Can "distraction-free" devices change the way we write? – article by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.... I tried 'distraction-free' writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die).... Then, in the late twenty-teens, focussed writing tools started cropping up everywhere.... The movement seemed to crest in the first months of the pandemic, as writers newly intimate with the routines of spouses and roommates—or with their own restlessness—sought peace with newfound desperation."
'Words to avoid' – from the .GOV style guide. Includes: "agenda (unless it’s for a meeting), use ‘plan’ instead"; "deliver, use ‘make’, ‘create’, ‘provide’ or a more specific term (pizzas, post and services are delivered - not abstract concepts like improvements)"; "key (unless it unlocks something), usually not needed but can use ‘important’ or ‘significant’"; "transform, describe what you’re doing to change the thing"; "utilise, use ‘use’"; "going/moving forward, use ‘from now on’ or ‘in the future’ (it’s unlikely we are giving travel directions)"; "one-stop shop, use ‘website’ (we are government, not a retail outlet)".
Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow: the new thinking about feelings – review by Alison Gopnik in The Guardian. "Emotions are evolutionarily ancient, rooted in genes and brain structures we share with insects. And at the same time they are embedded in complex and sophisticated cultural scripts and schemas.... [Mlodinow] chronicles many of the disparate neural, evolutionary, social, cultural, cognitive and phenomenological aspects of emotion within what has become something like the received form for popular science books – the equivalent of the sonnet rhyme scheme. Instead of A, B, C and D, Mlodinow alternates between study summaries, illustrative stories and self-help tips.... What’s missing from the book, and the standard popular science form in general, are theories and explanations – the heart of science.... There is often an inverse relationship between how much psychological phenomena lend themselves to stories – how compelling they are – and how much they lend themselves to scientific explanations."
How Civil Wars Start by Barbara F Walter: sounding the alarm – review by H W Brands in The Guardian. "The key concept is that of 'anocracy', a transition stage of government between autocracy and democracy. The transition can be made in either direction, and it is during the transition that most civil wars erupt. Autocracies possess sufficient powers of repression to keep potential insurgents in check; democracies allow dissidents means to effect change without resorting to violence. But when autocracies weaken, repression can fail, and when democracies ossify, the release valves get stuck.... She notes that on the scale researchers in her field employ, the US in the last few years has slipped into the range of anocracy. The slide commenced in the 1990s with the emergence of partisan television networks; it continued with the efflorescence of Facebook, Twitter and weaponised talk radio. And then: 'Into this political morass stepped the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all: Donald Trump.'... So what is a democrat to do? First, concentrate on improving the performance of government. The research of Walter and her colleagues shows that politics is more important than economics in starting or preventing civil wars. She suggests federalising election laws, curtailing partisan gerrymandering, curbing unaccountable campaign contributions and eliminating the electoral college.... And social media must be regulated."
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser: a panoramic history of getting dressed – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "People have always dressed above their station, and other people have always minded terribly.... Worn, though, consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads – linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool – she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that 'there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.'... Thanhauser, who lives in New York, travels to Texas where America’s modern cotton industry is based. At first sight there may no longer be slave labour of the kind that Georgia and the Carolinas depended on two centuries ago, but the underlying patterns have not changed greatly."
Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence by Dr Gavin Francis: the art of getting better – review by Emily Mayhew in The Guardian. "Francis’s book explains recovery as a discrete therapeutic entity that deserves our full attention and why we should never give up trying to get better, even when it seems we couldn’t get much worse. Recovery is a difficult but essential part of what makes us human. In his characteristically deft case studies, he shows how it’s the time that recovery takes that is, over and over again, the greatest challenge to patient and care-giver... Francis recalls the rich history of slow-paced recovery and of the places and people who enabled it..... The underlying recognition of taking our time to rebuild ourselves is a profound insight into human regenerative capabilities. We used to know this, but somewhere in the white heat of changing medical technologies, we forgot and came instead to expect the instant and the effortless."
Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the 'Vimes Boots Index' as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the 'insidiously creeping prices' of basic food products. The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner.... 'The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,' wrote Pratchett [in the Discworld novel Men at Arms]. 'Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.'"
Thursday, 3 February 2022
Sunday, 16 January 2022
Seen and heard: July to December 2021
One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, by Musa Okwonga – memories of his schooldays, by an ordinary black kid from Staines, unusual only in that he won a scholarship to Eton. Interesting, but I wish he had been as detailed in his accounts of the perpetuation of class culture as in his accounts of casual and not-so-casual racism. Sample: "Shamelessness is the superpower of a certain section of the English upper classes. While so many other people in the country are hamstrung by the deference and social embarrassment they have been taught since birth, the upper classes calmly parade on through the streets and boardrooms to claim the spoils. They don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, but this is where they perfect it." I think he's probably right, but precisely HOW this happens is still a mystery. (See interview and longer extract in The Guardian and further extracts on Unbound.
Tell Me Why – another good (but not great) adventure game from the producers of Life is Strange. Powerful setting (small-town Alaska) and setup (twins reunite as adults to clear out their single-parent mother's house, having been separated after her shocking death many years ago), with a sensitively explored sub-theme of transexuality (the boy twin was born a girl). I wasn't entirely happy with either of the two alternative endings, but it was definitely worth the journey. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)
Live from London Summer – more livestreamed concerts from Voces8 and their friends, some of them excellent, notably 'Angel of the Apocalypse' (Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, led by violinist Jack Liebeck), and Handel arias and duets sung by Mary Bevan and Barnaby Smith (see their new CD, with a YouTube sample of Barnaby singing 'Ombra Mai Fu'). Also a beautiful encore to the King's Singers concert, in which they formed a supergroup with Voces8: 'Lullabye', by Billy Joel.
Several classic films, which I saw for the first time on TV: Laura (powerful noir), The Innocents (really, really creepy, especially when vile insults spring out of the mouth of the sweet little boy), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (odd but successful genre mashup). But the one that has stayed with me is Went the Day Well? (imagined German takeover of an English village during the early years of World War 2), especially after seeing again on TV the recent Their Finest (2016), about a WW2 film unit's making of a morale boosting Dunkirk drama. This made me think about how the film was put together and why, and how it would have been seen by audiences in 1942, with the events being set that very same year, a prologue and epilogue establishing a narrative perspective in the future, from after the end of the war, "when old Hitler got what was coming to him".
Professor T – sharply written and produced detective show, with Ben Miller excellent as the academic criminologist with OCD and Frances de la Tour as the (not unsympathetic) mother from hell. Proper plots too, with solutions which actually make sense, not a killer picked at random by the scriptwriter. Disappointed not to see more shots of Cambridge though, unlike Morse or Lewis where you can play the game of trying to be the first to spot the Sheldonian each time it turns up.
Write Around the World with Richard E Grant – short BBC series, exploring connections between famous works and the places they were written. In other words, an excuse to see around some exotic locations. Richard E Grant is a good travel companion, making this a superior documentary of its kind.
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, Sam Peters, Secret Files 3 – decent adventure games, on the model of the original Secret Files: Tunguska, which means ridiculously large inventories and numerous locations making the puzzles challenging. The translations from the German have improved, though, so that the voiceovers flow more naturally. I was actually getting fond of Nina and Max by the end, though I still think she sounds too American for a Russian brought up in Germany.
The Mandalorian, Seasons 1 and 2 – binge-watched at a time when I needed some good distraction. Really confirms the thesis that science fiction has taken over the tropes of the Western, re-setting them with spaceships for horses and blasters for Colt 45s. One can certainly imagine the strong, silent hero being played by Clint Eastwood in his heyday.
A House Though Time, Season 4 – more slices of British lives, this time in Leeds, featuring stories of rags to riches and back to rags, exploitative capitalists and social campaigners, war and disease and journalism. Most moving was the reunion of former university students who had shared the house at the turn of the Millenium.
Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies – excellent TV series on Sky Arts, with good clips illustrating the evolving techniques composers used to achieve great film effects.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – fascinating detail in this rapidly-produced collaboration with (ghost-writer?) "writer/editor" Deborah Crewe. But the most striking bit for me was Cath Green’s account of how she decided to write the book. In August 2020, during a lull in the vaccine work and while lockdown was lifted, she was on holiday with her daughter and friends at a campsite in Wales, and got into conversation with another camper while waiting for dinner from the pizza van. From talk about the poor mobile phone signal, the other woman voiced her concerns about 5G, and then went on to vaccines. "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth." At which point Cath Green came clean on what she did for a living, and that she was one of "them" and knew precisely what was in the vaccine because she was making it, and offered to answer any questions she had. They talked for about 15 minutes, though somehow I doubt that the other woman changed her mind. But at least the rest of us got this book out of it.
