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham. This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy. It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost credibility... The problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks, whistleblowing and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.”
The far right will try to exploit any Brexit outcome. We can’t let it happen - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "On 9 December a convicted fraudster and thug named Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – or 'Tommy Robinson', as he styles himself – will lead a so-called Great Brexit Betrayal protest in London. The Tory Brexiteers ran a referendum of impossible promises in 2016; the consequent disillusionment is an unmissable opportunity for the far right.... The classic hard-right trope is the 'stab in the back' myth, of a great national project – normally going to war – betrayed by internal subversion and a lack of fight. Whether May’s plan passes or fails, a narrative will be woven of a true, pure Brexit betrayed by elites. Yaxley-Lennon wishes to present himself as the leader of the 52% who opted for leave in the referendum. He must not be gifted this mantle.... Little plays into the far right’s hands more than the portrayal of leave voters as a bloc of bigots and brainwashed dupes, or a remain campaign with an image of establishment entitlement. ... It may well be that a second referendum becomes the only option. But such a campaign will be far more vicious than the last, with a leave campaign offered a megaphone for several months to whip up bigotry and bitterness. ... It is when the far right are able to deceitfully dress themselves in the garb of anti-establishment rebellion that they thrive: we must not let them."
Why it’s wise to give people advice - article by Oliver Burkeman in his 'This column will change your life' column in The Guardian. "[Here's a message for] parents, teachers, managers and anyone else who finds themselves in the position of needing to motivate others: far better than giving them advice is to give them the opportunity to give advice. That’s the conclusion of a new study by psychologists at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, who found that American middle-school pupils were much more enthusiastic about doing their homework after dispensing advice on the topic to younger children, as compared with after receiving advice from teachers. This motivational effect lasted weeks, and was also observed among adults who were attempting to lose weight, save money, control their temper or find a job. Teach a man to fish and he’ll know how to fish – but get him to teach others how to fish, and he might actually get on with some damned fishing. ... Faced with a challenge, we tend to assume we need to seek advice in order to obtain more knowledge about how to proceed; yet the truth, very often, is that we know exactly what we need to do – we just lack the confidence to do it. The act of giving advice reacquaints us with the knowledge we already possess, which instils confidence, which motivates action."
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