Cuttings: May 2021

In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly –  article by Rafael Behr in The Guardian, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there. Everyone who has worked with him in journalism and politics describes a pattern of selfishness and unreliability. He craves affection and demands loyalty, but lacks the qualities that would cultivate proper friendship. The public bonhomie hides a private streak of brooding paranoia. Being incapable of faithfulness, he presumes others are just as ready to betray him, which they duly do, provoked by his duplicity. Johnson is driven by a restless sense of his own entitlement to be at the apex of power and a conviction, supported by evidence gathered on his journey to the top, that rules are a trap to catch weaker men and honour is a plastic trophy that losers award themselves in consolation for unfulfilled ambition.”

The obscure maths theorem that governs the reliability of Covid testing – article by Tom Chivers in The Guardian. “Maths quiz. If you get a positive result on a Covid test that only gives a false positive one time in every 1,000, what’s the chance that you’ve actually got Covid? Surely it’s 99.9%, right? No! The correct answer is: you have no idea. You don’t have enough information to make the judgment.... Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). ... it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example. Imagine you undergo a test for a rare disease. The test is amazingly accurate: if you have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time; if you don’t have the disease, it will correctly say so 99% of the time.... But the disease in question is very rare; just one person in every 10,000 has it. This is known as your ‘prior probability’: the background rate in the population. So now imagine you test 1 million people. There are 100 people who have the disease: your test correctly identifies 99 of them. And there are 999,900 people who don’t: your test correctly identifies 989,901 of them. But that means that your test, despite giving the right answer in 99% of cases, has told 9,999 people that they have the disease, when in fact they don’t. So if you get a positive result, in this case, your chance of actually having the disease is 99 in 10,098, or just under 1%. ... Without knowing the prior probability, you don’t know how likely it is that a result is false or true. If the disease was not so rare – if, say, 1% of people had it – your results would be totally different. Then you’d have 9,900 false positives, but also 9,990 true positives. So if you had a positive result, it would be more than 50% likely to be true.” See also ‘Covid, false positives and conditional probabilities...’ by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.

The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea –  article by Robert P Baird in The Guardian. “A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: ‘The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.’ Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the ‘new religion of whiteness’ – a religion founded on the dogma that ‘of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan’ – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.”

The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health –  article by Laura Barton in The Guardian. “Our Bodies, Ourselves [was] a book about women’s health and sexuality that would prove revolutionary. It sold more than 4m copies globally and became available in 33 languages, and is considered one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Across its nine editions, it addressed sexual health, sexual orientation, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, postnatal depression, abortion (still illegal in much of the US in the book’s early editions), violence and abuse, gender identity, birth control and desire.... In the spring of [1969] as the women’s movement gained momentum, a Female Liberation conference had been held at ... Emmanuel College [Massachusetts]. There were taekwondo demonstrations, talks called Women and the Church, How Women Oppress Themselves and, on the Sunday morning, a workshop called Women and Their Bodies, held by Nancy Miriam Hawley. At the end of the workshop, the attenders were reluctant to leave, and the discussions spilled on outside. Over the months that followed, they formed a group that would be named the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to discuss their bodies, their lives, sexuality and relationships. The next year, they published a book named after the original workshop title. In 1971, they changed the book’s title to Our Bodies, Ourselves, to reflect women taking ownership of their own bodies. “

Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers –  article by Jude Rogers in The Guardian. “Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin,… is one of 10 electronic music pioneers featured in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s debut documentary, released this weekend. … Rovner’s big coup … is getting Laurie Anderson to narrate: the avant-garde composer signed up, delighted to hear that Oliveros and French composer Éliane Radigue would be properly getting their dues… . ‘It’s very interesting,’ Anderson says today, ‘that a lot of that early work in electronics was done by women. Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened, which is telling. They wanted to think about how sound could recalibrate our body and mind.’ “

