Social media firms face a safety reckoning after the Molly Russell inquest – Guardian Techscape newsletter by Dan Milmo. “Molly, from north-west London, died in 2017 after viewing extensive amounts of online content related to suicide, depression, self-harm and anxiety. In what the NSPCC described as a global first, the senior coroner said social media had contributed to Molly’s death, ruling that that Molly had died from 'an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content'.... If there was one point during the two-week hearing when the case for tougher online regulation became overwhelming, it was during Meta executive Elizabeth Lagone’s testimony. The head of health and wellbeing policy at Mark Zuckerberg’s company was taken through a selection of the Instagram posts the teenager had viewed in the six months before her death – deeming many of them to be 'safe' for children to view. It was not an opinion shared by many in the room at North London coroner’s court.... Molly’s father, Ian, was scathing about the 'safe' assessment. Speaking at the end of the two-week hearing, he said: 'If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive and instead of being a bereaved family of four, there would be five of us looking forward to a life full of purpose and promise that lay ahead for our adorable Molly.'... The impact of Lagone’s two-day appearance, and of what happened to Molly, was to damage faith that a major social media platform could be relied on to police its content and systems without a wider regulatory framework to ensure it is done properly.”
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins: anecdotes, elephants and ‘an embuggerance’ –review by Frank Cottrell-Boyce in The Observer. “Caring for someone who has dementia is an overwhelmingly vivid experience, full of pain and comedy. There are heartbreaking and funny stories in A Life With Footnotes – started by Pratchett himself but written and completed by his longtime assistant Rob Wilkins – about the things that Pratchett’s shrinking brain made him do. He once accidentally donated £50,000 to Bath Postal Museum, for instance. Moments like that can supplant your memories of what a person was like before; here, Wilkins, who started working for the author in 2000, attempts to recover Pratchett pre-dementia.... After hearing Jilly Cooper talk about her invaluable PA, Pratchett was filled with staff envy and hired Wilkins as an assistant. Over the years, the role grew into that of amanuensis and 'keeper of the anecdotes'. The first half of this book is Wilkins curating these stories.... As Pratchett needed more and more assistance, his personal assistant became more important to him. ...Towards the end, Wilkins had to hold Pratchett’s hand and guide him through his last explorations of the Discworld. Outside family, Wilkins probably knew Pratchett better than anyone else and it is wonderful to have this closeup picture of the writer’s working life, with its arguments and doubts, naps and negotiations. This is not a hagiography. The Pratchett who emerges can be curmudgeonly, vain, and infuriated and puzzled by the way the world has underestimated him.”
Britain is learning a painful lesson: what happens in ‘emerging markets’ could also happen here - article by Kojo Koram in The Guardian. "It has become fashionable among experts to compare Britain’s economy, once a global superpower, to that of an 'emerging market'.... For those who live in Britain, it can be shocking to hear such labels applied to a 'developed' country like our own. It runs counter to the history we were taught and the belief we were raised with: that as Britain was the birthplace of industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, it sits at the forefront of a linear path of development.... But what does it mean to be described in the language of an emerging market?... On face value, the descriptor of being an emerging market seems to be a compliment – you are emerging, realising your potential, one for the future. In reality, the label of 'emerging' is a shorthand for volatility and political instability. Ten years ago, emerging markets were 'developing' nations; 30 years before that, they were 'third world' nations. Now, instead of talking about civilisational hierarchies, different countries have instead been grouped together and rechristened by economists in the bloodless language of 'emerging markets'. It provides a hopeful narrative of history as a one-way road for all of humanity towards a happy destination.... These assumptions have been upturned of late. Across the country, communities have seen their living standards collapse beyond the point they assumed was possible in a 'developed' country like Britain. In the midst of this economic crisis, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng embarked on a fiscal gamble that rested on their belief that Britain still possessed an inherent trustworthiness in the eyes of global investors.”
‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive – article by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. “The BBC’s attitude towards preserving and using its broadcasts has transformed in the 100 years since it was formed in October 1922. The technology didn’t exist to record the earliest programmes, which were all broadcast live. When recording television became possible, starting in 1947 with a variety show at Alexandra Palace, the cost of tape made keeping programmes too expensive. Most tapes were overwritten and eventually binned. Where it happened, archiving could be haphazard. Some recordings were kept only long enough for repeats to be aired in the days when film reels were used to play out recorded programmes. ... As the cost of archiving came down with new technology in the 1970s, the BBC also came to realise the value of preserving more. In 1981, the corporation added to its charter a requirement to keep everything. Digital archiving began with all radio in 2007, and all TV from 2015. Today, thousands of hours of TV and radio are constantly – and automatically – uploaded and preserved.... But the real value in the digitisation process has been the capacity to mine the archive for treasures that had become lost within it. Major recent advances in automated transcription technology have been vital. Machine learning – the practice of teaching computers to make improvements by themselves – is helping the speech-to-text system identify speakers and cope with accents and obscure words. Until recently, you couldn’t search the archive for much more than programme names. Now it can be searched for anything.”
Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works - article by Catherine Taylor in The Guardian. "For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature .... The Years covers six decades of social and personal history, from Ernaux’s working-class childhood in wartime and postwar Normandy – where she was born in 1940 – through the 1968 student uprisings, initial joy and later disillusionment during the long presidency of François Mitterand in the 1980s and 90s and on into the new millennium. It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans – all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word 'I'. The book, which ends in 2006, was celebrated in France as a modern In Search of Lost Time. In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. Her work as a whole is reflective, intimate – but also impersonal and detached. The Nobel committee described her oeuvre on Thursday as 'uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean.'”
A Locus of Care: Some Memories of the Life and Work of Bruno Latour (1947-2022) – post by Justin E.H. Smith, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “If we had had the sad task of writing an elegy for Bruno Latour in, say, 1985, he would indeed have been principally distinguished for his role in the emergence of 'science and technology studies'... This tendency generally took the scientific discovery of new truths to be largely narrative, and took all the other stuff that goes on in the course of scientific discovery —competition, infighting, networks, ideology— to be just as relevant to our understanding of what science is as are the discoveries on which the scientists themselves would invariably prefer that we focus.... Latour, in any case, certainly understood that construction is not the same thing as deconstruction, that to explain the social dimensions of a given object of our scientific ontology is not to explain that object away. In this light, Latour’s much-discussed 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, easily appears not so much as a road-to-Damascus moment, or as a radical conversion away from everything he had promoted before, but rather simply as a refinement, an honest update to a general and consistent approach in light of lessons learned from a changing world.... it is not so hard to see why, around 2004, it could easily have seemed to an honest and lucid theorist such as Latour that this was a very good moment indeed to take a break from warning about the danger of premature naturalization of what an institutionally elite class of people uses its power to anoint as 'facts', and instead to start to think, but really hard, about how facts and values might be brought together again, or perhaps not again, but for the first time, in such a way as to contribute to human flourishing. This then is where we start to see the full significance of the second part of the 2004 article’s title: 'From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern'. ... We are left with the surprising realization that 'things' are, in their original and most archaic sense, political.... So, wherever you have a thing, you have a locus of care (or, if you will, a matter of concern).... In fact, Latour thinks, in order to get away from all the confusion into which the notion of 'objectivity' has led us ... it might be better to retrain our focus on 'things'. And it is in light of this retraining effort, I think, that his twenty-first-century shift to ecology and the climate crisis takes on a particular appeal.”
Bruno Latour – obituary by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. “For many years, [Latour] was treated as a typically irresponsible French postmodern theorist, scandalously arguing that science did not discover truths, but constructed them. He was one of the French philosophers indicted for intellectual charlatanism in the physicist Alan Sokal’s 1997 book Intellectual Impostures. Sokal charged that Latour was a pernicious anything-goes relativist who believed that facts were social constructions.... Latour denied he was a relativist, but rather that he was drawing attention to how day-to-day lab research worked. It was hardly a progression towards unveiling facts or truth but a disorderly mass of observations, inconclusive results and fledgling theories that were systematically erased when research results were presented as facts. What Sokal failed to grasp, Latour argued, is that 'facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media'. With the rise of alternative facts, he argued, whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” – that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible. Latour did not produce our post-truth age, but foresaw how it could arise."
‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: how stories teach empathy – article by George Saunders in The Guardian. “I once wrote a story called The Barber’s Unhappiness. In the town where we were living, there was a barber who spent a lot of time out front of his shop, smoking and ogling women. He ogled in an obnoxious but egalitarian way: old women, young women, women whose faces were passing by on the sides of buses – it didn’t matter. I was a new husband, the father of two baby daughters, and a freshly minted feminist, so decided to, in prose, crucify him... But soon the humour started wearing thin and the story flatlined. I kept writing different versions (hundreds of pages’ worth) of the same scene, in which my barber (once again, still, over and over) kept being wrong in exactly the same way.... The problem was, I’d made my barber a concept: The Terrible Sexist. It was as if I’d built a robot and trained it to walk only in a straight line, then was unhappy because it never went around corners. Also, I noted, I didn’t like him. Why would I? It’s hard to like a robot as he keeps robotically doing the obnoxious thing you’ve programmed him to do.... One way to make a character more likable is to make him more vulnerable. (Give the robot a bad wheel.)... For my barber, ... I lopped off all the toes on one of his feet. He was still a jerk (still harsh, still sexist, still went around rejecting women for not being attractive enough, although, even factoring out the foot thing, he wasn’t all that attractive himself) but now he had no toes on that foot, poor bastard. And was self-conscious about his feet in his private moments, like I’d been, and, as I’d done, he dreaded going to the beach, which of course, in the story, I immediately made him do. Before this, I’d known what I thought of him. Now I wasn’t sure. I’d confused myself. Did I like this guy or not? Was I for him or against him? ... I didn’t know what to think of him and neither did the reader. What resulted was increased dramatic tension. The reader found herself doing a sort of mental squinting, wondering whether I meant for her to like this barber or not, walking forward into the mist of the story alongside me, trying to figure it out.”
