The thermocline of truth – blog post by Rob Miller, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This month, the Court of Appeal finally quashed the remaining criminal convictions [of sub-postmasters accused by Royal Mail of embezzlement, when the appearance of missing money was due to errors in its new IT system]. How were [Royal Mail leaders] able to convince themselves almost to the last that their own systems couldn’t have been the source of the errors? How were those at the top seeing such a warped version of reality? In the ocean, … sometimes, what’s called a thermocline forms: a temperature barrier, a point at which the temperature changes rapidly. … In a 2008 blogpost, legendary IT consultant Bruce F. Webster applied the idea of the thermocline to large-scale IT projects. Why was it, Webster asked, that so many projects seemed to be on-track until just before their launch date, at which point it became suddenly clear that they were miles behind schedule? Webster observed that, generally speaking, those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. … Those at the top, though, have no such first-hand knowledge. They rely on the bubbling-up of information from below, in the form of dashboards and status reports. But, Webster noticed, those status reports tend to produce a comically optimistic view of the state of the project. … The result is that there is a thermocline within the organisation: not of temperature, but of truth. There is a clear line in the org chart, below which the truth of the project’s disastrous state is known, but above which everything looks rosy…. Thermoclines, to be clear, are not the fault of subordinates. They emerge because of the culture set by the leadership of an organisation. They are the inevitable consequence of an organisation that puts more emphasis on reputation than truth; that rewards good news and punishes bad; that has a leadership team disconnected from the delivery of the actual work; that instils fear and compliance with process into its employees, rather than a desire to do the right thing.”
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction – interview with Gaya Herrington by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.… Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse…. Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website …) independently ‘out of pure curiosity about data accuracy’. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability. Earlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth, the analyst wrote plainly: ‘Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.’”
The Truth About Lies by Aja Raden: a history of deceit, hoaxes and cons – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “Raden takes us on a whistle-stop tour of hoaxes and cons. She’s not talking here about little fibs, the grownup version of hiding your spinach under your plate, but rather the swaggery whoppers that are capable of bringing down a whole peer group. Something like the Bernie Madoff scandal, a long con that lasted three decades and involved a lot of very rich people believing a criminal when he promised to make them even richer, without explaining how. … Why on earth would anyone – especially smart, rich anyones – fall for such obvious nonsense? Raden explains that it’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it benefits us to take information on trust.… That is why the most compelling hoaxes start with a nugget of truth. Take snake oil. The indentured Chinese labourers who built the American transcontinental railroad in the 19th century naturally looked to their medicine chests to soothe their smashed joints and sunburnt skin. Snake oil, made from the rendered fat of black water snakes, was extraordinarily rich in Omega-3 and worked a treat as an anti-inflammatory. Soon news of its efficacy had spread throughout the whole blistered-fingered west. Demand outstripped supply (the medicine had to be imported from China since there are no black water snakes in North America) with the result that any number of fakes started to appear. … The Truth About Lies claims to be a ‘taxonomy’ of deceits, hoaxes and cons, but actually it is no such thing. … What we get is a ragbag of anecdotes, from the original Ponzi scheme of the 1920s to the slips and sleights of big pharma that have led to the current opioid crisis. All hugely interesting, and certainly entertaining, but not quite the serious and scholarly investigation that Raden would have you believe.”
At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks, so why do we lose so much time to online distraction? – article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, excerpted from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, also reviewed in The Guardian. “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. … And so distraction truly matters – because your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. … What’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’ …. is that it’s essentially a giant machine getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. … [Because] the attention economy is designed to prioritise whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful – it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are – and all these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well… it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place. … Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter – the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives – that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives?… The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time. … what we think of as distractions aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.”
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “Seventy-six years after his death, Hitler remains one of the most known men in the world and ubiquitous in western culture. … [Michael Tucker, one of the directors of the film The Meaning of Hitler,] calls it a ‘Hitler industrial complex’ unburdened by self-scrutiny. He comments: ‘Clearly, it’s not like these materials stop the spread of the ideology or that they curb antisemitism. If anything, the more they’re presented without context, the more they propagate these ideas. … ‘ Determined to avoid contributing to the cult of personality, Epperlein and Tucker use excerpts from former Observer journalist Sebastian Haffner’s penetrating 1978 book The Meaning of Hitler as a narrative spine. … They interview historians and writers … and Nazi hunters as well as an archaeologist forensic biologist, psychiatrist and sociologist in search of clues that might begin to explain how Hitler became Hitler. But historian Deborah Lipstadt … tells them: ‘When we try to figure out where Hitler’s antisemitism came from, what we’re trying to do is rationally explain an irrational sentiment. When people say, “Oh well, his mother was treated by a Jewish doctor and he couldn’t save her”, so what? The minute you’re trying to give a rational explanation for an irrational sentiment, you’re going to be lost.’ Thus the film presents a paradox. To try to understand Hitler is to risk humanising him and reducing his culpability; but to admit that he defies all understanding is to risk elevating him to superhuman status, to make him a modern Lucifer.”
‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology, then Covid hit – interview by Edward Helmore in The Guardian. “In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.… ‘Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t really get at the motivational roots for why people don’t want to get vaccinated,’ Taylor told the Guardian. … A preferable term, Taylor writes, and one that has been used by psychologists for close to 60 years, is psychological reactance – a motivational response to ‘rules, regulation, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening to one’s autonomy and freedom of choice’. … ‘The harder you try to push and persuade these psychologically reactive people, the more they are likely to push back because they perceive their freedoms are being threatened. While they may be a minority, they are also highly vocal, and so we see many different types of people joining in.’ That in turn, leads to what psychologists term ‘motivated thinking’, otherwise fantasy-thinking in which Covid-19, or climate change, are seen as hoaxes so people can tell themselves positive stories that everything is going to be fine and their freedom is not threatened.”
Being You by Professor Anil Seth: the exhilarating new science of consciousness – review by Gaia Vince in The Guardian. See also Seth’s ‘Consciousness: Eight Questions Science Must Answer’. “Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field…. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing. We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world that’s really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains…. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us,’ Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example…. What … is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being …? At its most fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seth’s often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our ‘self’ is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others’ minds.”
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Sunday, 5 September 2021
Cuttings: July 2021
The internet is rotting – article by Jonathan Zittrain in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has ‘billions of books and no central filing system.’. … Some colleagues and I joined those investigating the extent of link rot in 2014 and again this past spring. The first study… focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.… The problem isn’t just for academic articles and judicial opinions. With … the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted…. The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
From Boomer to Zoomer: a whistle-stop tour of the terms for our times – note by Steven Poole to article ‘On the Road to Bridget Jones: five books that define each generation’ in The Guardian. “Boomer. According to the US Census Bureau, the postwar baby boom lasted from 1946 to 1964. Boomers grew up in a now near-mythical world of cheap houses and dependable jobs. The word is most enjoyably employed now in the dismissive retort ‘OK boomer’, which can be used by anyone at all to someone just a little bit older than them. // Generation X. Obviously the coolest generation, named after the most mysterious letter. … It is the generation born between the mid 1960s and early 80s, which grew up ironic and disaffected in a world of ‘McJobs’ and information overload. … // Millennials. Spare a thought for millennials: they are so named because they are the cohort who came of age around the year 2000, but the term inescapably evokes a sort of silly cultishness.”
Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention – article by Katrine Marçal in The Guardian. “Why did it take us so long to put wheels on suitcases? This has become something of a classic mystery … in management and innovation literature…. But there is one factor that these thinkers have missed. I stumbled upon it when I was researching my book on women and innovation. I found a photo in a newspaper archive of a woman in a fur coat pulling a suitcase on wheels. It made me stop in my tracks because it was from 1952, 20 years before the official ‘invention’ of the rolling suitcase. … In 1967, a Leicestershire woman wrote a sharply worded letter to her local newspaper complaining that a bus conductor had forced her to buy an additional ticket for her rolling suitcase. … The woman in the fur coat and the Leicestershire woman on the bus are the vital clues to this mystery. Suitcases with wheels existed decades before they were ‘invented’ in 1972, but were considered niche products for women. And that a product for women could make life easier for men or completely disrupt the whole global luggage industry was not an idea the market was then ready to entertain. Resistance to the rolling suitcase had everything to do with gender. Sadow, the ‘official’ inventor, described how difficult it was to get any US department store chains to sell it: ‘At this time, there was this macho feeling. Men used to carry luggage for their wives. It was … the natural thing to do, I guess.’”