Listening through the Lens: The Christopher Nupen Films – BBC programme about a film maker who pioneered classical music documentaries on TV, using his privileged access to Daniel Barenboim and other performers of that generation to get an intimate behind-the-scenes view.
Jonny Quest documentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) – excellent and thorough (over 2 hours long) fan-film about the 1960s TV cartoon series, the first action adventure show from Hanna-Barbera, then most for comedy cartoons such as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat and The Flintstones. It was hugely important to boys of my generation, and it still stands up well, though the representation of tribal peoples is very much of its time. More troubling to me now is its complete masculinity, with no regular female characters at all; Jonny's father is the government scientist, whose missions provide the basis for each episode, but we never even hear what happened to his mother. I still love it that Jonny's best friend Haji is Asian, even though it's remarkably unclear what kind of Asian he is. And I was delighted to discover that 'The Invisible Monster' is other fans' favourite episode also; it's definitely the most scary.
Shetland series 6 – top-notch BBC crime drama. We love it, though we have trouble remembering the story from one week to the next. Typical scene: Tosh is taking a call in the police headquarters, and puts down the phone looking aghast. "It's Sharon!" she gasps, and everyone looks stunned. And we think: "Who the hell is Sharon?" Maybe we need to take notes. But it's a testimony to the power of the writing, acting and filming that it keeps us gripped, even though we can't follow what's going on. God help us, there are unresolved plotlines at the end of this series which are being carried over to the next; they’d better give us a pretty good catch-up.
The Moment of Silence – German adventure game from 2004, resembling in some ways the wonderful Norwegian The Longest Journey (1999), especially in the extensive and well-written dialogues, but alas not in the quality of its characterisation or its storytelling. I don’t think it deserved its 4-star Adventure Gamers review.
Back to work video – funny and charming Belgian video, which did the rounds when people who'd been working from home during lockdown were starting to go back. (See the original, without English subtitles.)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway – extraordinary documentary presented by Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald about the wildlife around the edges of the M25. She's a great guide; we should see more of her.
Drummers playing the BBC News theme – led by BBC weather presenter Owain Wyn Evans, finishing his 24-hour drum-athon for Children in Need live on the local news.
A Woman's Guide to Heart Disease, by Carolyn Thomas – important and useful book for women who have had heart attacks, chiefly for normalising their experience and letting them know that it’s quite usual for women, rather than falling to the floor grasping their chest (as is the cliché for men) to try to continue with their regular activities, thinking “blimey my heartburn / asthma / angina is bad today." Also that it’s usual to be frustrated at how long it takes to recover any amount of strength, depressed at the new kind of person one has become, and to have people say “you’re looking really well” when you know you’re going to be in a state of collapse in an hour’s time.
Strictly Come Dancing 2021 – a very strong set of celebrities this year, with no absolutely plonkers and a lot who with no previous background turned out to be really quite good, though not necessarily consistently. Rose and Giovanni fully deserved their win, with a beautiful Couple’s choice (including silent interlude), but I wish we’d seen AJ and Kai in the final too (she had to withdraw due to injury), because they did a tremendous Quickstep the previous week, or alternatively that Rhys and Nancy (who were eliminated at Semi-final stage) could have been promoted to take part, because they did some tremendous dances, such as their Argentine tango.
Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing, by Gretchen McCulloch – really good analysis of internet language, by a linguist not a technologist, so delightfully free of techno-hype. Also great that it's historical, so she distinguishes several groups of internet people: (1) old internet people, who used bulletin boards before the World Wide Web, and are probably the most technically skilled; (2) full internet people, who went online in the second wave around 2000 and used it as a medium for their social lives; (3) semi-internet people, who went online in the same wave but used it for work or functional purposes; (4) pre-internet people, who went online in a third wave, when use of it became unavoidable, but whose lives were largely lived before it; (5) post-internet people, who have never known a time without the internet, who came to it when their parents were already on Facebook. All these groups use language on the internet in a different way. It's not just about emojis.
The Truth – clever and moving French film, with Catherine Deneuve as a film actor who has just published her autobiography and Juliette Binoche as her daughter who disputes her account of events. We get hints: is the mother's memory playing tricks (could she perhaps be in early stage dementia), or is she being manipulative - or is the real truth that all storytelling, all acting involves placing a construction on the world? The questions are explored, as she takes a part in a science fiction film, playing the elderly daughter of a space traveller who remains eternally young. A good watch.
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by Jonathan Van-Tam – now this is what we pay our licence fee for: JVT (as everyone calls him), familiar as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health on the podium but here appearing as a scientist and virologist, giving school kids the lowdown on just what viruses are, how they spread, and how vaccines work against them. Best bit was in the demonstration of mathematical modelling, by one of his guest presenters, which had the kids holding up their phones while a wirelessly connected connected app changed the screen colour: blue or yellow, depending on their R number or infection rate, and red if they were infected. In the first few runs, the infection petered out after a few iterations. But with just a small change to the starting conditions, you heard the kids giving out little squeaks of fright as phone after phone went red, spreading the disease across the lecture hall.
Tell Me Why – another good (but not great) adventure game from the producers of Life is Strange. Powerful setting (small-town Alaska) and setup (twins reunite as adults to clear out their single-parent mother's house, having been separated after her shocking death many years ago), with a sensitively explored sub-theme of transexuality (the boy twin was born a girl). I wasn't entirely happy with either of the two alternative endings, but it was definitely worth the journey. (See review on Adventure Gamers.)
Live from London Summer – more livestreamed concerts from Voces8 and their friends, some of them excellent, notably 'Angel of the Apocalypse' (Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, led by violinist Jack Liebeck), and Handel arias and duets sung by Mary Bevan and Barnaby Smith (see their new CD, with a YouTube sample of Barnaby singing 'Ombra Mai Fu'). Also a beautiful encore to the King's Singers concert, in which they formed a supergroup with Voces8: 'Lullabye', by Billy Joel.
Several classic films, which I saw for the first time on TV: Laura (powerful noir), The Innocents (really, really creepy, especially when vile insults spring out of the mouth of the sweet little boy), and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (odd but successful genre mashup). But the one that has stayed with me is Went the Day Well? (imagined German takeover of an English village during the early years of World War 2), especially after seeing again on TV the recent Their Finest (2016), about a WW2 film unit's making of a morale boosting Dunkirk drama. This made me think about how the film was put together and why, and how it would have been seen by audiences in 1942, with the events being set that very same year, a prologue and epilogue establishing a narrative perspective in the future, from after the end of the war, "when old Hitler got what was coming to him".
Professor T – sharply written and produced detective show, with Ben Miller excellent as the academic criminologist with OCD and Frances de la Tour as the (not unsympathetic) mother from hell. Proper plots too, with solutions which actually make sense, not a killer picked at random by the scriptwriter. Disappointed not to see more shots of Cambridge though, unlike Morse or Lewis where you can play the game of trying to be the first to spot the Sheldonian each time it turns up.
Write Around the World with Richard E Grant – short BBC series, exploring connections between famous works and the places they were written. In other words, an excuse to see around some exotic locations. Richard E Grant is a good travel companion, making this a superior documentary of its kind.
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, Sam Peters, Secret Files 3 – decent adventure games, on the model of the original Secret Files: Tunguska, which means ridiculously large inventories and numerous locations making the puzzles challenging. The translations from the German have improved, though, so that the voiceovers flow more naturally. I was actually getting fond of Nina and Max by the end, though I still think she sounds too American for a Russian brought up in Germany.
The Mandalorian, Seasons 1 and 2 – binge-watched at a time when I needed some good distraction. Really confirms the thesis that science fiction has taken over the tropes of the Western, re-setting them with spaceships for horses and blasters for Colt 45s. One can certainly imagine the strong, silent hero being played by Clint Eastwood in his heyday.
John Eliot Gardiner, conducting Handel and Bach at the Proms – one of the most thrilling concerts I've heard in a long time, this 78-year-old bringing zip and punch to some great Baroque tunes.
A House Though Time, Season 4 – more slices of British lives, this time in Leeds, featuring stories of rags to riches and back to rags, exploitative capitalists and social campaigners, war and disease and journalism. Most moving was the reunion of former university students who had shared the house at the turn of the Millenium.
Great Film Composers: The Music of the Movies – excellent TV series on Sky Arts, with good clips illustrating the evolving techniques composers used to achieve great film effects.
Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus, by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green – fascinating detail in this rapidly-produced collaboration with (ghost-writer?) "writer/editor" Deborah Crewe. But the most striking bit for me was Cath Green’s account of how she decided to write the book. In August 2020, during a lull in the vaccine work and while lockdown was lifted, she was on holiday with her daughter and friends at a campsite in Wales, and got into conversation with another camper while waiting for dinner from the pizza van. From talk about the poor mobile phone signal, the other woman voiced her concerns about 5G, and then went on to vaccines. "I'm not saying there is definitely a conspiracy. But I do worry that we don't know what they put in these vaccines: mercury and other toxic chemicals. I don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth." At which point Cath Green came clean on what she did for a living, and that she was one of "them" and knew precisely what was in the vaccine because she was making it, and offered to answer any questions she had. They talked for about 15 minutes, though somehow I doubt that the other woman changed her mind. But at least the rest of us got this book out of it.
Listening through the Lens: The Christopher Nupen Films – BBC programme about a film maker who pioneered classical music documentaries on TV, using his privileged access to Daniel Barenboim and other performers of that generation to get an intimate behind-the-scenes view.
Jonny Quest documentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) – excellent and thorough (over 2 hours long) fan-film about the 1960s TV cartoon series, the first action adventure show from Hanna-Barbera, then most for comedy cartoons such as Huckleberry Hound, Top Cat and The Flintstones. It was hugely important to boys of my generation, and it still stands up well, though the representation of tribal peoples is very much of its time. More troubling to me now is its complete masculinity, with no regular female characters at all; Jonny's father is the government scientist, whose missions provide the basis for each episode, but we never even hear what happened to his mother. I still love it that Jonny's best friend Haji is Asian, even though it's remarkably unclear what kind of Asian he is. And I was delighted to discover that 'The Invisible Monster' is other fans' favourite episode also; it's definitely the most scary.
Shetland series 6 – top-notch BBC crime drama. We love it, though we have trouble remembering the story from one week to the next. Typical scene: Tosh is taking a call in the police headquarters, and puts down the phone looking aghast. "It's Sharon!" she gasps, and everyone looks stunned. And we think: "Who the hell is Sharon?" Maybe we need to take notes. But it's a testimony to the power of the writing, acting and filming that it keeps us gripped, even though we can't follow what's going on. God help us, there are unresolved plotlines at the end of this series which are being carried over to the next; they’d better give us a pretty good catch-up.
The Moment of Silence – German adventure game from 2004, resembling in some ways the wonderful Norwegian The Longest Journey (1999), especially in the extensive and well-written dialogues, but alas not in the quality of its characterisation or its storytelling. I don’t think it deserved its 4-star Adventure Gamers review.
Back to work video – funny and charming Belgian video, which did the rounds when people who'd been working from home during lockdown were starting to go back. (See the original, without English subtitles.)
The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway – extraordinary documentary presented by Helen (H is for Hawk) Macdonald about the wildlife around the edges of the M25. She's a great guide; we should see more of her.
Drummers playing the BBC News theme – led by BBC weather presenter Owain Wyn Evans, finishing his 24-hour drum-athon for Children in Need live on the local news.
A Woman's Guide to Heart Disease, by Carolyn Thomas – important and useful book for women who have had heart attacks, chiefly for normalising their experience and letting them know that it’s quite usual for women, rather than falling to the floor grasping their chest (as is the cliché for men) to try to continue with their regular activities, thinking “blimey my heartburn / asthma / angina is bad today." Also that it’s usual to be frustrated at how long it takes to recover any amount of strength, depressed at the new kind of person one has become, and to have people say “you’re looking really well” when you know you’re going to be in a state of collapse in an hour’s time.
Strictly Come Dancing 2021 – a very strong set of celebrities this year, with no absolutely plonkers and a lot who with no previous background turned out to be really quite good, though not necessarily consistently. Rose and Giovanni fully deserved their win, with a beautiful Couple’s choice (including silent interlude), but I wish we’d seen AJ and Kai in the final too (she had to withdraw due to injury), because they did a tremendous Quickstep the previous week, or alternatively that Rhys and Nancy (who were eliminated at Semi-final stage) could have been promoted to take part, because they did some tremendous dances, such as their Argentine tango.
Because Internet: Understanding how Language is Changing, by Gretchen McCulloch – really good analysis of internet language, by a linguist not a technologist, so delightfully free of techno-hype. Also great that it's historical, so she distinguishes several groups of internet people: (1) old internet people, who used bulletin boards before the World Wide Web, and are probably the most technically skilled; (2) full internet people, who went online in the second wave around 2000 and used it as a medium for their social lives; (3) semi-internet people, who went online in the same wave but used it for work or functional purposes; (4) pre-internet people, who went online in a third wave, when use of it became unavoidable, but whose lives were largely lived before it; (5) post-internet people, who have never known a time without the internet, who came to it when their parents were already on Facebook. All these groups use language on the internet in a different way. It's not just about emojis.
The Truth – clever and moving French film, with Catherine Deneuve as a film actor who has just published her autobiography and Juliette Binoche as her daughter who disputes her account of events. We get hints: is the mother's memory playing tricks (could she perhaps be in early stage dementia), or is she being manipulative - or is the real truth that all storytelling, all acting involves placing a construction on the world? The questions are explored, as she takes a part in a science fiction film, playing the elderly daughter of a space traveller who remains eternally young. A good watch.
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by Jonathan Van-Tam – now this is what we pay our licence fee for: JVT (as everyone calls him), familiar as the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health on the podium but here appearing as a scientist and virologist, giving school kids the lowdown on just what viruses are, how they spread, and how vaccines work against them. Best bit was in the demonstration of mathematical modelling, by one of his guest presenters, which had the kids holding up their phones while a wirelessly connected connected app changed the screen colour: blue or yellow, depending on their R number or infection rate, and red if they were infected. In the first few runs, the infection petered out after a few iterations. But with just a small change to the starting conditions, you heard the kids giving out little squeaks of fright as phone after phone went red, spreading the disease across the lecture hall.
Saturday, 1 January 2022
Cuttings: December 2021
The neoliberal era is ending. What comes next? – article by Rutrger Bregman in The Correspondent, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Where the neoliberals had spent years preparing for the crises of the 1970s, [in the financial crash of 2008] their challengers now stood empty-handed. Mostly, they just knew what they were against. Against the cutbacks. Against the establishment. But a programme? It wasn’t clear enough what they were for…. Now, 12 years later, crisis strikes again. One that’s more devastating, more shocking, and more deadly… But the most important distinction between 2008 and now? The intellectual groundwork. The ideas that are lying around. … [Gabriel] Zucman [has become] one of the world’s leading tax experts. In his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), he worked out that $7.6tn of the world’s wealth is hidden in tax havens. … His mentor [Thomas] Piketty released another doorstopper in 2020 … but Zucman and Saez’s book can be read in a day. Concisely subtitled ‘How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay,’ it reads like a to-do list for the next US president…. [And] where is wealth actually created? Media like the Financial Times have often claimed – like their neoliberal originators, Friedman and Hayek – that wealth is made by entrepreneurs, not by states. Governments are at most facilitators. … But in 2011, after hearing the umpteenth politician sneeringly call government workers ‘enemies of enterprise', [Mariana Mazzucato] decided to do some research. Two years later, she’d written a book that sent shockwaves through the policymaking world. Title: The Entrepreneurial State. In her book, Mazzucato demonstrates that not only education and healthcare and garbage collection and mail delivery start with the government, but also real, bankable innovations. Take the iPhone. Every sliver of technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone instead of a stupidphone (internet, GPS, touchscreen, battery, hard drive, voice recognition) was developed by researchers on a government payroll…. When government subsidises a major innovation, she says industry is welcome to it. What’s more, that’s the whole idea! But then the government should get its initial outlay back – with interest. It’s maddening that right now the corporations getting the biggest handouts are also the biggest tax evaders. Corporations like Apple, Google, and Pfizer, which have tens of billions tucked away in tax havens around the world.”
4 Easy Steps to Take Back Control Of Your Privacy in 2022 – "1. Email provider: Fastmail..... 2. Password Manager: 1Password.... 3. Search Engine: DuckDuckGo.. 4. Web Browser: Get Off Google Chrome."
All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic – article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.… Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up. Yet, as the forthcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-produced biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain relates, these popular pussycats didn’t give him a happy life. Tragedy and financial ruin soured the milk. He started to believe there was something sinister about electricity, and that his sisters were stealing his money. After attacking them, he was certified insane in 1924 and spent the rest of his life in asylums.”
