Cuttings: February 2021

A year after Johnson’s swaggering Greenwich speech, 100,000 dead – article by Tim Adams in The Guardian. “Almost exactly a year ago – perhaps the last moment in which he fondly imagined that all the world lay before him - [the prime minister] in the grand surroundings of Christopher Wren’s Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich ... set out his vision for a buccaneering global Britain, high on union flags and free trade. ... That speech will be remembered not, as Johnson hoped, for its rhetoric about unleashed British swagger, but for the fact that in the midst of it, in a throwaway phrase, there lurked the seed of all of his – and our – locked-down nightmares of the past year. ... There was to be no doubt which government would stand stubbornly oblivious to the risks of the virus, ignore the panic, and keep the market economy open at all costs. Britain, the prime minister cried, was ‘ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles, leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion’ of economic freedom in any stand-off with public health restriction.”

We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins: the reinvention of reporting for the internet age – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. “We Are Bellingcat is [Eliot] Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age. ... . A media studies dropout and avid gamer, he found he had time on his hands as the Arab spring kicked off... He realised it was possible to establish from your sofa what was going on in a faraway war zone, in Libya or Syria. The material was out there: YouTube videos, Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram – a galaxy of images and text tossed out via social media. By sifting, discoveries could be made. Higgins became an expert on weapons. He found collaborators. Bellingcat developed a credo: look for public evidence, cite sources, collaborate. An open model, in contrast to tabloid chicanery. This transparent method has had remarkable success. Bellingcat has uncovered war crimes in Syria and unmasked neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. In 2018 it winkled out the real identities of ... the two GRU assassins who went to Salisbury to snuff out Sergei Skripal.... Bellingcat’s rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it. The balance between open and secret intelligence is shifting. The most useful stuff is often public. Bellingcat, you suspect, knows more than the suits of MI6; certainly, it’s nimbler. ‘An intelligence agency for the people,’ as Higgins’s subtitle puts it.”

Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room – article by Stuart A. Thompson in The New York Times. Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “As President Biden’s inauguration ticked closer, some of Donald Trump’s supporters were feeling gleeful. Mr. Trump was on the cusp of declaring martial law, they believed. Military tribunals would follow, then televised executions, then Democrats and other deep state operatives would finally be brought to justice. These were honestly held beliefs. Dozens of Trump supporters spoke regularly over the past three weeks on a public audio chat room app, where they uploaded short recordings instead of typing. In these candid digital confessionals, participants would crack jokes, share hopes and make predictions. I spent the past three weeks listening to the channel — from before the Jan. 6 Washington protest to after Mr. Biden’s inauguration. ... If the Q movement had a slogan, it would be ‘Do your research.’ The conspiracy is designed like a game. Discovering clues that clarify Q’s cryptic missives produces a eureka effect, which offers a hit of dopamine and improves memory retention. It’s the same satisfaction that comes from solving a puzzle or finding the answer to a riddle. Believers apply the same approach to everyday news: Find information that confirms any existing beliefs, then use it to augment their understanding of the conspiracy. Reject facts or information that counter the existing beliefs. ... The audio chat offers a clearer picture of these believers than the Facebook pages and Telegram channels where they also gather. The all-caps screeds of the internet give way to gentler moments, like when they talk about their pets or babysitting their grandkids. Many members were struggling in some way — financially or emotionally, with legal troubles or addiction. As Covid-19 swept their states, many got sick, and some family members died. A few members were recently out of prison. Another was living in a sober house.... As I listened over these three weeks, I saw that they’re drawn to Q and Mr. Trump for many reasons. The political status quo wasn’t working for them. Mr. Trump was an antidote to Washington and was beholden to neither party. And Q offered not just a political orientation but also a way to place themselves in a bigger narrative that explains life’s shortcomings.... Listening in, I came to realize what extremism researchers and cult experts have long known to be true: You cannot just destroy a community and expect it to disappear when it is load bearing. If we are to deradicalize Q believers in a Biden era, how will we do it? What can we offer them in its place?”

The age of the cyber romantics is coming to an end – article by Onora O’Neill in Noema.
Referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Is this heightened suspicion of experts an inevitable effect of digital communications technologies? I suspect that the problem may lie not with the technologies themselves but with the disruption to practices and standards for communication that have followed their chaotic introduction. ... This is not the first time that new technologies have disrupted established communicative practices and standards. Plato tells us that Socrates was so worried by the written word’s disruption of communication that he relied entirely on the spoken word. ... The practices of attribution, validation, authorization and commentary, on which writing and publishing now depend, had not been developed in ancient Greece. ... A second wave of difficulties arose with the development of printing. Once again, the difficulties were not due to the technology but to the disruption caused by innovation. Laws had to be enacted and practices developed in order to define the respective roles and responsibilities of authors, printers and publishers. New laws had to provide remedies for the wrongs that can be inflicted by distributing printed material, ranging from defamation to breach of copyright, from fraud to breach of privacy, and from misleading advertising to breaches of commercial and professional confidentiality. ... The situation is similar with online communication. Legal and cultural measures needed to secure ethical standards in communication have been massively disrupted, leaving us less able to judge whether others’ claims are honest, competent and reliable. Seemingly direct, unmediated, even intimate online communication sometimes turns out to emanate from or to have been shared with unknown others. Seemingly professional and expert claims sometimes misrepresent or falsify. Seemingly original material sometimes turns out to have been plagiarized. Yet the ethical standards and the epistemic norms that matter for trustworthy communication, and that underpin the possibility of checking and challenging what others communicate, matter every bit as much for online as for offline communication.”

Planting Iris – from a talk ‘How to keep going’ by Austin Kleon, quoted in his blog post. Referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Leonard Woolf had listened to Hitler’s ‘savage and insane ramblings’ on the radio with his wife, Virginia, and one day, when he was out in the orchard, she called out to him that the lunatic was back on the radio. ‘I shan’t come!’ he shouted back at her. ‘I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead!’ I don’t know what my equivalent of planting iris is, but I intend to find it, and so should you.”

Twitter, George Soros, and Porn – blog post by Ranjan Roy. Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been a tech platform cassandra for my non media+tech friends for a few years now, but trying to explain how ad-based business models and algorithms combine to create a completely distorted understanding of reality has been difficult. The one thing that almost instantly breaks through is to equate the reality presented in a social feed to porn. Yes, the things you are presented with are real and do exist, but they are not representative of the mundane nature of everyday life.... The algorithm does not promote the uninteresting and the unstimulating. If there is any censorship on these platforms, it’s of the tedious and routine elements of life. To look at your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feed as representative of reality is to look at Pornhub and think ‘this is how most people have sex’.”

Classics reissued with lower standards – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “The Adequate Mr. Ripley – Highsmith. George’s Passable Medicine – Dahl. Reasonable Expectations – Dickens. The Mediocre Wizard of Oz – Baum. The OK Gatsby – Fitzgerald.”

'You could be a cult leader': Diane Morgan and Adam Curtis on Brexit, Trump and his new series – interview by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. “AC With this one I had a question in my head, which is: why does no one have any other alternative visions of the future? Why are we stuck, when we’re also dissatisfied? ... Why, post-Trump and Brexit, did none of the people who hated Trump and Brexit have any alternative to offer? Why did they spend all their time going into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about Vladimir Putin rather than actually thinking: ‘Well, actually, if all these people are really pissed off, can we offer something better than weirdos like Donald Trump and strange dreams like Brexit?’ They didn’t. That was my theme and I had all these stories to fit together. DM The whole thing about Britain is deluded self-confidence, right? AC Yeah. ... I was interested in Michael de Freitas, ... I’d read [his] book, where he said there was a sadness at the heart of England. [He] didn’t like the racism, but he said there’s something underneath that, which is a sort of melancholy about what they’d lost. And I think you still feel that now, not just among the Brexit voters, but you also feel it about the people who hated the Brexit voters because they go: ‘We’ve come to this?’”