Caitlin Moran on How to Be a Woman: ‘It was a thrill to rifle through the box marked TABOOS’ – article by Caitlin Moran in The Guardian. “It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. … I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? … ‘What topics would you cover?’ my editor asked. ‘Everything. Big and small. And as amusingly as possible. Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, periods, abortion, miscarriage, abusive relationships, comfort eating, how great furry muffs are, masturbation, having children, not having children, how ridiculous £20k weddings are, loving your body, Katie Price, Lady Gaga, being fat, how we treat our role models, what we call our vaginas, how we need to reclaim the word “feminism”. The headline would be “How to Be a Woman” … ’ I tailed off. ‘Actually, Nicola, I’ve just realised – it’s not a feature. It’s a book. Soz. Bye.’”
Why be a performative Insta parent when your kids will be happy in front of the TV? – article by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. “This week, I happened to come across a particularly fascinating Instagram post from a member of that strange and relatively new breed of people known as ‘mumfluencers’, and it shows the aforementioned mumfluencer, dressed ever-so-casually but with mysteriously perfect makeup, marching through a forest with three small boys. Most intriguingly, she is holding a letter board on which she has spelled out: ‘Into the woods we go because kids won’t remember their best day of television.’ I have a lot of questions about this photo, which has gone heavily viral in the US… Has this person ever been a kid? I absolutely remember my best days of television, because television is bloody brilliant, especially when you’re a kid. … Of course, the message of this photo has nothing to do with television, and everything to do with parenting – and specifically, performative parenting. There’s been a lot of it about recently, especially during the lockdowns, when some parents needed to prove to everyone that they were not merely parenting in this difficult time, but parenting better than anyone ever has or will. (New linguistic rule: when a noun turns into a verb – eg, to friend, to parent – it becomes more about outward show than emotional connection.)”
Summer reading list for conspiracy theorists – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Slaughterhouse 5G, Vonegut. Of Mice and Little Green Men, Steinbeck. Normal Sheeple, Rooney. Across the World in 80 Days, Verne. The Old Man and the CIA, Hemmingway.”
Footballer speak – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. “How does it feel Mr Footballer? // (On a distant planet) Yeh y’know obviously it’s a great honour to make first contact we’re here to represent humanity and give it 100 per cent // (In hell) Yeh y’know obviously it’s disappointing to be in the fiery pit but you’ve got to look forward // (In a disintegrating landscape) Yeh y’know obviously the murderous nanobots are a factor but we’ve got to take the positives // (At a VE Day celebration) Yeh y’know obviously we’re pleased to win World War 2 they came out organised and made it difficult for us // (In an abstract geometric scene) Yeh y’know obviously there’s no easy games at Multiverse we’ve just got to take one dimension at a time // (In heaven) Yeh y’know obviously it’s great to see the face of God we’re happy with that // (In a post-apocalyptic landscape) Yeh y’know obviously we wanted to survive as a species but we haven’t managed to do that.”
Realpolitik: the book behind Boris Johnson’s vision for ‘Global Britain’ – review by Richard Godwin in The Guardian. “[John] Bew’s Realpolitik was written six years ago… In his summary of Rochau’s four key principles … you begin to see why the book might have ‘pinged’ for Johnson. The first is that ‘the law of the strong is the determining power in politics’ – so, it doesn’t matter if you ‘won the argument’, as Jeremy Corbyn protested after the 2019 election. It matters that you won the actual election. However, power often lies outside conventional politics, too; the art is to figure out where precisely it lies and how to use it. The second principle is that the most effective governments harness the competing social forces within a society. Harmonious nations are strong nations. If an opponent cannot be crushed, they must be assimilated. … The third is that ideas do play a vital role in politics, but not because they are ‘right’ or ‘true’ or ‘moral’. They matter only insofar as people care about them. … And finally: the zeitgeist – ‘the consolidated opinion of the century’ – is the most important factor in determining a nation’s trajectory. All leaders, even the strongest ones, are beholden to forces they cannot control. … So being able to switch priorities, renege on commitments, make new friends and ditch old ones is not necessarily the weakness your opponents imagine it to be. One moment liberal, migrant-loving mayor of London; the next moment champion of the north and enemy of the ‘woke’.”
The Weirdest People in the World: a theory-of-everything study – review by Nicholas Guyatt in The Guardian. “There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, ‘weird’: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic. … He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. … Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, ‘weird’ culture became more receptive to strangers. … Historians will find plenty to dispute here [and] a casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. …the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents ‘prosperity’ and ‘innovation’ rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of ‘weird’ culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate ‘impersonal prosociality’ when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.”
