AI: what is to be done? – newsletter from Katherine Viner, The Guardian Editor-in-Chief. "For months we have been grappling with [this question]. A working group of our journalists and digital experts has been considering how the Guardian responds to the risks and opportunities of the AI era. Recently, we set out our thoughts in a statement of principles. Broadly, there are three. First, any use of genAI must have human oversight. The Guardian will remain a champion of journalism by people, about people, for people. Gen AI tools will only be used when there is a clear and obvious case for them, and only with the express permission of a senior editor. We will be open with our readers when we do this. Second, any use of genAI will focus on situations where it can improve the quality, not the quantity, of our work, for example helping interrogate vast datasets containing important revealing insights, or assisting our commercial teams in certain business processes. Third, to avoid exploiting the intellectual property of creators, a guiding principle for the Guardian will be the degree to which genAI systems have considered copyright permissioning and fair reward. Like other technologies before it, generative artificial intelligence will create risks and challenges, but this isn’t a reason to reject it out of hand. Nor can we ignore the impact it will have on society. We want to work with engineers who seek to design and build these technologies in a responsible and cautious way."
Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’ – article by Hannah Devlin in The Guardian. "The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with 'iron palaces', including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station. Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: 'This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.'”
The Guardian view on Blaise Pascal: a thinker for our times – editorial in The Guardian. "Amid rising concern over the future impact of artificial intelligence, and fears of digital overload, Pascal’s passions and preoccupations speak to our times as well as his. In his youth, the mathematical prodigy from the Auvergne was a tech bro avant la lettre, before later becoming a supreme analyst of the human condition. Pascal was responsible for innovations that paved the way for some of the possibilities of AI. In his 20s, at the request of a gambling acquaintance who couldn’t break a losing run at dice, he undertook groundbreaking studies in probability theory. Before that, he invented the world’s first mechanical calculator – the snazzily named Pascaline. But mastery of tech didn’t assuage a sense of angst. Pascal’s 'arithmetical machine', as he puts it in the Pensées, 'produces effects which approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals'. But human reason was something altogether more splendid and problematic, because it was bound up with a soul, a mortal body and a will. Unlike both animals and machines, humans were condemned to worry about the meaning of life. But as finite beings, seeing through a glass darkly, they were hopelessly ill-equipped to find a satisfactory explanation.... Pascal berated the tendency of his contemporaries to park the problem by seeking distraction in sport, sex and other ways to pass the time. 'All of humanity’s problems,' he wrote, 'stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'”
Tom Cruise, anti-imperialism and zero body-fat: Bruce Lee’s legacy 50 years after his death – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Lee is one of those rare stars who is bigger than his movies. Despite leaving a slim body of work – just four complete films – he practically spawned a whole genre, and wrote the book for Hollywood action to this day. Lee runs through the DNA of global culture: video games, hip-hop and mixed martial arts, not to mention the general rise of the super-fit, zero-body-fat masculine physical ideal. The fact that he died young, in perplexingly banal circumstances (a reaction to a painkiller) only burnishes his myth. Lee also built a unique persona – intense, disciplined, physical yet cerebral – light years away from western stereotypes of Asian masculinity that were very much in play when he first came to Hollywood in the mid-1960s.... Despite training a roster of celebrity students in the martial arts ..., Lee realised the US was not ready to accept an Asian leading man. The final insult came with the 1970s TV series Kung Fu. Lee’s involvement in developing the show, which followed a Shaolin monk in the old west, is contested. Either way, he auditioned for the lead role, only to be passed over in favour of David Carradine, who had neither Chinese ancestry nor any knowledge of martial arts.... The success of [his Hong Kong] films caught Hollywood’s attention at last, but, even with his classic Enter The Dragon (released a month after his death), Lee wasn’t trusted to carry the movie alone, so Jim Kelly and John Saxon were cast alongside him. The 70s kung fu craze fed into everything from comic books (Marvel’s Stan Lee once described Lee as 'a superhero without a costume') to pop music. By that time, Lee had also reinvigorated the Hong Kong film industry, which has sent a flow of actors westwards ever since: Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Maggie Cheung and, of course, Michelle Yeoh."
Should we confront the toxic legacy of blackface … or just forget it? – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "As we try to show in [the television documentary] David Harewood on Blackface, the transatlantic history of blackface minstrelsy can broadly be divided into two chapters. The first ended and the second began one day in the spring of 1896, when the French camera operator and projectionist Charles Moisson took a walk down Rupert Street in Soho [and] stumbled across a group of blackface minstrels. The short film Moisson produced is called Nègres dansant dans la rue. Filmed more than 60 years after the first minstrel shows had arrived in London, it captures a group of white men in blackface performing a dance routine in front of a small crowd. By 1896, three generations of British men had applied burnt cork to their faces and made their living through racial impersonation – presenting audiences with what was by then a highly ritualised image of African Americans – a people about whom they knew little and who lived in a nation they had never visited. I’ve watched Moisson’s film dozens of times, and what captivates me most are the young boys lined up on Rupert Street: they are as captivated by the unfamiliar sight of a movie camera as by the far more familiar image of street performers in blackface. Those boys will have been in their late 50s and 60s by the time the Windrush arrived in that same city half a century later. In their formative years, this is the image of black people that was presented to them.... Making a documentary about a forgotten aspect of a forgotten history is always challenging. What has made the production of this documentary so difficult – and led to me to keep changing the scripts and tweaking the final version – is the issue of language. Minstrelsy was one of the delivery systems through which stereotypes and racial slurs were transmitted from the US into British English.... Is it possible to reveal how horrific minstrelsy was without discussing such language? Would removing those terms play into the hands of those who seek to minimise the history of race and racism? Can the warnings we make throughout the documentary be enough to protect those who – for entirely understandable reasons – would rather avoid hearing those words and seeing those images? Are there some subjects that are better left entombed in the archives?"
The Visionaries review – seers who were shaped by the shadow of war – review by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "The Visionaries is about four contemporaries [Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand] working independently of one another. They had little in common but the fact that they were women and were writing and thinking as what Auden called the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s gave way to the horrors of the second world war – each finding very different ways of responding in their writings to a world turned upside down by the Holocaust and Hiroshima.... In 1939, as 5 million troops faced one another in western Europe, [Weil] wrote the profoundly timely essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, arguing war petrifies souls into a blindness to the consequences of one’s own actions... 'To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as to its victims: the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.' Simone de Beauvoir ... only met the other Simone once, but [when they did] inevitably they clashed. Weil announced the only thing that mattered in the world was a revolution to feed the world’s starving. 'I retorted that the problem was not to make men happy but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down. "It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry", she snapped. Our relations ended right there.' And yet the story that Eilenberger threads through the book is of De Beauvoir emerging from the influence of her lover and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre to find, not just her own polymorphous sexuality, but a philosophy not trapped in the intellectual prison of the solitary ego, as his was.... The example of Hannah Arendt, on the run throughout this decade from fascist murderers first to Paris then Lisbon and eventually New York, is particularly salutary in this context: from early on her writing was profoundly engaged with geopolitical realities in a manner as yet beyond Sartre. Her developing thinking, Eilenberger relates, led Arendt to doubt universal declarations of human rights. There’s nothing that would make one more sceptical about France’s human rights tradition than seeing fellow Jews delivered by gendarmes to Nazi killers.... A few streets away in New York, ... Ayn Rand was developing philosophy very different from Arendt’s generous humanism. Personally, I find it ridiculous that Eilenberger gives this sophomoric pseudo-Nietzschean space in a book devoted mostly to much more subtle women. Her endless blethering in the imperative mood like Jordan Peterson on a bad day, about will, selfishness, the worthlessness of altruism and the moral foundation of capitalism, is very hard to take. And yet, I suppose, it is important to realise that Rand, though the feeblest of the thinkers here, was the most successful... Former British cabinet minister Sajid Javid, he of the 'Tory power stance', is a fan." See also review by Caroline Moorehead: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger review – four women who changed the world
Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story – article by Anna Funder in The Guardian, derived from her book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. "The newlyweds were living in a tiny cottage in Wallington, 30 miles from London, with no electricity, one tap and an outdoor privy. According to some of [his biographers], he’s 'the happiest he’s ever been….'... Orwell’s 'combination of elements and circumstances' are, apparently, happy accidents rather than a situation tailor-made for him by Eileen. These conditions appear to exist without a creator, because the passive voice has made her disappear. For mysterious reasons the biographers don’t directly attribute to Eileen, his writing suddenly got much better.... Eileen had taken the word “obey” out of her marriage vows: the first radical act of the editing genius – she wrote 'emendations' on his drafts, and they worked very closely together on Animal Farm – that would define her marriage. But Eileen was there, working, dealing with his correspondence, organising their social lives, doing all the shopping (involving a bus ride to a village three miles away) and much of the cleaning (there is, intermittently, a 'char'), tackling the occasional flood, the cesspit, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors. And managing her impulses towards murder or separation when George doesn’t want his work interrupted by life. (He 'complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven,' Eileen wrote to Norah.)... As I came to recognise the methods of omission, they fascinated me. When women can’t be left out, they are doubted, trivialised, or reduced to footnotes in eight-point type. Other times, chronology is manipulated to conceal. But the most insidious way the actions of women are omitted is by using the passive voice. Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved, by the passports being 'in order'. Every time I saw [in the biographies of Orwell] 'it was arranged that' or 'nobody was hurt' I became sensitised – who arranged it? Who might have been hurt? I didn’t want to take Orwell, or his work, down in any way. I worried he might risk being 'cancelled' by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already – by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all – work, man and wife – in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. I was fortunate to obtain permission to use the six letters from Eileen to Norah, and from them I created a counterfiction, to exist alongside the fiction of omission in the biographies."
Wednesday, 2 August 2023
Thursday, 6 July 2023
Seen and heard: April to June 2023
The Importance of Being Eton by Nick Fraser. Curious book, part reminiscences of the author’s time at Eton, part interviews with other Old Etonians and past and present staff, but despite his occasional attempts at analysis I’m not sure what it all adds up to. Surprisingly, one theme which emerges is that of failure: “I realise that I must… accomplish an ancient Eton ritual, by undermining, not necessarily with fatal results, my own promise. In order to truly succeed, it now seems to me that I need to fail.” And again: “Clearly, I must begin to fail at what I did - even if only as a compensation for all that Eton success. I could do what I wanted so long as I allowed myself to spoil whatever I was doing.” I think it’s really his attempt to work out the place of Eton in his life and the effect of having gone there, so only intermittently interesting to the rest of us.
Bournville by Jonathan Coe. Another topical (though also historical) novel from Coe, well-rooted in English place – this one in the eponymous village suburb of Birmingham where the Cadburys built their chocolate factory – with Coe’s wonderfully compassionate writing being kind even to unlikeable characters. Beautiful and satisfying to read.
Barnaby Smith: Bach. Tremendous solo concert (supported by Illyria Consort) from the male alto and director of Voces8, presenting the same programme as his new album.
Magpie Murders (not THE Magpie Murders, the difference is important). Really sparkling detective show, adapted for the BBC by Anthony Horowitz from his own novel. The clever concept is that there are TWO murder mysteries: one in the present, where a publishing editor (played to perfection by the wonderful Lesley Manville) investigates the suspicious death of her best-selling author; the other is the story of his latest novel, set in the 1950s, of which the last chapter is missing from the manuscript. Beautifully, the editor and the fictional detective often traverse the same landscape, then start to appear in the same shot, then – in the editor’s imagination – start to have conversations as they try to solve their respective mysteries. A class act.