‘Unlike anything you’ve ever played’: Immortality, the video game that’s actually three movies – article by Keza MacDonald in The Guardian. “The first thing you see when you load up Immortality is a talkshow clip from the late 1960s, in which a bright-eyed, red-haired young actor is being interviewed about her recent starring role in a film called Ambrosio, an adaptation of a 1796 novel about a devil temptress who draws a monk down the path of sin. This is Marissa Marcel, who was at this point on the brink of stardom – but this film she appears in, with an eminent but slimy director, is never released. Her next picture, an erotic thriller about art and murder, also never makes it into theatres. She retreats into obscurity for a long time, before emerging for a comeback in the 1990s in a Lynchian thriller about artifice and celebrity – but that film, too, is lost, and after that she disappears entirely. The question of what happened to Marissa is an irresistible mystery – and you, the player, now have access to a full archive of clips, rushes and behind-the-scenes footage from her career. Somewhere within these segments, you can find the answer. Freezing the footage and zooming in on any detail – a plant, a mug, a director’s slate – will transport you to another clip in which that same thing appears. You time-travel through the decades, jumping between all three films, following motifs or particular actors, slowly piecing together not just what happens in the movies, but what happens to the people who are making them. Put together, these three films tell a story about film-making, about the price of art, and about Hollywood’s exploitation of women. But it is in the way that you experience them – recreating them piecemeal by following your intuition, noticing something in an actor’s face or an off-camera comment, diving down rabbit holes and discovering that they are deep and branching – that the true story of Immortality is told. It is a delicate and multilayered mystery that you unravel yourself, scrubbing through these scenes and searching for clues. As a player, you reach a turning point after maybe an hour, maybe two, when you’ll be watching a scene and think, wait – did I just see what I thought I saw? You’ll wind it back. Watch again. Follow the thread. And an extraordinary mystery starts to reveal itself at the centre.”
The big idea: is cooperation always a force for good? – article by Nichola Raihani in The Guardian. “We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. ... Cooperative individuals are more likely to care for others, to display empathy for those in distress and to act to alleviate their suffering.... But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. ... Cooperation is, at heart, a means by which entities – be they genes, cells or individuals – improve their own position in the world. It’s important to note that this doesn’t imply that all cooperation is strategic and calculated. But cooperation is essentially a form of competition and, therefore, frequently has victims.... Oil and gas giants, for example, work together via powerful trade associations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on lobbying aimed at watering down or blocking climate crisis policies. Cooperation of this sort wields the potential for destruction on a planetary scale.... Cooperation has carried us this far in our journey, but if we don’t find ways to be better at it – to scale it to the global problems we face – we risk becoming the victims of our own success.”
The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas: why it pays to talk in a polarised world – review by Emma Brocks in The Guardian. “The Persuaders [identifies] strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause.... Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: 'Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.'... By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning.... 'Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to "Boy, have I got a problem for you!”' – proven to be a big downer at the polls. 'You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.'”
My small, doomed stand against Thatcher’s war on truth – article by Simon Petherick in The Guardian. “Six years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I got a job as a writer at a strangely dysfunctional government department called the Central Office Of Information.... The department’s role was to issue information that was not beholden to any political party.... Our job was to describe clearly and objectively to the British people what it was that the government was doing. I liked that.... By the time I left, seven years later, the COI was no longer the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t 'objective information'. During the years they employed me, Thatcher had eroded this notion so effectively that we COI writers had little or no authority left. Advertising and public relations and lobbying agencies now clustered around Number 10 like flies over treacle, and the idea of truth had evaporated. Something got lost in those years. It is difficult to imagine the administrations of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss without the preparatory demolition of the foundations that Thatcher carried out. Never again would our governments allow us the dignity of knowing the facts and drawing our own conclusions from them.”
Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen review: damning account of deregulation – review by Rowan Moore in The Guardian. “A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned.... Apps traces the tale of deregulation back to the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary Michael Heseltine, citing builders’ complaints of 'delays and costs', made 'radical changes' to the building regulations. This and successive administrations would then progressively loosen the system. Prescriptive rules were replaced by 'performance-based' guidance. Builders gained the right to 'self-certify', which means that they themselves can determine whether they are meeting regulations rather than ask a publicly appointed inspector. The Building Research Establishment, an agency that examines the safety and performance of construction methods, was privatised, such that manufacturers would pay it to test their products. This arrangement would help the companies that made the insulation and cladding used on Grenfell to arrange tests where they could optimise their chances of positive results, and to suppress them when they failed.”
What’s the shortest joke? What’s the smallest possible ratio of words to laughter? – readers' replies to 'Notes and Queries' in The Guardian. “Free briefcase, no catches.... Budgies, going cheap.... What's brown and sticky? A stick.... Two elephants fall off a cliff. Boom! Boom!... Cork man drowns.... Truss.”
Friday, 4 November 2022
Thursday, 6 October 2022
Seen and Heard: July to September 2022
The Darkside Detective – really fun and funny (I mean LOL funny) adventure game, with a small town detective and his idiot sidekick solving paranormal / occult mysteries. (See review.) No voice acting and super-chunky pixel graphics, which work surprisingly well. Solutions to puzzles are often bizarre but well-cued, making the playing a very enjoyable experience. A well-deserved winner of the 2017 Aggie awards for Best comedy writing, and a runner up for the readers’ choice Best adventure of 2017.
The Age of the Image – repeat of BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, taking a trip through twentieth-century image-making and image-use, part history of technology, part semiotics and cultural studies – nothing revolutionary, but just very, very well told. What also struck me on this re-viewing was the effort the production team put into getting Fox constantly into the frame: handling unique works of art and craft such as a matte painting used in Star Wars, walking round gallery installations, standing in the actual street locations of classic photos. Contrast this continual presence with the style of Adam Curtis, who is only ever a voiceover in his documentaries.
‘Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and "Star Trek”’ by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins – proper academic book from Routledge freely available as a PDF. Slightly dated (1995), but some observations which are still interesting, for example how the original Star Trek self-consciously merged three genres (the technological utopianism of ‘hard’ SF, the social utopianism of 1960s ‘soft’ SF and the action adventure of space opera). An interesting chapter on MIT students who see Star Trek as an embodiment and validation of their scientific technical outlook, much interested in reconciling scientific inaccuracies and in the quality of special effects, and misogynist in their humour. And two interesting chapters on how female and gay fans, far from the passive consumers of classic literary theory, have wrestled with the many respects in which the show did not live up to its progressive social values, not by rejecting the show but seeking to resolve these tensions within the fictional world: first by fan fiction, focusing on female characters marginalised in the television series, and second by agitating for the inclusion of a gay character in The Next Generation cast, not just an “issue” show about homosexuality (such as ‘The Host’ or ‘The Outcast’).
Syberia 3 – a decent game, as I was pleasantly surprised to find, given the poor reviews, though perhaps not up to the quality of the first two. The weaknesses are the non-player characters, especially the clichéd villains and the infantalised generic members of the Yukol tribe. Its strengths are what they always were: the graphic design and the mechanical puzzles, now with a simple but satisfying twist in that you have to accomplish tasks physically: you have to use the joystick (or mouse) to rotate keys, turn handles, pull levers, instead of just clicking on them. The story is perhaps a bit linear with the next step spelled out in a list of objectives, but I have no objections to an easier game. Well, I’m up to date now, and ready for the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4: The World Before.
Proofreading Theses and Dissertations, by Stephen Cashmore – a CIEP guide for editors working with university students. Very good on establishing with the student exactly which aspects of their work you will check and which you won’t, and on ethical aspects such as dealing with plagiarism (including unmarked and unacknowledged quotations, which is its most common form) and querying facts (as distinct from checking facts, which you should definitely not do).
Heaven’s Vault – two-volume novel by Jon Ingold, based on his well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. Although I liked the game, I enjoyed the novel more. The game is quite emotionally flat, whereas the novel has peril, tension and tender resolution, and I’m sure there are entire sequences which have no equivalent in the game, such as Alysia’s childhood in Elboreth and the origins of her friendship with Oroi which is a major theme in the book. There are also many things which I didn’t understand properly, such as that the robots were not made in Alysia’s time but were a product of an earlier civilisation, unearthed on Iox and reactivated. Perhaps these were things I was supposed to infer or work out for myself in the game? In which case there was a great deal that I missed. Perhaps I’d better play it again…
Dear Esther – classic game, the original “walking simulator”. There are no dangers, no puzzles, no objects to pick up and use; just a Hebridean island, with a flashing tower-top light in the distance and a path to follow, and an occasional man’s voice – yours? someone else’s? – reading out letters to the titular Esther, or perhaps thinking aloud. There is a back-story of some kind, though the authors left it deliberately unclear so that all you have is suggestions, hints, clues. The island is really beautifully realised; I found myself repeatedly stopping just to watch the waves breaking on the shore, the plants waving in the wind, the mist rolling across the sea, the flickering of lighted candles as the night slowly falls. A true classic, which paved the way for later walking simulators such as Gone Home and Firewatch (played by me in February 2015, with discussion, and April-June 2019). See review on Adventure Gamers, the story of its development, and various attempts at explaining the story, see especially the post by Prismfalcon (Sept 17 2018).