Wednesday, 21 July 2021
Seen and Heard: April to June 2021
Magic Mobile by Michael Frayn – lovely collection of short funny pieces, including many perceptive pastiches of people's extraordinary use of language. My favourites: 'As true as I'm standing here', a documentary presenter is determined to render the film-making process transparent to viewers by including ALL the shot footage. 'Well done ya!', a telesales caller is treated to unsolicited replies to their unsolicited questions. 'Oh, you shouldn't have' The MD of a gas company sends an inappropriately chatty letter to a customer who has just paid their final demand bill under threat of legal action.
Agent A: Puzzle in Disguise – very enjoyable escape room puzzle game. The sixties spy thriller theme – it both looks and sounds (musically) like The Incredibles – has you playing in first person as the eponymous secret agent (gender unspecified), in pursuit of the femme fatale Ruby La Rouge, who has set numerous obstacles and traps in your path while carelessly also leaving around sufficient tools, hints and passcodes for you to overcome them. See also a review (of Part 1 only), an interview with the designer, and a walkthrough guide.
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – another escape room puzzle game, but this one is creepy: a bit David Lynch. Astonishing how hard puzzles can be, even in a very limited setting with very restricted possible actions. Thank goodness for walkthroughs...
Funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – a most impressive display, actually made more impressive by Covid restrictions, without thousands of public spectators, and the Windsor Castle chapel choir replaced by four soloists who did a stunning job. See a detailed commentaries on the musical choices by John Rutter and on the performance by James MacMillan (composer).
Saved by a Stranger – BBC TV documentary series. The concept sounded a bit cheesy - people whose lives have been saved are reunited with the people who saved them - but it was actually moving and soul-enlarging, mainly down to two things. The first was the time and care taken to reconstruct for us the life-threatening circumstances (the 7/7 London terrorist bombings, the Bosnian genocide, HIV infection in the 1980s, the Belfast 'Troubles' etc). The second was Anita Rani as presenter and interlocutor for the survivors, displaying the necessary compassion and sensitivity to an extraordinary degree.
Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles – astonishing fly-on-the-wall documentary series of life-saving surgery inside the womb. If you needed to have it done, this is the team you’d want to have doing it.
Call the Midwife, series 10 – another set of challenging but heart-warming episodes, now up to 1966.
Gris – the game looked good, with an intriguing premise, but I just couldn't manage the platforming, and quickly abandoned it.
Jenny LeClue: Detectivú – well-reviewed cartoon adventure game. Now this is more like it! A game that isn't too hard (arguably it's too easy), yet manages to continually baffle and surprise. Jenny LeClue is the heroine of Arthur Finklestein's series of children's detective stories, now facing declining sales as readers start to find them too safe and trite. Under pressure from his publisher, Finkelstein throws Jenny into a challenging story, involving conspiracy, corporate cover-up and (gasp!) actual death, at least apparently. Pitch-perfect scripting and (in the enhanced edition) voice acting brings the story to life. Once again, indie studios show how it should be done.
The Odyssey – in a new well-received translation by Emily Wilson, breaking with the tradition (going back to Alexander Pope) of rendering it in portentous language. "Homer's language is markedly rhythmical, but it is not difficult or ostentatious.... Stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric." (Translator's note, p. 83) Her straight-forward, ordinary language certainly makes it easier to see what is happening, and indeed not happening. The surprise for me was how little of the work is actually occupied by heroic adventures (which are all one gets in popular re-tellings), and how much by people being entertained as guests in each other's courts. Is this in fact a work primarily about hospitality? The ending – in which Athena abruptly intervenes to prevent all-out war between Odysseus's family and the relatives of the suitors he slaughtered – is just baffling.
Extra Life – BBC documentary series, in which David Olusoga and Steven Johnson recount the history and the science of four key developments which led to the past century's dramatic increase in life expectancy, with more than an eye on the current Covid pandemic: vaccination, drugs, data and hygiene behaviour. No dumbing down or presentational gimmicks, and great history from Olusoga (as you’d expect), always pointing out the social and political setting of what might otherwise appear as simple scientific progress. TV at its best.
Agent A: Puzzle in Disguise – very enjoyable escape room puzzle game. The sixties spy thriller theme – it both looks and sounds (musically) like The Incredibles – has you playing in first person as the eponymous secret agent (gender unspecified), in pursuit of the femme fatale Ruby La Rouge, who has set numerous obstacles and traps in your path while carelessly also leaving around sufficient tools, hints and passcodes for you to overcome them. See also a review (of Part 1 only), an interview with the designer, and a walkthrough guide.