The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley review: how the modern world was made – article by Miles Taylor in The Guardian. “Few documents are venerated as much as the American constitution…. Yet, as Linda Colley’s brilliant new book shows, viewing constitutions as national tablets of stone tells us more about their contemporary charisma than the complex histories from which they were wrought. In this compelling study of constitutions produced around the world between the mid-18th century and the outbreak of the first world war, she upends the familiar version of history at every turn. Out goes the myth that constitutions were the product of democratic aspirations or revolution – rather they arose from the ashes of war or the threat of invasion. Nations may have been girded by constitutional documents, but these were borderless texts, available for adaptation across time and space. Above all, constitutions were ‘protean and volatile pieces of technology’ that travelled far and wide, assisted by the expansion of print media and the speeding-up of long-distance travel and communication…. Countries needed constitutions not to free the people, but to defend them from aggression from without, and disunion from within.“

‘It was exhilarating’: how the Guardian went digital ... and global – article by Alan Rusbridger in The Guardian. “A trip to the US in 1993 to ‘see the internet’ left me in no doubt: the days of the daily printed newspaper were numbered. Once people learned about this thing they were calling the ‘world wide web’, there would be no going back. It might take 10 years, it might take 50, but it was clear that the future was digital. If that much seemed obvious, everything else was a mist of incomprehension and wild futurology. … The questions began in earnest, dozens of them, some concurrent, other consecutive. Was this a new medium, or simply a novel way of distribution?… If it was a new medium, did that require a different team with different skills to produce it?… How much should we invest in this new medium?… How could you protect your commercial revenues?… How could you run print and digital editorial operations in tandem?… What new skills did we need to enlist?… How could the Guardian adapt to being global?… Which came first: the paper or digital?… It took the Guardian nearly 140 years to be confident enough as a national paper to drop the word ‘Manchester’ from its title. It didn’t find a permanent home in London until 1976. Within 25 years of that move, it began to attract an enormous international readership – and it is now viewed on more than a billion browsers a year. The paper’s journey from local to national to global was bewilderingly sudden. Revolutions are fascinating things for historians to study. Living through one is unnervingly interesting. Decisions fly at you furiously fast. There is never enough time to think, and never enough data to help you make the right choice. If you get even half of the decisions right, you’re probably doing quite well. And you may not even know what ‘right’ was until many years later.”

Typo negative: the best and worst of Grauniad mistakes over 200 years – article by Elisabeth Ribbans in The Guardian. “‘If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.’ So wrote Ian Mayes, the Guardian’s first readers’ editor, in his debut column in that role in 1997. His appointment marked the start of a daily corrections and clarifications column, a first for a UK newspaper, which has mined a rich seam of typos and other slips for which ‘the Grauniad’ is fondly known. Thus we can recall how an April 1998 obituary declared the show that turned Joan Heal into a star was Grab Me a Gondolier (it should have read Grab Me a Gondola), while four months later the finance pages reported a £250,000 advance for Vikram Seth’s new novel, ‘A Suitable Buy’. We had a rather agile George Formby standing on a lamp-post, rather than leaning on one, in August 2002, which was around the same time we referred to a Miles Davis album as Sketches of Pain (when Spain was meant)….Sometimes the red pen must take itself to task. In 2007 it blushed: ‘We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26.’”

‘From a standing fart’: readers on their favourite Grauniad mistakes – letter to The Guardian. “ I enjoyed the litany of errors admitted to by the Guardian, but it brought to mind my own personal discomfort from a slip between copy and print. Many years ago, as a young would-be actor, I played Sally Bowles in a community theatre production of the musical, Cabaret. Imagine my dismay on reading the local newspaper critic’s eagerly awaited review, which opined that I had ‘failed totally to convince as Sally’. Later in the day, a knock at my front door revealed said critic, clutching his hand-typed review and apologising profusely. He had in fact not been quite as damning as first appeared, actually writing, ‘failed to totally convince’. Still not great, but it gave me something to work with. Getting ready in the dressing room that evening, the (very good) actor playing the MC popped his head round the door and, in vicious character, announced: ‘Anuzzer total failure tonight zen, Sally!’”