A Grief Observed. C S Lewis’s very fine reflective account of his thoughts and feelings after the death of his wife. Of course everyone’s experience is different, but it’s always comforting to know that other people have gone through something comparable and to be reassured that the peculiar turns one's mind takes are in fact normal.
Hidden Figures. Interesting film, bringing to light the unfamiliar story of black women in the US space programme during the 1960s. Teams of black women mathematicians worked as computers - this being when a computer was a person, not a machine; in fact, it’s during the period covered by the film that one of IBM’s machines is installed, and the women, realising that it is going to make them redundant, retrain themselves as coders. A powerful civil rights story too; Kevin Costner’s character has been criticised as being a “white saviour”, which is valid, but the film does also show the women powerfully and forcefully making their grievances known, and movement towards equality usually requires action from the (white) people in power.
The Red Turtle. Beautiful and powerful wordless animated film. A shipwrecked sailor’s efforts to escape from his island on a raft are repeatedly frustrated by a mysterious red turtle, which in anger he flips onto its back on the beach so that it dies in the sun. The dead turtle, however metamorphoses into a woman, who becomes his wife and mother of their child for the rest of his life on the island.
The Shape of Water. Striking fantasy film by Guillermo del Toro, with something of the feel of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Sally Hawkins is a cleaner in a research laboratory which holds an aquatic humanoid alien. Developing a relationship with him, she determines to set the alien free before he is destroyed by the scientists’ experiments.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Lovely film about a journalist writing a profile piece on the (real) legendary Mr Rogers, whose television programme Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood was part of childhood of several generations of Americans – something like Blue Peter in the UK, maybe, only more so because Mr Rogers dealt in what we would now call emotional intelligence, how to recognise and manage feelings. The journalist goes in full of cynicism, and to his discomfort discovers that Mr Rogers is just as nice as he seems to be, in the process doing some work on his own wounded inner child. Tom Hanks, as Mr Rogers, is of course excellent, and so is Matthew Rhys as the journalist, especially in the bits where you can see that he wants to cry but is determinedly not doing so. The film is based on a real journalist’s article ‘Can you say … hero?’ for Esquire magazine.
The Uncertain: Light at the End. Adventure game, sequel to The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day. An okay game, with a decent review: you guide a small group of humans scavangeing to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world in which robots have taken over. But the characters are stereotypes and the dialogue is stilted, and I couldn’t really care about any of them, even the principal. If there are more sequels (the story clearly sets up for a long sequence), I won’t be playing them.
Blue Steel. An early (1980) film from director Kathryn Bigelow, with Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop, being stalked by a man who becomes obsessed with her after seeing her gun down an armed robber. Curtis is great, and nice to see Ron Silver in a different role (knowing him first as Bruno Gianelli in The West Wing). But I found it very intense and had to watch it in two instalments. I was also irritated that they never settled on what Ron Silver’s psychiatric condition was. They seemed to be setting him up as a psychopath: he was charming, which psychopaths often are, and his day job was a city trader, the kind of job at which psychopaths excel. But then they gave him schizophrenic voices too and a kind of religious mania as well. Too much, guys, pick a psychopathology and stick to it.
Bridge to Terabithia. Not the film I was expecting from the publicity summaries: children discover a magical fantastic world. It sounded like sub-Narnia. In fact, the film is thoroughly rooted in this world: a misfit boy (loner, artistic, bullied at school) has his life transformed by friendship with a misfit girl (literary, imaginative, rebellious), and yes they invent the world of Terabithia together but it’s an overlay onto the real world. It’s not a fantasy story any more than Swallows and Amazons, in which the children role-play their Lake District sailing and camping as adventures on the high seas and in unexplored territories. Also unexpected is that at the end the girl dies in an accident, so it’s also about the boy coming to terms with loss. Apparently the book on which this film was based is well-known and well-loved in the USA, inspired by the actual death of a child friend of the author’s young son; in a nice real life twist, the grown-up son, now a screenwriter, co-authored the screenplay of the film. Courageous of him to revisit it all again, one more time.
Steeltown Murders. Interesting BBC dramatisation of the real life investigation and re-investigation of the murders of three young women around Port Talbot. The narrative swings between the two time frames: one immediately after the bodies were discovered in 1973, and the other in 2002 when DNA technology raised the possibility of at last identifying the killer. By cop drama standards, the pace is slow and it seems unreasonable that the story can be dragged out for three episodes. But that's the point, I think: this is street level, shoe leather policing, where the investigation depends on pains-taking interviewing and collating of hundreds of potential witnesses, suspects and people of interest, every step of the way dependent on consent and goodwill on the part of the community.
The Hobbit: An unexpected journey. Well. I remember when it first came out asking my sister, who'd seen it, what she thought of it, and she replied: "It's long." And I thought then that if that was the best thing she could say, I wouldn't bother to see it. And I now rather wished I'd not bothered to watch it on television. There’s nothing actually bad about it; it just feels long, and most of the additions to increase the tie-in with The Lord of the Rings (whose events it precedes) weaken the story rather than strengthening it. The best thing, also the best thing in The Lord of the Rings films, was Gollum / Smeagol, who in his obsessive insanity is truly piteous and pitiable and not simply monstrous. I kept on till the end out of curiosity to see where in the story they finished the episode, but I’m definitely not spending my time on the second and third instalments.
Soul. Now here’s a proper film, of the quality we expect from Pixar: unexpectedly profound, being not only about jazz but about life and what it means to be alive. The principal character Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is an aspiring jazz musician, who enters a limbo state after a nearly fatal accident, in which he rebels against his fate, being convinced that jazz is his purpose in life, because his accident happened as he was just about to get his big break. In the limbo state, he’s called on to mentor an as-yet-unborn soul (Soul 22, voiced by Tina Fey) who sees no point in embarking on life; he helps her find her “spark” which means she is ready for life. And so is Joe: he thought jazz was his purpose, but perhaps it’s really his spark; he’s been like a fish swimming around, looking for the ocean, unaware that he’s already in it. That’s a great deal better than the self-actualisation just-be-yourself pap which is all so many films, for adults as well as children, have to offer. And the music is pretty good too.
Torchlight (see review). My current guilty pleasure: an action RPG with cartoon-simple but elegant graphics and a reassuringly easy ride on the Normal level of difficulty. The amount and variety of weaponry and armour available is breath-taking. I'm playing as a Vanquisher (specialist in ranged weapons), presently at Level 21, equipped with hardened plate tunic, the Indigo Plate Sash of the Winds (which provides protection against ice and a 15% change of reflecting 50% of missile damage), gorgon boots and the Fury of the Hunted gloves. She also wears the Shadow Guise, because athough I've found helmets which offer a better armour class I rather like the way this one steals health points from every hit. Until recently, she fought with the Brighteye's Sonic pistol in one hand and an Icy Brand wand in the other, but I've changed her over to a two-handed crossbow called the Arcuballista of the Bear, which despite being slow can usually dispatch weaker enemies in a single shot – very handy in the boss battle she's just survived, where I had her pick off the minions one by one to avoid being overwhelmed before she took on the big boss itself.
The Gallows Pole. Strange but compelling BBC drama, telling the story (based on real events, apparently) of a Yorkshire village community in the late 18th century, on the edge of destitution because of industrialising cloth production, which a returning prodigal determines to save by using his big city skills to strike illegal gold sovereigns from the clippings of real ones. The characters, especially the principals David and Grace, are very vivid, helped by director Shane Meadow’s encouragement of colloquial (though not obviously anachronistic) dialogue, and it’s a real insight into the class and economic conflict of the times.
Breathing Room. Rather lovely sculpture by Anna Berry: a twisting corridor composed of paper cones, of which the walls flex gently in and out as though you are inside a room that is breathing. From outside, you can see the mechanism which drives it: a large set of cogs and levers, made from recycled bike parts. The effect of being inside is calming and soothing, especially on a hot day, and encourages staying still to listen to the room breathe. It reminded me of Doctor Who (which in my book is a good thing), 'The Claws of Axos' from the Jon Pertwee era, which featured a spacecraft which was actually alive; the humanoid aliens inside it turned out to be part of the same single organism. In travelling to see the installation in Docklands, I learned the important lesson NOT to trust Apple Maps, which confidently placed me in the wrong location and guided me in the wrong direction.
Digital Storytelling. Exhibition at the British Library, featuring some notable recent games / stories, including 80 Days, Zombies! Run!, Breathe, Clockwork Watch, Astrologastor and Seed. Nice video interviews with the authors / designers with a few artefacts and playable extracts, but nothing which couldn’t have been displayed just as effectively and conveniently on a website. (The Guardian reviewer was also a bit sceptical.) But perhaps there is some added value in seeing the material in an exhibition space, in a prestigious institution.
Double Indemnity. Classic Billy Wilder film, with Barbara Stanwyck as a great femme fatale, a very good performance by Fred MacMurray, of whom I’d never heard, as the leading man, and tremendous presence from Edward G. Robinson in the third role. Great storytelling, with not a screen second wasted.
Bournville by Jonathan Coe. Another topical (though also historical) novel from Coe, well-rooted in English place – this one in the eponymous village suburb of Birmingham where the Cadburys built their chocolate factory – with Coe’s wonderfully compassionate writing being kind even to unlikeable characters. Beautiful and satisfying to read.
Barnaby Smith: Bach. Tremendous solo concert (supported by Illyria Consort) from the male alto and director of Voces8, presenting the same programme as his new album.
Magpie Murders (not THE Magpie Murders, the difference is important). Really sparkling detective show, adapted for the BBC by Anthony Horowitz from his own novel. The clever concept is that there are TWO murder mysteries: one in the present, where a publishing editor (played to perfection by the wonderful Lesley Manville) investigates the suspicious death of her best-selling author; the other is the story of his latest novel, set in the 1950s, of which the last chapter is missing from the manuscript. Beautifully, the editor and the fictional detective often traverse the same landscape, then start to appear in the same shot, then – in the editor’s imagination – start to have conversations as they try to solve their respective mysteries. A class act.
A Grief Observed. C S Lewis’s very fine reflective account of his thoughts and feelings after the death of his wife. Of course everyone’s experience is different, but it’s always comforting to know that other people have gone through something comparable and to be reassured that the peculiar turns one's mind takes are in fact normal.
Hidden Figures. Interesting film, bringing to light the unfamiliar story of black women in the US space programme during the 1960s. Teams of black women mathematicians worked as computers - this being when a computer was a person, not a machine; in fact, it’s during the period covered by the film that one of IBM’s machines is installed, and the women, realising that it is going to make them redundant, retrain themselves as coders. A powerful civil rights story too; Kevin Costner’s character has been criticised as being a “white saviour”, which is valid, but the film does also show the women powerfully and forcefully making their grievances known, and movement towards equality usually requires action from the (white) people in power.
The Red Turtle. Beautiful and powerful wordless animated film. A shipwrecked sailor’s efforts to escape from his island on a raft are repeatedly frustrated by a mysterious red turtle, which in anger he flips onto its back on the beach so that it dies in the sun. The dead turtle, however metamorphoses into a woman, who becomes his wife and mother of their child for the rest of his life on the island.