Rusty Lake: Cube Escape – another escape room puzzle game, but this one is creepy: a bit David Lynch. Astonishing how hard puzzles can be, even in a very limited setting with very restricted possible actions. Thank goodness for walkthroughs...
Funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – a most impressive display, actually made more impressive by Covid restrictions, without thousands of public spectators, and the Windsor Castle chapel choir replaced by four soloists who did a stunning job. See a detailed commentaries on the musical choices by John Rutter and on the performance by James MacMillan (composer).
Saved by a Stranger – BBC TV documentary series. The concept sounded a bit cheesy - people whose lives have been saved are reunited with the people who saved them - but it was actually moving and soul-enlarging, mainly down to two things. The first was the time and care taken to reconstruct for us the life-threatening circumstances (the 7/7 London terrorist bombings, the Bosnian genocide, HIV infection in the 1980s, the Belfast 'Troubles' etc). The second was Anita Rani as presenter and interlocutor for the survivors, displaying the necessary compassion and sensitivity to an extraordinary degree.
Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles – astonishing fly-on-the-wall documentary series of life-saving surgery inside the womb. If you needed to have it done, this is the team you’d want to have doing it.
Call the Midwife, series 10 – another set of challenging but heart-warming episodes, now up to 1966.
Gris – the game looked good, with an intriguing premise, but I just couldn't manage the platforming, and quickly abandoned it.
Jenny LeClue: Detectivú – well-reviewed cartoon adventure game. Now this is more like it! A game that isn't too hard (arguably it's too easy), yet manages to continually baffle and surprise. Jenny LeClue is the heroine of Arthur Finklestein's series of children's detective stories, now facing declining sales as readers start to find them too safe and trite. Under pressure from his publisher, Finkelstein throws Jenny into a challenging story, involving conspiracy, corporate cover-up and (gasp!) actual death, at least apparently. Pitch-perfect scripting and (in the enhanced edition) voice acting brings the story to life. Once again, indie studios show how it should be done.
The Odyssey – in a new well-received translation by Emily Wilson, breaking with the tradition (going back to Alexander Pope) of rendering it in portentous language. "Homer's language is markedly rhythmical, but it is not difficult or ostentatious.... Stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric." (Translator's note, p. 83) Her straight-forward, ordinary language certainly makes it easier to see what is happening, and indeed not happening. The surprise for me was how little of the work is actually occupied by heroic adventures (which are all one gets in popular re-tellings), and how much by people being entertained as guests in each other's courts. Is this in fact a work primarily about hospitality? The ending – in which Athena abruptly intervenes to prevent all-out war between Odysseus's family and the relatives of the suitors he slaughtered – is just baffling.
Extra Life – BBC documentary series, in which David Olusoga and Steven Johnson recount the history and the science of four key developments which led to the past century's dramatic increase in life expectancy, with more than an eye on the current Covid pandemic: vaccination, drugs, data and hygiene behaviour. No dumbing down or presentational gimmicks, and great history from Olusoga (as you’d expect), always pointing out the social and political setting of what might otherwise appear as simple scientific progress. TV at its best.
Saturday, 3 July 2021
Cuttings: June 2021
Thelma & Louise at 30: a groundbreaking road movie that still strikes a nerve – article by Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. “There is plenty about [Thelma & Louise] that remains audacious, but still now, I think one of the boldest decisions taken by writer Callie Khouri and director Ridley Scott is to let it be funny, despite the weight of some of its storylines. It is quick, sarcastic, even silly. Thelma tells Louise to shoot the cop’s radio, she blows out the one playing music in his car. Darryl, Thelma’s grotesque, preening, deadbeat husband, is so incapable of talking to her nicely that when he answers the phone with a pleasant ‘Hello’, she immediately knows he’s being watched by the police. ‘My husband wasn’t sweet to me,’ she tells the sexist truck driver who crudely heckled her and Louise on the road, ‘and look how I turned out.’ There is an obscene number of air-punch moments like this …, though brilliantly, Khouri always leads the audience into a kind of moral murk. Thelma is famously robbed by Pitt’s JD, though he has given her fair warning that he is a robber. He leaves her with the gift of his criminal playbook, and she turns out to be really very good at a life of crime. It is satisfying to watch her stick up a store, charmingly, with the exact lines JD gave her. But is her choice to commit armed robbery worse than Louise’s spontaneous decision to shoot Harlan in the heart? Should they blow up the moron’s truck? Is it cathartic? Is it earned? Films, at their best, should challenge your perspective.”