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew: in praise of a Victorian New Woman – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Whenever someone mentions Charlotte Mew, they feel obliged to add context. The fact that Thomas Hardy said she was the ‘greatest poetess’ he knew, or that Siegfried Sassoon maintained she was ‘the only poet who can give me a lump in my throat’…. Walter de la Mare, trying hard to define the source of Mew’s power, ventured ‘she just knows humanity’. The reason why any account of Mew, including this fine biography by Julia Copus, feels obliged to begin by bigging her up is precisely because she has so often been done down. Even during her lifetime Mew’s name was familiar only to those who lived and breathed contemporary literature… For these readers Mew’s ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (1912) was nothing short of a punch to the gut and a slap on the ear, and all in a good way. The poem is a dramatic monologue in which an unschooled farmer laments the refusal of his child bride to respond to his physical and emotional expectations. Mew gives us both the farmer’s bumbling cruelty and the girl’s blind terror as she slips away ‘shy as a leveret’ across the fertile fields. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ feels as old as the hills yet startlingly new, with its balladry, mixed-up metre and long, wayward lines.”

The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war –article by Dan Hancox in The Guardian. “During the [second world] war, as many as 20,000 Chinese seamen worked in the shipping industry out of Liverpool. They kept the British merchant navy afloat, and thus kept the people of Britain fuelled and fed while the Nazis attempted to choke off the country’s supply lines. … Working below deck in the engine rooms, they died in their thousands on the perilous Atlantic run under heavy attack from German U-boats. Following [a decision by the Attlee government], the police and immigration inspectorate in Liverpool, working with the shipping companies, began the process of forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats and sending them back to China. With the war over and work scarce, many of the men would have been more than ready to go home. But for others, the story was very different. In the preceding war years, hundreds of Chinese seamen had met and married English women, had children and settled in Liverpool. These men were deported, too. The Chinese seamen’s families were never told what was happening, never given a chance to object and never given a chance to say goodbye. Most of the Chinese seamen’s British wives would go to their graves never knowing the truth, always believing their husbands had abandoned them.”

Seen and Heard: January to March 2021

‘All Good Things...’ – final double episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994). Caught it on rerun, and was delighted to be reminded of how good the show was, at its best. Great characters, great concepts, and in this case a supremely crafted punchy script, featuring increasingly rapid cross-cutting between three timelines.

The West Wing – watched again on box set, starting in the run up to the US election, because we needed an antidote to the Trump presidency. Seasons 4 and 5 are still the weakest, the victim of a need to follow contemporary post-9/11 politics with a terrorist-crisis-of-the-week, but the first three and the last two seasons stand up excellently. Deeply rich and demanding; some episodes I felt I was only properly understanding now. when watching for the third time.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman – re-reading the novels in the wake of the second season of the TV, to remind myself of the third part of the story. (Can’t see how they’ll ever film that one.) A good yarn, with memorable scenes, but I still feel the overall narrative is wandering and directionless and I can’t get my head around the shape of the whole thing.

Deponia / Chaos on Deponia / Goodbye Deponia / Deponia Doomsday – popular sequence of cartoon style point-and-click adventure games, published between 2012 and 2016, telling the story of arch-slacker Rufus’s efforts to escape the junk planet of Deponia and reach the paradise world of Elysia. The voice acting is good and the scripting is funny and hint-laden, which is just as well because there are a stupidly large number of bizarre objects and places where they might be used to solve a puzzle. Rufus himself is puerile, self-centred and rude, and on the whole the writing is sufficiently smart for this to be funny, though there are several places, especially in the third game, where his misogyny and racism seems to be endorsed by the game design, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. The fourth game, a supplement to the originally planned trilogy, redeemed the sequence for me, and I was glad to end on a happier note.