The Shape of Water. Striking fantasy film by Guillermo del Toro, with something of the feel of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Sally Hawkins is a cleaner in a research laboratory which holds an aquatic humanoid alien. Developing a relationship with him, she determines to set the alien free before he is destroyed by the scientists’ experiments.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. Lovely film about a journalist writing a profile piece on the (real) legendary Mr Rogers, whose television programme Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood was part of childhood of several generations of Americans – something like Blue Peter in the UK, maybe, only more so because Mr Rogers dealt in what we would now call emotional intelligence, how to recognise and manage feelings. The journalist goes in full of cynicism, and to his discomfort discovers that Mr Rogers is just as nice as he seems to be, in the process doing some work on his own wounded inner child. Tom Hanks, as Mr Rogers, is of course excellent, and so is Matthew Rhys as the journalist, especially in the bits where you can see that he wants to cry but is determinedly not doing so. The film is based on a real journalist’s article ‘Can you say … hero?’ for Esquire magazine.
The Uncertain: Light at the End. Adventure game, sequel to The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day. An okay game, with a decent review: you guide a small group of humans scavangeing to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world in which robots have taken over. But the characters are stereotypes and the dialogue is stilted, and I couldn’t really care about any of them, even the principal. If there are more sequels (the story clearly sets up for a long sequence), I won’t be playing them.
Blue Steel. An early (1980) film from director Kathryn Bigelow, with Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie cop, being stalked by a man who becomes obsessed with her after seeing her gun down an armed robber. Curtis is great, and nice to see Ron Silver in a different role (knowing him first as Bruno Gianelli in The West Wing). But I found it very intense and had to watch it in two instalments. I was also irritated that they never settled on what Ron Silver’s psychiatric condition was. They seemed to be setting him up as a psychopath: he was charming, which psychopaths often are, and his day job was a city trader, the kind of job at which psychopaths excel. But then they gave him schizophrenic voices too and a kind of religious mania as well. Too much, guys, pick a psychopathology and stick to it.
Bridge to Terabithia. Not the film I was expecting from the publicity summaries: children discover a magical fantastic world. It sounded like sub-Narnia. In fact, the film is thoroughly rooted in this world: a misfit boy (loner, artistic, bullied at school) has his life transformed by friendship with a misfit girl (literary, imaginative, rebellious), and yes they invent the world of Terabithia together but it’s an overlay onto the real world. It’s not a fantasy story any more than Swallows and Amazons, in which the children role-play their Lake District sailing and camping as adventures on the high seas and in unexplored territories. Also unexpected is that at the end the girl dies in an accident, so it’s also about the boy coming to terms with loss. Apparently the book on which this film was based is well-known and well-loved in the USA, inspired by the actual death of a child friend of the author’s young son; in a nice real life twist, the grown-up son, now a screenwriter, co-authored the screenplay of the film. Courageous of him to revisit it all again, one more time.
Steeltown Murders. Interesting BBC dramatisation of the real life investigation and re-investigation of the murders of three young women around Port Talbot. The narrative swings between the two time frames: one immediately after the bodies were discovered in 1973, and the other in 2002 when DNA technology raised the possibility of at last identifying the killer. By cop drama standards, the pace is slow and it seems unreasonable that the story can be dragged out for three episodes. But that's the point, I think: this is street level, shoe leather policing, where the investigation depends on pains-taking interviewing and collating of hundreds of potential witnesses, suspects and people of interest, every step of the way dependent on consent and goodwill on the part of the community.
The Hobbit: An unexpected journey. Well. I remember when it first came out asking my sister, who'd seen it, what she thought of it, and she replied: "It's long." And I thought then that if that was the best thing she could say, I wouldn't bother to see it. And I now rather wished I'd not bothered to watch it on television. There’s nothing actually bad about it; it just feels long, and most of the additions to increase the tie-in with The Lord of the Rings (whose events it precedes) weaken the story rather than strengthening it. The best thing, also the best thing in The Lord of the Rings films, was Gollum / Smeagol, who in his obsessive insanity is truly piteous and pitiable and not simply monstrous. I kept on till the end out of curiosity to see where in the story they finished the episode, but I’m definitely not spending my time on the second and third instalments.
Soul. Now here’s a proper film, of the quality we expect from Pixar: unexpectedly profound, being not only about jazz but about life and what it means to be alive. The principal character Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is an aspiring jazz musician, who enters a limbo state after a nearly fatal accident, in which he rebels against his fate, being convinced that jazz is his purpose in life, because his accident happened as he was just about to get his big break. In the limbo state, he’s called on to mentor an as-yet-unborn soul (Soul 22, voiced by Tina Fey) who sees no point in embarking on life; he helps her find her “spark” which means she is ready for life. And so is Joe: he thought jazz was his purpose, but perhaps it’s really his spark; he’s been like a fish swimming around, looking for the ocean, unaware that he’s already in it. That’s a great deal better than the self-actualisation just-be-yourself pap which is all so many films, for adults as well as children, have to offer. And the music is pretty good too.
Torchlight (see review). My current guilty pleasure: an action RPG with cartoon-simple but elegant graphics and a reassuringly easy ride on the Normal level of difficulty. The amount and variety of weaponry and armour available is breath-taking. I'm playing as a Vanquisher (specialist in ranged weapons), presently at Level 21, equipped with hardened plate tunic, the Indigo Plate Sash of the Winds (which provides protection against ice and a 15% change of reflecting 50% of missile damage), gorgon boots and the Fury of the Hunted gloves. She also wears the Shadow Guise, because athough I've found helmets which offer a better armour class I rather like the way this one steals health points from every hit. Until recently, she fought with the Brighteye's Sonic pistol in one hand and an Icy Brand wand in the other, but I've changed her over to a two-handed crossbow called the Arcuballista of the Bear, which despite being slow can usually dispatch weaker enemies in a single shot – very handy in the boss battle she's just survived, where I had her pick off the minions one by one to avoid being overwhelmed before she took on the big boss itself.
The Gallows Pole. Strange but compelling BBC drama, telling the story (based on real events, apparently) of a Yorkshire village community in the late 18th century, on the edge of destitution because of industrialising cloth production, which a returning prodigal determines to save by using his big city skills to strike illegal gold sovereigns from the clippings of real ones. The characters, especially the principals David and Grace, are very vivid, helped by director Shane Meadow’s encouragement of colloquial (though not obviously anachronistic) dialogue, and it’s a real insight into the class and economic conflict of the times.
Breathing Room. Rather lovely sculpture by Anna Berry: a twisting corridor composed of paper cones, of which the walls flex gently in and out as though you are inside a room that is breathing. From outside, you can see the mechanism which drives it: a large set of cogs and levers, made from recycled bike parts. The effect of being inside is calming and soothing, especially on a hot day, and encourages staying still to listen to the room breathe. It reminded me of Doctor Who (which in my book is a good thing), 'The Claws of Axos' from the Jon Pertwee era, which featured a spacecraft which was actually alive; the humanoid aliens inside it turned out to be part of the same single organism. In travelling to see the installation in Docklands, I learned the important lesson NOT to trust Apple Maps, which confidently placed me in the wrong location and guided me in the wrong direction.
Digital Storytelling. Exhibition at the British Library, featuring some notable recent games / stories, including 80 Days, Zombies! Run!, Breathe, Clockwork Watch, Astrologastor and Seed. Nice video interviews with the authors / designers with a few artefacts and playable extracts, but nothing which couldn’t have been displayed just as effectively and conveniently on a website. (The Guardian reviewer was also a bit sceptical.) But perhaps there is some added value in seeing the material in an exhibition space, in a prestigious institution.
Double Indemnity. Classic Billy Wilder film, with Barbara Stanwyck as a great femme fatale, a very good performance by Fred MacMurray, of whom I’d never heard, as the leading man, and tremendous presence from Edward G. Robinson in the third role. Great storytelling, with not a screen second wasted.
Tuesday, 4 July 2023
Cuttings: June 2023
Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. “Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough.”
Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism: On Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” – article by Jonathan Kirschner in Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is an essential read for its articulation of the perilous crossroads at which the future of enlightened liberal civilization now stands. Wolf argues persuasively that, for all their visible flaws and imperfections, competitive market capitalism and liberal democracy are the best bad systems available for organizing human societies. And each requires the other to thrive—‘[b]ut this marriage between those complementary opposites […] is always fragile.’ Capitalism has been allowed to run amok, and it has elicited a backlash that threatens democracy…. Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. … Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy. … When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.”
The policy paradox: the more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen – blog post by Sam Freedman, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This struck me with renewed force when reading a recent review of the health system by Patricia Hewitt, the former New Labour health minister. Hewitt argues for a greater focus on preventative health. … Despite everyone agreeing with the policy – including the person who was health secretary in 2015 and is Chancellor now – funding has been cut rather than increased. … As I tell the eager young think-tankers I meet, there’s no point writing another report making the case. The blockage needs to be identified and removed. In my experience there are three core categories of barrier that prevent the obvious ideas happening: spending rules; misdiagnosis; and fear of the electorate. Spending rules. … The Treasury’s objective in a spending review is to hit a target number that is driven by an arbitrary fiscal rule. To do this they have to overcome various obstacles including promises to protect highly politically sensitive budgets like hospitals and schools. One trick to achieve this is to move money into unprotected budgets. They did this with public health during the coalition years, removing the money from the NHS and giving it to local authorities instead. Once it was in was in the local government budget it could be cut while keeping promises to protect NHS spending. … Misdiagnosis…. Vocational education is a classic example… The misdiagnosis here is the belief that academic qualifications are more valued either for reasons of cultural snobbery, or because vocational qualifications are poor quality. But it is simply a function of labour markets…. The belief that ‘esteem’ is something that governments can provide means politicians keep pulling at the wrong policy levers…. Fear of the electorate. … An obvious example is council tax revaluation. … The bit that no can defend is that, in England, properties have never been revalued since the tax was introduced in 1991…. Why will it be different this time? … It's taken me a long time to realise it but ideas are overrated in policy. The real skill is figuring out how to make the ideas we already have happen.”
‘Red Team Blues’ and the As-You-Know-Bob problem – review of Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow by Henry Farrell on his Crooked Timer blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The ‘As-You-Know-Bob’ problem of bad science fiction [is that of] indigestible lumps of technical explanation of detail in the guise of purported dialogue. ‘As you know, Bob, the neutron flux problem eases after we pass the hyperluminal barrier. That’s how we were able to escape the Wixilit fleet.’ The problem is not only that this kind of stuff is painfully dull to read, but that it does not make narrative or logical sense. If both parties know how something works, why is one telling the other about it?… Red Team Blues… takes on … the technical workings of cryptocurrency. The book’s protagonist is an accountant in his mid-sixties. These are not promising sounding premises for a fun book that you might want to buy, and read. [But] you do want to read it, and I say this as someone who (a) has read more about accounting standards than he ever wanted to, and (b) has regularly had the ‘oh f***, here we go’ feeling when someone mentions the word ‘blockchain’ at a conference. Red Team Blues shows you how to solve the Bob problem for a wildly unpromising topic. And it not simply entertains readers, but explains things to them that they absolutely ought to know about – the evil crap that the complexities of the modern financial system enable…. Making it so that all this information about complicated and boring seeming details doesn’t seem complicated or boring at all – that requires technical skill. You don’t notice this artistry as a reader, which is the point unless you’re watching closely to try to figure out how the magic trick works, so that you can one day perhaps replicate it yourself. There are important lessons here for academics who want to push out their ideas to a popular audience.”