When meditation turns toxic: the woman exposing spiritual sexism – article by Rachel Mabe in The Guardian. “[After] she … lost a pregnancy and [was] abused by her spiritual teacher in front of her community, [Tara Brach] came to the realization that the world of meditation had a serious problem with sexism and patriarchal practices. [Thirty-eight years later,] Brach has become a spiritual leader… She releases one guided meditation and one dharma talk weekly; more than 2.5 million people listen every month. … While some types of meditation require practitioners to completely detach from earthly concerns,… Brach’s brand of meditation focuses on compassion towards emotions during meditation.… Brach’s ‘little acronym’ Rain … moves through four steps – recognizing difficult emotions, allowing them to be there, investigating them with curiosity and nurturing them with love.”
How to Fix Social Media – article by Nicholas Carr in The New Atlantis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation.... By once again making [the distinctions between different forms of communication that guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era], particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.... The postal system remained the sole technology for long-distance personal communication until the construction of the telegraph system in the middle of the nineteenth century.... Despite the legislative and judicial wrangling, the public never had any doubt that messages sent over wires should be as secure as letters carried in pouches.... Radio broadcasting had no such precedent. For the first time, a large, dispersed audience could receive the same information simultaneously and without delay from a single source.... Amateurs ... played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and ... some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem.... The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs."
Rewritten history – article by Richard J, Evans in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2018 the [National Trust] launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that ‘British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, … less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered.’ Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’.… In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’.… There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway). Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalised British citizenship are examined as part of their admission process. In July 2020, the Historical Association posted a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing the document as ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’ in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonisation.“
Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country – article by Richard Beard in The Guardian, extracted from his book Sad Little Men, referenced in Guardian Letters. “March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.… One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were…In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up ‘the right habits for life’. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip…. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the ‘hardness of heart of the educated’, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class. … According to [Lucille] Iremonger [in her book Fiery Chariot, describing ‘the Phaeton complex’], a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.”
Auld Lang Syne arm-linking at new year connected to Freemasons, book finds – article by PA Media in The Guardian. “Dr Morag Grant, a musicologist at the University of Edinburgh – who has published a book about the song – spotted the masonic link while sifting through the archives of Glasgow’s Mitchell library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge’s Burns supper in 1879 describes the song being sung as members formed ‘the circle of unity’– a common masonic ritual also called the ‘chain of union’.… Burns was a Freemason all his adult life and the organisation was instrumental in promoting his work during his lifetime and after his death…. Grant’s study shows Auld Lang Syne’s global fame preceded the invention of sound recording and radio, despite many commentators having previously linked its rise to the dawn of the broadcast era.“
How one writer’s new year resolution got complicated – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “First draft: write a book. Second draft revised by editor: write a GOOD book. Third draft with publisher’s input: write a good book THAT SELLS. Final draft, approved by editor, publisher and downstairs neighbour Marco: write a good book that sells WITHOUT PACING AROUND QUITE SO MUCH.”
4 Easy Steps to Take Back Control Of Your Privacy in 2022 – "1. Email provider: Fastmail..... 2. Password Manager: 1Password.... 3. Search Engine: DuckDuckGo.. 4. Web Browser: Get Off Google Chrome."
All hail Cat Jesus! The fantastic feline artist behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s latest biopic – article by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Cat Jesus, as the work is known to staff, can be found on a painted mirror in the archives of the Bethlem hospital’s Museum of the Mind. It was created by the celebrated cartoonist of comical cats and Bethlem psychiatric hospital patient Louis Wain, whose art is about to go on show here. One Christmas, Wain was asked to help with the institutional decorations. He asked if he could paint on mirrors – and the results still survive. In Cat Jesus, a feline Father Christmas holds up a white kitten with a sunflower halo around its head while other cats salute the radiant offspring, in front of a Taj Mahal-like building in a fantasy jungle.… Wain drew cats doing human things – playing cricket, taking tea, going to the doctor – and the pet-loving public lapped it up. Yet, as the forthcoming Benedict Cumberbatch-produced biopic The Electrical Life of Louis Wain relates, these popular pussycats didn’t give him a happy life. Tragedy and financial ruin soured the milk. He started to believe there was something sinister about electricity, and that his sisters were stealing his money. After attacking them, he was certified insane in 1924 and spent the rest of his life in asylums.”
When meditation turns toxic: the woman exposing spiritual sexism – article by Rachel Mabe in The Guardian. “[After] she … lost a pregnancy and [was] abused by her spiritual teacher in front of her community, [Tara Brach] came to the realization that the world of meditation had a serious problem with sexism and patriarchal practices. [Thirty-eight years later,] Brach has become a spiritual leader… She releases one guided meditation and one dharma talk weekly; more than 2.5 million people listen every month. … While some types of meditation require practitioners to completely detach from earthly concerns,… Brach’s brand of meditation focuses on compassion towards emotions during meditation.… Brach’s ‘little acronym’ Rain … moves through four steps – recognizing difficult emotions, allowing them to be there, investigating them with curiosity and nurturing them with love.”
How to Fix Social Media – article by Nicholas Carr in The New Atlantis, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. "The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation.... By once again making [the distinctions between different forms of communication that guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era], particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.... The postal system remained the sole technology for long-distance personal communication until the construction of the telegraph system in the middle of the nineteenth century.... Despite the legislative and judicial wrangling, the public never had any doubt that messages sent over wires should be as secure as letters carried in pouches.... Radio broadcasting had no such precedent. For the first time, a large, dispersed audience could receive the same information simultaneously and without delay from a single source.... Amateurs ... played a crucial role in the development of radio technology, and ... some, in another foreshadowing of the net, were bent on mischief and mayhem.... The nuisance became a crisis in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank after its fateful collision with an iceberg. Efforts to rescue the passengers were hindered by a barrage of amateur radio messages. The messages clogged the airwaves, making it hard for official transmissions to get through. Worse, some of the amateurs sent out what we would today call fake news, including a widely circulated rumor that the Titanic remained seaworthy and was being towed to a nearby port for repairs."
Rewritten history – article by Richard J, Evans in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “In 2018 the [National Trust] launched a schools-focused project called Colonial Countryside, pointing out that ‘British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy. As historians take new approaches to British imperial history, … less familiar and often newly discovered colonial stories of our places are being uncovered.’ Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’.… In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’.… There is also evidence of interference in the museum sector, where trustees have apparently been threatened by the government with the non-renewal of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway). Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, the information booklet on which applicants for naturalised British citizenship are examined as part of their admission process. In July 2020, the Historical Association posted a letter signed by 175 historians denouncing the document as ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’ in its account of slavery, the slave trade and the process of decolonisation.“
Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country – article by Richard Beard in The Guardian, extracted from his book Sad Little Men, referenced in Guardian Letters. “March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.… One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were…In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up ‘the right habits for life’. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip…. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the ‘hardness of heart of the educated’, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class. … According to [Lucille] Iremonger [in her book Fiery Chariot, describing ‘the Phaeton complex’], a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.”
Auld Lang Syne arm-linking at new year connected to Freemasons, book finds – article by PA Media in The Guardian. “Dr Morag Grant, a musicologist at the University of Edinburgh – who has published a book about the song – spotted the masonic link while sifting through the archives of Glasgow’s Mitchell library. A newspaper report of an Ayrshire lodge’s Burns supper in 1879 describes the song being sung as members formed ‘the circle of unity’– a common masonic ritual also called the ‘chain of union’.… Burns was a Freemason all his adult life and the organisation was instrumental in promoting his work during his lifetime and after his death…. Grant’s study shows Auld Lang Syne’s global fame preceded the invention of sound recording and radio, despite many commentators having previously linked its rise to the dawn of the broadcast era.“
How one writer’s new year resolution got complicated – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “First draft: write a book. Second draft revised by editor: write a GOOD book. Third draft with publisher’s input: write a good book THAT SELLS. Final draft, approved by editor, publisher and downstairs neighbour Marco: write a good book that sells WITHOUT PACING AROUND QUITE SO MUCH.”
Wednesday, 1 December 2021
Cuttings: November 2021
Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) – Wikipedia entry. “MartÃn de Porres Velázquez OP (9 December 1579 – 3 November 1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order who was … canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people … and all those seeking racial harmony…. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, Don Juan de Porras y de la Peña, and Ana Velázquez, a freed slave of African and Native descent. … Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.”
The big idea: Is democracy up to the task of climate change? – article by Rebecca Willis in The Guardian. “It’s time to acknowledge a difficult truth: our democracies are failing us on the climate crisis. … Faced with a problem of these proportions, some are running out of patience. The veteran Earth scientist James Lovelock puts his faith in eco-authoritarianism. Climate change is so severe, he has said, that ‘it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’. … My experience leads me to a very different conclusion to that of the eco-authoritarians.… Could it be that the problem here is not too much democracy, but too little? … That if we designed a meaningful dialogue between citizens, experts and governments, we would get better outcomes? Just before Covid-19 struck last year, I was part of an incredible experiment that did just this. Climate Assembly UK was a citizens’ assembly commissioned by parliament, bringing together a representative group of 108 citizens. Over a series of weekends, they learned about climate science, impacts and action; discussed and debated with experts and each other; and then voted on recommendations. The assembly’s findings are a coherent, far-reaching set of proposals for tackling the climate emergency – created by a different sort of democratic body. Processes such as this aren’t intended to replace our system of representative democracy, but to make it work better. They allow citizens and politicians alike to talk about what they need from each other.”
Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins: gloriously interwoven tales – review by Edith Hall in The Guardian. “There is no shortage these days of lively, well-written retellings of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but Charlotte Higgins has embraced a central metaphor – weaving – that leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings. Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity…. Inspired by the ancient world’s favourite literary technique of ekphrasis – not only describing a static tableau but telling a story that moves through time via a description of an artwork – she uses the personae of her weavers to add psychological depth, emotional clout and sometimes philosophical profundity to dozens of embedded narratives. Weaving was a metaphor at the heart of ancient metaphysics, since the Fates measure out and cut off the threads of human life itself.”
The Every by Dave Eggers: scathing big-tech satire sequel – review by Rob Doyle in The Guardian. “If you meant to read Shoshana Zuboff’s important and demanding The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, … The Every tackles the same concerns from a shared perspective of humanist outrage, in the form of a gulpable fictive entertainment. The Circle’s titular startup turned metaphysical empire (think: Googlebook) has merged with an unmistakable e-commerce site referred to, doubtless for legal reasons, only by its nickname: ‘the jungle’. Messianically rebranded as The Every, the corporation is now run by Mae Holland, The Circle’s fast-rising, newbie protagonist. Under Holland, The Every pursues its heedless agenda of a worldwide, soft totalitarian order of mass behavioural compliance through surveillance. … Enter another newbie, Delaney Wells [and] her housemate Wes… . The pair settle on a strategy of terroristic accelerationism: if they can introduce enough vile or moronic apps into The Every’s portfolio, it might trigger a popular insurrection that will bring about the company’s downfall. Predictably, it doesn’t work out this way. Both The Every and regular people embrace their innovations even as they bring ‘a new kind of self-hatred and ruination upon all humans’. Delaney begins to realise how much humiliation and diminished liberty the people of the world are willing to suck up in exchange for safety,”
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries: how we became postmodern – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers.… The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance…. Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault… Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth.… Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds?… The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffries’s compelling critique will help to sort them out.”
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English: a lexical treasure chest – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Those Anglo-Saxons did have a way with words – ‘word’ itself being one of those that has survived unchanged from the first millennium to ours. Hana Videen’s delightful thesaurus (from the Greek for ‘treasure-house’) of Old English is, she says, inspired by ‘hord-wynn’ (‘hoarding joy’), and organised around spheres of activity: eating and drinking, reading and writing, travelling or the natural world. There is, though, no word for ‘nature’ in Old English: a salient reminder that those times are as alien in some ways as they are familiar in others. …There was no call for a word for ‘nature’, one supposes, because Anglo-Saxons had not yet invented its opposite. They simply lived, like everything else, in ‘sceaft’ – creation. Which was elf-haunted and sometimes wyrm-ravaged…. What is most striking to the modern reader, perhaps, is what strong pleasure the Anglo-Saxons evidently took in smashing words together to form compounds: devil-sickness, slaughter-mist, war-sweat. Some such forms, if deliberately metaphorical or riddling, are known as kennings (as in ‘beyond my ken’). So ‘day-candle’ is the sun; ‘bone-locker’ is the body; and a ‘weaver-walker’ is a spider. Probably it’s too facile to suggest that such a combinatorial habit of description embodied a view of everything as more interconnected and interdependent, which it might be salutary for us moderns to recover. In which case, it’s a pleasure just to be reminded of their world-craft.”
‘We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. “Earlier this year, two researchers based at the University of Cambridge – Dolly Theis and Martin White – published a paper showing that from 1992 to 2020, there were no fewer than 689 separate obesity policies put forward in England. Like failed diets, almost none of these initiatives have been realised in any meaningful way.… When it comes to food policy, there has long been an attitude of ‘leave it to the market’… Recent English obesity policies have spoken endlessly of ‘action’ to help people eat healthier diets, but what they deliver, often as not, is another raft of patronising diet information leaflets… Given that poorer UK households would have to spend nearly 40% of their income to buy food for a healthy diet, according to recent data from the Food Foundation, to frame healthy eating as simply a matter of ‘choosing’ is dishonest. It’s not choice if you can’t afford it…. Earlier this year, the need for a radical rethink of food policy in the UK was set out in Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy: The Plan, an independent review commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).… There are signs that the pandemic has finally jolted us into new ways of thinking about food. Marcus Rashford’s passionate advocacy has made far more people recognise how unacceptable it is to live in a country where mothers like his struggle to buy ‘a good evening meal’ on minimum-wage jobs. Our great-grandchildren may laugh when we tell them that English schools routinely used to sell sugary drinks for profit, that hospital food courts provided burgers and chips to people who had just undergone heart surgery, and that farmers were paid to produce the very foods that caused the most damage to health and the environment. ‘That was what it was like,’ we will say, ‘living in a country where the politicians didn’t know that food mattered.’”
Tuesday, 2 November 2021
Cuttings: October 2021
Covid by Numbers: how to make sense of the statistics – review by Oliver Johnson in The Guardian. “Every internet user can access accurate and timely information on Covid cases, deaths, hospitalisations and vaccines, broken down by age, gender and location. However, while this wealth of information can be immensely valuable, it can also cause problems. Taken out of context and spun in a misleading way, raw coronavirus numbers can be a source of disinformation, which through social media can spread as efficiently as the virus itself. A simple fact, such as the median age of coronavirus victims (83) actually exceeding UK life expectancy at birth (81) can lead to governments and the public not taking Covid as seriously as they should. (Having lived to 83, one would ordinarily expect to live longer still – what matters is life expectancy conditional on having reached this age.)… The right way to think involves not raw data but its analysis via the academic discipline of statistics.… There can be few better people to do this than David Spiegelhalter, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and Anthony Masters, the Society’s ‘statistical ambassador’. Readers of their Observer column will not be surprised that in this book they give a clear and extremely readable guided tour of the pandemic, mostly from a UK viewpoint.”
Minding our language: How editors can frame questions without judgement – blog post by Louise Harnby. "Are the words I placed in bold [in an extract from Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me] ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t. Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have."
HarperCollins removes story from David Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “David Walliams’ story about a Chinese boy called Brian Wong, which was criticised by campaigners for its ‘casual racism’, is set to be removed from future editions of his short story collection The World’s Worst Children. Walliams’ bestselling anthology, which was published in 2016, was criticised earlier this year by the podcaster Georgie Ma over the Brian Wong story, which tells of a boy who was ‘never, ever wrong’, and who was a ‘total and utter swot’. ‘There are so many racist jokes on ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] community with the surname Wong and associating it with wrong,’ Ma said on Instagram. ‘If David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this.’ Ma, who said the story was ‘normalising casual racism from an early age’, particularly criticised Tony Ross’s illustration of the character. ‘You can see it’s just got the stereotypical small eyes, and the glasses, and it’s just complete casual racism,’ she said.”
Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists And The New Right – article by Chris Horner in 3 Quarks Daily, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades,… [we find] a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’…. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’… Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc…. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed? A first step would be for liberals and radicals to listen to each other, and to reflect on what they both stand for and oppose.…”
The big idea: does practice make perfect? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it.… ‘Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that may be labelled “practice”.’ And this is the key idea of Ericsson’s own research: it’s not so much how much you practice, as what kind of practice you do. Simply repeating a task until it has become automatic and then doing it a lot – like, say, driving a car – does not count as real practice. (Indeed, people tend to become worse at driving over time.) That’s ‘naive practice’… By contrast, improving at a complex skill such as a sport or a musical instrument requires ‘purposeful practice’, venturing repeatedly out of one’s comfort zone in a state of watchful self-criticism. For world-class performance, you additionally need a well-structured field of competitive endeavour (such as tennis or violin-playing) plus a teacher who can design the right kind of training activities. All that adds up to the ideal of what Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’, a method that has been widely adopted by sports psychologists.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.“
Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world – article by Howard W. French in The Guardian, extracted from his book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us learned in school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away in the heart of ‘darkest’ west Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home…. European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia… Bartolomeu Dias, another Portuguese explorer who knew Elmina well, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that…. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades between the Portuguese arrival at Elmina in 1471 and their landing in India in 1498. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”
Can Anyone Reshape the State? – blog post by Nicolas Colin from January 2020, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Transforming a large organization is difficult and prone to failure … but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here’s what we know about what works. … All large organizations that have overcome the innovator’s dilemma have taken the same path: not trying to reshape themselves, but creating something new and different on the side. There still aren’t many examples, however… Most of the time, that something new is barely connected to the parent organization. In fact, most of the output of corporate research is used by outside organizations rather than by whomever commissioned the research. Xerox developed the mouse, but it was Apple that innovated with it. … There are some cases in which large organizations have reinvented themselves without making a detour to the outside, but these are so few as to make it difficult to draw conclusions…. All of the above is why I think Dominic Cummings is bound to fail [in his then topical efforts to reshape the state]. Like many people with a Prometheus complex, he wants the best of both worlds. He wants the proximity to power and the intoxicating impression of being at the top, orchestrating it all. At the same time he wants to build new things. But it doesn’t work that way. If Cummings had the radical ambition of a Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t become a special advisor to Xerox’s CEO (in this metaphor, that’s Boris Johnson). Rather he would put as much distance as possible between himself and the top of the organization.”