Spain’s postal service accused of racism over flesh-toned stamps – article by Sam Jones in The Guardian. “Spain’s state-owned postal service has been accused of a damaging and counterproductive approach to equality after issuing a set of flesh-toned, anti-racism stamps in which the stamp with the lightest skin colour is worth more than twice as much as the darkest one. On Tuesday, Correos España unveiled the set of four ‘equality stamps’: a pale, €1.60 one, a slightly darker €1.50 one, a brown €0.80 one, and a black €0.70 one.”
The empty office: what we lose when we work from home – article by Gillian Tett in The Guardian. “Although [Xerox PARC] had initially been dominated by scientists, by the time JSB [John Seeley Brown] arrived, a collection of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists were also there. One of these anthropologists was a man named Julian Orr, who was studying the ‘tribe’ of technical repair teams at Xerox…. These technicians were routinely ignored, partly because the managers assumed that they knew what they did. But Orr and JSB suspected this was a big mistake, and that the technicians did not always think or behave as their bosses thought they should. JSB first noticed it … when he met a repairman known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’, who said to him: ‘Well, Mr PhD, suppose this photocopier sitting here had an intermittent image quality fault, how would you go about troubleshooting it?’ JSB knew there was an “official” answer in the office handbook: technicians were supposed to ‘print out 1,000 copies, sort through the output, find a few bad ones, and compare them to the diagnostic’…. ‘Here is what I do,’ Mr Troubleshooter told JSB… ‘I walk to the trash can, tip it upside down, and look at all the copies that have been thrown away. The trash can is a filter – people keep the good copies and throw the bad ones away. So just go to the trash can … and from scanning all the bad ones, interpret what connects them all.’ In short, the engineers were ignoring protocols and using a solution that worked – but one that was ‘invisible … and outside [the] cognitive modelling lens’ of the people running the company, JSB ruefully concluded…. Like many other anthropologists before him, [Orr started] looking at the group rituals, symbols and spatial patterns that the technicians used in their everyday life. [he] quickly realised that many of the most important interactions took place in diners.”
David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’ – interview by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. “Mitchell translated the autism memoir The Reason I Jump from Japanese to English with his wife, Keiko Yoshida. Written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13, the book became an international bestseller and has now been turned into an award-winning documentary also featuring Mitchell. ‘The book challenges stereotypes about autism. Was that important for you?’ ‘By its very existence, it explodes some of the more pernicious, hurtful, despair-inducing myths. If autistic people have no emotional intelligence, how could that book have been written? … And, practically, it helped us understand things like our son’s meltdowns, his sudden inconsolable sobbing or his bursts of joyous, giggly happiness.’ ‘What was the most valuable thing the book taught you?’ To assume intelligence. Don’t assume the lack of it. Assume complete comprehension and act accordingly. No baby talk, don’t adjust your vocabulary, don’t treat an autistic person any differently to a neurotypical person. Let them out of infantilisation prison and allow them full human credentials, which they’re too often denied. You’re doing no harm at all and good things can happen.’ “
The Father: Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower… Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on.… What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise[,] keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.”
Less storytelling, please: why documentaries will benefit from getting real – article by Simran Hans in The Guardian. “‘Main character. Three acts. Heroic journey. Climax. Resolution. Nothing else seems to suffice in today’s documentary marketplace. A good story reigns supreme,’ writes the Toronto-based film-maker Brett Story in an essay for World Records Journal about ‘story’ as documentary’s hottest commodity…. With the intellectual property market booming, there is pressure on those who work in nonfiction – film-makers, long-form journalists, audio producers – to shoehorn the lives of real people into the tried and tested template of classic storytelling. … In her essay, Story argues that ‘story’ is only as natural as capitalism. It’s easier to sell a neat, narrativised nugget of information – but to become reliant on story as an organising principle is to lose something unique to the documentary form…. Documentary films have the power to make viewers understand their subjects rather than to simply identify with them. … Through their juxtapositions, [documentary] film-makers are able to ask questions, convey scale and create emotional resonances that reflect the mundanities, digressions and complexities of real life.”