Interrobang? – review of Florence Hazrat, An Admirable Point: A History of the Exclamation Mark, by Kieran Setiya on the Under the Net website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Punctuation is said to originate almost 5000 years after the invention of the written word, with the Mesha Stele in 840 BCE, a stone inscribed for King Mesha of Moab in present-day Jordan. The text of the stone features full stops or periods between each word and vertical strokes to mark the ends of sections. Six hundred and forty years later, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots to indicate the amount of breath one would need to complete a given stretch of text when reading aloud, a mid-level dot marking a short passage or komma, a dot at the bottom marking a longer passage or kolon, and for very long pauses, a dot near the top of the line. Skip ahead eight hundred years, to the 7th century CE, and the Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville invents the comma, colon, and full stop, adapting Aristophanes’ pauses as grammatical markers. The modern system of punctuation was completed between 1400 and 1600 and has remained static since then: a technology not subject to improvement. There is no Moore’s Law for punctuation marks. A sorry consequence of this is that the list of books devoted to individual signs cannot go on forever, commas giving way to comforting ellipsis. Instead, we face a full stop. There are fourteen books to write and some have been written already: Semicolon by Cecelia Watson, F***ing Apostrophes by Simon Griffin, and now An Admirable Point, a history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat.”
The backlash: how slavery research came under fire – article by Samira Shackle in The Guardian. “When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as 'a "woke activist" with an agenda'. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about 'fanatical' scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.... In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.... [Then] Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery... As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the Royal African Company, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty.... But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people 'carry the taint of original sin' and that it was motivated by an 'agenda' to 'implicate' the college in slavery. What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.”
Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’ – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. “[The protagonist of Kuang's new thriller, Yellowface,] who describes herself as a boring 'brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward from Philly', is viciously jealous of fellow writer Athena Liu, a 'beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of colour'... After Athena suddenly dies, June discovers a manuscript she had been working on, about the 95,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps who supported Britain in the first world war. It’s intimidatingly good. When June polishes it up and passes it off as her own, the book shoots her to literary stardom. Reviewers then debate June’s right to tell the story, echoing familiar conversations on whether authors should write about characters and histories outside their own race or lived experiences.... Kuang’s view, however, is clearer. 'I really do not like this framework,' she says. Concerns about 'who has permission to tell these stories, or who has the right, or who is qualified' seem like 'the wrong questions to ask'. 'We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,' she continues.... For her, more interesting is how authors approach these stories: 'Are they engaging critically with tropes and stereotypes that already exist in the genre? Or are they just replicating them? What is their relationship to the people who are being represented?' And, 'most importantly, does the work do something interesting? Is it good?'”
‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China – article by Rafqa Touma in The Guardian. “Under a photo of processed cheese, ham and crackers packed neatly in plastic, a Weibo user writes that to eat this for lunch is to 'learn what it feels like to be dead'. The post is part of a trend among Chinese social media users who are recreating 'báirén fàn' or 'white people food' to better understand – or poke fun at – western packed lunches made up of plain ingredients such as raw vegetables and sliced meats. The social media platforms Weibo and Xiaohongshu have been inundated with photos and reviews of cold sandwiches, raw carrots and canned tuna. Many are from Chinese international students surprised by the simple lunches eaten by their peers overseas.... Marcelo Wang explains that the fascination with these meals comes from that fact that many Chinese people are used to cooking with a lot of different ingredients. But to some Chinese netizens, this kind of food is the 'lunch of suffering', as put by blogger Shanyoule, who bought a pack of string beans and a tomato to see what it was like to eat them raw: 'It’s so lawless and outrageous.'”
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links – article by Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. “An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city. Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.... By asking questions about how Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the university’s collections, the museum said it has made new discoveries about Cambridge’s own connection to colonialism.... The exhibition, which opens in September, is the first in a series of planned shows and interventions at the Fitzwilliam Museum between 2023 and 2026.”
Overambitious beach reads – cartoon by Tom Gaud in The Guardian. “It's a sunny day at the beach and the litguards have spotted somebody who has got into difficulties... [Wife:] 'Please help! He's just reading the same page over and over!' [Litguard:] 'We see this a lot: people make overambitious book choices at home, then get overwhelmed on holiday.... I've given him a sedative and a soothing mystery novel. if you keep him away from challenging multigenerational epics, he should be fine.' [Wife:] 'Thank you!'”
Self-Made by Tara Isabella Burton: selfie society – review by Rachel Aspden in The Guardian. “What do a 41-minute sex tape featuring a little-known personal stylist and a sombre self-portrait in oils by the Renaissance polymath Albrecht Dürer have in common? According to a compelling new study of the ways in which we see ourselves and attempt to shape how we’re seen by others, they are both masterpieces not just of self-promotion, but self-creation. Kim Kardashian, Superstar – as the tape became known – and Dürer’s Self-Portrait at 28 are controversial statements of their subjects’ fame worthiness and magnetism; both were successfully parlayed into real-life celebrity and riches. The eye-opening comparison is typical of Self-Made, US cultural critic Tara Isabella Burton’s fun, insightful romp through an identity parade of geniuses, dandies, charlatans, moguls and film stars. It’s a journey that culminates in the billions of us with smartphone cameras and social media accounts. Burton is a scholar of religion in its broadest sense. Her previous book, Strange Rites, unpacked the ways in which people stubbornly continue to create meaning, ritual and faith in supposedly ever more secular western societies. Self-Made picks up that thread, identifying a key imaginative shift during the Renaissance as the foundation of our 21st-century world of selfies and brand collabs. As belief in God as the arbiter of destiny began to wane, faith in humans’ ability to shape their own selves and therefore their lives grew. (In Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the artist appears face-on in a pose usually reserved for depictions of Jesus.) Self-Made is strong on the weirdly mystical dimensions of celebrity: the notion that there are innate qualities that can be nurtured but not learned or taught.”
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: a book for the ages – review by Hermione Lee in The Guardian. “Woolf’s first surviving diary entry was made in 1897, when she was nearly 15; her last was on 24 March 1941, four days before her death. She kept these 42 years’ worth of writings in unlined notebooks with soft covers which she bound in coloured papers.... How many different uses she puts her diary to! It is a record of her world, and if you want to know the details, written up at speed in the heat of the moment, of the general strike, or the abdication crisis, or the civilian experience of the second world war, this is the place to go. It is a writer’s exercise book, where she works at finding an 'elastic' form which will make something of 'this loose, drifting material of life': 'It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales.' It is an essential form of therapy, where dangerous feelings – anger over a row with Leonard about money, terror at the onset of depression, pain in illness, social embarrassment, apprehension of being laughed at when her books are coming out – can be laid to rest. This is where she 'composes' herself: 'To soothe these whirlpools, I write here.' It is a reader’s notebook, where she records her literary responses and judgments and often tells herself 'what a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!' It is an intimate account of her own writing process, like the joyous moment in her bath when she suddenly invents Three Guineas – 'Lord how exciting!' – or the evolution of To the Lighthouse, from the first thought: 'to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in – life, death, etc'. It is a memory book, which, very importantly for her, brings back her past and compulsively revisits key dates like her mother’s death when she was 13, or her marriage to Leonard, or the moves to different houses. It is a book about mortality, knowing that death is coming and making the most of what is now and here.... She wrings all the juice from life: love, pleasure, affection and enjoyment run all through. She wants to live for the moment. 'If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L & say stay this moment.'”
There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with ‘diversity training’ – article by Arun Kundnani in The Guardian, based on his book What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism. “The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes. Its founders, such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, were interested in understanding the rise of nazism in the 1930s.... To remove this danger, they called on the liberal establishment to persuade the masses, especially the poor and uneducated, that racist opinions have no legitimate basis. This approach remains at the core of liberal antiracism today, from the enthusiasm for diversity training ... to the hope that better representation in Hollywood films will educate us out of our biases.... The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups.... The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued in 1956 that we should abandon the habit 'of regarding racism as a disposition of the mind, a psychological flaw'. Rather, 'military and economic oppression most frequently precedes, makes possible and legitimates' racist beliefs. And this 'systematic oppression of a people' can continue even if a majority of citizens do not have racist biases, unconsciously held or otherwise. Radical antiracists argue that the only way to fight this oppression is to build autonomous organisations with the power to dismantle existing social systems and build new ones. To them, racism is closely connected to capitalism. This is partly because racism weakens class struggle by dividing white workers from most of the world’s working people. More fundamentally, race provides a means by which capitalism can more intensively exploit certain categories of worker – the enslaved, the indentured, colonised peasantries, migrant workers – as well as justify discarding peoples deemed superfluous to the economy.”
Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism: On Martin Wolf’s “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” – article by Jonathan Kirschner in Los Angeles Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is an essential read for its articulation of the perilous crossroads at which the future of enlightened liberal civilization now stands. Wolf argues persuasively that, for all their visible flaws and imperfections, competitive market capitalism and liberal democracy are the best bad systems available for organizing human societies. And each requires the other to thrive—‘[b]ut this marriage between those complementary opposites […] is always fragile.’ Capitalism has been allowed to run amok, and it has elicited a backlash that threatens democracy…. Wolf’s central argument is that capitalism and democracy are inherently interdependent, yet also often in tension with one another—and managing the balance of that indispensable relationship is akin to walking a tightrope. In traditional autocracies, the economy has been captured by those that control the state, and that control is the basis of their power (which is why they are so reluctant to let go of the reins of authority). Liberal democracies today face the inverse problem: the capture of the state by those that control the economy. … Decades of stagnant incomes, rising inequality, and the erosion of high-quality jobs for the middle class and the less-educated have allowed the relationship between capitalism and democracy to become dangerously unbalanced. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism argues that the fault lies with the failure of public policy to tame the excesses of capitalism; it warns that those excesses will unleash the forces that destroy democracy. … When it comes to solutions, unfortunately, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism comes up short. Wolf, ever measured, is convincing in making the case for reform over revolution. Although it is tempting to think that deeply ingrained problems require tearing things down, revolutionary movements almost invariably spiral out of control, fall into the hands of ever more radical extremists, and devolve into bloodbaths. Yet it is disheartening that the sensible, reformist agenda of reasonable, practical measures that Wolf outlines already seems beyond the capacity of our politics.”
The policy paradox: the more obvious an idea is the less likely it will happen – blog post by Sam Freedman, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “This struck me with renewed force when reading a recent review of the health system by Patricia Hewitt, the former New Labour health minister. Hewitt argues for a greater focus on preventative health. … Despite everyone agreeing with the policy – including the person who was health secretary in 2015 and is Chancellor now – funding has been cut rather than increased. … As I tell the eager young think-tankers I meet, there’s no point writing another report making the case. The blockage needs to be identified and removed. In my experience there are three core categories of barrier that prevent the obvious ideas happening: spending rules; misdiagnosis; and fear of the electorate. Spending rules. … The Treasury’s objective in a spending review is to hit a target number that is driven by an arbitrary fiscal rule. To do this they have to overcome various obstacles including promises to protect highly politically sensitive budgets like hospitals and schools. One trick to achieve this is to move money into unprotected budgets. They did this with public health during the coalition years, removing the money from the NHS and giving it to local authorities instead. Once it was in was in the local government budget it could be cut while keeping promises to protect NHS spending. … Misdiagnosis…. Vocational education is a classic example… The misdiagnosis here is the belief that academic qualifications are more valued either for reasons of cultural snobbery, or because vocational qualifications are poor quality. But it is simply a function of labour markets…. The belief that ‘esteem’ is something that governments can provide means politicians keep pulling at the wrong policy levers…. Fear of the electorate. … An obvious example is council tax revaluation. … The bit that no can defend is that, in England, properties have never been revalued since the tax was introduced in 1991…. Why will it be different this time? … It's taken me a long time to realise it but ideas are overrated in policy. The real skill is figuring out how to make the ideas we already have happen.”