'I’ve been called Satan': Dr Rachel Clarke on facing abuse in the Covid crisis – article by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. “During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I’ve been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren’t empty. ... we have reached the point in the pandemic where what feels like armies of trolls do their snarling, misogynistic utmost to silence NHS staff who try to convey what it’s like on the inside. Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant ‘Covid is a hoax’ outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them. I well understand why they want to gag us. Our testimony makes Covid denial a tall order. We bear witness not to statistics but to human beings. Our language is flesh and blood. This patient, and then this patient, and then another. The pregnant woman in her 20s on ICU, intubated and lifeless. The three generations of one family on ventilators, each of them dying one after the other. We humanise, empathise, turn the unfathomable dimensions of the 100,000 dead into mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Increasingly, speaking out feels like a moral imperative. Because perhaps – if we can only disprove enough untruths, if we can just slow the onslaught of disinformation – we may have fewer dying hands to hold in the future. Please don’t flinch. Please don’t look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospitals needs telling.”

Naomi Wolf accused of confusing child abuse with gay persecution in Outrages – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “Outrages recounts the life of writer John Addington Symonds and how gay men in the 19th century would have feared lengthy prison sentences and hard labour for ‘unnatural offences’. The book first ran into trouble when ... the historian Dr Matthew Sweet ... pointed out that she had misunderstood the term ‘death recorded’ in historical records. Wolf had believed it signified an execution, and claimed that she had found ‘several dozen executions’ of gay men after the last recorded execution for sodomy in 1835. However, the term reflects a crime punishable by death that was commuted to a custodial sentence, a common occurrence.... Now Sweet and historian Dr Fern Riddell have responded to the corrected paperback edition, accusing Wolf of citing cases of men found guilty of sexually assaulting children and animals as examples of a wider persecution of gay men in consensual relationships. In a blistering article in the Telegraph, Sweet pointed to Wolf’s depiction of John Spencer, a man who she describes as ‘tried three times, accused of sex with three different men’. Sweet’s article says that Spencer was a school headmaster who was accused of sexually assaulting a group of schoolchildren and found guilty on one count, according to contemporaneous newspaper reports and Old Bailey records from 1860.”

‘D Day’: UK marks 50 years since decimalisation – article by Hilary Osborne in The Guardian. “The anniversary of Decimal Day on Monday 15 February 1971 marks when Britain finally moved to a system based on units of 10. ... It was ... in 1966 that the country agreed to switch. ... The long buildup ensured a smooth transition. The chair of the Decimal Currency Board, Lord Fiske, had said he hoped it would be ‘the non-event of 1971’ and he got his wish. The first decimal coins were issued in 1968, to give shoppers a chance to get used to them before the old system was scrapped. ... Banks had trained their staff to deal with the new currency, and held talks for members of the public. NatWest alone delivered 3,000 presentations by June 1970 to groups including the Women’s Institute. It also produced a monthly Decimal Currency Digest which it sent to staff, and cashiers had to read four booklets and complete six training exercises to make sure they understood the new systems. The country’s banks all closed for the Thursday and Friday before – this was a time when they were already closed at the weekend – to convert accounts. The Stock Exchange closed, and on the Friday Post Offices were shut. The Royal Mint spent years producing millions of new coins, and these were distributed to banks around the country ahead of the switch.”

Some literary collective nouns – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A chapter of novelists. A stanza of poets. A draft of editors. A borrowing of librarians. A recommendation of booksellers. A blurb of publicists. An autopsy of critics. A gruop of proofreaders.”

As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own – article by Namina Forna in The Guardian.  "When I was a child, I was what you would call a JRR Tolkien fangirl. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. ... When the first Lord of the Rings movie was finally released, I was 14 and so excited to see it. But immediately, I noticed something distressing: no one on screen looked like me. The darkest characters on screen, the orcs, were all male. Even as a monster, it seemed, there was no place for people who looked like me in Tolkien’s world. Thankfully, I had my own to work with. I grew up in Sierra Leone, a place I consider the most fantastical in the world. ... Fantasy was a lifesaver. When I was born, in the late 1980s, Sierra Leone was on the brink of civil war. The country was in chaos; people were suffering and dying. To distract me, my father and grandmother would tell me stories about the magic of Africa, some of them rooted in real history.... When I moved to the US in 1996, war was suddenly no longer a part of my life. But neither was the magic. Instead of goddesses and Amazons, there was now the legacy of slavery, civil rights and racial struggle.... But this didn’t make any sense to me. I knew my history. Yes, some Black people had been slaves, but others had been queens, kings, adventurers, tricksters, country folk. Yes, there were huts and slave cabins, but there were also castles in Ethiopia, towering walls and streetlights in Benin, libraries in Timbuktu and fortresses in Great Zimbabwe. The richest man to ever exist, Mansa Musa, was African. The N’Nonmiton, the female warriors my father and grandmother had told me tales about when I was young, were African. There was more to Blackness than struggle."

Seven ways to cope until the end of lockdown – portmanteau article in The Guardian. Matt Haig on hope ("I always think it is interesting that arguably the most hopeful song of the 20th century – 'Over the Rainbow' – arrived in arguably its darkest year"), Ella Risbridger on food ("I have cooked my way through so many crises in my life: mental illness, family estrangement, a suicide attempt, the slow death of my partner and the complex grief that followed"), Adam Phillips on boredom ("This boredom is like a fog over the battlefield. If we allowed ourselves not to be bored, we would be acutely aware of how frustrated we are; of what we want and the fact that we mostly can’t have it; and of the scale of suffering of oneself and other people"), Anita Sethi on nature ("if lockdown has taught me anything it’s the virtue of putting one foot in front of the other – however far those footsteps might take us"), Philippa Perry on art ("there are dark moods around right now that might be more manageable if we processed them into songs, pictures or poems"), Mollie Goodfellow on friends ("I’ve only really grasped in the last few months ... the concept of being really honest with your friends"), Nikesh Shukla on play ("Playing with my kids has been a real reminder for me to lean into my imagination").

Cuttings: January 2021

In praise of the humble products all around us – blog post by Tim Hartford, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In a famous 1958 essay, ‘I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E Read’, Read’s pencil-narrator ... explains that it has an impressive pedigree: its graphite is from Ceylon, mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphuric acid and animal fats. Its cedar wood grew naturally but harvesting the timber required saws, axes, motors, rope and a railway car. The pencil – if you let it – will talk your ears off on the subject of its six coats of lacquer, or the origin of the brass in its ferrule, or the eraser on its tip. (Shockingly, the pencil even reveals how the graphite gets into the middle of the wood.) ... A modern variation on the pencil’s family tree comes courtesy of Thomas Thwaites, an artist and designer whose ‘Toaster Project’ was an attempt to design and build an ordinary toaster, beginning with assembling his own raw materials – quarrying mica, refining plastic, smelting steel. ‘You could easily spend your life making a toaster,’ he told me when I interviewed him about the project more than a decade ago. And indeed he took various short-cuts. Nevertheless, his finished toaster cost about £1,000 and required several months of work. It looked like a cake iced by a three-year-old, and when plugged into the mains it immediately caught fire.”

John Rawls: can liberalism's great philosopher come to the west's rescue again? – article by Julian Coman in The Guardian. “The vision of fairness in A Theory of Justice aspired to what Rawls called ‘the perspective of eternity’... Imagine, he suggested, if a society gathered to debate the principles of justice in a kind of town hall meeting, but no one knew anything about themselves. ‘No one knows his place in society,’ wrote Rawls, ‘his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.’ Passing judgment from behind this ‘veil of ignorance’, he believed, people would adopt two main principles. First, there should be extensive and equal basic liberties. Second, resulting social and economic inequalities should be managed to ‘the greatest benefit of the disadvantaged’ ... Following its triumphant publication however, the times began to change at dizzying speed. De-industrialisation bestowed a bitter legacy of distrust, division and disillusionment in the west, symbolised in Britain by the scars left by miners’ strike of 1984. Marketisation and the rise of the new right inaugurated an era in which growing inequality was not only sanctioned but celebrated.... The neo-liberal dismantling of the welfare state sidelined the ethos of Rawlsian egalitarianism. ... Following the financial crash, further culture wars ignited, dividing liberal cities from socially conservative hinterlands amid a resurgent nationalism. A new focus on systemic racism led to the formation of movements such as Black Lives Matter. There is now a palpable crisis of faith in the possibility of the kind of consensus that Rawls hoped to philosophically ground. What was it that A Theory of Justice didn’t foresee, or value enough, or understand?”