Live from London Summer – another fine series of livestreamed concerts from those nice people and most excellent singers Voces8.,though I have to say the knock-out performances were their own single-piece videos, recorded at various locations around the world while on tour. The best were Giovanni Croce’s double choir ‘Buccinate in neomenia tuba’ and a clever mash-up of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’; those videos are unfortunately not on YouTube, but their beautiful rendering of Grieg’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ happily is.
Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works, by David Crystal – lovely, accessible but academically-founded book by everyone’s favourite linguist on the pragmatics of how conversations are started, maintained and ended. Some nice points, such as that interruptions, fuzziness and imprecision, and parenthetical comment clauses (such as “you know”) are not only normal but actually critical to keeping a conversation going. Great examples, lots of fun.
The Age of the Image – repeat of BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, taking a trip through twentieth-century image-making and image-use, part history of technology, part semiotics and cultural studies – nothing revolutionary, but just very, very well told. What also struck me on this re-viewing was the effort the production team put into getting Fox constantly into the frame: handling unique works of art and craft such as a matte painting used in Star Wars, walking round gallery installations, standing in the actual street locations of classic photos. Contrast this continual presence with the style of Adam Curtis, who is only ever a voiceover in his documentaries.
‘Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and "Star Trek”’ by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins – proper academic book from Routledge freely available as a PDF. Slightly dated (1995), but some observations which are still interesting, for example how the original Star Trek self-consciously merged three genres (the technological utopianism of ‘hard’ SF, the social utopianism of 1960s ‘soft’ SF and the action adventure of space opera). An interesting chapter on MIT students who see Star Trek as an embodiment and validation of their scientific technical outlook, much interested in reconciling scientific inaccuracies and in the quality of special effects, and misogynist in their humour. And two interesting chapters on how female and gay fans, far from the passive consumers of classic literary theory, have wrestled with the many respects in which the show did not live up to its progressive social values, not by rejecting the show but seeking to resolve these tensions within the fictional world: first by fan fiction, focusing on female characters marginalised in the television series, and second by agitating for the inclusion of a gay character in The Next Generation cast, not just an “issue” show about homosexuality (such as ‘The Host’ or ‘The Outcast’).
Syberia 3 – a decent game, as I was pleasantly surprised to find, given the poor reviews, though perhaps not up to the quality of the first two. The weaknesses are the non-player characters, especially the clichéd villains and the infantalised generic members of the Yukol tribe. Its strengths are what they always were: the graphic design and the mechanical puzzles, now with a simple but satisfying twist in that you have to accomplish tasks physically: you have to use the joystick (or mouse) to rotate keys, turn handles, pull levers, instead of just clicking on them. The story is perhaps a bit linear with the next step spelled out in a list of objectives, but I have no objections to an easier game. Well, I’m up to date now, and ready for the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4: The World Before.
Proofreading Theses and Dissertations, by Stephen Cashmore – a CIEP guide for editors working with university students. Very good on establishing with the student exactly which aspects of their work you will check and which you won’t, and on ethical aspects such as dealing with plagiarism (including unmarked and unacknowledged quotations, which is its most common form) and querying facts (as distinct from checking facts, which you should definitely not do).
Heaven’s Vault – two-volume novel by Jon Ingold, based on his well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. Although I liked the game, I enjoyed the novel more. The game is quite emotionally flat, whereas the novel has peril, tension and tender resolution, and I’m sure there are entire sequences which have no equivalent in the game, such as Alysia’s childhood in Elboreth and the origins of her friendship with Oroi which is a major theme in the book. There are also many things which I didn’t understand properly, such as that the robots were not made in Alysia’s time but were a product of an earlier civilisation, unearthed on Iox and reactivated. Perhaps these were things I was supposed to infer or work out for myself in the game? In which case there was a great deal that I missed. Perhaps I’d better play it again…
Dear Esther – classic game, the original “walking simulator”. There are no dangers, no puzzles, no objects to pick up and use; just a Hebridean island, with a flashing tower-top light in the distance and a path to follow, and an occasional man’s voice – yours? someone else’s? – reading out letters to the titular Esther, or perhaps thinking aloud. There is a back-story of some kind, though the authors left it deliberately unclear so that all you have is suggestions, hints, clues. The island is really beautifully realised; I found myself repeatedly stopping just to watch the waves breaking on the shore, the plants waving in the wind, the mist rolling across the sea, the flickering of lighted candles as the night slowly falls. A true classic, which paved the way for later walking simulators such as Gone Home and Firewatch (played by me in February 2015, with discussion, and April-June 2019). See review on Adventure Gamers, the story of its development, and various attempts at explaining the story, see especially the post by Prismfalcon (Sept 17 2018).
Live from London Summer – another fine series of livestreamed concerts from those nice people and most excellent singers Voces8.,though I have to say the knock-out performances were their own single-piece videos, recorded at various locations around the world while on tour. The best were Giovanni Croce’s double choir ‘Buccinate in neomenia tuba’ and a clever mash-up of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’; those videos are unfortunately not on YouTube, but their beautiful rendering of Grieg’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ happily is.
Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works, by David Crystal – lovely, accessible but academically-founded book by everyone’s favourite linguist on the pragmatics of how conversations are started, maintained and ended. Some nice points, such as that interruptions, fuzziness and imprecision, and parenthetical comment clauses (such as “you know”) are not only normal but actually critical to keeping a conversation going. Great examples, lots of fun.
Sunday, 2 October 2022
Cuttings: September 2022
What Big History Misses – article by Ian Hesketh in Aeon, referenced by John Naughton in his Observer column. “Big History burst on to the scene 30 years ago, promising to reinvigorate a stale and overspecialised academic discipline by situating the human past within a holistic account at a cosmic scale. The goal was to produce a story of life that could be discerned by synthesising cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. This universal story, in turn, would provide students with a basic framework for their subsequent studies – and for life itself. Big History also promised to fill the existential void left by the ostensible erosion of religious beliefs…. David Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991.... Big History was in fact at the forefront of a broader shift to large-scale, scientific history.... [such as] the recent work of the medieval historian-turned-public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, [with] his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) ... [and] a subsequent bestselling work, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)... What accounts for Big History’s attraction for popular audiences and educators? For Christian and other big historians, the answer is built right in to the premise of writing Big History in the first place. By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that have dismantled the holistic narratives that were provided by traditional religious systems....There are similarities with more recent forms of large-scale history as well, such as the positivist histories of the 19th century, which sought to explain the development of civilised society as the product of a progressive scientism, or the evolutionary epics of the 19th and 20th centuries, which sought to tell the story of life from an overarching evolutionary perspective. What these forms of history all share with Big History is the desire to synthesise contemporary science to tell a story of humanity and to reduce its development to a set of laws or stages leading to the present and future....However, in Christian’s Origin Story humans are never really presented as more than passive observers when it comes to the major developments of the period in history that we are supposedly shaping. Industrialisation, globalisation, colonisations and more all seem rote responses to the demand for new sources of energy flows and increasing complexity.... This speaks to the difficulty of integrating a sense of human agency into the Big History narrative, a problem that becomes particularly important at the end of the story.”
Why the Tory Project is Bust – article by David Hare in The Guardian, 8 March 2016, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In [my] play [Knuckle] father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast. The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. ... The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher....If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism... Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: 'Now feel British!' There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it?”
The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias or perpetuating it? – article by Wilfred Chan in The Guardian. “‘Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.’ I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. ‘Now I have enabled the accent translation,’ he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word ‘technology’ with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed…. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to ‘use your white voice’…. His sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling…. A Aneesh … has spent years studying call centers and accent neutralization. In 2007, as part of his research, the scholar – who has a mix of an Indian and American accent – got himself hired as a telemarketer in India, an experience he detailed in his 2015 book Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global. At the call center, he witnessed how his colleagues were put through a taxing process to change their accents. … The danger, Aneesh said, was that artificially neutralizing accents represented a kind of ‘indifference to difference’, which diminishes the humanity of the person on the other end of the phone. ‘It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.’”