‘Red Team Blues’ and the As-You-Know-Bob problem – review of Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow by Henry Farrell on his Crooked Timer blog, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The ‘As-You-Know-Bob’ problem of bad science fiction [is that of] indigestible lumps of technical explanation of detail in the guise of purported dialogue. ‘As you know, Bob, the neutron flux problem eases after we pass the hyperluminal barrier. That’s how we were able to escape the Wixilit fleet.’ The problem is not only that this kind of stuff is painfully dull to read, but that it does not make narrative or logical sense. If both parties know how something works, why is one telling the other about it?… Red Team Blues… takes on … the technical workings of cryptocurrency. The book’s protagonist is an accountant in his mid-sixties. These are not promising sounding premises for a fun book that you might want to buy, and read. [But] you do want to read it, and I say this as someone who (a) has read more about accounting standards than he ever wanted to, and (b) has regularly had the ‘oh f***, here we go’ feeling when someone mentions the word ‘blockchain’ at a conference. Red Team Blues shows you how to solve the Bob problem for a wildly unpromising topic. And it not simply entertains readers, but explains things to them that they absolutely ought to know about – the evil crap that the complexities of the modern financial system enable…. Making it so that all this information about complicated and boring seeming details doesn’t seem complicated or boring at all – that requires technical skill. You don’t notice this artistry as a reader, which is the point unless you’re watching closely to try to figure out how the magic trick works, so that you can one day perhaps replicate it yourself. There are important lessons here for academics who want to push out their ideas to a popular audience.”
Interrobang? – review of Florence Hazrat, An Admirable Point: A History of the Exclamation Mark, by Kieran Setiya on the Under the Net website, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Punctuation is said to originate almost 5000 years after the invention of the written word, with the Mesha Stele in 840 BCE, a stone inscribed for King Mesha of Moab in present-day Jordan. The text of the stone features full stops or periods between each word and vertical strokes to mark the ends of sections. Six hundred and forty years later, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced a system of dots to indicate the amount of breath one would need to complete a given stretch of text when reading aloud, a mid-level dot marking a short passage or komma, a dot at the bottom marking a longer passage or kolon, and for very long pauses, a dot near the top of the line. Skip ahead eight hundred years, to the 7th century CE, and the Spanish theologian, Isidore of Seville invents the comma, colon, and full stop, adapting Aristophanes’ pauses as grammatical markers. The modern system of punctuation was completed between 1400 and 1600 and has remained static since then: a technology not subject to improvement. There is no Moore’s Law for punctuation marks. A sorry consequence of this is that the list of books devoted to individual signs cannot go on forever, commas giving way to comforting ellipsis. Instead, we face a full stop. There are fourteen books to write and some have been written already: Semicolon by Cecelia Watson, F***ing Apostrophes by Simon Griffin, and now An Admirable Point, a history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat.”
The backlash: how slavery research came under fire – article by Samira Shackle in The Guardian. “When the historian Nicolas Bell-Romero started a job researching Cambridge University’s past links to transatlantic slavery three years ago, he did not expect to be pilloried in the national press by anonymous dons as 'a "woke activist" with an agenda'. Before his work was even published, it would spark a bitter conflict at the university – with accusations of bullying and censorship that were quickly picked up by rightwing papers as a warning about 'fanatical' scholars tarnishing Britain’s history.... In the spring of 2020, Bell-Romero and another post-doctoral researcher, Sabine Cadeau, began work on the legacies of enslavement inquiry. Cadeau and Bell-Romero had a wide-ranging brief: to examine how the university gained from slavery, through specific financial bequests and gifts, but also to investigate how its scholarship might have reinforced, validated or challenged race-based thinking.... [Then] Bell-Romero was approached by Gonville and Caius, the college where he had recently completed his PhD, to conduct a separate piece of research into the college’s links to slavery... As with the university inquiry, the idea was to look at all possible links to slavery. Alongside investigating whether the college held investments in slave-trading entities such as the Royal African Company, he was asked to explore any connections to slavery among alumni, students and faculty.... But it was at Gonville and Caius that the problems would begin. The reaction to Bell-Romero’s draft report caused a rift among faculty at the college – with some pushing to prevent its publication entirely. According to the critics, the work suggested all white people 'carry the taint of original sin' and that it was motivated by an 'agenda' to 'implicate' the college in slavery. What happened at the college demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced. The intensity of this clash sheds some light on why it has proved so difficult to reappraise Britain’s past.”
Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’ – interview by Rebecca Liu in The Guardian. “[The protagonist of Kuang's new thriller, Yellowface,] who describes herself as a boring 'brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward from Philly', is viciously jealous of fellow writer Athena Liu, a 'beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of colour'... After Athena suddenly dies, June discovers a manuscript she had been working on, about the 95,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps who supported Britain in the first world war. It’s intimidatingly good. When June polishes it up and passes it off as her own, the book shoots her to literary stardom. Reviewers then debate June’s right to tell the story, echoing familiar conversations on whether authors should write about characters and histories outside their own race or lived experiences.... Kuang’s view, however, is clearer. 'I really do not like this framework,' she says. Concerns about 'who has permission to tell these stories, or who has the right, or who is qualified' seem like 'the wrong questions to ask'. 'We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,' she continues.... For her, more interesting is how authors approach these stories: 'Are they engaging critically with tropes and stereotypes that already exist in the genre? Or are they just replicating them? What is their relationship to the people who are being represented?' And, 'most importantly, does the work do something interesting? Is it good?'”
‘Lunch of suffering’: plain ‘white people food’ goes viral in China – article by Rafqa Touma in The Guardian. “Under a photo of processed cheese, ham and crackers packed neatly in plastic, a Weibo user writes that to eat this for lunch is to 'learn what it feels like to be dead'. The post is part of a trend among Chinese social media users who are recreating 'báirén fàn' or 'white people food' to better understand – or poke fun at – western packed lunches made up of plain ingredients such as raw vegetables and sliced meats. The social media platforms Weibo and Xiaohongshu have been inundated with photos and reviews of cold sandwiches, raw carrots and canned tuna. Many are from Chinese international students surprised by the simple lunches eaten by their peers overseas.... Marcelo Wang explains that the fascination with these meals comes from that fact that many Chinese people are used to cooking with a lot of different ingredients. But to some Chinese netizens, this kind of food is the 'lunch of suffering', as put by blogger Shanyoule, who bought a pack of string beans and a tomato to see what it was like to eat them raw: 'It’s so lawless and outrageous.'”
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge explores founder’s slavery links – article by Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. “An exhibition by the Fitzwilliam Museum will explore Cambridge’s connections to enslavement and exploitation for the first time, both in the university and the city. Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance features works made in west Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and interrogates the ways Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the University of Cambridge’s collections.... By asking questions about how Atlantic enslavement and the Black Atlantic shaped the university’s collections, the museum said it has made new discoveries about Cambridge’s own connection to colonialism.... The exhibition, which opens in September, is the first in a series of planned shows and interventions at the Fitzwilliam Museum between 2023 and 2026.”
Overambitious beach reads – cartoon by Tom Gaud in The Guardian. “It's a sunny day at the beach and the litguards have spotted somebody who has got into difficulties... [Wife:] 'Please help! He's just reading the same page over and over!' [Litguard:] 'We see this a lot: people make overambitious book choices at home, then get overwhelmed on holiday.... I've given him a sedative and a soothing mystery novel. if you keep him away from challenging multigenerational epics, he should be fine.' [Wife:] 'Thank you!'”
Self-Made by Tara Isabella Burton: selfie society – review by Rachel Aspden in The Guardian. “What do a 41-minute sex tape featuring a little-known personal stylist and a sombre self-portrait in oils by the Renaissance polymath Albrecht Dürer have in common? According to a compelling new study of the ways in which we see ourselves and attempt to shape how we’re seen by others, they are both masterpieces not just of self-promotion, but self-creation. Kim Kardashian, Superstar – as the tape became known – and Dürer’s Self-Portrait at 28 are controversial statements of their subjects’ fame worthiness and magnetism; both were successfully parlayed into real-life celebrity and riches. The eye-opening comparison is typical of Self-Made, US cultural critic Tara Isabella Burton’s fun, insightful romp through an identity parade of geniuses, dandies, charlatans, moguls and film stars. It’s a journey that culminates in the billions of us with smartphone cameras and social media accounts. Burton is a scholar of religion in its broadest sense. Her previous book, Strange Rites, unpacked the ways in which people stubbornly continue to create meaning, ritual and faith in supposedly ever more secular western societies. Self-Made picks up that thread, identifying a key imaginative shift during the Renaissance as the foundation of our 21st-century world of selfies and brand collabs. As belief in God as the arbiter of destiny began to wane, faith in humans’ ability to shape their own selves and therefore their lives grew. (In Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the artist appears face-on in a pose usually reserved for depictions of Jesus.) Self-Made is strong on the weirdly mystical dimensions of celebrity: the notion that there are innate qualities that can be nurtured but not learned or taught.”
The Diary of Virginia Woolf: a book for the ages – review by Hermione Lee in The Guardian. “Woolf’s first surviving diary entry was made in 1897, when she was nearly 15; her last was on 24 March 1941, four days before her death. She kept these 42 years’ worth of writings in unlined notebooks with soft covers which she bound in coloured papers.... How many different uses she puts her diary to! It is a record of her world, and if you want to know the details, written up at speed in the heat of the moment, of the general strike, or the abdication crisis, or the civilian experience of the second world war, this is the place to go. It is a writer’s exercise book, where she works at finding an 'elastic' form which will make something of 'this loose, drifting material of life': 'It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales.' It is an essential form of therapy, where dangerous feelings – anger over a row with Leonard about money, terror at the onset of depression, pain in illness, social embarrassment, apprehension of being laughed at when her books are coming out – can be laid to rest. This is where she 'composes' herself: 'To soothe these whirlpools, I write here.' It is a reader’s notebook, where she records her literary responses and judgments and often tells herself 'what a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me!' It is an intimate account of her own writing process, like the joyous moment in her bath when she suddenly invents Three Guineas – 'Lord how exciting!' – or the evolution of To the Lighthouse, from the first thought: 'to have father’s character done complete in it; & mothers; & St Ives; & childhood; & all the usual things I try to put in – life, death, etc'. It is a memory book, which, very importantly for her, brings back her past and compulsively revisits key dates like her mother’s death when she was 13, or her marriage to Leonard, or the moves to different houses. It is a book about mortality, knowing that death is coming and making the most of what is now and here.... She wrings all the juice from life: love, pleasure, affection and enjoyment run all through. She wants to live for the moment. 'If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough. Always hurry. I am now going in, to see L & say stay this moment.'”
There are two kinds of antiracism. Only one works, and it has nothing to do with ‘diversity training’ – article by Arun Kundnani in The Guardian, based on his book What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism. “The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes. Its founders, such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, were interested in understanding the rise of nazism in the 1930s.... To remove this danger, they called on the liberal establishment to persuade the masses, especially the poor and uneducated, that racist opinions have no legitimate basis. This approach remains at the core of liberal antiracism today, from the enthusiasm for diversity training ... to the hope that better representation in Hollywood films will educate us out of our biases.... The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups.... The Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued in 1956 that we should abandon the habit 'of regarding racism as a disposition of the mind, a psychological flaw'. Rather, 'military and economic oppression most frequently precedes, makes possible and legitimates' racist beliefs. And this 'systematic oppression of a people' can continue even if a majority of citizens do not have racist biases, unconsciously held or otherwise. Radical antiracists argue that the only way to fight this oppression is to build autonomous organisations with the power to dismantle existing social systems and build new ones. To them, racism is closely connected to capitalism. This is partly because racism weakens class struggle by dividing white workers from most of the world’s working people. More fundamentally, race provides a means by which capitalism can more intensively exploit certain categories of worker – the enslaved, the indentured, colonised peasantries, migrant workers – as well as justify discarding peoples deemed superfluous to the economy.”