The director who dared to suggest Jewish men don't need rescuing by blond women – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “The director Joan Micklin Silver, who died [recently], made distinctly Jewish movies, as opposed to the kind of Jewish-lite movies that were – and are still – Hollywood’s more usual style.... . She took on what has stealthily become a staple cliche of American romcoms, exploded it and inverted it: the theme of Jewish assimilation.... Romcoms are based on the idea that love will save the protagonist. In fairytales, this means a wealthy prince rescuing a poor girl; in modern romcoms, it often means a dark-haired young man getting lifted out of his Semitic misery by a perky blond woman. [Woody] Allen more than any other film-maker established this template, particularly in his films with his then partner, Mia Farrow.... Thanks in no small part to Allen, you see this trope in every romcom starring actors such as Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler opposite the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, Drew Barrymore. In all these movies, the men are attractive because they have what are now seen as innately male Jewish qualities (anxiety, sarcasm, self-obsession), but simultaneously need to be rescued from them. Only someone who is their exact opposite can do that because while male Jewish qualities are depicted as desirable, the qualities associated with Jewish women (nagging, spoilt, nasal voices, dark hair) are very much not, as these movies often emphasise.... But in Crossing Delancey, [Silver] made that rarest of things: an American movie that actually celebrates Jewishness, as opposed to mocking it, exploiting it or apologising for it.”

Katharine Whitehorn obituary – by Janet Watts in The Guardian. “In the column she contributed to the Observer from 1963 until 1996, Katharine Whitehorn, who has died aged 92, did much to revolutionise the journalism that women wrote and read. She made her readers laugh, told them to stop trying to be perfect and brought their private concerns to public attention in ways that liberated lives – men’s as well as women’s.... She was a survivor, and she survived in style. A defining image of her adorned the cover of Whitehorn’s Social Survival (1968): the author in sparkling party mode, showing how to hold a bag, gloves, plate, cigarette, drink and fork in one hand, while leaving the other free ‘for shaking’.... Her best-loved book was her first, Cooking in a Bedsitter (1961...). Clever hostesses – including herself – went on serving her dirt-cheap, delicious recipes to their guests into the next millennium.... The book sold well for 40 years and the original edition was republished in 2008; it immortalised the lifestyle it outlived, in which even people as glamorous as the young Whitehorn ‘entertained’ in one room.”

Thank you, Katharine Whitehorn, for giving all the female reprobates a voice – article by Barbara Ellen in The Guardian. “Whitehorn’s writing aimed to reflect the times she was living in and it was defiantly human, female liberal, sane, amused, authentic and often revolutionary in its candid audacity. In her classic book, Cooking in a Bedsitter, she talked about grim landladies, shared bathrooms and cooking kippers. In one of her most famous articles, ‘Sluts’, she dryly appealed to her chosen tribe of female reprobates: ‘Those who have ever changed their stockings in a taxi, brushed their hair with someone’s nailbrush or safety-pinned a hem.’ In this way, Whitehorn was an instinctive and valuable feminist voice. One way to do womankind a favour is to take the sting out of our omnipresent anxieties and imagined inadequacies. She had a gift (and it is a gift) for evoking the pathos and humour of chaotic female life and for making women especially (though by no means exclusively) relate and laugh. Whitehorn made women of her generation feel ‘seen’, and she continues to do so decades later. ... She created a need for female-fuelled journalism. She cemented the market that clamoured for it. She created a safe space for all stripes of women writers to write and… breathe. On behalf of all the ‘sluts’ who followed, RIP, Ms Whitehorn, and thanks.”

How FarmVille and Facebook helped to cultivate a new audience for gaming – article by John Naughton in The Observer. “FarmVille was an agriculture-simulation game.... It was launched on Facebook in 2009 and for two years was the most popular game on the site.... You started with a virtual farm and a fixed amount of the virtual currency, Farm Coins, which you could add to by harvesting crops or visiting your neighbours. Your virtual farming career involved ploughing land, planting seeds and harvesting. If you were not diligent your crops would wither and die after a given time, depending on how long it took to grow each one.... The intriguing thing is that at one time more than 34 million sentient beings were doing this stuff every day. ... In its heyday, it was despised by the gaming industry, focused as it was on expensive, specialised gaming consoles and DVD franchises. [Marcus] Pincus [the original chief executive of the company which created Farmville] saw [it] as a relaxing activity that would appeal to a general audience, especially adults and women who would never have spent serious money on a PlayStation or an Xbox 360 and yet might enjoy playing a game. Now that most gaming seems to be moving online, you could say that he saw the future before the industry did.”

Seen and Heard: October to December 2020

Hero U: Rogue to Redemption – ingenious and well-reviewed dungeons-and-dragons-type RPG, but also a simulation of university life, so I just had to try it didn’t I. You play a teenage thief, who is mysteriously enrolled in the Hero University, where he studies how to be a "rogue" (basically, a thief with morals) alongside several other misfits too unskilled to be Warriors, not clever or magical enough to be Wizards, not good enough to be Paladins, and lacking the musical or acting talent to become Bards. As well as attending classes, with regular tests, you have to negotiate relationships with your classmates (the upper class snob, the swot, the feisty girl etc), who you can choose to help with their personal quests or not, as well as pursuing your own journey, while making money to buy better equipment and clothing by washing dishes, catching rats in the wine cellars, or looting chests in the haunted catacombs. I was really quite sorry to say goodbye to my friends at the end of term - the sign of a good game.

Strictly Come Dancing – we wondered how it could ever happen this year, since any form of ballroom dancing would seem to be ruled out by social distancing. But the BBC found a way, and a lot of people made a lot of sacrifices (couples formed social bubbles, not meeting their families at all while they were in the show), and how grateful we all were for the result. Standout moment for me was 55-year-old Bill Bailey’s hip-hop number with Oti Mabuse. Knowing him as a comedian, we all expected him to be the joke contestant: entertaining, but not dancing very well. But when Bill decides to learn something, he learns it properly - as shown by his demonstration on Graham Norton of his mandola-playing skills learned during lockdown. A deserving winner of the 2020 season: not the best dancer in the final, but the most inspiring.

Roadkill – BBC TV drama series by David Hare. Hugh Laurie was naturally excellent and magnetic in the lead role, but the whole never seemed to come together, one problem being the (deliberately?) different genre of each episode. If one is conspiracy thriller, another is political drama, a third domestic tragedy, then you don't know where it's going and what's even what would count as an ending.

His Dark Materials – BBC TV drama, Series 2. Two very strong performances at its core, from Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Marisa Coulter, easily the scariest super-villain we've seen for some time. As with Series 1, though, closure is in short supply, so there's definitely a case for Series 3.

The Crown – Netflix TV drama, Series 3. We loved the first two series, which had a real sense of being driven by the transcendent Crown and its crushing demands on mere mortal humans, rather like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings (the books, not the films), but now it's become just a Royal soap opera, even if a well-made one. I don't think we'll go out of our way to catch the fourth series.

Portrait Artist of the Year – extraordinarily good television, even when (as usually happens) the sitter is someone apparently famous of whom we've never heard. It's just great to hear artists talking about what they're doing while they're doing it, and seeing the amazingly different ways they portray the same person.

Dracula – another fine dance production from Northern Ballet, one of our favourite companies, with great physical movement, costumes and lighting vividly conveying the Gothic horror in contrast to middle-class respectability. Thank you BBC for showing this during lockdown.