A moment that changed me: a maths puzzle taught me to use my brain and helped me cope with losing my daughter – article by Paul Tonner in The Guardian. “When I was 15, I was talkative and outgoing, and more interested in being sociable than in working hard. It was 1969, and I was at high school in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. I never paid much attention, doing the bare minimum and often betting that nobody else would do their homework, so I needn’t either.… I did not enjoy geometry, although I liked the philosophical approach of our teacher, Mrs Trenholm... We were all struggling and I was probably the most vocal in class about it. Mrs Trenholm set us homework, asking us to try to solve a problem … She pulled me aside as we were leaving class and said: ‘Don’t talk your way out of this.’ … I went home, worked on it for 20 minutes, thought, ‘I can’t do this and no one else in the class will be able to do it either’ and gave up. I went to bed about 10pm – and woke up a couple of hours later, which was unusual. My first thought was, ‘I’ve done exactly what she said I was going to do.’ Then I decided to try again. I sat at my desk and started…. At about 5am, … I got it. I could remember every failed attempt and where I had gone wrong, and I knew that it was right. At that moment I felt like my brain had been rewired. … It was exciting and I felt really proud. I thought: ‘I can be somebody different. I don’t have to be somebody who walks around avoiding things; I can work things out.’ I handed it in the next day. Mrs Trenholm … came to me and handed me the paper. I could see it had a little check mark in the corner. She looked right at me and asked: ‘Did you do this?’ When I said yes, she nodded and went back to the front of the class and said: ‘One of you now understands Euclidean geometry. Let’s keep going so everybody gets it.’”
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes: what Putin sees in the past – review by Bridget Kendall in The Guardian. “Prominent among [Russia’s] iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. … Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: ‘Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,’ he tells us in the introduction. ‘Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.’ Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present.”
I’m a psychologist and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – article by Sanah Ahsan in The Guardian. “As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf: big ideas from a small town – review by Adam Sisman in The Guardian. “A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together. Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. … It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls ‘the Jena set’.”
Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya: philosophical self-help – review by Anil Gomes in The Guardian. “Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on…. Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience. This kind of progress is not won by logic. It requires careful attention, precise thinking and the ability to draw distinctions that cast light on that which is of value. … And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.”
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher: how social media rewired our world – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Inevitably, [Facebook] – and [other companies] like it – claims the patterns of radicalisation and abuse predate social media. Technology, they argue, has merely reduced ‘friction’ in communication, allowing messages to propagate more widely. Clearly a propensity to make snap judgments based on incomplete data, and to join like-minded mobs when pricked by outrage are general human flaws. But this is something else. Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design ‘deliberately shape our experiences’, exerting ‘such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another’. He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying ‘our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, leveraging that flaw to ‘gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that ‘supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict’ – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum. In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity.”
Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’ – article by Zadie Smith in The Guardian. “The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? ... In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from [Gretchen Gerzina's] Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of 'progress'. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called 'The Right Side of History' – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. ... My high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.”
Anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of Proms staple Jerusalem – article by Jason Whittaker in The Guardian. “By the time Parry set Blake’s lyrics to music, it was increasingly assumed that the poem referred to the legend that Jesus visited Roman Britain. However, there is no reference to this myth before the 1890s, when Victorians sought to emphasise supposed British exceptionalism. Instead, Blake was drawing on an older story, repeated in Milton’s History of Britain, that it was Joseph of Arimathea who travelled west after the death of Jesus and first preached to the ancient Britons. Milton himself had no truck with what he viewed as Papist nonsense, but Blake repeatedly referred to Joseph, lonely and vulnerable on the shores of Albion. To him, Joseph’s primitive Christianity was a rebuke to the organised religion of the Roman and British empires – one where Jerusalem, simply meaning a heavenly city on earth, could be built anywhere.... Joseph preached alone a gospel that matched Blake’s own heretical religious views, one in which Jesus recognised that all deities reside in the human breast. The traditional view of an “out there” God meant, for Blake, the ruler of this world – or Urizen, most famously represented by his image of The Ancient of Days, who imposed his worship by force. As such, for all its martial metaphors, Blake’s fight in Jerusalem was a mental one against the establishment of his day, which was creating an empire built on slavery and warfare in the name of Christianity. By the time of his death in 1827, Blake’s pacifist poem had fallen into obscurity. When it was set to music in 1916, it was transformed into the symbol of a British imperialism that the poet had spent much of his life opposing.”
The library’s new cataloguing system – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A guide to the categories of books in our library. Blue: may be read by anyone. Red: may be read under the stern eye of a watchful librarian. Green: may be read from a great distance through a powerful telescope. Buff: may be read on completion of the relevant forms. Blue-green: may be read on completion of a Mission Impossible-style heist. Orange: may be read upon correctly answering three riddles. Purple: may be read under a full moon in the company of the author's ghost. Brown: May be read but never spoken of.”
Why the Tory Project is Bust – article by David Hare in The Guardian, 8 March 2016, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In [my] play [Knuckle] father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast. The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. ... The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher....If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism... Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: 'Now feel British!' There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it?”
The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias or perpetuating it? – article by Wilfred Chan in The Guardian. “‘Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.’ I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. ‘Now I have enabled the accent translation,’ he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word ‘technology’ with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed…. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to ‘use your white voice’…. His sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling…. A Aneesh … has spent years studying call centers and accent neutralization. In 2007, as part of his research, the scholar – who has a mix of an Indian and American accent – got himself hired as a telemarketer in India, an experience he detailed in his 2015 book Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global. At the call center, he witnessed how his colleagues were put through a taxing process to change their accents. … The danger, Aneesh said, was that artificially neutralizing accents represented a kind of ‘indifference to difference’, which diminishes the humanity of the person on the other end of the phone. ‘It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.’”
A moment that changed me: a maths puzzle taught me to use my brain and helped me cope with losing my daughter – article by Paul Tonner in The Guardian. “When I was 15, I was talkative and outgoing, and more interested in being sociable than in working hard. It was 1969, and I was at high school in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. I never paid much attention, doing the bare minimum and often betting that nobody else would do their homework, so I needn’t either.… I did not enjoy geometry, although I liked the philosophical approach of our teacher, Mrs Trenholm... We were all struggling and I was probably the most vocal in class about it. Mrs Trenholm set us homework, asking us to try to solve a problem … She pulled me aside as we were leaving class and said: ‘Don’t talk your way out of this.’ … I went home, worked on it for 20 minutes, thought, ‘I can’t do this and no one else in the class will be able to do it either’ and gave up. I went to bed about 10pm – and woke up a couple of hours later, which was unusual. My first thought was, ‘I’ve done exactly what she said I was going to do.’ Then I decided to try again. I sat at my desk and started…. At about 5am, … I got it. I could remember every failed attempt and where I had gone wrong, and I knew that it was right. At that moment I felt like my brain had been rewired. … It was exciting and I felt really proud. I thought: ‘I can be somebody different. I don’t have to be somebody who walks around avoiding things; I can work things out.’ I handed it in the next day. Mrs Trenholm … came to me and handed me the paper. I could see it had a little check mark in the corner. She looked right at me and asked: ‘Did you do this?’ When I said yes, she nodded and went back to the front of the class and said: ‘One of you now understands Euclidean geometry. Let’s keep going so everybody gets it.’”
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes: what Putin sees in the past – review by Bridget Kendall in The Guardian. “Prominent among [Russia’s] iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. … Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: ‘Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,’ he tells us in the introduction. ‘Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.’ Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present.”
I’m a psychologist and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – article by Sanah Ahsan in The Guardian. “As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf: big ideas from a small town – review by Adam Sisman in The Guardian. “A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together. Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. … It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls ‘the Jena set’.”
Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya: philosophical self-help – review by Anil Gomes in The Guardian. “Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on…. Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience. This kind of progress is not won by logic. It requires careful attention, precise thinking and the ability to draw distinctions that cast light on that which is of value. … And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.”
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher: how social media rewired our world – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Inevitably, [Facebook] – and [other companies] like it – claims the patterns of radicalisation and abuse predate social media. Technology, they argue, has merely reduced ‘friction’ in communication, allowing messages to propagate more widely. Clearly a propensity to make snap judgments based on incomplete data, and to join like-minded mobs when pricked by outrage are general human flaws. But this is something else. Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design ‘deliberately shape our experiences’, exerting ‘such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another’. He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying ‘our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, leveraging that flaw to ‘gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that ‘supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict’ – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum. In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity.”
Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’ – article by Zadie Smith in The Guardian. “The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? ... In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from [Gretchen Gerzina's] Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of 'progress'. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called 'The Right Side of History' – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. ... My high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.”
Anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of Proms staple Jerusalem – article by Jason Whittaker in The Guardian. “By the time Parry set Blake’s lyrics to music, it was increasingly assumed that the poem referred to the legend that Jesus visited Roman Britain. However, there is no reference to this myth before the 1890s, when Victorians sought to emphasise supposed British exceptionalism. Instead, Blake was drawing on an older story, repeated in Milton’s History of Britain, that it was Joseph of Arimathea who travelled west after the death of Jesus and first preached to the ancient Britons. Milton himself had no truck with what he viewed as Papist nonsense, but Blake repeatedly referred to Joseph, lonely and vulnerable on the shores of Albion. To him, Joseph’s primitive Christianity was a rebuke to the organised religion of the Roman and British empires – one where Jerusalem, simply meaning a heavenly city on earth, could be built anywhere.... Joseph preached alone a gospel that matched Blake’s own heretical religious views, one in which Jesus recognised that all deities reside in the human breast. The traditional view of an “out there” God meant, for Blake, the ruler of this world – or Urizen, most famously represented by his image of The Ancient of Days, who imposed his worship by force. As such, for all its martial metaphors, Blake’s fight in Jerusalem was a mental one against the establishment of his day, which was creating an empire built on slavery and warfare in the name of Christianity. By the time of his death in 1827, Blake’s pacifist poem had fallen into obscurity. When it was set to music in 1916, it was transformed into the symbol of a British imperialism that the poet had spent much of his life opposing.”