Monday, 5 June 2023
Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter: an appreciation
(Copied from my original post 15.2.2021 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)
When I went off to uni in 1977, Cooking in a Bedsitter was one of the books I took with me, and it got a great deal more use than any of my textbooks. Although Katharine Whitehorn had written it for a different generation of young people (it was first published in 1961), the material conditions of life had not changed so very much; if your student room was in a moden block you might be lucky enough to have a shared kitchen, but if you were in an old university building or living out in digs, the best you could hope for was a single gas or electric cooking ring in your room, and no fridge. There were no take-aways other than fish and chips; pizza was still regarded as foreign food and McDonalds had yet to achieve a serious presence on the high street. Chilled ready-meals were many years in the future. So if you wanted to cook for yourself, the challenges were enormous – and it was those that Katherine Whitehorn addressed. Cooking in a Bedsitter was not a book of recipes; it was a lifestyle book, shot through with her trademark down-to-earth simplicity and straightforward common sense.
It was that punchy pragmatic tone which characterised her Observer column. Take for instance her observation (early ’60s, remember) that a woman at a party needs to hold a bag, gloves, plate, drink, serviette, fork and cigarette – AND have a hand free for shaking hands. Having identified the problem, she then worked out the answer, and a photograph of her doing it appeared on the cover of her Social Survival (1968). (Bag goes on the arm, gloves between fifth and fourth fingers, serviette between fourth and third, cigarette between third and second. Hold the plate with first finger and thumb, with the thumb holding down the wineglass and the fork resting on the plate. Your other hand is free for eating, drinking, smoking and shaking.)In the same vein, Whitehorn’s opening chapter of Cooking in a Bedsitter defined “The problem – and some of the answers”.
Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of finding something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork while you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding somewhere else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or your hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, and a pot boiling over on to your landlady’s carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which is any case is full of socks. (p. 13)
My copy of the book had one of Penguin’s great new photographic covers of the 1970s, which “allowed the title to be ‘read’ instantly from the image alone” (Baines, 2005, p. 205). In this case the image was of a cast iron bed frame, hung with cooking utensils and food items (see above). Arresting and funny, this was an illustration of the same problem: that the place where you cook is also the place where you sleep.
Whitehorn’s answers to this problem included casseroles (“far the best way of cooking a number of different things together, as one must on a gas ring” p. 16); a damp cloth (for wiping), a water jug (for adding water during cooking) and a plastic bucket (for emptying dregs); newspaper (as a work surface and wrapper for rubbish); and equipment (“it is not a question of the best possible tools, but the fewest” pp. 20-21). All these she covered in her magisterial first chapter, followed by a supremely useful “beginner’s index” of ingredients, including “how much to buy, how to prepare, standard cooking times” (p. 27). The recipes, although they occupied the remainder of the book, were in a sense secondary; fundamentally this was a book on how to approach and think about cooking – which is why its popularity endured, even as ingredient availability expanded and food tastes changed.
Here are some of Whitehorn’s best insights, which have shaped my cooking from that day to this.
- “Cooking to stay alive.” Most of the recipes in the book fall into this category, the other being “Cooking to impress”, for which there are special tips. “(1) Finish any cleaning. You can finish cooking without shame in front of your visitors, but you cannot very well sweep under their embarrassed feet. (2) Set the table – it will reassure people that they have come on the right day, and that there will be a meal eventually. (3) Get yourself looking nice. In a house you can disappear and finish dressing – in a bedsitter, no.” (p. 145) And for the cooking itself: “Never have more than one thing that needs last-minute attention.” (p. 144) Further guidance is divided according to the category of person you are trying to impress: “(1) The troglodyte in the next bedsitter. (2) Couples … who … have forgotten what it was like to cook in a bedsitter (if they ever knew), and it is your business not to remind them. (3) Your parents, or your parents’ spies… (4) Delicious little parties à deux.” (p. 147)
- “The potato-shaped space.” “Most of us have a potato-shaped space inside that must be filled at every meal, if not by potatoes, then by something equally filling – rice, bread, spaghetti, macaroni, and so on.”(p. 16)
- On drink and parties (by her husband, Gavin Lyall). “It is a bad rule to buy the cheapest of anything, and a good rule, when faced with the temptation, to buy the best of something cheaper…. The happy fact is that nobody will know you thought of giving them champagne anyway.” (p. 175)
And here, as a specimen of how all this works out in practice, is one of my most-used recipes from the “Cooking to stay alive” section: Leeks Lucullus.
3 leeks (about 1lb)
2 or 3 potatoes
1 tablespoon grated cheese
butter
top of the milk
salt, pepper
Boil leeks and potatoes together in salted water with lid on pan till tender – 15-20 mins. Pour off liquid. Mash leeks and potatoes with a fork; stir in as much butter as you can spare (at least a teaspoon), cheese, creamy milk. Eat with a piece of toast. If you have a grill, sprinkle more cheese and brown the top. This looks like pale green mashed potatoes, but tastes delicious. (25 mins.) (p. 65)
Rest in peace, Katherine Whitehorn. Thank you for teaching me how to think about cooking, how to think about life, and that it’s possible to be smart, practical and funny all at the same time.
References
Baines, Phil (2005), Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 (London: Allen Lane).
Whitehorn, Katharine (1963), Cooking in a Bedsitter (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
See also Obituary of Katherine Whitehorn by Janet Watts and ‘Thank you, Katharine Whitehorn, for giving all the female reprobates a voice’ by Barbara Ellen.
When signs get personal
(Copied from my original post 4.3.2020 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)
What do you think of signs like this? Do you find them cute and amusing, or do you find them annoying? Above all, do you find them effective for what they’re trying to do?
I must admit I rather like this sign, which I spotted on the luggage trolleys at Milton Keynes railway station. In one sense, the sign is redundant: if you’re looking for a luggage trolley, you don’t need a sign to tell you that you’ve found one. But I think the purpose of the sign is other than that. For one thing, it prompts someone with luggage to think of using a trolley, even if they weren’t looking for one. (We’ve all seen people struggling with wheelie suitcases who should really be using a trolley, for the benefit of other passengers if not themselves.) More important than that, though, the real purpose of the sign I think is to give a voice and identity to the station and the railway company: what discourse analysts call “subject positioning” [1]. The words on the sign are the sort of thing which might be said by someone who was considerate and helpful and attentive to your needs. The implication is that the station staff and the railway company collectively have the kind of personality which means they talk to you like that: polite, kind and helpful in a personal way. Contrast that with the sort of sign which you’re more likely to see on a luggage trolley:
Warning: trolleys MUST be returned to a designated point. Penalty for abandoned trolleys £500.
What kind of person says that? Someone who is bureaucratic and officious, and that’s the kind of personality such a sign attributes to an organisation which puts it up.
Such personal-sounding offers of help need to be carefully judged, of course. Those of my generation who used Microsoft Word 97 will remember the Office Assistant, which by default took the form of a cheery, cheeky animated paper clip, popping up unbidden at the least appropriate moments. I’m afraid the paper clip’s conversations with me generally did not go well.
Office Assistant: It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help?
Me: No! Sod off!
I think the reason the Office Assistant’s appearance was so annoying is that it was intrusive: it actually interrupted what you were doing (such as writing a letter) and demanded that you respond to it before you could continue. Although the notice on the trolley hails you as a carrier of luggage – subject positioning again – this is not annoying in the same way; if you’re not part of the target audience, you simply disregard the hail and walk on, though perhaps with a pleasant lingering appreciation for the fact that HAD you needed help with your luggage it would have been available.
The relevance of this for education, specifically for learning materials, is that often you want to address the learner personally and directly. This is an illusion of course, just as a TV presenter talking to you directly is an illusion because what they’re actually talking to is a television camera. [2] Nevertheless, when it’s done right, it feels natural and unremarkable, even though the writer or presenter cannot see you and knows nothing about you and what you are thinking and feeling; you only notice it when it goes wrong and the illusion is broken.
The reason authors of learning materials, like TV presenters, try to address the members of their audience individually and directly, is that it sets up a personal relationship and introduces emotional warmth into the communication. The standard for learning materials is to use the second person (“you”) and contractions (“as you’ve seen”), resembling spoken language more than written language. A common stylistic model is what Derek Rowntree many years ago called “a tutorial in print” [3]: you talk to the learner as though they were there with you, and invite responses from them. (“What would you do next in this situation?” “What do you make of this argument?”) This kind of writing has been fundamental to the learning materials of The Open University, both printed and online, since its inception in the 1970s.
This too can go wrong, of course. As with the Microsoft Office Assistant, eagerness to help can come across as patronising, if the reader or learner is fully capable of managing by themselves; there’s an OU legend of the course materials which at one point suggested to the learner that they should take a coffee break if it was all getting too much. But there are many OU students who are grateful for a supportive tone; I remember one telling me how she’d been finding a particular section of her course hard going when she was delighted to read the materials’ reassurance that this topic was difficult and probably wouldn’t make sense until later. The perfect anticipation of what she was thinking and feeling not only encouraged her but reinforced her relationship with the course, communicating to her that the personality behind it was concerned for her and her success.
The OU was set up to bring higher education to people who had missed out on it earlier in life. Such people, frequently with a poor educational background, could not be expected to be familiar with formal study and the experience of a new subject being initially difficult but becoming easier with practice. They would therefore very likely be in need of assurance that the experience of difficulty is not a reason for thinking yourself incapable or for giving up. Postgraduate students, at the OU and elsewhere, can be expected to be better able to manage their own study, and can be safely left to self-regulate and negotiate normal difficulties for themselves, to say nothing of deciding when to have their own coffee breaks.
But I would argue that, even for experienced and sophisticated learners, learning materials should still embody that personal relationship implied by direct address. It’s what distinguishes education or training from an information dump. The illusion of the materials being a personal tutor – an illusion in which the learner acquiesces, just as we acquiesce in the illusion that a TV or radio presenter is talking to us – allows learning materials to do two very important things. The first is to support motivation – the great challenge in all distance learning – by giving comfort and encouragement. The second is to support self-management, by modelling how to mentally step back from the subject, the information, to reflect on the learner’s experience of its study; by internalising this supervisory voice, the learner eventually becomes better able to evaluate and regulate their learning for themselves.
The temptation when writing learning materials is to be factual and presentational. Getting personal, addressing the reader directly – and thinking about how they would like to be addressed – is something to which writers need to give deliberate attention .
References
[1] See for example Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990), ‘Positioning: the discursive production of selves’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol 20, pp. 43-65.
[2] This point was powerfully illustrated by one of Michael Wesch’s anthropology students in the early years of YouTubeing, when she held up a mirror to her webcam to show us what she was actually talking to (in other words, not us) while making her video. (Wesch included the short video clip in his talk An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, timecode 21:38 to 22:03.)
[3] Rowntree, D. (1994), Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning: An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, London, Kogan Page, p. 14. Lockwood, F. (1992), Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, London, Kogan Page, p. 25. See also my blog post ‘Alternatives to telling: what are we forgetting when we put education online?’
7 questions about branching scenarios
(Copied from my original post 20.11.2019 on the electricwordcraft.com site.)
While writing a branching scenario about absence management as a proof-of-concept for simulating difficult conversations, I found that I needed to answer some basic questions.