Revisor – a visually powerful piece of dance theatre, based on the Gogol play The Government Inspector, in which a minor bureaucratic functionary is mistaken for the very important inspector of the title and the various officials of a government department run around and bow and scrape to ingratiate themselves with him. The dialogue is pre-recorded by actors, and the dancers mime and move - how they move! - in sync with it to extraordinary effect.

How People Learn by Nick Shackleton-Jones – amusing and outspoken reflections on the design of training and education. Very much after my own heart, in his acidic comments on the e-learning which never amounts to more than an information dump and the education system's attempts to intimidate people into learning things they're not interested in learning. I think he's over the top in completely denying the existence of semantic memory (as distinct from episodic memory), but he's surely bang on in calling for learning (whether "push" or "pull") to be designed on a basis of affective context (and not just motivation).

Winterwatch: The Big Freeze 1963 – including the whole of a BBC documentary from early 1963 on the then-recent worst winter of the twentieth century, in which sub-zero temperatures persisted for months. Great to see familiar presenters from the past, such as Cliff Michelmore, and the low-tech but highly effective studio graphics, and scary to see how the country's infrastructure broke down. I'd have been four at the time, but I have no memory of it; my parents must have shielded me well.

Live from London: Christmas – another great series of livestreamed concerts arranged by Voces8, whose own performances (especially with baroque violinist Rachel Podger) were absolutely fantastic, though there were also other very good shows from Apollo5, The Tallis Scholars and I Fagiolini, as well as two overseas groups to discover: Anúna (from Dublin) and amarcord (from Germany). We also had the Gabrieli Consort performing the cantatas of Bach's Christmas Oratorio each on the day for which it was originally written, though these were rather disappointing. The a capella group concerts were definitely a highlight of this lockdown year; we could happily watch them again every Christmas.

Carols from King’s – another Christmas tradition adjusted for Covid-19: not merely no audience / congregation (expected) but no adult choir members either (having had to isolate), their place being taken by The King's Singers. Most excellent it was too, maybe even (whisper) better than the usual service? I think my expectations have been raised by the livestreamed and filmed Live from London concerts.

Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special – and again Covid-19 forcing a change of format. Instead of a handful of celebs performing one dance each, we got the top 25 dances from the past 17 years, as voted for by viewers, shown in their entirety (very important) with commentary from judges, pro dancers and sometimes the celebs themselves. Every dance was a stunner, of course, and how good it was to have a celebration of Strictly's long history. 

Cuttings: December 2020

Cambridge Dictionary names 'quarantine’ Word of the Year 2020 – article by Tom Almeroth-Williams on the University of Cambridge Research website. "Quarantine was the only word to rank in the top five for both search spikes (28,545) and overall views (more than 183,000 by early November)... The Cambridge Dictionary editors have also tracked how people are using quarantine, and have discovered a new meaning emerging: a general period of time in which people are not allowed to leave their homes or travel freely, so that they do not catch or spread a disease. Research shows the word is being used synonymously with lockdown, particularly in the United States, to refer to a situation in which people stay home to avoid catching the disease. Wendalyn Nichols, Cambridge Dictionary Publishing Manager, said: '... Neither coronavirus nor COVID-19 appeared among the words that Cambridge Dictionary users searched for most this year. We believe this indicates that people have been fairly confident about what the virus is. Instead, users have been searching for words related to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic, as evidenced not just by quarantine but by the two runners-up on the shortlist for Word of the Year: lockdown, and pandemic itself."

Can American democracy survive Donald Trump? – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. “As [Hannah] Arendt understood, in its attempt to change the record, lying ‘is a form of action’. In this sense, lies are what the linguist JL Austin called ‘performative’ utterances, statements that can transform social reality instead of merely describing it – but only under rigidly defined circumstances. When a judge says ‘guilty as charged’, the defendant’s life changes, but only if they’re both in a courtroom under the ritualised conditions of ‘due process’. If a judge says it at home watching a legal drama, the statement has no effect. This is why it was so absurd when Trump tweeted during the election, ‘I hereby claim Massachusetts’ – because none of the conditions that would give that statement performative force had been met. He was just an old man shouting at clouds. But when [in a Tweet of 16 November, 10 days after the election] he pronounces ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’ he is trying to imbue his claim performatively with the symbolic authority of his office. That authority depends entirely on collective recognition. It matters that most world leaders have now ‘recognised’ Joe Biden as America’s president-elect: society’s acceptance is what gives language performative power.... Trump has spent four years exerting political power to make reality conform to his every assertion. This is both a theocratic performance, and a totalitarian one. The more deranged the assertion, the better it served his purpose: the statements had to be wildly detached from reality, so as to make clear his power to bend reality toward his word. Godlike Trump pronounced, and people scrambled to make it real – or to appear real. That was the essence of ‘Sharpiegate’, for example, when a weather map did not conform to Trump’s description of Hurricane Dorian’s path. Having crudely altered the map with a Sharpie pen, Trump insisted that official records be altered to conform to his claims. As philosophers of language have pointed out, the crudity was not an error, it was the point. Trump was not aiming to deceive, he was performing divine fiat: make it so. This is precisely the process of ‘rectifying’ official records that Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four; in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ two years earlier he’d noted that ‘totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past’.”

The Godless Gospel by Julian Baggini review: Jesus as a moral teacher – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “Baggini sees that Jesus was a divisive, iconoclastic figure who declared that he had come to tear families apart. The book also highlights the fact that he had almost nothing to say about sex.... His demands are fearsomely exacting: we can flourish only by a transformation of the self so deep-seated that it amounts to self-dispossession.... Moved by Jesus but sceptical of his divinity, Baggini devotes the last part of his book to rewriting the Gospel by leaving out most of the supernatural bits. ... For all its insights, this account can’t quite escape the dualist thought of the modern age. It claims, for example, that ‘the important changes to be made are within our hearts, not within our societies’; yet when Jesus speaks of ‘the things that are God’s’, his listeners would have known that this meant welcoming the stranger, caring for the widows and orphans, protecting the poor against the violence of the rich and other such scriptural injunctions. Jesus’s God is the Yahweh of the Book of Isaiah, who tells his pathologically religious people that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils, and asks them what they are doing about social justice.... Baggini sees Jesus’s selflessness as a kind of asceticism, but it is actually a form of self-giving, not a Puritan hostility to the flesh. In fact, he and his followers were denounced as gluttons and drunkards. His so-called morality isn’t a matter of what Baggini rather lamely calls ‘being good’ and ‘doing the right thing’, but of abundance of life. At Pentecost, his disciples are so reeling and ecstatic with the stuff that one of them has to remind the onlookers that the wine shops aren’t yet open. There are times when the book makes Jesus sound less like a moral teacher than a modern therapist, concerned with ‘personal growth’ and ‘moral health’. But the New Testament isn’t a spiritual self-help manual. Jesus’s mission was to Israel, not in the first place (as Baggini argues) to the individual. It was directed against suffering and oppression, not against bad vibes and low self-esteem. One can only understand it fully against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest empires in history.”

The magnifying glass: how Covid revealed the truth about our world – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. “Trump was only the most garish example of a pattern that became identifiable across the globe. The populist loudmouths, the braggarts whose stock in trade was railing against the experts, imagining themselves to be free of the laws of factual reality, fared badly against a threat as real as the virus, a menace that could not be talked away with a rally, an insult or a joke. Several contracted it themselves.... Again, none of this was exactly novel. Even before the pandemic struck, it was clear that Merkel and others valued quiet, technocratic competence while Johnson’s administration was built on slogans and myths, rhetoric and promises, prizing chummy loyalty over the hard graft of good governance. But Covid put that contrast in lights. ... Through it all, Johnson – a leader for sunny days who found himself facing a hurricane – tried to dodge his duty to deliver bad news. Again and again, he served up false cheer. ... As if to fill the vacuum, leadership came from other quarters, some of them unexpected.... Inequality is so entrenched, it can feel like a law of nature. Even so, the coronavirus lens managed to magnify it in new and sharp ways. US politicians like to speak of the difference between jobs where you shower before you go to work and jobs where you shower once you get home. In the age of Covid, that distinction between white- and blue-collar labour found a new form: those who could work from home, and those who couldn’t.”