Live from London Spring – Another fine season of livestreamed concerts led by Voces8. Highlight for me was their performance of Jonathan Dove's The Passing of the Year (several songs from which Polymnia performed a couple of years ago), especially the blistering conclusion to the sequence 'Ring Out Wild Bells'. As previously, the sound balance was disappointingly off in some of the concerts with larger forces, especially the Fauré Requiem, but they got it right for a splendid Bach B Minor Mass.

Elizabeth R – landmark TV series from 1971, with Glenda Jackson suitably commanding in the title role, reshown as part of the BBC's lockdown plundering of the archive. It stands up very well, despite the limitation of being almost entirely studio-recorded; the Shakespearean ethos is so strong you’re quite comfortable with, for example, the Wyatt Rebellion and the Spanish Armada taking place off-stage.

Can't Get You Out of My Head – another hypnotically compelling documentary series from the mighty Adam Curtis, though as usual when coming round after each episode I found myself wondering what exactly I’d just seen. I >think< it was about Britain’s difficult adjustment to the loss of empire, the rise of individualism and failed dreams of revolution, the rise of China, and of course money and power. As always, Curtis and his researchers have found some astonishingly powerful film material in the archive.

Blitz Spirit with Lucy Worsley – for a change, she’s not dressing up herself; instead actors movingly recreate the transformed and shattered lives of six people in World War 2 Britain. Her conclusion: the idea of the Blitz Spirit >was< manufactured, for political purposes, but behind it was real suffering, resilience, and courage in the face of danger.

Cuttings: April 2021

Snakes and ladders: versions of meritocracy – article by Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.  “The Meritocracy Trap [by Daniel Markovits] is full of riveting and sobering detail... Markovits ... claims that meritocracy works and that’s the problem. The winners are selected for ability and effort, but this locks them (and their children) into a remorseless cycle of overachieving, while damaging the prospects and self-esteem of everyone else. But, on the other hand, what the bulk of the book’s evidence shows is that, in fact, those who succeed do so because of parental advantage. Yes, the top law firms recruit from the top law schools, which recruit from the top colleges and so on, but, as Markovits shows, the main determinants of who gets into these highly selective institutions are social advantages that start in the womb. Everything suggests that meritocracy is the camouflage adopted by self-sustaining dynastic advantage in an age of democratic sentiment.... One of the most striking (and depressing) features of recent political debate has been the constant emphasis on, and hostility to, a supposedly condescending or indifferent elite. But this, other failings aside, runs together at least two distinct social groups. On the one hand, it takes aim at ‘the highly educated’, and the social attitudes supposedly associated with them. This is a cultural category largely, and most visibly, made up of those who work in the arts, the media, publishing, higher education, NGOs etc, hardly any of which are really well paid. On the other hand, there are those in the top 0.5 per cent of the income distribution, most of whom are in the upper echelons of the financial and corporate worlds: these are the people who have reaped the financial rewards of globalisation and who have the power to shape the economy and society by their decisions. Although a lot of popular hostility is directed at the first group, with its visible markers of ‘educated’ social attitudes and cultural tastes, it is the decisions taken in boardrooms and fund managers’ offices that have the real impact on most people’s lives – decisions about whether the return on capital will be greater if certain branches are closed, certain work practices introduced, and so on. Talk of the elite obscures far more than it illuminates: instead of going along with the use of such terms, we should be asking questions about who gets what and why.”

Those Who Can, Teach by Andria Zafirakou: a lesson in education – review by Lamorna Ash in The Guardian. “‘We are the ones alerting social services to child-protection issues, severe poverty, or the fallout of police intervention,’ Zafirakou writes. It is this kind of granular information, she believes, that cannot be ‘captured by the facts and figures’ the government focuses on, and which makes the idea of solving the issues faced by today’s students by way of more rigorous exams (as Michael Gove did in 2010) or ensuring children remain silent in corridors (another Williamson proposal) appear laughable. ... As Kate Clanchy’s celebrated memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me does so well, Those Who Can, Teach relies on case studies of students to illustrate, for instance, the impact of social media, of poverty, of mental health or learning difficulties on young people today. Both books demonstrate how leading lessons is but a small portion of what it means to be a teacher in 21st-century Britain.”