1. What is a branching scenario?
A branching scenario is a story, but one which is presented to you step by step, and in which what happens next is dependent on the choices you make – like the old “chose-you-own-adventure” gamebooks, only digital. (Related concepts: interactive fiction, hypertext fiction, adventure games.)
2. What use is a branching scenario?
In education or training, a branching scenario can enable learners to practice or test their skills. The scenario will be based on a workplace situation, like a case study but with the addition of interactivity: learners are required to go through the steps and make the decisions themselves. In this sense, a branching scenario is comparable to virtual reality, which may be useful in training where the situations are physical and the skills required are visual; but in human situations where the skills required are communicative, a text-based branching scenario will usually be more appropriate, as well as considerably cheaper to produce.
3. How can people learn from a branching scenario?
The big advantage of a branching scenario is that learners are engaged right away. A realistic practical situation, of a kind that learners might actually have to deal with, presents them with a challenge they can’t ignore. Furthermore, unlike a case study or set of process instructions, in which it’s too easy to think that the learning points are obvious, learners are forced to remember or work out what to do at each step. The relevance and the difficulty of the challenge are evident.
At its heart, a branching scenario enables learning by doing, by providing a simulated environment in which learners can practice and make errors safely. A scenario can also include feedback for the learners’ choices, ideally built into the narrative, to complete the learning cycle.
4. How do you prevent the tree becoming massive?
Say you provide three choices at the first decision point, and each of those branches leads to another three choices and so on. After three decision points there will be 27 branches, after four decision points there will be 81, and after five decision points there will be 243! How can you possibly write so many storylines?
The answer is, of course, that you don’t. You don’t need to cover every possible choice which a learner might make, just those mistakes which a learner is most likely to make in a real situation. (The need to simulate errors follows directly from active learning theory, but it nevertheless needs emphasising because of subject-matter experts usual tendency to focus solely on the correct course of action. See my blog post “What should a simulation simulate?”)
In my absence management scenario, the main mistakes which I wanted to include were: failing to prepare properly for a return-to-work interview with Pam, a frequently-absent member of staff; not holding the interview in a private meeting room; and challenging Pam on the genuineness of her sickness when there’s no conclusive evidence of her malingering.
5. How do you prevent the choices being obvious?
The problem here is the same as with multiple-choice questions: since the correct choice has to be in plain view, learners don’t need to think of it for themselves, so doesn’t this remove the challenge if all they need to do is recognise it?
The answer is that you can make the target choices less obvious by careful wording, so that recognising them as correct requires understanding of the situation and thinking through the implications of the choice. For example, in my absence management scenario, the choice which I gave learners was not between “Go to a meeting room” and “Don’t go to a meeting room” but between the dialogue lines “Come and sit down for a chat” and “We need to have a proper talk”. Because I’ve already established that you’re in an open plan office, the first option should be easily recognised as inappropriate if you’re thinking properly about the difficult conversation you’re about to have with Pam, yet the second option isn’t shouting its correctness.
It’s worth bearing in mind that there are many narrative games (see for example Life is Strange 2, Heaven’s Vault, Tacoma, Tales from the Borderlands) which are successful in creating both challenge and surprise, despite being effectively based around multiple choice options. And since our aim is education and training, even an obviously wrong choice may prompt thought and hence learning. In my absence management scenario, for example, learners are repeatedly presented with the option of bottling out of doing a return-to-work interview with Pam. (The team is under pressure, deadlines are looming, and the temptation to focus on tasks at hand is strong.) This is fairly obviously incorrect, and yet its inclusion serves to make the point that determination and a conscious decision may be necessary to carry through with a difficult conversation they would rather not have.
6. Can’t learners just try every choice until they get it right?
The whole point of a branching scenario for education or training is that learners should be learning to think differently and better, so if they’re making choices at random or systematically working their way through the choices then something is wrong with the design.
There are several ways of encouraging learners to think about their choices. The most important is to embed feedback into the scenario as far as possible, so that they can quickly get a feeling for whether a past choice was good, bad or neutral. For example, in my absence management scenario, if you remain in the open plan office and start to ask Pam about her illness and whether she has any problems with work colleagues, then the text will tell you that you wish you’d gone to a meeting room and Pam will cut the interview short. (The excellent Cathy Moore has a blog post about the importance of feedback being embedded, rather than delivered by the Voice of God.)
Another trick, which can be used to force learners to prioritise, is to impose a limit on the number of alternative choices which can be pursued. For example, in my absence management scenario, the preparation choices before the return-to-work interview are: ask a colleague for advice, look at HR guidance, check Pam’s absence record, look for her self-certification forms, or do nothing – but there’s an artificial time limit which means you can only do one of these things. (Spoiler: all are informative, but you can’t achieve the best possible ending without checking Pam’s absence record and printing it out, which enables you to confront her with just how often she’s been off sick.)
A third technique, which as well as being realistic makes systematic exploration of choices more difficult, is to have the availability of certain choices dependent on other choices made earlier. In a healthcare scenario where you’re interviewing a patient, for example, certain dialogue choices would only appear if you’ve previously read the case notes and talked to other professionals so that you know to ask about those topics.
7. How does a branching scenario end?
Many narrative games now include a number of distinct endings, and in imitation of this I planned my absence management scenario to have five: you fail to deal with Pam’s absenteeism problem, you attempt to hold a return-to-work interview but get nowhere with it, you accuse Pam of faking illness whereupon she gets angry and makes a complaint of bullying, you get her to agree to obtain doctor’s certificates for any future sickness absence, and – the best ending – you confront her with her absence record and get her commitment to improve.
If you expect or want learners to replay a scenario, then they should be enabled and motivated to do so. In my absence management scenario, I did this by finishing it with feedback on the main choices taken and suggesting that a good ending was possible. I also put in two restart links: one to restart from the beginning of the scenario and one to restart from the beginning of the conversation with Pam.
I wrote the absence management scenario as a demonstration piece, a proof-of-concept, and it’s confirmed for me that branching scenarios of this kind have great potential for education and training in communications and people-management skills. They’re not a substitute for didactic presentation or for formal assessment, but because of their potential to engage learners and to encourage them to think differently and better about practical human problems, I believe they should be part of the genre library of all producers of training materials.
Saturday, 3 June 2023
Cuttings: May 2023
The Rediscovery of America: why Native history is American history – article by David Smith in The Guardian. “'Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light,' writes Ned Blackhawk, a historian at Yale University and member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone. 'Binary, rather than multiracial, visions dominate studies of the past where slavery represents America’s original sin or the antithesis of the American idea. But can we imagine an American Eden that is not cultivated by its original caretakers? Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous peoples await the telling of a continental history that includes them. It was their garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.' In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, Blackhawk attempts to tell that continental history over five centuries, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Indian self-determination. Native Americans played a foundational role in shaping America’s constitutional democracy, he contends, even as they were murdered and dispossessed of their land. Taken with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, it is a reminder of the danger of a single story when history is better understood as a multiverse of perspectives."
Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark: the revolts that reshaped Europe – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s magnificent new history of the revolutions, ... rejects the historians’ consensus that the insurrections failed, arguing that to talk of 'success' and 'failure' is to miss the point. We can, he insists, only judge uprisings by their impact... The uprisings were initially strikingly successful, bringing in their wake new parliaments, new freedoms and new constitutions. Within a year, though, the old order had begun to reassert itself, often with great ferocity, and many of the newly gained political and social freedoms were rolled back. The moral of the story, Clark writes, is that revolutionaries were unable to build sufficiently robust international solidarity that could withstand 'the threat posed by the counter-revolutionary international'. Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals. This was a period in which the meanings of both liberalism and radicalism were still being fashioned, and 1848 played an important role in helping delineate the two. Liberals were mainly bourgeois writers, thinkers and politicians who viewed themselves as trapped between 'revolution and despotism' and wished 'to trace a middle path' between the privilege and hierarchies of the traditional ruling order and what they saw as the authoritarianism and social extremism of the radicals, exemplified by the Jacobin terror unleashed during the French Revolution. Liberals, in Clark’s words, 'rejected privileges of birth' while 'affirming the privilege of wealth', demanded 'political equality without insisting on social equality', asserted 'the principle of popular sovereignty' while also 'limiting that sovereignty, lest it come to endanger liberty'. They were not democrats, because while they 'aspired to speak for the people', what they really meant by 'the people' was 'a small proportion of educated male taxpayers.' They were, at best, 'reluctant revolutionaries'."
The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder – article by James Fox in The Guardian, based on his book The World According to Colour. "In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.... The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour... For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. ... Every person’s visual system is unique and so, therefore, are their perceptions.... [Another] cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language.... People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else.... The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. Many people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, but only a hundred years ago baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue.... Colour is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a pigment of our imaginations."
Greed, eugenics and giant gambles: author Malcolm Harris on the deadly toll of Silicon Valley capitalism – interview by Lois Beckett in The Guardian. "Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between ... patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy [Silicon Valley and Chinese tech manufacturers]. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates. The book is ambitious. Its full title is Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and it examines the global spread of what Harris terms the 'Palo Alto System', a strategy to achieve fast growth and big returns for investors at any cost, with a focus on exploiting young talent and new technologies. Since the late 19th century, as Harris tells it, the Anglo settlers of California have operated on the principle of Facebook’s infamous slogan, 'move fast and break things', which has also meant moving fast and breaking people.... You originally pitched Palo Alto as part history, part memoir, but in the writing of it, you ended up taking out most of the personal stories. What are some of the memoir pieces that you cut? One of my first jobs was working at Score!, a for-profit tutoring center in Palo Alto. It was so sad. The tutoring was automated through computers, based on a behaviorist system. The employees weren’t teaching anything. You’re acting as a reinforcer, not as a teacher: checking stuff off, making sure the students stayed sitting at their desks, controlling the reinforcement system, which was about points, and pieces of plastic. It was awful for the students and pretty miserable for the employees, and it paid minimum wage."
I took anger management classes. Here’s what they get wrong about the world – article by Olivia Wilson in The Guardian. "Anger management courses focus on a participant’s triggers, offering a standardized set of guidelines for coping with situations in which they feel the rage rising. Such an approach glosses over the sources of anger – particularly those that might spring from unfair or imbalanced social dynamics – and places responsibility for anger squarely on the shoulders of the angry individual, seeking to treat the symptoms rather than addressing the disease. As essential as such techniques may be, in particular for those prone to physical aggression, I can’t help but wonder, during the 10 weeks of the course, who else might be benefiting from the 'management' of all this anger. Without exception, everyone on the course is dealing with huge stressors – that is to say, they are angry for a reason. Marriages are collapsing, jobs are on the line, money is short. As we rattle through the introductions, it strikes me that it is stress – specifically the almost unbearable demands placed on us all – rather than anger that unites us.... Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boom in anger management courses dovetails neatly with the historical moment in the early 1980s in which a new economic model began to restructure lives at work and in the home. That model of neoliberalism – favored first by the west and today’s dominant global ideology – gave rise to a new social sphere in which government support shrank and inequality grew, and competition became the key tenet of the social order. Since then, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has soared, and the workplace has become king. And nowhere is maintaining control over anger more crucial than in the workplace.... In this context, anger management begins to look like something that doesn’t have the good of the individual at heart, but instead plays an important supporting role in molding acquiescent employees and submissive citizens. This focus on individual behavioral change, to the exclusion of a more socially focused understanding of an individual’s problem, is a key concern in Bessel van der Kolk’s pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, in which Van der Kolk repeatedly laments the use of therapeutic techniques and medication aimed at controlling a person’s behavior, rather than addressing the 'undeniable social causation of much psychological suffering'."