The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument – article by David Robson in The Guardian. “Discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions. (1) Ask ‘how rather than ‘why’.... (2) Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story.... (3) Reframe the issue.... (4) Appeal to an alternative identity.... (5) Persuade them to take an outside perspective.... (6) Be kind."

This is the last exit to Brexit. But in truth, there was only ever one road – article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian. ”There is one Brexit deal. There has only ever been one. ... It is this: the UK will give up wealth in exchange for sovereignty. In what proportions and over what timescale is the only real subject of negotiation. ... Leavers started from a position of denial that sovereignty had any price at all – that Brexit was all upside. That case rested on two pillars. First was the idea that EU membership was a drag on Britain, an unwanted subscription service that could be cancelled and the money redirected to better causes. Second was the belief that Europeans would be so sad to lose access to British markets that they would agree to continue something like the old service without charge. Those things were not true, but the Brexiteers believed they could be made true by force of conviction and a more aggressive negotiating stance. Meanwhile, remainers saw the whole deal as a scam. The price was too high and the sovereignty being bought was worthless. ... But that argument has never had traction with leavers. The claim that Brexit has no value is palpable nonsense to tens of millions of people who, by the act of voting, bestowed it with profound emotional significance.”

Cuttings: November

Liberalism and Its Discontents – article by Francis Fukuyama in American Purpose, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The ‘democracy’ under attack today is a shorthand for liberal democracy, and what is really under greatest threat is the liberal component of this pair. ... Classical liberalism can best be understood as ... a system for peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies. It arose in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries in response to the wars of religion that followed the Protestant Reformation, wars that lasted for 150 years and killed major portions of the populations of continental Europe.... This remains one of its most important selling points today: If diverse societies like India or the United States move away from liberal principles and try to base national identity on race, ethnicity, or religion, they are inviting a return to potentially violent conflict.... Liberalism’s present-day crisis is not new; since its invention in the 17th century, liberalism has been repeatedly challenged by thick communitarians on the right and progressive egalitarians on the left. Liberalism properly understood is perfectly compatible with communitarian impulses and has been the basis for the flourishing of deep and diverse forms of civil society. It is also compatible with the social justice aims of progressives: One of its greatest achievements was the creation of modern redistributive welfare states in the late 20th century. Liberalism’s problem is that it works slowly through deliberation and compromise, and never achieves its communal or social justice goals as completely as their advocates would like. But it is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences.”

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

It’s time for fantasy fiction and role-playing games to shed their racist history – article by Payal Dhar in The Guardian. “The racist history of fantasy fiction, including role-playing games (RPGs), has its roots in our fascination with medieval European history, says Kavita Mudan Finn, a first-generation Indian American, who is an interdisciplinary scholar of medieval and early modern European history. ‘It reaches back to a misplaced imaginary nostalgia for a golden age when everyone was in their place and, most importantly, they were happy to be there....’ What is popular fantasy today is inextricably linked to the idea of medievalism imagined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the social and cultural values of that time, where heroism was associated with masculinity and whiteness. Take JRR Tolkien. On the one hand, he spoke out against Nazi race doctrine and has been heralded for ‘multiculturalism’ in his work. Nevertheless, his stories are steeped in Eurocentric bias. As Dimitra Fimi, author of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History, writes on her blog, the forces of ‘good’ in Middle-earth are fair-skinned, while forces of ‘evil’ are dark; Orcs are ‘slant-eyed, swarthy and sallow-skinned’; the ‘heroes’ are all white-skinned. ... ‘When fantasy took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” says [Helen] Young, “a lot of what was produced was quite imitative of Tolkien in particular, but also of [Robert E.] Howard and his early sword-and-sorcery stories. So the 19th-century racisms … that founded the genre were then written into genre convention through that process of imitation.’”

Solitude, sunshine and sanctuary in The Secret Garden – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. “If the last time you encountered Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was in childhood, you probably think of Mary, a sour little girl, waking up in a house in India to find herself orphaned and alone; a vast wind-buffeted house on the Yorkshire moors, and the sound of crying; a robin, a key, and a hidden garden; the transcendent scene in that garden, one of the most famous in children’s literature, in which Colin, a previously bedridden child, stands and learns to walk. So far, so magical. But rereading the book in adulthood reveals that it is also a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness; a book that, for all its light, is underpinned by darkness. In fact, the novel offers such practical ways of coping, and even of healing that it was once suggested it should be prescribed on the NHS.”

Tragic deaths in the badly written novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. ”Choked on a piece of terrible dialogue. Lost forever down a colossal plot hole. Drowned in a sea of unnecessary details. Died in a fall from a bungled cliff-hanger. Crushed by an enormous chunk of exposition.”

The National Trust is under attack because it cares about history, not fantasy – article by Peter Mitchell in The Guardian. “The National Trust is in trouble. Earlier this week, 26 MPs and two peers from the recently formed ‘Common Sense Group’ wrote to the Daily Telegraph recommending that the heritage organisation’s funding applications to public bodies be reviewed in light of its having ‘tarnished one of Britain’s greatest sons [Winston Churchill] by linking his family home, Chartwell, with slavery and colonialism’. ... The National Trust’s major crime was to have produced a report in September that examined Trust properties’ relationship to the slave trade and colonialism. It explored how the proceeds of foreign conquest and the slavery economy built and furnished houses and properties, endowed the families who kept them, and in many ways helped to create the idyll of the country house. ... The MPs’ letter’s main charge is that the National Trust’s leadership has been captured by ‘elitist bourgeois liberals’... The narrative that the culture of these islands is being stolen from the (implicitly white, native and straight) majority is now disturbingly commonplace in our politics. Suggestions that demographic change – orchestrated by the treachery or connivance of a ‘cosmopolitan’ liberal elite – threaten British identity, or indeed the entirety of western civilisation, have been around since the late 19th century, but they have become ever more insistent in recent years, and have characterised much of the commentary surrounding Black Lives Matter and the statue protests of the summer.”

'It's the screams of the damned!' The eerie AI world of deepfake music – article by Derek Robertson in The Guardian. “‘It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him.... The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by ‘research and deployment company’ OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. ... It’s not hard to foresee, though, how such deepfakes could lead to ethical and intellectual property issues. If you didn’t want to pay the market rate for using an established artist’s music in a film, TV show or commercial, you could create your own imitation. Streaming services could, meanwhile, pad out genre playlists with similar sounding AI artists who don’t earn royalties, thereby increasing profits. Ultimately, will streaming services, radio stations and others increasingly avoid paying humans for music?“

'Hello work' or job centre? language experts spell trouble for Japan's mangled English – article by Justin McCurry in The Guardian. “Encountering mangled English is a frequent source of mirth for many residents of Japan, but for one group of language professionals, the proliferation of inappropriate words and phrases is becoming a national embarrassment. Their recently formed group, loosely translated as the association for the consideration of Japan’s English, is taking local governments and other bodies to task for their over-reliance on machine translation on official websites and public signage.... [The] group, comprising interpreters, researchers and employees of foreign companies, had long been frustrated by the widespread use of wasei-eigo – Japanese-made English – in official literature, advertising and marketing. ... Even major corporations occasionally fall into the wasei-eigo trap, Tsuruta said, citing Hitachi’s long-running ‘Inspire the Next’, and Toyota’s Olympic-inspired ‘Start your Impossible’. ... Others, though, are guilty only of the same poor punctuation found on shop signage in countries where English is the first language. This month, Takashimaya department store in Kyoto was forced to cover up posters after social media users pointed out how a missing comma had sabotaged its simple, and supposedly inspirational, message. ‘Rising Again,’ it began. ‘Save the World from Kyoto JAPAN.’ ”

Why Mangrove is guilty of being a better courtroom drama than Sorkin's Chicago 7 – article by Caspar Salmon in The Guardian. “Sorkin can’t get to the trial soon enough: after some perfunctory exposition, his film arrives at the courthouse in its 13th minute, whereas it takes Steve McQueen nearly an hour before his protagonists face a jury. This is because Sorkin loves a courtroom drama: his movie revels in legalese and repartee, with every other event in the film taking a backseat to the case itself. Many of the events the film centres on are presented in flashback; the first time Bobby Seale is even seen is in court. This means the characters are presented as legal subjects foremost – a perspective that aligns Sorkin with the state. Conversely McQueen spends time with his characters, taking time and sometimes joy in depicting a whole community, a place for gathering, and the anti-police protest itself. Not for nothing is the film called Mangrove (after the Mangrove restaurant, a hub for Notting Hill’s Black community) and not The Trial of the Mangrove 9. In other words, McQueen’s portrayal of his protagonists is fully in keeping with their outsider status: by the time they arrive in court, the institution feels brutal and alien.... Mangrove’s film-making shows up the limits, cliches and hollowness of the courtroom drama in general, while a flimsy exemplar of it such as The Trial of the Chicago 7 only underscores McQueen’s rigour. His project upends conventions, the better to carve out space for his subjects to live in.”