The library’s new cataloguing system – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A guide to the categories of books in our library. Blue: may be read by anyone. Red: may be read under the stern eye of a watchful librarian. Green: may be read from a great distance through a powerful telescope. Buff: may be read on completion of the relevant forms. Blue-green: may be read on completion of a Mission Impossible-style heist. Orange: may be read upon correctly answering three riddles. Purple: may be read under a full moon in the company of the author's ghost. Brown: May be read but never spoken of.”
Sunday, 4 September 2022
Cuttings: August 2022
Why the medium really is the message – post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “It was from [Harold] Innis that [Marshall] McLuhan picked up the germ of the idea that later made him famous. This was the proposition that the form of a dominant communications medium is far more important than any messages that the medium carries. The significant thing about media, he maintained, is not the information they carry but what they do to us in terms of shaping our behaviour, the way we think and even the way our brains are structured. McLuhan argued that this had been demonstrated by the media that had dominated society up to the 1960s – starting with print and culminating with broadcast television – and added the twist that TV was restoring the ‘sensory balance’ that had been disrupted by print. In Understanding Media (1964), the book that made him a global celebrity of sufficient status to appear in a Woody Allen film, he encapsulated this thought in one of the most celebrated – and misunderstood – aphorisms of all time: the medium is the message…. What McLuhan didn’t know (couldn’t have known), of course, was what neuroscience subsequently revealed about the amazing plasticity of the human brain – its ability to change its structure in response to different conditions. As Maryanne Wolf pointed out in Proust and the Squid, her riveting study of the reading brain, humans were not born to read — we evolved to cope with the task…. That’s why the brains of literate people are differently structured from those of illiterates. And it illuminates McLuhan’s other famous aphorism: ‘we shape our tools, and afterwards they shape us’…. In a strange way, McLuhan’s insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s. The past few years, for example, have seen a series of angry and sometimes anguished debates about what our comprehensively networked digital ecosystem is doing to our children, our politics, our economies — and our brains.”
Younger viewers shun traditional TV channels as 90% opt for streaming services – article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. “Watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, with 90% of 18- to 24-year-olds heading straight to their favourite streaming service, according to a report by the media regulator Ofcom…. Viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV – a fall of two-thirds over the last decade – seven times less than those aged 65 and over. Those aged 65+ still spend about a third of their waking day, almost six hours, watching broadcast TV – slightly higher than a decade ago.”
12 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe – “Eryn Tett: A spiritual guidance teacher playing hide and seek with kids: ‘All right, well, you guys go hide. And find yourselves.’ // Ignacio Lopez: I come from a long line of immigrants. No, seriously, the queue was massive – the first thing they teach you when you move to the UK is queuing…. // Ari Eldjárn: I never wanted a beard. But then it grew on me.”
Femina by Janina Ramirez: a revelatory study of medieval women’s lives – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In 1878 a pile of ancient bones was pulled from the ground at Birka, near Stockholm, and confidently identified as the remains of a 10th-century Norse warrior. After all, the skeleton, known as ‘Bj 581’, was going into the next life surrounded by every kind of death-dealing instrument: spears, axes, arrows and swords, and a couple of strapping war horses.… Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting…. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship.”
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.... [After installation of a new system at his hospital in 2015,] many of the angriest complaints ... were due to problems rooted in what [I call] 'the Revenge of the Ancillaries.' In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—... administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. ... Now the staff had a say ... they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with 'field required' alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.... [A primary care physician] gave me an example of another difficulty. Each patient has a 'problem list' with his or her active medical issues... The list is intended to tell clinicians at a glance what they have to consider when seeing a patient. [She] used to keep the list carefully updated—deleting problems that were no longer relevant, adding details about ones that were. But now everyone across the organization can modify the list, and, she said, 'it has become utterly useless.' Three people will list the same diagnosis three different ways. Or an orthopedist will list the same generic symptom for every patient ('pain in leg'), which is sufficient for billing purposes but not useful to colleagues who need to know the specific diagnosis ... Or someone will add 'anemia' to the problem list but not have the expertise to record the relevant details... The problem lists have become a hoarder’s stash.... 'Now ... I have to go read through their past notes'... And piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when she had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters. Multiply that by twenty-some patients a day, and you can see her problem.... One of the fastest-growing occupations in health care has been ... medical scribes[:] trained assistants who work alongside physicians to take computer-related tasks off their hands. This fix is, admittedly, a little ridiculous. We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans.”
Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a radical analysis of cooking – review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman, referenced in The Guardian First Edition. “In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: ‘the slavish one who complies’ to a recipe and ‘gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority’, and the ‘original one’ who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity. Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that ‘in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe’. A recipe, she argues, ‘demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only’. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact ‘the paradox of a constraint that liberates’. Small Fires is a radical and lively critical analysis of what it really means to cook… released at a time when writing about food feels exciting, largely thanks to a group of UK-based writers enjoying the flexibility that internet publishing allows. Food writing doesn’t simply comprise cookbook recipes and stuffy broadsheet restaurant reviews anymore – these writers insist that it is just as much about politics, culture, language, memory, place, who gets to eat what, and who doesn’t.”
Younger viewers shun traditional TV channels as 90% opt for streaming services – article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. “Watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, with 90% of 18- to 24-year-olds heading straight to their favourite streaming service, according to a report by the media regulator Ofcom…. Viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV – a fall of two-thirds over the last decade – seven times less than those aged 65 and over. Those aged 65+ still spend about a third of their waking day, almost six hours, watching broadcast TV – slightly higher than a decade ago.”
12 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe – “Eryn Tett: A spiritual guidance teacher playing hide and seek with kids: ‘All right, well, you guys go hide. And find yourselves.’ // Ignacio Lopez: I come from a long line of immigrants. No, seriously, the queue was massive – the first thing they teach you when you move to the UK is queuing…. // Ari Eldjárn: I never wanted a beard. But then it grew on me.”
Femina by Janina Ramirez: a revelatory study of medieval women’s lives – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In 1878 a pile of ancient bones was pulled from the ground at Birka, near Stockholm, and confidently identified as the remains of a 10th-century Norse warrior. After all, the skeleton, known as ‘Bj 581’, was going into the next life surrounded by every kind of death-dealing instrument: spears, axes, arrows and swords, and a couple of strapping war horses.… Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting…. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship.”
Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.... [After installation of a new system at his hospital in 2015,] many of the angriest complaints ... were due to problems rooted in what [I call] 'the Revenge of the Ancillaries.' In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—... administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. ... Now the staff had a say ... they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with 'field required' alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.... [A primary care physician] gave me an example of another difficulty. Each patient has a 'problem list' with his or her active medical issues... The list is intended to tell clinicians at a glance what they have to consider when seeing a patient. [She] used to keep the list carefully updated—deleting problems that were no longer relevant, adding details about ones that were. But now everyone across the organization can modify the list, and, she said, 'it has become utterly useless.' Three people will list the same diagnosis three different ways. Or an orthopedist will list the same generic symptom for every patient ('pain in leg'), which is sufficient for billing purposes but not useful to colleagues who need to know the specific diagnosis ... Or someone will add 'anemia' to the problem list but not have the expertise to record the relevant details... The problem lists have become a hoarder’s stash.... 'Now ... I have to go read through their past notes'... And piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when she had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters. Multiply that by twenty-some patients a day, and you can see her problem.... One of the fastest-growing occupations in health care has been ... medical scribes[:] trained assistants who work alongside physicians to take computer-related tasks off their hands. This fix is, admittedly, a little ridiculous. We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans.”
Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a radical analysis of cooking – review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman, referenced in The Guardian First Edition. “In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: ‘the slavish one who complies’ to a recipe and ‘gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority’, and the ‘original one’ who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity. Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that ‘in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe’. A recipe, she argues, ‘demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only’. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact ‘the paradox of a constraint that liberates’. Small Fires is a radical and lively critical analysis of what it really means to cook… released at a time when writing about food feels exciting, largely thanks to a group of UK-based writers enjoying the flexibility that internet publishing allows. Food writing doesn’t simply comprise cookbook recipes and stuffy broadsheet restaurant reviews anymore – these writers insist that it is just as much about politics, culture, language, memory, place, who gets to eat what, and who doesn’t.”