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Humankind. “The real Lord of the Flies ... began in June 1965. The protagonists were ... pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa [capital of Tonga]. ... They had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand. ... The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. ... ‘We drifted for eight days,’ [one of the boys] told me. ‘Without food. Without water.’ ... Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. ... These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But ‘by the time we arrived,’ [their rescuer] Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, ‘the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.’ While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. [One boy] fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat ... and played it to help lift their spirits.”

Musa Okwonga: ‘Boys don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, it is where they perfect it’ – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s 1996 [and] Musa Okwonga ... goes to school at Eton College... [He] thrives at the school, which he set his heart on after being dazzled by a documentary he saw as a child. He wins a scholarship and aged 13 becomes a boarder, putting on the school’s distinctive morning suit every day... He becomes a model student, almost to a fault. But he’s carrying around a double burden of responsibility: first to his father, who was killed amid political violence in Uganda when he was four, and his widowed mother, who works hard as a doctor to pay his fees. Then there’s the second, crushing weight imposed by society’s expectations of young black men and the mostly white environment of the school. ‘I think it is unlikely that many of my contemporaries,’ Okwonga writes, ‘have had a close black friend, and so I don’t want to conform to any of the stereotypes they might have about black people. I resolve never to get drunk around any of them, never to get stoned in their company. I don’t even risk getting a haircut that I might enjoy.’ ... Okwonga tries to make sense of the pressures, absurdities and rewards of his schooldays in his latest book, One of Them: An Eton College Memoir. ... [He says] ‘It felt like it was time. Look at our society – politically and socially, where we are.’ (In the book, he writes of the current moment that ‘It feels like the bad guys have won’.) ‘I’ve gone to this boarding school which prides itself on creating prime ministers,’ he says, ‘but then I look at the job those prime ministers have done. David Cameron promised stability, but he’s given us – well, he hasn’t given us stability. And Boris Johnson has done terrible damage to the country.”

The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “Since its publication, the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been denounced... As a historian, for me the most disturbing passages are those in which the authors stumble, ill prepared and overconfident, into the arena of history. ... Shockingly, the authors – perhaps unwittingly – deploy a version of an argument that was used by the slave owners themselves in defence of slavery 200 years ago: the idea that by becoming culturally British, black people were somehow beneficiaries of the system.... The report argues that young black people should reclaim their British heritage. Which is exactly what black British people have been doing, by recovering the contributions of their ancestors to British history and culture. Yet the report crudely characterises those struggles to bring marginalised black figures and communities into the mainstream of British history as ‘token expressions of black achievement’ – a poisonously patronising phrase.... The report [falsely characterises the] demands made by students and staff at many universities for the decolonisation of the curriculum ... as the ‘banning of white authors’.... [which] the authors dismiss as the ‘idealism’ of the ‘well-intentioned’. What is really happening in our universities is that curricula are being expanded to include the voices and the stories of formerly colonised people. Is the report’s reduction of this to the ‘banning of white authors’ deliberate provocation or just ignorance? Have they begun to believe their own culture war disinformation?... The government has been quick to point to the ethnic diversity of the commission. What is lacking here is not ethnic diversity but diversity of opinion.“ See also the Report itself. 