The cheap pen that changed writing forever – article by Stephen Dowling on the BBC Futures website in the Heroes of Design series, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The new [cheap ballpoint] pen had [a] dramatic effect on the act of writing itself, says David Sax, the Canadian journalist who wrote the book The Revenge of Analog. ‘The ballpoint pen was the equivalent of today’s smartphone. Before then, writing was a stationary act that had to be done in a certain environment, on a certain kind of desk, with all these other things to hand that allowed you to write. What the ballpoint pen did was to make writing something that could happen anywhere. I’ve written in snow and rain, on the back of an ATV and in a boat at sea and in the middle of the night,’ says Sax. Biros don’t drain batteries, they don’t require plugging in in the middle of nowhere, and even the tightest pocket can accommodate them. ‘It only fails if it runs out of ink,’ Sax adds.”

How 'woke' became the word of our era – article by Kenya Hunt in The Guardian. “What is ‘woke’? Most online dictionaries define it as a perceived awareness of inequality and other forms of injustice that are normally racial in nature. A few describe the term as characterising people who are merely ‘with it’ – as in, every cool kid you knew at uni. And increasingly, these days, many use it as a pejorative term to describe someone who is a slave to identity politics. How can all three possibly be the same? It’s a sensibility, a quality, a state of being, a feeling backed up by a set of actions, sometimes all these things at once.”

Sarah Cooper: ‘Trump has bigger fish to fry than me’ – interview by Sophie Heawood in The Guardian. “Sarah Cooper is ... an American comedian who has appeared out of nowhere and made millions of us actually want to listen to Donald Trump. That is, as long as his voice is coming out of her mouth, in the videos where she lip-syncs and mimes along to his rambling speeches.... Cooper ... graduated in economics from the University of Maryland, encouraged by parents who thought she should make some money, rather than taking the risk of pursuing her performing dreams. She also studied design, another sensible decision that helped her get jobs at Yahoo and Google in user experience, only to find that Silicon Valley was all about pursuing your dreams. Allegedly. ‘In the tech world there’s ...this idea that your job has to be your dream and the thing that you live for, and not just the paycheque, it’s difficult – because it is a paycheque. Having to put this mask on and pretend all day is very draining.’ Or as she put it during a recent comedy performance, ‘People always ask me if it was fun to work at Google, and it was fun. I knew that it was fun because they kept telling me how much fun I should have each quarter, else I would be fired.’ Ironically enough, she ditched all that follow-your-dreams stuff, so she could follow her actual dream, which was to become a comedian who made fun of workplaces that said such things.”

Let Us Dream by Pope Francis review: the holy father of fraternity – review by Julian Coman in The Guardian. “Not long into these reflections on the lessons of a traumatic year, Pope Francis offers a line from his favourite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Where the danger is, grows the saving power.’ ... The book is recognisably a product of that strange, surreal first phase of the coronavirus pandemic. ... Calamities such as this, says Francis, can be a ‘threshold’ experience, dividing one era from another. ‘This is a moment to dream big,’ he writes, ‘to rethink our priorities – what we value, what we want, what we seek – and commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.’ The Covid crisis, argues the pope, has given the lie to a ‘myth of self-sufficiency’ that sanctions rampant inequalities and frays the ties that bind societies together. Pitilessly, the virus has demonstrated our mutual dependency and common vulnerability. We have collectively relied on the state as never before. ... There is a spiritual urgency and warmth to Let Us Dream that will appeal to lay readers as well as the faithful. But these thoughts of a pope in lockdown already feel a little as if they belong to another time. The stark strangeness of spring and summer has gone, along with the Thursday night applause and that sense of shocking novelty and a shared predicament. ... Can the fraternal intimations of the first wave survive the divisions of the second?”

Want to understand the Covid map? Look at where we live and how we work – article by Danny Dorling in The Guardian. “Why is [Covid-19] currently more common in the north? ... In poorer, more often northern, parts more people have jobs that cannot be done from home and more use public transport. Frequently, childcare is provided by the extended family who live nearby – wages and benefits are usually too low to allow other childcare options. There is less early retirement and more pensioners need to work too. Further, overcrowding in homes in cities is more common and anyone out of work exacerbates that. There is also the question of taking a test. People are often not sure whether they have symptoms or not. If the implication of volunteering to take a test is that you and your family are then trapped in a small home for two weeks, that your older children cannot go out to work, that your school-age children will be trying to learn at home with whatever computer you have (if any), and that you and any partner you have also cannot go out – would that influence whether you thought a test was worth it? Of course it would."

Seen and heard: July to September 2020

Black and British: A Forgotten History – BBC TV documentary series by the great and compassionate historian David Olusoga. I expected something worthy but instead found it quietly and powerfully moving. Even the plaque installation ceremonies at the end of each segment, which at first seemed like a bit of a stunt, were validated by the obvious joy of the local communities, white people as well as black, at having that part of their history marked and celebrated. 

The Luminaries – strange and grimy magic realist book-adapted TV drama, set in the nineteenth century New Zealand gold rush, which must have dispelled many viewers' desire to visit the country originally kindled by Lord of the Rings. But despite the sordid Wild West atmosphere, I had to watch it to the end, even if only to find out what happened to the two nice people we met at the beginning.

Unavowed – one of the best adventure games I’ve ever played, and a deserving winner of multiple 2018 Adventure Gamer awards (best story, best writing, best gameplay by readers' vote, and best adventure game). You start on a rooftop in a thunderstorm, being exorcised. As you recover your memory (here you have a choice of being male or female, and a cop, an actor or a bartender), your rescuers introduce themselves as members of The Unavowed, guardians against supernatural danger, and explain that in the last year the demon possessing you has been creating havoc. With them, across a series of missions, you set out to track its activity, and to work out what it wants and how to stop it. The extraordinary thing about the writing is that the missions adjust according to who you are, which of your companions you take with you, and which order you tackle the missions - despite a major plot twist about two thirds of the way through. Great characters, great narrative, great game.

Mrs America – US TV drama series, with Cate Blanchett giving a very rounded portrayal of anti-feminist campaigner Phyllis Shlafly, who could so easily have been a caricature. Vivid portrayals also of leading American feminists of the 1970s (Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug), though I can't say any of them came across as truly likeable (except perhaps Steinem). Compelling viewing though, with vivid period detail.

Live from London – series of livestreamed concerts organised and hosted by the top-drawer chamber choir Voces8, featuring other great vocal groups (i Fagiolini, The Swingles, The Gesualdo Six, The Sixteen, Stile Antico, Chanticleer) as well as the Academy of Ancient Music and the English Chamber Orchestra. Lovely to have something to look forward to at 7:00 pm on a Saturday evening; the sense of watching a live event definitely adds something, more than compensating for the occasional technical problems. Absolutely worth the subscription price, and these are concerts we'd never have travelled to London to see. If the business model works, we could be seeing a lot more of this in the future.

Once Upon a Time in Iraq – jaw-droppingly powerful TV documentary series following the course of the second Iraq war and its aftermath, through interviews with ordinary people rather than political and military leaders.  See also review and interview with the director and one of the interviewees. 