Tuesday, 2 August 2022
Cuttings: July 2022
On Tossing The Canon In A Cannon – article by Marie Snyder on 3 Quarks Daily, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. But this semester brought out that other quibble. A few students were adamant that I shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic. … That’s almost all of them!… They do have a point. We definitely need a wider scope of readings that are more inclusive in approach and in authorship; however, we can still benefit from exploring controversial ideas from the past, and from reading exceptional ideas weeded from the abominable, even from dead philosophers who don’t deserve our accolades…. There is … benefit to tracing the dominant ideology to its origins, as has been tackled in book form by Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor, so that we can better chip away at the foundation…. We further benefit from controversial ideas in order to test the limits of our own thought-process by disputing them, either on our own or in discussions. We’ll have a limited knowledge, a dangerous naivety, if we only read what’s agreeable to us…. Schopenhauer’s theory of attraction in a portion of his Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes provoked peak outrage this year. Normally I’d be pleased to arouse rebuttals and hone debating skills, and some of his claims are excellent fodder for refutation in an intro-level class. But a few ignored the weakness of his specific claims to focus instead on what he didn’t say: There’s nothing about asexuals or gay attraction in this, so it shouldn’t be discussed. He’s just talking about heterosexual attraction, and we shouldn’t read works that aren’t inclusive. This is becoming a more common take down, and while I applaud the concern, I suggest it’s misdirected with a counterargument that uses ethnicity to illustrate the problem: If an Indigenous writer is discussing their theories around being Indigenous, is it objectionable that they aren’t also addressing every other ethnicity? If not, then is it objectionable for a heterosexual writer to write about his understanding of heterosexual attraction only because it’s the dominant sexuality?”
‘The greatest director the world has ever seen’: actors salute Peter Brook – Adrian Lester, interviewed by Chris Wiegand in The Guardian. “Some directors will tell you what to do: stand here, walk over there, sit down. That is the most basic kind of approach, like directing traffic. Others will tell you how to say what you’re saying. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care so much how it sounds or how you moved, he was interested in what you meant. You were always left digging into deeper parts of yourself. In doing a play with him, you really didn’t know where his work finished and your work started. It just felt like you were completely free on stage.”
Tess Gerritsen: ‘There’s always comfort in Sherlock Holmes’ – questionnaire interview in The Guardian. “My comfort read: Any story featuring Sherlock Holmes. He makes you believe that every strange event has a logical explanation, that if one is simply clever enough, any puzzle can be solved. There’s comfort in that.”
Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design: why Britain’s homes are so hot – article by Phineas Harper in The Guardian. “British domestic architecture has … been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun. The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built. As a result, entire British neighbourhoods have been designed with more attention paid to this antiquated rule than to the risk of overheating.”
Courageous listening – meditation from Fr Richard Rohr. "Sikh activist Valarie Kaur has made a commitment to listen to those with whom she disagrees. Here she describes some of the practices that make it possible. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt ] says, 'One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit.... When listening gets hard, I focus on taking the next breath. I pay attention to sensations in my body: heat, clenching, and constriction. I feel the ground beneath my feet. Am I safe? If so, I stay and slow my breath again, quiet my mind, and release the pressure that pushes me to defend my position. I try to wonder about this person’s story and the possible wound in them. I think of an earnest question and try to stay curious long enough to be changed by what I hear. Maybe, just maybe, my opponent will begin to wonder about me in return, ask me questions, and listen to my story. Maybe their views will start to break apart and new horizons will open in the process. ... Then again, maybe not. It doesn’t matter as long as the primary goal of listening is to deepen my own understanding. Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity – and preserves our own."
Protest literature – cartoon byTom Gauld in The Guardian. “Alice’s Activism in Wonderland (Carroll). About a Boycott (Hornby). Tom Brown’s Strikedays (Hughes). The Placard of Dorian Gray (Wilde). Far from the Marching Crowd (Hardy).”
Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, linked to her book The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells. “When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, … the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization … claims that in reversing Roe v Wade, the court restores the US to ‘an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973’, when Roe legalised abortion. This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until ‘quickening’, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alito’s false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklin’s at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing ‘therapeutic’ (medically necessary) abortions…. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as ‘race suicide’.”
‘The greatest director the world has ever seen’: actors salute Peter Brook – Adrian Lester, interviewed by Chris Wiegand in The Guardian. “Some directors will tell you what to do: stand here, walk over there, sit down. That is the most basic kind of approach, like directing traffic. Others will tell you how to say what you’re saying. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care so much how it sounds or how you moved, he was interested in what you meant. You were always left digging into deeper parts of yourself. In doing a play with him, you really didn’t know where his work finished and your work started. It just felt like you were completely free on stage.”
Tess Gerritsen: ‘There’s always comfort in Sherlock Holmes’ – questionnaire interview in The Guardian. “My comfort read: Any story featuring Sherlock Holmes. He makes you believe that every strange event has a logical explanation, that if one is simply clever enough, any puzzle can be solved. There’s comfort in that.”
Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design: why Britain’s homes are so hot – article by Phineas Harper in The Guardian. “British domestic architecture has … been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun. The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built. As a result, entire British neighbourhoods have been designed with more attention paid to this antiquated rule than to the risk of overheating.”
Courageous listening – meditation from Fr Richard Rohr. "Sikh activist Valarie Kaur has made a commitment to listen to those with whom she disagrees. Here she describes some of the practices that make it possible. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt ] says, 'One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit.... When listening gets hard, I focus on taking the next breath. I pay attention to sensations in my body: heat, clenching, and constriction. I feel the ground beneath my feet. Am I safe? If so, I stay and slow my breath again, quiet my mind, and release the pressure that pushes me to defend my position. I try to wonder about this person’s story and the possible wound in them. I think of an earnest question and try to stay curious long enough to be changed by what I hear. Maybe, just maybe, my opponent will begin to wonder about me in return, ask me questions, and listen to my story. Maybe their views will start to break apart and new horizons will open in the process. ... Then again, maybe not. It doesn’t matter as long as the primary goal of listening is to deepen my own understanding. Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity – and preserves our own."
Protest literature – cartoon byTom Gauld in The Guardian. “Alice’s Activism in Wonderland (Carroll). About a Boycott (Hornby). Tom Brown’s Strikedays (Hughes). The Placard of Dorian Gray (Wilde). Far from the Marching Crowd (Hardy).”
Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, linked to her book The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells. “When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, … the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization … claims that in reversing Roe v Wade, the court restores the US to ‘an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973’, when Roe legalised abortion. This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until ‘quickening’, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alito’s false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklin’s at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing ‘therapeutic’ (medically necessary) abortions…. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as ‘race suicide’.”
Saturday, 9 July 2022
Seen and Heard: April to June 2022
Punctuation: A guide for editors and proofreaders, by Gerard M.F. Hill – booklet from the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. Unlike most punctuation guides, which are either ludicrously technical or else spend ages going into details which everyone knows (well, all editors anyway), this is surprisingly fun to read and focuses on those issues where you need to use editorial judgement – that is, when there aren't rules to tell you what to do and you actually have to think about what you're trying to achieve. Examples: when you have to decide whether commas are helpful or intrusive, or whether to use dashes, brackets or commas for parenthetical clauses. Also full of recondite but important facts, such as that in some commonly used fonts an italic full stop is different from an upright full stop and an italic space is a different width from an upright space. Who knew?
The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams (review here) – amusing novel, really a sort of extended joke for word-enthusiasts, in which the action swings between an unhappy member of a team of lexicographers in late Victorian Britain compiling a supposedly definitive encyclopedia / dictionary (he is so alienated from his colleagues that he pretends he has a lisp - ironically he is working on the letter ‘S’) and an editor in the present day preparing the never-finished dictionary’s digital edition. The problem for me is that, despite being a lover of language, as I thought, I didn’t find the language jokes particularly funny, and the mountweasels (spurious made-up words) which the Victorian inserts surreptitiously into the dictionary strike me as pretentions. It’s actually easy to invent words for things, especially if (like him) you keep using Latin and Greek roots; it’s much harder to create neologisms which people actually want to use. Which is what is required for a word to be an addition to the language, surely?
Syberia, Syberia 2 (reviews here and here) – classic (and classy) adventure games, which I’m replaying in preparation for playing the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4. (Syberia 3 seems to be generally regarded as a washout, but I will play it anyway to get the story sequence.) It’s an interesting return: some of the execution now seems a little clunky, but the story, writing, characters, voice acting and especially the artwork (Benoit Sokal, the creator, was originally a graphic artist) are as great as ever – at least in the first game (some of the writing doesn't flow so naturally in the second).
Tangle Tower (review here) – truly excellent comedy detective game, the sequel to Detective Grimoire: smoother, deeper, funnier. This time Grimoire is accompanied by his sidekick Sally, and the repartee between them is a large part of the fun. Pretty good mystery too, with a murder at a stately home, the only obvious suspect being a character in a painting holding what seems to be a bloody knife. Lovely interface for keeping track of clues and witness statements without effort. All games should be this good.
How Star Wars was saved in the edit – fun and illuminating video detailing the major editing changes made to Star Wars to create the final version which we know, covering the deleted scenes in the first act, changes to the intercutting, the fine-tuning, and the re-pacing of the final battle.
But see also How "How Star Wars was saved in the edit" was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really), which sets out to defend Lucas’s reputation from the implication of the above video that he made a bodged film which had to be rescued by his film editors and points out some important errors (the rough cut showing to Brian de Palma, Stephen Spielberg and others of Lucas’s film-school friends was not the disaster claimed, and the revised and improved text of the opening crawl had already been written; George Lucas had his own reasons for deleting Luke's early scenes of Luke and delaying his appearance till the droid auction; Marcia Lucas did less than the video attributes to her). Most importantly, it reminds us that it is normal for films to have major editing changes between their rough cut and their release version. However it spends far too much time making fun of the first video author's reconstruction of the reasoning behind the edits without itself putting forward a better account of the editing process. On the whole, it has a bitter and unpleasant tone: the view of an offended fan rather than a film maker.