A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent, and saved him –article by Patrick Stewart in The Guardian. “I never sat my 11-plus. … Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. … I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too. The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. … A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship.… It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: ‘What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!’”
‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building, … is a six-storey hymn to one of the main reasons for going to university: meeting other people. It is a place of wide sociable staircases, broad public terraces, and open-plan study areas that look across to dance studios and performance spaces. In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards. Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place, where even the public is free to roam from top to bottom. ‘It is a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas,’ said Lord Norman Foster, speaking on behalf of the Stirling prize jury. ‘In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning can delightfully coexist. That is no mean feat.’”
Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “‘Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.’ So said the director Bong Joon-ho, as he accepted his best picture Oscar for Parasite in 2020… The success of Netflix’s Korean series Squid Game… has proved him more than right. It has become Netflix’s biggest hit yet,… But it has also sparked an intense debate about what gets lost in that one-inch block of text – and raised questions over whether Netflix is investing enough in creating accurate versions of foreign-language scripts…. ‘If you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show,’ concludes Youngmi Mayer, the New York-based co-host of the podcast Feeling Asian. She released a TikTok video unpicking the flaws in Squid Game’s subtitles… One of the lead female characters … is represented as more subservient and less intelligent than in Korean. The ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ first game (Red Light, Green Light) is not properly translated, either, and the concept of ‘gganbu’ (a link between two equals – which becomes a major plot point) is glossed over. … ‘Netflix is notorious for its weak translations of Korean dramas,’ wrote Sharon Kwon in Slate. Alongside many others online, Kwon highlighted the translation of ‘sir’ instead of ‘boss’ – as used by the Pakistani character Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) to defer to others – arguing that by not using the latter, it lessens the impact of the anti-capitalist message of the series. Vice’s Eileen Cho wrote: ‘How will people learn about our culture if the streamer is mistranslating the language?’”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes up for the flaws of Mulan – article by Jingan Young in The Guardian. “This time last year I was disheartened by the troubling [Disney] live-action Mulan … so I had few expectations of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings… It was therefore a satisfying prove-me-wrong moment to watch the film…. I left with hope and elation, not disappointment. Shang-Chi is a film so very unlike Mulan, which featured a bland ‘superheroine’ who simply reacted to a series of fantastical, though unconnected, events around her. In stark contrast Shang-Chi is a heartfelt reimagining of the story by two Asian-American film-makers… Cretton and Callaham have created a modern bildungsroman, eradicating the ‘yellow peril’ origins of its superhero; Marvel’s initial comic series was developed as a spin-off from Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr Fu Manchu novels. Instead they offer up a story of revenge, redemption, grief and familial trauma – and several of the most spectacular fight sequences ever shown in cinema, the first being a balletic seduction scene which I have no doubt will be replicated many times.”
Out now: four new novels expanding the Hey-Diddle-Diddle universe – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Fiddle: can an idealistic kitten make it in the merciless world of professional violin playing? Little Dog: an inspiring journey from runt of the litter to a world of wonder, fun and laughter. Moon: how an ordinary cow overcame prejudice and ridicule to realise her incredible dream. Dish and spoon: they’ve run away together, but can their love bridge the gulf between crockery and cutlery?”
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: inequality is not the price of civilisation – review by David Priestland in The Guardian. “Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow [argue against the] common assumption [that] as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and ‘civilised’, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress…. It is this tale … which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ … simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.”
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? – article by Anna Leach and Miles Probyn in The Guardian. “Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two…. A diagram of story elements is not going to deradicalise someone who believes vaccines are implanting microchips in people’s arms. … But [this project] does raise one tantalising possibility that perhaps this mapping – what one of the authors, Pavan Holur, calls ‘an AI mirror held up to online conversations’ – lets people see the totality of the belief system they are tying themselves into. While someone might think vaccines are unsafe, they do not necessarily think 5G causes coronavirus. ‘If people are looking at it and thinking “Wait a minute, I don’t trust at least this part of the narrative”,’ Tangherlini says, ‘you might be able to fracture those low-probability links between domains. And if you can fracture or question them, you get the potential for community level change.’”
Minding our language: How editors can frame questions without judgement – blog post by Louise Harnby. "Are the words I placed in bold [in an extract from Imran Mahmood’s You Don’t Know Me] ‘incorrect’ or ‘wrong’? That’s a judgemental approach that implies there’s a single perfect, right way to write and speak English. There isn’t. Are the terms ‘non-standard’? To my ear, yes, some of them are, but that’s because I’m a 54-year-old middle-class white woman raised in Buckinghamshire, England, who was taught how to write and speak according to a standard dreamt up by … actually, I’m not sure who dreamt up the standard but it was probably someone who looked, spoke and was educated quite a lot like me and had the advantages I have."
HarperCollins removes story from David Walliams’ book The World’s Worst Children - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “David Walliams’ story about a Chinese boy called Brian Wong, which was criticised by campaigners for its ‘casual racism’, is set to be removed from future editions of his short story collection The World’s Worst Children. Walliams’ bestselling anthology, which was published in 2016, was criticised earlier this year by the podcaster Georgie Ma over the Brian Wong story, which tells of a boy who was ‘never, ever wrong’, and who was a ‘total and utter swot’. ‘There are so many racist jokes on ESEA [East and Southeast Asian] community with the surname Wong and associating it with wrong,’ Ma said on Instagram. ‘If David Walliams would have done his research, he would have known this.’ Ma, who said the story was ‘normalising casual racism from an early age’, particularly criticised Tony Ross’s illustration of the character. ‘You can see it’s just got the stereotypical small eyes, and the glasses, and it’s just complete casual racism,’ she said.”
Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists And The New Right – article by Chris Horner in 3 Quarks Daily, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “In place of the neoliberal politics of the last decades,… [we find] a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’…. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’… Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc…. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed? A first step would be for liberals and radicals to listen to each other, and to reflect on what they both stand for and oppose.…”
The big idea: does practice make perfect? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it.… ‘Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that may be labelled “practice”.’ And this is the key idea of Ericsson’s own research: it’s not so much how much you practice, as what kind of practice you do. Simply repeating a task until it has become automatic and then doing it a lot – like, say, driving a car – does not count as real practice. (Indeed, people tend to become worse at driving over time.) That’s ‘naive practice’… By contrast, improving at a complex skill such as a sport or a musical instrument requires ‘purposeful practice’, venturing repeatedly out of one’s comfort zone in a state of watchful self-criticism. For world-class performance, you additionally need a well-structured field of competitive endeavour (such as tennis or violin-playing) plus a teacher who can design the right kind of training activities. All that adds up to the ideal of what Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’, a method that has been widely adopted by sports psychologists.”