History of Ideas – podcast series by David Runciman, as part of the London Review of Books Talking Politics podcasts. What a good lecturer he is, wearing his great learning very lightly and delivering a great introduction (or more than an introduction) to some key political writers, such as Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, de Toqueville, Marx, Ghandi, Weber, Arendt, Hayek and Fukuyama, to list only those I'd heard of before. If we're going to have stand-up monologic lectures, this is what they should be like.

Sr Lucy Bryson, Journey into Interfaith Dialogue 1939-2011 – autobiographical article, circulated after her death in August. Having known Sister Lucy of the Turvey Benedictines for many years as a teacher (Lectio Divina, Enneagram), I was aware of her commitment to interfaith work (joint Catholic-Buddhism workshops, an exchange visit to Iran) but it wasn’t until I read this and its companion article that I realised that she grew up in a narrowly Catholic environment pre-Vatican II. What a journey that must have been - and what a testimony to how a great and compassionate soul can grow.

The Encounter – stunning one-man show by Simon McBurney (of Complicité), about a photographer from National Geographic who in 1969 became lost in the Amazon rain forest of Brazil. Ingenious use of sound, delivered through headphones even for the theatre audience, and a cunning opening to soften us up with aural tricks to prime us for the exercise of the imagination.

Mata Hari – ballet from Dutch National Ballet, beautifully choreographed by Ted Brandsen. A noble corrective to the popular stereotype of the sexy spy, this shows Margaretha (her real name) escaping an unhappy marriage to a violent and alcoholic army officer in the Dutch East Indies to reinvent herself as an exotic dancer in Paris, a dance innovator like Isadora Duncan.

Last Night of the Proms – very interesting to hear the familiar tunes played by a reduced and distanced orchestra, making the musical lines clearer and sharper. A pity the BBC bottled out of dropping the words of the imperialist anthems; it’s going to happen sometime, and this would have been a great opportunity.

Secret Files: Tunguska – a replay for me of a 2006 adventure game, not because it’s a special favourite but because I bought the series in a discount and thought I should start agin from the first episode. It’s certainly ingenious, with massive inventories allowing for outrageously tricky puzzles, but there are definitely problems with the translation from the German (dialogue is crabbed and long-winded, and humour repeatedly misfires) and with the lead voice actor. (How come a Russian girl raised in Berlin sounds like a squeaky American?)

Miss Marple – as played by Joan Hickson, accept no imitations. A welcome re-showing on the Drama channel. How we were spoilt in the 1980s: definitive portrayals of not only Miss Marple but Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) and Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett).

The Romantics and Us with Simon Schama – his usually classy cultural-historical TV essays, though this time explicitly making connections between the thinking of the Romantics (Blake, Shelley, Piranesi, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns, Chopin) and our own time, hence the title.

The Secret Life of Writing – truly excellent BBC TV documentary series, genuinely telling you important things you didn’t know or putting them in a new way. Maybe it’s rose-tinted spectacles, but I seem to remember more TV being like this.

Lilly Looking Through – beautiful and charming adventure game, with an ingenious core mechanic: the goggles which Lilly finds early on enable her to both see and be in the past, allowing for some ingenious puzzle solutions. For example, a wall in the present may not be there in the past, and a seed planted in the past may create a tree in the present. Fun to play too, with an environment which rewards experimentation, but it’s just too short, ending just as the story seems to be getting going. I'm hoping for a sequel.

Cuttings: October

How to tell if your cat is interested in your novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian.  “Cat meows constantly at the study door: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat watches you intently as you write: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat goes to sleep on your manuscript: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat repeatedly walks across your keyboard: the cat is not interested in your novel. Cat nests in your box of author copies: the cat is not interested in your novel.”

The wellness realm has fallen into conspiritualism; I have a sense why – article by Sarah Wilson in The Guardian. “People I loosely know have flooded my social feeds with impassioned pleas for me to ‘wake up’ and fight #msm (mainstream media), quoting what we now know to be QAnon conspiracy jargon, hashtagged and often in screaming caps. When I ask to see their research (I’m genuinely curious and the sheer onslaught has made me question my adherence to the scientific method) that coronavirus is a hoax dreamed up by a satanic cell of elites, I am directed to alt-right YouTube links and the viral documentary Plandemic. When I flag (in what I hope is a calm digital tone) the film has been removed from most digital platforms and Science magazine has systematically disproved most of its claims, I’m told it’s me who’s been sucked into the (#msm) conspiracy. #DOYOUROWNRESEARCH, they scream-text at me.... little prepared me for this most recent pop-political mash-up, coined conspiritualism. It’s certainly a Venn overlap that is hard to fathom. How did wellness warriors come to unite with the alt-right QAnon community? How did the ‘love and light’ go so dark?”

Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes: ancient misogyny – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "All the usual suspects are here, including Helen, Medusa, Jocasta, Penelope and Medea, and it’s striking, considering their stories en masse, how often they have been passed down the literary and artistic canon as scapegoats for the mistakes of men, or else muted altogether. Take the title character, who never had a box in the original version (the confusion is likely the fault of Erasmus in the 16th century, mistranslating the word for a large jar), and whose name means simply 'all-giving'.... As Haynes points out: 'Every telling of a myth is as valid as any other, of course, but women are lifted out of the equation with a monotonous frequency.' Except when they are vilified; she points to famous images of the Medusa myth as an example of the way the male viewpoint is privileged and we hardly think to question it: 'it’s just a hero and his trophy'. But Medusa was not always a monster; in some versions 'she’s a woman who was raped and then punished for it with snakish hair'."

Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020 – chosen by Michael E. Mann, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Boakye, Helen Lewis, John Naughton, in The Guardian. For Small Creatures Such as We, by Sasha Sagan. "Carl Sagan was arguably the greatest science communicator of our time. He inspired many – including me – to enter the world of science. He is sadly no longer with us. But his daughter, Sasha Sagan, honours his legacy in her wonderful new book." The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. "A refreshing counterbalance to the glut of apocalyptic visions of climate catastrophe.... Stan uses the accounts of fictional future eyewitnesses to convey the stark threat of climate change. But that future, by some measure, is already here. Rather than suggesting our doom is destined, he shows how we can rise to this extraordinary challenge." What Is Populism?, by Jan-Werner Müller. "The movements that we have come to call 'populist' are defined by one central idea: they reject pluralism....Populists, Müller explains, claim that they alone represent the people, or the nation; that their opponents are traitors, foreigners or unpatriotic elites; that there can be no neutral political institutions and symbols." Think Like a White Man, by Dr Boulé Whytelaw III. "Powerful exploration of race politics is one thing, searing social commentary is another, and razor-sharp satire is a third entirely. But put them all together? This is a book like no other, taking you on a thrill ride/thrill guide through the world of default white dominance.... Wicked in every sense of the word." Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates. “'Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,' wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch. Well, the internet certainly fixed that.... Bates has spent eight years giving talks to schools, and in that time she has watched boys become 'angry, resistant to the very idea of a conversation about sexism'." Re-engineering Humanity, by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger. "This sobering book by a legal scholar (Frischmann) and a philosopher (Selinger) suggests ... that we have been building a world in which humans are being subtly re-engineered to make them more receptive to machine-driven logics. ... Implausible? Maybe. And then you remember that the only response option offered to its users by Facebook is to 'Like' something: the entire spectrum of possible human responses is forced through a single, narrow aperture. If that isn’t dumbing down, I don’t know what is."

The real black history? The government wants to ban it – article by Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian. "One familiar defensive response to discussions of racism today is to insist that Britain is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. Missing from that grand claim is the story of how all progress on race has been won through persistent protest and campaigning, by ethnic minorities and their allies. Black people, both in Britain and in the colonial world, have not waited meekly for changes to take place.... Black people in Britain have defended their communities, mobilised and contributed to vital social and institutional change. ...Across Britain and the British Empire black people were never just passive victims but active resisters.... Minority ethnic communities, including those of African and Caribbean heritage, have long helped shape Britain for the better, insisting on taking their place and staking their claims. They were, of course, demonised as extremists for doing so, just as Black Lives Matter is being vilified by politicians today."