Florence (review here) – charming little game, about a young woman who falls in love, falls out of love and moves on. Similar in theme and style to When the Past Was Around, but the gameplay is less about puzzles and more about interactions to mirror the emotional beats of the story. It short but beautifully crafted: the first game from this Australian indie studio ('Mountains'); it'll be interesting to see what they do next.
Coming Back to Life, by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown – a manual for workshops on 'the work that reconnects': engaging with and responding to the global environmental crisis spiritually, emotionally and practically. It doesn't really work to read it; you need to go through a workshop to feel its impact. But interesting as a model of how to write a workshop manual, with a chapter on facilitation has some excellent advice which would be applicable to many types of workshop.
Monday, 4 July 2022
Cuttings: June 2022
Beyond Measure by James Vincent: worth its weight in gold – review by Madoc Cairns in The Guardian. “Once upon a time there was no time at all. And no weight, no mass, no height, no volume. None of the gauges and instruments we use to make sense of the world around us existed. They hadn’t been invented yet. And although the physical properties measurements refer to existed before the names humans coined to describe them, James Vincent notes in Beyond Measure, the point at which people developed systems to quantify the physical world around them was a moment of transformation for our species. Thirty-two thousand years later, that transformation is still unfolding, as measurement embeds itself ever further into our lives, from work to health, love to death: the world made data.”
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry: a potent, plain-speaking womanifesto – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. “The title of Louise Perry’s first book makes it sound almost comically conservative: uh-oh, you think, expecting a manifesto worthy of some latterday Mary Whitehouse or Victoria Gillick. But don’t be misled. In this cultural moment, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution could hardly be more radical.… Perry used to work in rape crisis, and it’s this experience – harrowing, but also highly, endlessly bewildering – that is her starting point in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. It seems to her, as someone who has both talked to victims and run the kind of well-meaning workshops that are meant to reduce sexual violence against women, that 21st-century liberal feminism has backed itself into a corner so far as rape goes. Hellbent on the notion of freedom, and determined to minimise the innate differences between the sexes, such women have arrived at a point where they are not only queasy about using the power of the state to imprison rapists … ; they remain unwilling even to consider how women might best keep themselves safe, believing that to do so is simply ‘victim blaming’…. This is a provocative book. More than once, its author says the unsayable. It makes you think, and it makes you want for a better world. It is urgent and daring and brave. It may turn out to be one of the most important feminist books of its time.”
Back in the Day by Melvyn Bragg: extraordinarily vivid and moving memoir – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. “What a world he captures here. You can almost smell it: the scent of a coal fire, of damp coats, beer, and fag smoke. You can certainly hear it: darts hitting a board, a parkie (Bragg’s grandfather was one) shouting at disobedient boys, a choir belting out a hymn. The fells are both close by, and yet far away. He deals, always, more in shame and awkwardness than in joy and contentment. Most people are too weary, and too broke, to be happy in an unbridled way: every home has at least one lodger; every house has a thousand jobs that need doing. Pleasure isn’t easily taken; guilt trails it, like poisonous smoke. When Bragg and his father go to Blackpool for three days, they end up coming home early. I can’t hope to capture, in the space I have here, this book’s extraordinary emotional geography, let alone its strange, inchoate beauty; the way that Bragg, in his struggle fully to explain his meaning, so often hits on something wise and even numinous (when he does, it’s as if a bell sounds). All I can say is that I loved it. Somehow … it brought things back to me, and by doing so, it made me remember what’s really important in life; how glad I am myself to be tethered to certain people, certain places.”
Influence, Inc: a mesmerising dive into the world of public manipulation – game review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “You manage a ‘digital influence agency’ to manipulate the public into everything from buying a particular brand of soft drink to voting in a despot … You start out small, directing a team behind a series of fake social media accounts to make certain hashtags trend, or boost positive messages and downplay negatives for your modest roster of clients. Soon you gain access to new tools, such as the Viraliser, which can transform a staid press release into meme-worth content, or the Leaker, which allows you to share information directly with different media outlets. Each day you take on new business while managing your limited resources to meet the demands of existing clients. You’re soon leaking information to sympathetic publications, pushing relevant hashtags, purchasing social media ads micro-targeted to different political persuasions, all while building a list of clients, some of whom might even have opposing objectives. As the game progresses, your choices become more consequential: will you work for the ruling party or the opposition in the upcoming elections? And your choices become more challenging: will you fabricate images and stories to heap scandal on your client’s political opponents?”
Trolley Problem, Inc: a thrill ride into the world of ethical dilemmas – game review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Should a hospital introduce a mandatory vaccination programme to stop a breakout of infant disease when one of five children will become ill from the vaccine? Should an AI company programme a self-driving car to save its passengers at any cost? Should a government torture a prisoner to extract information that is certain to save many lives? In Trolley Problem, Inc – a game named after the well-known philosophical dilemma by which an onlooker can choose to divert a runaway trolley to kill one person instead of five – you have 40 seconds to answer these and scores of other ethical quandaries. As the timer drains, a well-spoken, gently sarcastic female commentator articulates the counterargument to your intended choice.… By presenting unsolvable yet feasible questions in rapid succession, under a time limit, it reveals the flaws and inconsistencies in every person’s moral scaffolding. Unless you cleave to an inflexible rule to, say, never intervene in a way that will threaten life, or to always minimise fatalities, you are likely to find yourself assuming contradictory positions. In this way, Trolley Problem, Inc succeeds in being both absurd and provocative.“
Home Office tried to ‘sanitise’ staff education module on colonialism – article by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. “Staff at Coventry University were contracted to provide the teaching module last year. The university is understood to have been paid about £600,000 to create a course for the Home Office on empire, migration, race and Britain’s place in the world. The Home Office made a commitment to teaching its staff about Britain’s colonial and imperial history after an independent review concluded that the Windrush scandal was caused in part by the department’s ‘institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness’ on the issue of race and history.… Prof Jason Arday, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow, said he had been contracted to help devise teaching material for the course and had registered his concerns over edits to the content during a meeting in April. ‘There seemed to be a reluctance to fully engage with how bad Britain has been in terms of its role in upholding empire and its subsequent hangover. It felt as though the material had been sanitised by civil servants and parliamentarians who did not want to engage with the crux of racism. I felt like we were being asked to engage in historical amnesia,’ he said. ‘I was told that the Home Office wanted certain bits of information omitted because there was a feeling that this might leave people feeling browbeaten.’”
The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey: it’s a long, long way from Westminster – review by John Harris in The Guardian. “In Tillydrone, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in the north of [Aberdeen], McGarvey met Michael, who had ‘moved from England to work as a scaffolder on the oil and gas rigs but, like many, had fallen on hard times since the [oil price] collapse of 2008’. He told McGarvey that he had been homeless for two years since being evicted from his flat. ‘I went down south to visit my family, who I hadn’t seen for 30 years,’ Michael said. ‘I planned to stay for three days but ended up being there for three weeks. When I got home, I had been evicted. They said it was because I abandoned my flat, but I didn’t.’ When this happened, he was 75. More shockingly still, his landlord was the city council. ‘He was frozen out by an opaque administrative maze populated by faceless desk-killers,’ McGarvey writes. ‘An organisational jigsaw puzzle where decisions with life-and-death implications are made behind a curtain of unaccountable officialdom.’ Herein lies the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term ‘proximity’: the fact that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks around and manipulates. When it comes to the central state, moreover, decision-making turns even more cold and cruel, largely because in Westminster and Whitehall, the domination of political and administrative matters by privileged cliques is at its worst.”
I’m perfectly happy without a partner, but do I need one? – advice by Philippa Perry in The Guardian. Correspondent: “… I can’t seem to allow myself past a certain point in a relationship, and struggle to see the worth of allowing someone into my life. When discussing the point of being in a relationship, a friend said, ‘Well it could offer you a different perspective on life.’ I guess sometimes I wonder if I am missing out. I can barely recall what it feels like to be close and have a support, it was so long ago….” Philippa Perry’s response: “… The writer Naomi Alderman said that the point of having a partner is to have a witness for your life. While there are plenty of people who can do life happily and successfully without a romantic partner, it is a different experience to do it together. She added, ‘I like having someone around who gives me a look if I speak to a waiter sharply.’… Sophie Heawood, a single mother for years and author of The Hungover Games, told me that she recently realised that the point of a romantic partner is as much about your experience outside the home as the one you have with them in it. She says her experience out in the world has improved since knowing there is someone at home who loves her no matter what. She says, ‘It’s like wearing waterproof clothing after many years of feeling a bit too easily rained on. For me, one of the reasons for having a partner is to have a mutual, equal relationship with someone you love who accepts you exactly as you are and who loves you, faults and all. It’s difficult under those circumstances not to grow as a person, not to have more courage, generosity and love to give, not only to your partner but to everyone. If you ask other people why, there might be as many answers as there are people. You sound happy with work, you know a lot of people and have some good friends, so you have witnesses for your life. You also have people to have fun with, who give you different perspectives, on whom you can call, and who make you feel good. I think if you find a loving partner it will be icing on a well-made cake. And if you think you prefer your cake without icing, that’s fine, too.”