Boris Johnson is a man of principles. We should thank Jennifer Arcuri for exposing them – article by Catherine Bennett in The Guardian. “In 1994, Nolan was tasked by John Major with rescuing politics from Tory sleaze. 'We seek to restore respect for the ethical values inherent in the idea of public service,' Nolan wrote of the resulting Seven Principles: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, leadership. ... Johnson recently hinted at the existence of a parallel Johnsonian code, but it has taken Arcuri, with additional input from Cameron, the PM turned lobbyist, to bring home the thoroughness of the rewrite.... 1. Greed.... 2. Shamelessness... 3. Self-interest... 4. Unaccountability... 5. Concealment... 6. Fabrication... 7. Entitlement.”

From pencil sharpeners to a $539m lawsuit: how big tech weaponised design patents – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “It was designed to make sharpening a pencil feel as thrilling as flying a jet. A gleaming chrome teardrop, tapered to a point and adorned with a bullet-like handle, ... [the] go-faster pencil sharpener never made it into production, deemed one chrome-plated, deco-styled step too far. The design does survive in the form of its patent, filed in 1933 and now republished as one of 1,000 such protected inventions, brought together in a new book.... The recent boom in design patents has mostly come from the electronics sphere, spurred on by a landmark supreme court case between Apple and Samsung, which began in 2011 and was finally settled in 2018, when Apple was awarded $539m in damages. The case revolved around Apple claiming Samsung had copied numerous elements of the iPhone, from its ‘bounce-back scrolling’ interface to the ’rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded’. ... The unprecedented ruling unleashed an arms race, with big tech companies amassing vast arsenals of pre-emptive patents, conceived as assets to be sold or traded, as well as providing an insurance policy against any potential litigation. If someone sues you for infringement, you are more likely to be able to countersue for one of the thousands of other patents in your possession.”

Why are Britons complaining more about what’s on TV? – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “Every time a woman of colour appears on a BBC television channel, an employee in the corporation’s complaints department prepares to write a polite response to a disgruntled viewer. ‘It’s always the same words – “rude, opinionated etc” – but it’s very clear why people are complaining,’ said one individual who works in the sprawling department. They said that every appearance of the BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty now prompts formal complaints from viewers. ‘The amount of people who genuinely are just complaining about the presence of a person of colour on screen and, to a lesser extent, a woman, is incredible.’ If you want to understand the culture wars that rile some segments of modern Britain, you could do worse than study the feedback received by the BBC’s complaints department or its commercial equivalent at the media regulator Ofcom.”

Britain’s royal family is an accident waiting to happen. Prince Charles should dismantle it – article by SImon Jenkins in The Guardian. “Back in 1969, the Queen gave in to pressure from her husband, Prince Philip, and her dynamic Australian press secretary, William Heseltine, to modernise the monarchy. The decision was made to validate hereditary monarchy as a ‘royal family’, and present it as such to the world. Cameras were invited into royal residences, to attend royal barbecues and see the teenage royals as ‘ordinary’. ... No other European royal family took Britain’s monarchical route to A-list celebrity. This path was not only unnecessary, it was high-risk. ... A racing certainty was that as each heavily publicised child stepped forward into adulthood, the searchlights would come on and the public glare descend. ... the policy was to harness the potency of celebrity to enhance the constitutional status of monarchy. The policy was a bad mistake.... Prince Charles is known to want a ‘slimmed down’ royal family. That is insufficient. He should dispense with it altogether. He should dismantle it as an official entity of state. He should guard his son and heir and tell the rest that, after a painful transition, they are on their own. They can do anything they like. The British constitution has no role for this latter-day Stuart retinue of courtiers. If monarchy is to survive at all, as an unobjectionable symbol of statehood, it should concentrate all its efforts on one goal: being boring.”

Cuttings: March 2021

Cooking recipes from Real Fast Food is like having Nigel Slater by your side – article by Jay Rayner in The Guardian. “Some cookbooks give an insight into a specific culture. Others drill down on a set of techniques and methods. And then there’s [Nigel Slater’s] Real Fast Food, which introduced the world to a particular voice and sensibility; to an endlessly encouraging approach not to the blunt mechanics of cooking, but to the joys of eating and living well. It ripples with good taste. Nigel’s good taste.” “Almost three decades on, it remains in print and with good reason.”