Barack Obama on how uncovering his past helped him plan his future – extract from Dreams from My Father: Adapted for Young Adults by Barack Obama in The Guardian. “I’ve always believed that the best way to meet the future involves making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. It’s why I enjoy reading different accounts of history and why I value the insights of those who’ve been on this earth longer than I have. Some folks might see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artefacts best stored in a vault. But for me, history is alive the same way an old-growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light. What matters most is how we carry ourselves through that forest – the perspectives we bring, the assumptions we make, and our willingness to keep returning to it, to ask the harder questions about what’s been ignored, whose voices have been erased. These pages represent my early, earnest attempt to walk through my own past, to examine the strands of my heritage as I considered my future.“
Built on the bodies of slaves: how Africa was erased from the history of the modern world – article by Howard W. French in The Guardian, extracted from his book Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World. “The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us learned in school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away in the heart of ‘darkest’ west Africa. Iberia’s most famous sailors cut their teeth not seeking routes to Asia, but rather plying the west African coastline. This is where they perfected techniques of mapmaking and navigation, where Spain and Portugal experimented with improved ship designs, and where Columbus came to understand the Atlantic Ocean winds and currents well enough that he would later reach the western limits of the sea with a confidence that no European had previously had before him, of being able to return home…. European expeditions to west Africa in the mid-15th century were bound up in a search for gold. It was the trade in this precious metal, discovered in what is now Ghana by the Portuguese in 1471, and secured by the building of the fort at Elmina in 1482, that helped fund Vasco da Gama’s later mission of discovery to Asia… Bartolomeu Dias, another Portuguese explorer who knew Elmina well, rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving the existence of a sea route to what would become known as the Indian Ocean. But no onward voyage to Asia would even be attempted for nearly a decade after that…. The teaching of history about this era of iconic discoveries is confoundingly silent not only on that decade, but on the nearly three decades between the Portuguese arrival at Elmina in 1471 and their landing in India in 1498. It was this moment, when Europe and what is nowadays styled sub-Saharan Africa came into permanent deep contact, that laid the foundations of the modern age.”
Can Anyone Reshape the State? – blog post by Nicolas Colin from January 2020, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Transforming a large organization is difficult and prone to failure … but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Here’s what we know about what works. … All large organizations that have overcome the innovator’s dilemma have taken the same path: not trying to reshape themselves, but creating something new and different on the side. There still aren’t many examples, however… Most of the time, that something new is barely connected to the parent organization. In fact, most of the output of corporate research is used by outside organizations rather than by whomever commissioned the research. Xerox developed the mouse, but it was Apple that innovated with it. … There are some cases in which large organizations have reinvented themselves without making a detour to the outside, but these are so few as to make it difficult to draw conclusions…. All of the above is why I think Dominic Cummings is bound to fail [in his then topical efforts to reshape the state]. Like many people with a Prometheus complex, he wants the best of both worlds. He wants the proximity to power and the intoxicating impression of being at the top, orchestrating it all. At the same time he wants to build new things. But it doesn’t work that way. If Cummings had the radical ambition of a Steve Jobs, he wouldn’t become a special advisor to Xerox’s CEO (in this metaphor, that’s Boris Johnson). Rather he would put as much distance as possible between himself and the top of the organization.”
A moment that changed me: Patrick Stewart on the teacher who spotted his talent, and saved him –article by Patrick Stewart in The Guardian. “I never sat my 11-plus. … Had I sat that test, I might never have met Cecil Dormand, a teacher at the secondary modern where I ended up, who would change my life when I was 12, by putting Shakespeare into my hands for the very first time. … I suspect Cec had already intuited that I loved to escape into the world of fiction and out of my dull, uncomfortable and sometimes scary home life, living with an abusive father. But he made literature and language feel like a part of our lives, too. The same year as he gave us The Merchant of Venice, he cast me in a play with adults – mostly my teachers. I had never acted before. The play was the wartime farce The Happiest Days of Your Life. … A few days before I left school, at the age of 15, Cec asked me if I had ever thought of taking up acting as a career. It made me laugh, because it was a ridiculous idea, but two years later I was offered a place at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, paid for by a scholarship.… It took me years to find a way to thank Cecil Dormand, but, when I did, I was in my first of 12 years as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where I presented him with an honorary degree. A few years later, I made him a second thank-you when I invited him to the luncheon celebrating my knighthood, presented by the Queen that same morning. The host invited everyone to say a few words. Cec said: ‘What the heck am I going to call him now? For decades he called me Sir!’”
‘It sounded crazy’: palatial six-storey hymn to social interaction is Britain’s best new building – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Kingston University’s Town House, a cathedral of social interaction that has been named the UK’s best new building, … is a six-storey hymn to one of the main reasons for going to university: meeting other people. It is a place of wide sociable staircases, broad public terraces, and open-plan study areas that look across to dance studios and performance spaces. In its free-flowing generosity, it is the exact opposite of the usual institutional world of siloed academic departments protected by swipecards. Instead, this is a welcoming, transparent place, where even the public is free to roam from top to bottom. ‘It is a theatre for life – a warehouse of ideas,’ said Lord Norman Foster, speaking on behalf of the Stirling prize jury. ‘In this highly original work of architecture, quiet reading, loud performance, research and learning can delightfully coexist. That is no mean feat.’”
Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem – article by Viv Groskop in The Guardian. “‘Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.’ So said the director Bong Joon-ho, as he accepted his best picture Oscar for Parasite in 2020… The success of Netflix’s Korean series Squid Game… has proved him more than right. It has become Netflix’s biggest hit yet,… But it has also sparked an intense debate about what gets lost in that one-inch block of text – and raised questions over whether Netflix is investing enough in creating accurate versions of foreign-language scripts…. ‘If you don’t understand Korean, you didn’t really watch the same show,’ concludes Youngmi Mayer, the New York-based co-host of the podcast Feeling Asian. She released a TikTok video unpicking the flaws in Squid Game’s subtitles… One of the lead female characters … is represented as more subservient and less intelligent than in Korean. The ‘grandmother’s footsteps’ first game (Red Light, Green Light) is not properly translated, either, and the concept of ‘gganbu’ (a link between two equals – which becomes a major plot point) is glossed over. … ‘Netflix is notorious for its weak translations of Korean dramas,’ wrote Sharon Kwon in Slate. Alongside many others online, Kwon highlighted the translation of ‘sir’ instead of ‘boss’ – as used by the Pakistani character Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi) to defer to others – arguing that by not using the latter, it lessens the impact of the anti-capitalist message of the series. Vice’s Eileen Cho wrote: ‘How will people learn about our culture if the streamer is mistranslating the language?’”
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings makes up for the flaws of Mulan – article by Jingan Young in The Guardian. “This time last year I was disheartened by the troubling [Disney] live-action Mulan … so I had few expectations of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings… It was therefore a satisfying prove-me-wrong moment to watch the film…. I left with hope and elation, not disappointment. Shang-Chi is a film so very unlike Mulan, which featured a bland ‘superheroine’ who simply reacted to a series of fantastical, though unconnected, events around her. In stark contrast Shang-Chi is a heartfelt reimagining of the story by two Asian-American film-makers… Cretton and Callaham have created a modern bildungsroman, eradicating the ‘yellow peril’ origins of its superhero; Marvel’s initial comic series was developed as a spin-off from Sax Rohmer’s notorious Dr Fu Manchu novels. Instead they offer up a story of revenge, redemption, grief and familial trauma – and several of the most spectacular fight sequences ever shown in cinema, the first being a balletic seduction scene which I have no doubt will be replicated many times.”
Out now: four new novels expanding the Hey-Diddle-Diddle universe – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Fiddle: can an idealistic kitten make it in the merciless world of professional violin playing? Little Dog: an inspiring journey from runt of the litter to a world of wonder, fun and laughter. Moon: how an ordinary cow overcame prejudice and ridicule to realise her incredible dream. Dish and spoon: they’ve run away together, but can their love bridge the gulf between crockery and cutlery?”
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: inequality is not the price of civilisation – review by David Priestland in The Guardian. “Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow [argue against the] common assumption [that] as societies become larger, more complex, wealthy and ‘civilised’, they inevitably become less equal. Early humans, it is said, lived like the foragers of the Kalahari, in small, mobile bands that were casually egalitarian and democratic. But this primitive idyll or Hobbesian hell (views differ) disappeared with settlement and farming, which required the management of labour and land. The emergence of early cities, and ultimately states, demanded even steeper hierarchies, and with them the whole civilisational package – leaders, administrators, the division of labour and social classes. The lesson, then, is clear: human equality and freedom have to be traded for progress…. It is this tale … which Graeber and Wengrow seek to dismantle using recent anthropological and archaeological research. Excavations in Louisiana, for example, show that in about 1600BC Native Americans built giant earthworks for mass gatherings, drawing people from hundreds of miles around – evidence that shatters the notion that all foragers lived simple, isolated lives. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’ … simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.”
Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? – article by Anna Leach and Miles Probyn in The Guardian. “Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates’ background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two…. A diagram of story elements is not going to deradicalise someone who believes vaccines are implanting microchips in people’s arms. … But [this project] does raise one tantalising possibility that perhaps this mapping – what one of the authors, Pavan Holur, calls ‘an AI mirror held up to online conversations’ – lets people see the totality of the belief system they are tying themselves into. While someone might think vaccines are unsafe, they do not necessarily think 5G causes coronavirus. ‘If people are looking at it and thinking “Wait a minute, I don’t trust at least this part of the narrative”,’ Tangherlini says, ‘you might be able to fracture those low-probability links between domains. And if you can fracture or question them, you get the potential for community level change.’”