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. “Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. ‘What’s the aim of the book?’ ‘We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. … We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”
Spain’s postal service accused of racism over flesh-toned stamps – article by Sam Jones in The Guardian. “Spain’s state-owned postal service has been accused of a damaging and counterproductive approach to equality after issuing a set of flesh-toned, anti-racism stamps in which the stamp with the lightest skin colour is worth more than twice as much as the darkest one. On Tuesday, Correos España unveiled the set of four ‘equality stamps’: a pale, €1.60 one, a slightly darker €1.50 one, a brown €0.80 one, and a black €0.70 one.”
The empty office: what we lose when we work from home – article by Gillian Tett in The Guardian. “Although [Xerox PARC] had initially been dominated by scientists, by the time JSB [John Seeley Brown] arrived, a collection of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists were also there. One of these anthropologists was a man named Julian Orr, who was studying the ‘tribe’ of technical repair teams at Xerox…. These technicians were routinely ignored, partly because the managers assumed that they knew what they did. But Orr and JSB suspected this was a big mistake, and that the technicians did not always think or behave as their bosses thought they should. JSB first noticed it … when he met a repairman known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’, who said to him: ‘Well, Mr PhD, suppose this photocopier sitting here had an intermittent image quality fault, how would you go about troubleshooting it?’ JSB knew there was an “official” answer in the office handbook: technicians were supposed to ‘print out 1,000 copies, sort through the output, find a few bad ones, and compare them to the diagnostic’…. ‘Here is what I do,’ Mr Troubleshooter told JSB… ‘I walk to the trash can, tip it upside down, and look at all the copies that have been thrown away. The trash can is a filter – people keep the good copies and throw the bad ones away. So just go to the trash can … and from scanning all the bad ones, interpret what connects them all.’ In short, the engineers were ignoring protocols and using a solution that worked – but one that was ‘invisible … and outside [the] cognitive modelling lens’ of the people running the company, JSB ruefully concluded…. Like many other anthropologists before him, [Orr started] looking at the group rituals, symbols and spatial patterns that the technicians used in their everyday life. [he] quickly realised that many of the most important interactions took place in diners.”
David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’ – interview by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. “Mitchell translated the autism memoir The Reason I Jump from Japanese to English with his wife, Keiko Yoshida. Written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13, the book became an international bestseller and has now been turned into an award-winning documentary also featuring Mitchell. ‘The book challenges stereotypes about autism. Was that important for you?’ ‘By its very existence, it explodes some of the more pernicious, hurtful, despair-inducing myths. If autistic people have no emotional intelligence, how could that book have been written? … And, practically, it helped us understand things like our son’s meltdowns, his sudden inconsolable sobbing or his bursts of joyous, giggly happiness.’ ‘What was the most valuable thing the book taught you?’ To assume intelligence. Don’t assume the lack of it. Assume complete comprehension and act accordingly. No baby talk, don’t adjust your vocabulary, don’t treat an autistic person any differently to a neurotypical person. Let them out of infantilisation prison and allow them full human credentials, which they’re too often denied. You’re doing no harm at all and good things can happen.’ “
The Father: Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower… Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on.… What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise[,] keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.”
Less storytelling, please: why documentaries will benefit from getting real – article by Simran Hans in The Guardian. “‘Main character. Three acts. Heroic journey. Climax. Resolution. Nothing else seems to suffice in today’s documentary marketplace. A good story reigns supreme,’ writes the Toronto-based film-maker Brett Story in an essay for World Records Journal about ‘story’ as documentary’s hottest commodity…. With the intellectual property market booming, there is pressure on those who work in nonfiction – film-makers, long-form journalists, audio producers – to shoehorn the lives of real people into the tried and tested template of classic storytelling. … In her essay, Story argues that ‘story’ is only as natural as capitalism. It’s easier to sell a neat, narrativised nugget of information – but to become reliant on story as an organising principle is to lose something unique to the documentary form…. Documentary films have the power to make viewers understand their subjects rather than to simply identify with them. … Through their juxtapositions, [documentary] film-makers are able to ask questions, convey scale and create emotional resonances that reflect the mundanities, digressions and complexities of real life.”
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. “Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. ‘What’s the aim of the book?’ ‘We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. … We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”
Friday, 4 June 2021
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.”
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.”
Thursday, 3 June 2021
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.
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.
Sunday, 2 May 2021
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.”
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.”
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.”
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