Boris Johnson,The Gambler: no blame, no shame – review by Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian. "Think of the many character flaws that we associate with the prime minister: serial infidelities, narcissistic ambition, a desperation for adulation, reckless gambles, broken promises and betrayed colleagues. The essential source of it all, contends Tom Bower, is a traumatised childhood.... Stanley Johnson was a feckless and self-obsessed dad and an unfaithful and violent husband, according to this book. ... The advantage of this as a biographical framing device is that it offers an apparently logical explanation for his subject’s frequently appalling behaviour as an adult. The flaw in assigning all the culpability to Stanley is that it gifts Boris a gold-plated alibi. We should not, it suggests, think too badly of him when he betrays a wife, concocts fabrications or stumbles from debacle to disaster through a public health crisis. We should think of him as the victim of that troubled childhood.... The apologias continue once he becomes prime minister. When his attempt to shut down parliament in 2019 is ruled unlawful by the supreme court, the villain of Bowers’s account is the court’s president, Brenda Hale, 'who had rarely concealed her contempt for Boris' and was animated by 'her determination to slap down the government'. This suggests that the Tory leader had been confounded by one outrageously biased woman, rather than condemned by the unanimous verdict of all 11 of the country’s most senior judges."

Pale Rider: painful lessons of the flu pandemic – review by Miranda Seymour in The Guardian, published June 2017. “In the spring of 1918, confusion was caused by the fact that the as-yet unidentified virus was not inevitably deadly. It struck first in Haskell County, Kansas, where a young army mess cook fell sick one morning in early March. By lunchtime, a hundred similar cases were reported at the base. By the end of that week, a makeshift hospital for victims had filled an aircraft hangar. Among the young soldiers who survived, some may have carried their infection to the front, where both sides became badly stricken by the virus. ... Late in the summer of 1918, a far deadlier form of Spanish flu appeared. It struck at three points around the Atlantic: Freetown in Sierra Leone, Brest in France and Boston in the US. ... Spinney’s important book does not attempt to offer light reading. No less than four pandemics are predicted in the 21st century. At least one will take the form of flu. Vaccination is not cheap, because the flu virus is constantly mutating. Annual vaccines currently offer the best protection. Britain does still possess a National Health Service. The enduring message of Spinney’s magisterial work is to underline just how crucial that remarkable service is to the future security of an unusually privileged nation.”

Are we nearly there yet? How Margaret Calvert steered Britain into the fast lane – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “It is almost impossible to escape Margaret Calvert. She’s standing at every motorway junction, beaming out in bold, bright letters, and at the corner of every street, warning of potential hazards ahead. Now aged 84, and still busy in her studio, the designer jointly responsible for giving British roads their visual identity is the subject of a retrospective at the Design Museum. ‘I’m not quite as slim as I was back then,’ says the South African-born designer, standing in front of one of her famous school crossing signs on show in the exhibition. ‘But the hairstyle has remained the same.’ Tasked with updating the previous sign, which had depicted a grammar-school boy in a cap leading a younger girl with a satchel across the road, she decided to flip it around and put the girl in charge. She modelled the silhouette on a photo of herself as a child. Her neat bob hasn’t changed much since – nor has her ability to lead the way.”

What now for the BBC? – article by Peter York in The Guardian, based on his book with Patrick Barwise The War Against the BBC. “The newly intensified attacks against the BBC are real, and the attacker is the government. This PM seems to be the most hostile towards the BBC of any in living memory – including Margaret Thatcher..... The world’s most admired and successful public service broadcaster now faces hits to its income of anywhere between £500m and £1bn. (A billion would be around a third of its current public funding.) And the recent attacks come on top of far deeper cuts than people have realised. In March 2020, consumer group Voice of the Listener & Viewer(VLV) analysed the BBC’s finances. The results are astonishing: since 2010, Osborne’s funding cuts have reduced the net public funding of the BBC’s UK services by 30% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. It’s remarkable that the BBC’s services have held up so well in the circumstances.... The positive case for the BBC is familiar: it creates social cohesion within the country – ‘One Nation’ – and develops the UK’s ‘soft power’ externally – ‘Global Britain’. Both things are, we are told, important to this prime minister. Without the BBC we would be more fragmented, we wouldn’t share the same realities, we would be more vulnerable to disinformation and polarisation. Recent research from the University of Zurich examined the factors that make nations more or less ‘resilient’ to sweeping disinformation, such as conspiracy theories. One key resilience factor is the existence of an independent public service national broadcaster at scale, such as the BBC. The US – nearly off the researchers’ scale in its vulnerability to such conspiracy theories as QAnon – has never had an equivalent-sized public service broadcaster.”

Time's Monster by Priya Satia: living in the past – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. “Time’s Monster is a book about history and empire. Not a straightforward history, but an account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonisation, ‘making it ethically thinkable’. Satia’s story begins with the Enlightenment, when the traditional idea of time as cyclical unwound into a linear vision of history, which came to be seen as ‘something that moves irresistibly forward’. ... The Enlightenment’s obsession with progress, combined with an unshakable attachment to moral universalism, Satia suggests, helped ‘normalise the violence of imperial conquest’. Colonialism came to be seen as morally just, a means of bringing progress to non-European peoples, freeing them from their own barbarism.... Time’s Monster is a coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians and empire. It is also a frustrating account. ... In the final chapter, ... she worries that historians have in recent decades become sidelined by political leaders and that new kinds of experts – economists and political scientists – have taken their place, experts who seem even more willing to be bag carriers for the powerful. .... Today’s historians, in other words, should continue the practice of using history as a means of deriving moral norms, but with different norms, a morality that supports the powerless rather than the powerful. It’s a demand that might seem obvious, but it’s also one that cuts against the grain of much of the argument in previous chapters which has condemned the very act of using the lessons of history to craft moral norms.”

The Interest by Michael Taylor: busting the British slavery myth – review by Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian. “Britain’s national myth about slavery goes something like this: for most of history, slavery was a normal state of affairs; but in the later 18th century, enlightened Britons such as William Wilberforce led the way in fighting against it. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807, before any other nation, and thereafter campaigned zealously to eradicate it everywhere else. As Michael Taylor points out in his scintillating new book, this is a farrago of nonsense. Slavery was certainly an ancient practice, but for 200 years the British developed it on an unprecedented scale. Throughout the 18th century, they were the world’s foremost slavers, and the plantation system they helped create devoured the lives of millions of African men, women and children. ... The cessation of the transatlantic trade in 1807 didn’t end this. It changed nothing for the 700,000 enslaved people already held captive in Britain’s West Indian colonies; soon afterwards, the British government acquired additional slave territories in South America. Slavery remained central to Britain’s economic and strategic interests, and for more than a decade and a half after 1807 almost no one campaigned to end it.... The Interest is the story of how widespread and deeply rooted such attitudes were, how powerfully calls for abolition were resisted and why the British parliament nonetheless voted at last in 1833 to end slavery in its West Indian and African territories.”

What the flip! The chance discovery that's uncovered treasures of the very earliest cinema – article by Pamela Hutchinson in The Guardian. “While later silent feature films were duplicated and distributed widely, there are hundreds of short experiments by the first film-makers, movies no more than a few seconds long, that no longer exist even as a memory. ... Yet a dogged research project by an independent scholar from France, Thierry Lecointe, has helped uncover miraculous images from lost films, not just by Méliès, but also by Alice Guy-Blaché. The frames were preserved as images printed on to the card pages of tiny flipbooks. With digital technology, the flipbooks, known as folioscopes, have now become something like film fragments again. The photographer Onno Petersen shot each page in high-resolution and the motion-picture restoration expert Robert Byrne, from the San Francisco Silent Film festival, produced animations revealing such treats as a long-lost magic trick, dance, comic sketch or a train caught on camera more than a century ago.”