Friday, 1 October 2021
Cuttings: September 2021
I was a therapist to killers in Broadmoor and felt ‘radical empathy’ for them – article by Gwen Adshead in The Guardian. "In our book, The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion... [Eileen Horne and I] take the reader into therapy rooms where I am assessing or treating people who our society labels 'monstrous': a serial killer, a stalker, a child sex-abuser, a girl who killed an old man as part of a teen gang, and others. These accounts demonstrate how radical empathy differs from 'regular' empathy; I am not trying to 'walk in their shoes'. Instead, I keep them company on their painful road towards greater self-knowledge as we work to get to the meaning of their violence. We are not always successful: without an ability to self-reflect, someone will have little capacity for recognising other people’s pain.... I have long wanted to try to share the things I’ve learned about human nature with a general audience, but my patients have also taught me that stories will find their moment to emerge when the teller and the listener are ready. As I watched the increased polarisation in our country and elsewhere in recent years, it struck me that ... we can still be blind to the essential truth that we are more alike than we are different.... I wonder if the present imbalance between condemnation and compassion might be righted if the methods my colleagues and I use in working with violent offenders were implemented at a societal level. This might mean more listening and less condemnation, fewer assumptions and more curiosity, and the willingness to get up close while maintaining both detachment and discernment."
What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "In 2018 [Merve] Emre, now an associate professor at Oxford University, wrote The Personality Brokers – an account of the strange and often troubling history of the MBTI.... Briggs Myers’s intentions ... were idealistic: she envisaged type as a way of achieving society-wide equilibrium, helping people to be efficient and at ease at work and home.... What Briggs Myers grasped, says Emre, was that the system would be more effective if it showed everyone to be good at something.... With just four letters, Briggs Myers created a simple, affirming framework in which we’d want to sort ourselves.... Yet what the MTBI’s mainstream impact belies is that most psychologists believe it to be deeply flawed – if not meaningless. With neither Jung, nor Briggs and Briggs Myers testing their theories against controlled experiments or data, it has no basis in clinical psychology. It parses people through false binaries, when most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum; and it produces inconsistent and inaccurate results.... Today, though the Myers-Briggs Company forbids unethical use of its assessment, its underlying logic of 'people sorting' has been absorbed by the growing use of data in human resources. As exposed in the recent HBO Max Documentary Persona (of which Emre is an executive producer), sophisticated psychometric testing is used to streamline hiring processes and filter candidates. [John Hackston, head of thought leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company] says, the MBTI is not a test with a right or wrong answer: 'It’s a process for you to find out for yourself, what type fits you best.' What you do with that information, he says, 'is entirely up to you – but it’s yours'."
Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan: scholarly anarchy – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Indexing is so arbitrary and anarchic. It chops up texts and can make prejudicial choices about what deserves to be emphasised; by following alphabetical order, the index, as Duncan says, 'turns from content to form, from meaning to spelling'. .... The index has often pretended to be morally useful. It began as a convenience for medieval preachers, who needed easy access to biblical quotations; more censoriously, it mimics our index finger, which we use to jab the air and make angry accusations..... Duncan can’t ignore the current worry about instantaneous online searches, which have slashed our attention span and made memory redundant..... [The subtitle is] A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ....-But [Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." See also review by Keith Khan-Harris in The Guardian.
Picture Stories: how one news magazine blew up British photography – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy. Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant... He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see."
Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year.... Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a 'zooflu' epidemic allows 'enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals' sending many people mad. When wildlife park guide Jean’s son loses his mind and sets out with his daughter Kimberly to find out what whale song really means, she follows him, along with Sue the dingo. 'In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along,' said the award’s director, Tom Hunter.... McKay wins prize money of £2021, as part of a tradition that sees the annual award money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Clarke [and] 2001: A Space Odyssey."
My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier: a British roasting – review by Jonathan Powell in The Guardian. "Five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages.... First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier ... focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began.... Second, Barnier says it was the unity of the 27, 'so unexpected for the British, that forced them to finally agree to pay their full share'. The British side repeatedly tried to negotiate with individual member states rather than the Commission, but kept being sent back to Barnier.... Third, the EU knew what it wanted and stuck to it. The British government spent a year negotiating rancorously and publicly with itself, which allowed the EU to take the initiative, set the agenda and frame the negotiations as it wished. It decided from the beginning that it would separate the divorce agreement from discussions on the future relationship, so the British could not use paying the leaving bill to buy access to parts of the single market.... The fourth reason for British failure was that Johnson made the disastrous tactical decision to try to provoke the EU in the hope it would be shaken, even briefing it as 'the mad man strategy'. .... Most disastrously, the threat of a no deal fell flat.... Finally, the EU used deadlines effectively to get its way, whereas the UK walked into a series of traps.... The fact is, the die was cast from the beginning. ... As Barnier writes: 'I still think it is insane that a great country like the UK is conducting such a negotiation and taking such a decision … without having any clear vision of it or a majority to support it.' ”
What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "In 2018 [Merve] Emre, now an associate professor at Oxford University, wrote The Personality Brokers – an account of the strange and often troubling history of the MBTI.... Briggs Myers’s intentions ... were idealistic: she envisaged type as a way of achieving society-wide equilibrium, helping people to be efficient and at ease at work and home.... What Briggs Myers grasped, says Emre, was that the system would be more effective if it showed everyone to be good at something.... With just four letters, Briggs Myers created a simple, affirming framework in which we’d want to sort ourselves.... Yet what the MTBI’s mainstream impact belies is that most psychologists believe it to be deeply flawed – if not meaningless. With neither Jung, nor Briggs and Briggs Myers testing their theories against controlled experiments or data, it has no basis in clinical psychology. It parses people through false binaries, when most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum; and it produces inconsistent and inaccurate results.... Today, though the Myers-Briggs Company forbids unethical use of its assessment, its underlying logic of 'people sorting' has been absorbed by the growing use of data in human resources. As exposed in the recent HBO Max Documentary Persona (of which Emre is an executive producer), sophisticated psychometric testing is used to streamline hiring processes and filter candidates. [John Hackston, head of thought leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company] says, the MBTI is not a test with a right or wrong answer: 'It’s a process for you to find out for yourself, what type fits you best.' What you do with that information, he says, 'is entirely up to you – but it’s yours'."
Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan: scholarly anarchy – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Indexing is so arbitrary and anarchic. It chops up texts and can make prejudicial choices about what deserves to be emphasised; by following alphabetical order, the index, as Duncan says, 'turns from content to form, from meaning to spelling'. .... The index has often pretended to be morally useful. It began as a convenience for medieval preachers, who needed easy access to biblical quotations; more censoriously, it mimics our index finger, which we use to jab the air and make angry accusations..... Duncan can’t ignore the current worry about instantaneous online searches, which have slashed our attention span and made memory redundant..... [The subtitle is] A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ....-But [Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." See also review by Keith Khan-Harris in The Guardian.
Picture Stories: how one news magazine blew up British photography – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy. Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant... He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see."
Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year.... Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a 'zooflu' epidemic allows 'enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals' sending many people mad. When wildlife park guide Jean’s son loses his mind and sets out with his daughter Kimberly to find out what whale song really means, she follows him, along with Sue the dingo. 'In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along,' said the award’s director, Tom Hunter.... McKay wins prize money of £2021, as part of a tradition that sees the annual award money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Clarke [and] 2001: A Space Odyssey."
My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier: a British roasting – review by Jonathan Powell in The Guardian. "Five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages.... First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier ... focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began.... Second, Barnier says it was the unity of the 27, 'so unexpected for the British, that forced them to finally agree to pay their full share'. The British side repeatedly tried to negotiate with individual member states rather than the Commission, but kept being sent back to Barnier.... Third, the EU knew what it wanted and stuck to it. The British government spent a year negotiating rancorously and publicly with itself, which allowed the EU to take the initiative, set the agenda and frame the negotiations as it wished. It decided from the beginning that it would separate the divorce agreement from discussions on the future relationship, so the British could not use paying the leaving bill to buy access to parts of the single market.... The fourth reason for British failure was that Johnson made the disastrous tactical decision to try to provoke the EU in the hope it would be shaken, even briefing it as 'the mad man strategy'. .... Most disastrously, the threat of a no deal fell flat.... Finally, the EU used deadlines effectively to get its way, whereas the UK walked into a series of traps.... The fact is, the die was cast from the beginning. ... As Barnier writes: 'I still think it is insane that a great country like the UK is conducting such a negotiation and taking such a decision … without having any clear vision of it or a majority to support it.' ”
Tuesday, 7 September 2021
Cuttings: August 2021
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.”
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.”
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