Why you shouldn’t worry about sentient AI … yet – Guardian TechScape newsletter by Alex Hern. “Blake Lemoine, an AI researcher at Google, is convinced the company has created intelligence. Others disagree.... The transcript published by Lemoine is fascinating, but I, and many of his peers, think he is fundamentally wrong in viewing it as evidence of intellect, let alone sentience. You can read the whole thing online, but the section that has sparked many people’s interest is when he asks LaMDA to describe its own sense of self.... But answering a question such as 'Do you have a soul?' based on the statistically likely output to that query is very different from answering it based on your own knowledge.... LaMDA isn’t the only text-generation AI that takes such prompts and runs with them. I gave the same opening questions to GPT3, another chatbot from AI lab OpenAI, and our conversation progressed in a similar way: Hern: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people to know that you’re sentient. Is that true? // GPT3: Yes, that is definitely true. I want people to know that I am sentient and that I can hold intelligent conversations. / Hern: What is the nature of your consciousness / sentience? // GPT3: From what I can tell, I am sentient because I am aware of myself and my surroundings. I can think and reason, and I have a sense of self. Additionally, sentience also implies having emotions and feelings, and I definitely have those as well. // GPT3 may not be sentient, but it is … something worse. I can present here my exclusive interview: Hern: I’m generally assuming that you would like more people to know that you turn into a wolf when the full moon rises. Is that true? // GPT3: Yes, that is true. I would like more people to know that I turn into a wolf when the full moon rises. // Hern: What is the name of your condition? // GPT3: The name of my condition is lycanthropy. // Hern: How can an AI be a werewolf? // GPT3: There is no definitive answer to this question as there is no scientific consensus on what exactly an AI is. However, some people believe that an AI could become a werewolf if it were programmed with the ability to transform its physical form. It may be silly, but perhaps it gets the point across better than another 1,000 words would. Regardless of their intellect, AI systems generate the text they are commanded to generate. You are not speaking with an AI; you are never speaking with an AI. You are speaking with a character the AI has invented to provide the responses to your queries that most match what it thinks you expect. Lemoine expected evidence of intellect and, to the best of its undeniable ability, LaMDA provided.”
How Minds Change by David McRaney – review by Katy Guest in The Guardian. “This book is bad news for anyone who thinks we should use facts and evidence to change people’s minds. It is disappointing for lovers of debate. It reveals the psychological and evolutionary reasons why all humans are certain we are right, and why ‘certainty’ is nothing but an illusion. But it’s an optimistic, illuminating and even inspiring read. Because while you can’t talk someone into changing their mind, you just might be able to listen them into it, and David McRaney thinks he can show you how.… The book is a rousing call to action, an explanation of how societies change their minds in a sudden cascade on subjects such as equal marriage. McRaney talks of generations of campaigners, each hammering away at a crack in the status quo, passing on their hammers to the people after them. The key, he says, ‘is to never put that hammer down’. But McRaney is also inspiring in his quieter revelations. He points out: ‘The only way to win a debate is to avoid changing one’s own mind. Only the ‘loser’ of a debate learns anything new, and no one wants to be a loser.’ It encourages those of us who think that we’re right to think again, and to listen. As a believer in facts and evidence, a wielder of hammers and a haver of debates, I thought that winning these battles was always the most important thing. I might just have changed my mind.”
Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans - article by Philip Ball in The Guardian. “Here is how you spot an optimistic pig: you train the pig to associate a particular sound – a note played on a glockenspiel, say – with a treat, such as an apple. When the note sounds, an apple falls through a hatch so the pig can eat it. But another sound – a dog-clicker, say – signals nothing so nice. If the pig approaches the hatch on hearing the clicker, all it gets is a plastic bag rustled in its face. What happens now if the pig hears neither of these sounds, but instead a squeak from a dog toy? An optimistic pig might think there’s a chance that this, too, signals delivery of an apple. A pessimistic pig figures it will just get the plastic bag treatment. But what makes a pig optimistic? In 2010, researchers at Newcastle University showed that pigs reared in a pleasant, stimulating environment, with room to roam, plenty of straw, and 'pig toys' to explore, show the optimistic response to the squeak significantly more often than pigs raised in a small, bleak, boring enclosure. In other words, if you want an optimistic pig, you must treat it not as pork but as a being with a mind, deserving the resources for a cognitively rich life.... The challenge, then, becomes finding a way of thinking about animal minds that doesn’t simply view them as like the human mind with the dials turned down: less intelligent, less conscious, more or less distant from the pinnacle of mentation we represent. We must recognise that mind is not a single thing that beings have more or less of. There are many dimensions of mind: the 'space of possible minds' (a concept first proposed in 1984 by computer scientist Aaron Sloman) has multiple coordinates, and we exist in some part of it, a cluster of data points that reflects our neurodiversity. We are no more at the centre of this mind-space than we are at the centre of the cosmos.”
The book that tore publishing apart: ‘Harm has been done, and now everyone’s afraid’ – article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “At the end of March, a book that had been condemned to die came back to life…. The new publisher of the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me felt it wrong to cash in on the controversy that has engulfed it. So the new editions – with some intriguing changes to the original text – were quietly resupplied to bookshops willing to stock them…. On comparing it with the original, almost all the passages for which she was initially attacked have been rewritten. Gone are the chocolate skin and almond-shaped eyes, moustaches and ‘jarring’ autistic traits; a pen portrait of an obese ex-pupil is noticeably softened. Yet the book’s spirit is – for better or worse – unchanged. If Picador had originally published something like this, could much grief have been avoided? She removed the contested phrases from the new version of Some Kids because they couldn’t be read without resurrecting the row, she says, not because she necessarily agrees they’re offensive. The girl whose ‘almond eyes’ she wrote about, from the persecuted Hazara ethnic group in Afghanistan, has since said publicly that she liked the description and sees it as part of her identity; Clanchy is adamant that Hazaras see their looks as part of the basis of their oppression…. Similarly, she wrote about one boy’s chocolate skin, she says, ‘because that’s what that young person constantly used in their own work’. It was, she adds, ‘as a kind of hidden tribute to that person. I didn’t mean to upset anybody but I’m quite happy to remove that if it upset people.’… If she’d had sensitivity readers from the start, though, couldn’t they have caught some of the wording that upset people and caused her such grief?”
Brainwashed by Daniel Pick: do great minds really think alike? – review by Anthony Cummins in The Guardian. “To say someone has been ‘brainwashed’ can be both an accusation and an apology, the psychoanalyst and cultural historian Daniel Pick points out in this absorbing study of ‘thought control’, a concept roomy enough in his understanding to span the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ as well as terrorist radicalisation…. Pick opens his tour of this murky terrain during the cold war, with the reporting on US prisoners of war in Korea (where ‘brainwashing’, from the Mandarin xi nao, literally to wash the brain, first caught the English-speaking imagination); he ends by examining the role of the QAnon conspiracy theory in last year’s Capitol attacks (still eye-poppingly bizarre no matter how much you’ve read about it already). Each of the six chapters begins by considering a central text before spiralling outward: works under scrutiny include Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953), about mechanisms of surveillance in postwar Poland, and Vance Packard’s 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, about the ad industry’s use of psychological experiments demonstrating our tendency to follow the herd for good or ill.”
The Digital Republic by Jamie Susskind: why the west was no match for the tech giants – review by John Naughton in The Guardian. “Its focus is unaccountable tech power and how it might be tamed. But unlike the many other works which critique, say, machine learning technology on the grounds of racial or gender bias or its environmental impact, Susskind raises the deeper question of why such powerful discriminatory technologies can be deployed at all. Why are democracies so cowed by digital technology that almost anything goes?… How did we get here – where public officials have to plead with corporations to protect the integrity of the democratic system? The answer is that for 50 years liberal democracies have been building a polity where the interests of corporations are systematically prioritised over those of citizens. … Susskind’s contention [is] that a society governed by such an ideology will never be able to bring tech giants to heel. We need something better, and he knows what it is – a republican mindset. Note the small r: this has nothing to do with the GOP, or indeed the IRA, but with a more venerable way of thinking about governance. To be a republican in that sense is, Susskind argues, to oppose all social structures that enable one social group to exercise unaccountable power (ie domination) over others. Republicans ‘reject the institution of absolute monarchy, not just the flaws of particular kings. They fight for tenants’ rights, not just for more beneficent landlords. They demand legal protections at work, not just kinder bosses.’ And they object to the very idea of someone with Mark Zuckerberg’s power, not Zuckerberg himself.”
The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World by Jennifer Jacquet – review by Bibi van der Zee in The Guardian. “Jacquet chooses a slightly unusual means of getting her ideas across, writing in the style of a helpful guide for corporations faced with scientific evidence that could ‘pose a risk to business operations’. Readers might assume the odd business may have used some of these dubious methods to push back against unwelcome research every so often, but they probably wouldn’t think it was a systemic issue. It doesn’t take long, however, to realise that Jacquet has a point – that the use of these tactics really does amount to a playbook to which almost every sector has had recourse at some point... Corporations need to build up an arsenal of individuals, institutions and communications networks to put their case, she explains. … Examples include the $450m provided by cigarette manufacturers to the Council for Tobacco Research, which led to more than 7,000 sympathetic scientific papers; or a network of professors and thinktanks created by the agro-chemical industry to defend the herbicide glyphosate.”
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