An algorithm that generates ideas for stories about artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A [lonely / wicked / dying / well-meaning] [genius / plumber / billionaire / scientist] creates a [superintelligent / malfunctioning / beautiful / creepy / gigantic] robot that wants to [befriend / understand / murder / emulate] humans.”

Be more Alice! The fictional characters with lessons for lockdown – article by Josh Cohen in The Guardian, based on his book How to Live. What to Do. "If we try to enlist the help of novels by extracting rules and hacks and counsel from them, we will probably prove Plato right. ['As Plato observed (via a fictionalised Socrates), Homer’s stories were composed to stir and entertain rather than to instruct us.'] Novels, or at least the ones worth reading, draw us in not by offering moral instruction or practical guidance, but by helping us to see ourselves in all our strangeness and complexity. Having spent a large portion of my life reading fiction and practising psychotherapy, this strikes me as the essential overlap between the two. Each gets us to listen to the nuances and rhythms of human experience, to make ourselves available to the unsuspected thoughts, feelings and desires murmuring below the surface. Listening is the engine of curiosity, and so of change and growth. Like the psychoanalyst, the novelist can’t cure us of error and illusion and shouldn’t try.... But psychoanalysis and literature can help us to experience those errors and illusions from the inside rather than view them from on high, to enter deeply enough into the world of the person who made them to begin to understand why."

Value(s) by Mark Carney: call for a new kind of economics – review by Will Hutton in The Guardian.  “If 25 years ago anyone had suggested that one of the world’s most prominent ex-central bankers would launch an intellectual broadside at free market fundamentalism for shredding the values on which good societies and functioning markets are based, I would have been amazed. If, in addition, it was suggested he would go on to argue that stakeholder capitalism, socially motivated investing and business putting purpose before profit were the best ways to put matters right, I would have considered it a fairy story. ... In a mix of rich analysis mixed with pages that read like a dry Bank of England minute, he blames the three great crises of our times – the financial crash, the pandemic and the climate emergency ... – on twisted economics, an accompanying amoral culture, and degraded institutions whose lack of accountability and integrity accelerate the system’s dysfunction.”

Sherry Turkle: 'The pandemic has shown us that people need relationships' – interview by Ian Tucker in The Guardian. “I see the memoir [The Empathy Diaries] as part of a trilogy. I wrote a book called Alone Together in which I diagnose a problem that technology was creating a stumbling block to empathy – we are always distracted, always elsewhere. Then I wrote a book called Reclaiming Conversation, which was to say here’s a path forward to reclaiming that attention through a very old human means, which is giving one another our full attention and talking. I see this book as putting into practice a conversation with myself of the most intimate nature to share what you can learn about your history, about increasing your compassion for yourself and your ability to be empathic with others. I also wanted to write this book because I’ve wanted to read this kind of book. That is to say a book where you learn about the backstory of somebody whose work life has truly been animated by the personal story. Many people have this book to write but daren’t because they think their work life should be pristine, that it should come from a purely cognitive place. And I knew that in my case, that wasn’t true.”

The disappearance of department stores will rob us of a certain kind of magic – article by Kitty Drake in The Guardian. “In department stores, life is broken down into helpful sections (baby, school, home). By contrast, online shopping – which I do compulsively – makes your options frighteningly limitless. Where Amazon Marketplace lists thousands of different options for a set of bed sheets, John Lewis offers just 64. ... If the department store is a place of dreams, the aspiration John Lewis sells is a slightly bland, middle-class British one. ... The shop represents a certain type of security and comfort that was, for many people, always illusory. And just as it has become more difficult to attain the markers of a middle-class lifestyle – a steady job, a house, a set of coordinated towels – the store that was one of the signifiers of such stability is now in a far less secure position.”

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.