Three days that proved the radical right has a hold on the Tory party – First Edition daily newsletter by Archie Bland in The Guardian. "Terms like 'populism', 'far right', 'radical right', 'extreme right', and 'fascism' get thrown around so much as to be useless at best, and actively confusing at worst. But they aren’t the same, and knowing how they differ is helpful to understanding what’s going on. Many people associate populism with the far right, but [Cas] Mudde says while that can be true, it’s also too simple: he is renowned for his argument that populism is a 'thin' ideology. (Here’s a great 2019 long read setting out the history of debate over the term.) 'It has a narrow scope,' he said. 'It sees society as divided between two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. But that can be combined with socialism, as in Venezuela, or nativism, as it is on the right.' Whether it’s populist or not, there are some consistent features across the far right: it tends to oppose immigration, fear threats to security and national identity from – among others – migrants and the left, believe in a hidden corrupt establishment, and worry that transnational bodies threaten national sovereignty. 'Within that, you have the extreme right – which is the opposite of populism, which believes in a small elite that is pure and is fundamentally opposed to democracy – and the radical right, which does believe people should elect their leaders, but has problems with aspects of liberal democracy and the rights of minorities.' When people call Tory MPs 'fascists', who would be categorised on the extreme right, that’s wrong: they do still believe in democracy. But there are many whose stated views place them firmly in the radical right category."
Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. "Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough."
‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases – interview by John Harris in The Guardian. "As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed 'intelligence' is based on huge data sets that 'overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations'. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired.... After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time.... Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard. 'That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,' she says. 'That means you can abdicate responsibility: "It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do." Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.'”
ChatGPT versus a human editor – blog post by Harriet Power on the blog of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). "[1] How does ChatGPT fare with the CIEP’s proofreading test? This test is available here; it’s a 270-word piece of text with 20 ‘common’ errors. I pasted the text into ChatGPT with the prompt ‘Please point out the proofreading errors in this text’... ChatGPT caught 15 out of 17 errors. It did well at spotting spelling mistakes (such as ‘peaking’ rather than ‘peeking’) and repeated words (‘There had certainly had been one or two eccentric characters’). It spotted that Anne’s cup of tea had morphed into a cup of coffee three paragraphs later, which according to my programming boyfriend is an impressive catch to make. It missed a hyphen that should have been an en dash, and didn’t change ‘Jones’ geraniums’ to ‘Jones’s geraniums’, although that’s arguably just a style choice (as the test itself acknowledges). Another thing it didn’t do was query how Ann spells her name: it assumed ‘Anne’ was right (probably because it was spelled this way where it first occurs in the text).... [2] How about writing posts for the CIEP blog? ChatGPT is certainly much quicker at this than us slow and plodding humans, taking under a minute to write a post. The results are quite bland and generic, but are also pretty serviceable.... [3] I amused myself with writing some terrible fiction, then asked ChatGPT to improve it... I was impressed that ChatGPT could take my original text and rewrite it while still keeping the essential bits of the narrative, and present them in a coherent way. It’s an example of how powerful ChatGPT can potentially be when it comes to simplifying text. [4] I took a list of references, introduced a bunch of mistakes, and then asked ChatGPT to edit them so they were consistent. ChatGPT did pretty well. It made corrections like replacing ‘and’ with ‘&’, moving the year to the correct place, changing the volume and issue number from ‘18:2’ to ‘18(2)’, and deleting the word ‘pages’ before the page range. The thing that impressed me was when I gave it a reference where I’d deleted one of the author’s initials, and ChatGPT filled them in correctly. It managed to do that correctly a couple more times, so it didn’t feel like a fluke. (Though if ChatGPT is simply making educated guesses about how to fill in the blanks then this is far from infallible.) If ChatGPT could track changes (and my guess is that it will be able to do this in Microsoft’s Copilot) then I’d happily use it to help me edit references."
End Times by Peter Turchin: can we predict the collapse of societies? – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In 2011 Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut and leader of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, established a project called Seshat [which] involves scores of expert collaborators – anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – in building the world’s largest collection of data on the prosperity and demise of societies from upper Egypt to lower Manhattan.... His model attempts to weight certain factors to predict this social meltdown. Key among them are rapidly growing inequality of wealth and wages, an overproduction of potential elites – children of wealthy dynasties, graduates with advanced degrees, frustrated social commentators – and an uncontrolled growth in public debt.... The driving forces of negative trends in all societies are broadly twin-engined, he argues. One is the presence of a perverse 'wealth pump' which, after years of more equitable wealth distribution, takes from the poor and gives to the rich.... The second major destabilising factor [is] what Turchin defines as the 'overproduction of elites', in which an ever greater number of people compete over a finite and increasingly corrupt structure of privilege and power. He offers four factions between which this competition for status is perennially played out: militaristic, financial, bureaucratic and ideological. As societies decline the balanced equation of these factions falls wildly out of balance. The forces of capital seek to destroy the voices of ideology – one 'elite' arms itself against another in a series of real wars or culture wars – and things fall apart.... If he trades in apocalypse, however, his hope is to identify the means by which some societies faced with these existential threats have managed to mitigate or dodge them. He examines the ways Britain escaped revolution with the 1832 Reform Act, and how the extreme indicators after the Great Depression led to 'a prosocial faction' within America’s ruling elite, giving away a large proportion of its wealth in taxes to prevent catastrophe.... 'Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well,' Turchin writes. 'We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.' Sadly, however, that particular algorithm is still under construction."
How Choose Your Own Adventures helped me win the Booker prize – article by Shehan Karunatilaka in The Guardian. "The Choose Your Own Adventure books appealed to nerdy kids in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I grew up in the 80s; they were read by kids around the world. First in school libraries and then bookshops, where you’d find them on the shelf next to the Enid Blytons our parents would recommend. The adventures had provocative titles, intriguing cover art and the promise that you could choose from up to 33 endings." "You, the reader, addressed in the second person, make choices every few pages, to find out who killed Harlowe Thrombey, to seek the lost jewels of Nabooti, uncover the secret of the pyramids, or escape being a prisoner of the Ant People. And while some endings can be deemed happy, in most scenarios you end up dead. You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters. You fall down mineshafts, off cliffs, into wormholes, and perish in every conceivable natural catastrophe.... The unnamed 'You' in each book was originally meant to be a gender-neutral figure that could be equipped with specialist skills – such as archery in The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, or computer wizardry in Supercomputer – but largely remained a blank slate for the reader to imbue with character traits. The illustrations depicted a young, predominantly male, somewhat androgynous hero, as successive publishers bowed to the age-old wisdom that girls may read stories with boy heroes but never vice versa.... The demise of the franchise was predictable. It had occupied a cultural sweet spot in the 80s, just before the rise of role-playing gamebooks such as Dungeons and Dragons, and before our hand-held game consoles became fully immersive and interactive narrative machines. But for this writer, there remains far more than nostalgia and gruesome deaths. When attempting my last book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I was confronted with the challenge of getting a dead man to narrate an entire novel in the second person. While some claimed it to be a fool’s errand, and asked why I’d draw inspiration from a franchise written in the second person, I boldly replied, 'Why ever not?'"
‘Social mobility is a fairytale’: Faiza Shaheen on fighting for Labour and hating Oxford – interview by Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. "Know Your Place [is] a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that 'anyone can make it with hard work' results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. 'Social mobility is a fairytale,' Shaheen concludes. 'In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.' She is, of course, one of these shining examples herself. She grew up in a working-class, low-income household. Her family moved often, and in one place she had to share a bed with her sister to keep warm in a room in which there were snail trails on the floor in the morning.... Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement.... On her experience of studying PPE at Oxford – the degree of prime ministers – she is unequivocal. 'I hated Oxford with a passion,' she says. 'I don’t think I was able to articulate that I was a socialist until I went there.' In her book, she writes: 'I can tell you that in my experience, many of the people who studied PPE are among the worst, most arrogant and entitled people around. I would go as far as saying that reading PPE at Oxford should be seen as a red flag.' What Oxford did give her was a class education. 'I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,' she says. 'It was atrocious.' ... Know Your Place offers a bleak assessment of inequality, but Shaheen believes change is possible if we reconsider what we are valuing. 'I don’t think aspiration should be limited to this idea of going to Oxford and getting a high-paying job,' she replies. 'The whole idea needs flipping.' She wants to bin the idea of 'the top'. The final section of the book lists the ways in which she believes the system can be changed. These range from valuing collective social impact over economic wealth, and a solidarity tax to pay for the policies she will fight for if she wins in the next general election. 'The book is called Know Your Place,' she says, 'but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: "We are not going to be put in our place any more."’"
Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark: the revolts that reshaped Europe – review by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Revolutionary Spring, Christopher Clark’s magnificent new history of the revolutions, ... rejects the historians’ consensus that the insurrections failed, arguing that to talk of 'success' and 'failure' is to miss the point. We can, he insists, only judge uprisings by their impact... The uprisings were initially strikingly successful, bringing in their wake new parliaments, new freedoms and new constitutions. Within a year, though, the old order had begun to reassert itself, often with great ferocity, and many of the newly gained political and social freedoms were rolled back. The moral of the story, Clark writes, is that revolutionaries were unable to build sufficiently robust international solidarity that could withstand 'the threat posed by the counter-revolutionary international'. Perhaps the most important thread running through Revolutionary Spring is the fraught relationship, and often open conflict, between liberals and radicals. This was a period in which the meanings of both liberalism and radicalism were still being fashioned, and 1848 played an important role in helping delineate the two. Liberals were mainly bourgeois writers, thinkers and politicians who viewed themselves as trapped between 'revolution and despotism' and wished 'to trace a middle path' between the privilege and hierarchies of the traditional ruling order and what they saw as the authoritarianism and social extremism of the radicals, exemplified by the Jacobin terror unleashed during the French Revolution. Liberals, in Clark’s words, 'rejected privileges of birth' while 'affirming the privilege of wealth', demanded 'political equality without insisting on social equality', asserted 'the principle of popular sovereignty' while also 'limiting that sovereignty, lest it come to endanger liberty'. They were not democrats, because while they 'aspired to speak for the people', what they really meant by 'the people' was 'a small proportion of educated male taxpayers.' They were, at best, 'reluctant revolutionaries'."
The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder – article by James Fox in The Guardian, based on his book The World According to Colour. "In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.... The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour... For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us. But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. ... Every person’s visual system is unique and so, therefore, are their perceptions.... [Another] cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language.... People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else.... The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. Many people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, but only a hundred years ago baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue.... Colour is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a pigment of our imaginations."
Greed, eugenics and giant gambles: author Malcolm Harris on the deadly toll of Silicon Valley capitalism – interview by Lois Beckett in The Guardian. "Palo Alto, a new book by the American author Malcolm Harris, attempts to understand the connection between ... patterns of suicide at two different hubs of the global tech economy [Silicon Valley and Chinese tech manufacturers]. To do so, Harris digs deeply into the history of Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the town where he grew up. As a teenager coming of age in the early 2000s, he saw the town’s international influence grow along with the tech companies headquartered around it, and the number of suicides among his classmates. The book is ambitious. Its full title is Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and it examines the global spread of what Harris terms the 'Palo Alto System', a strategy to achieve fast growth and big returns for investors at any cost, with a focus on exploiting young talent and new technologies. Since the late 19th century, as Harris tells it, the Anglo settlers of California have operated on the principle of Facebook’s infamous slogan, 'move fast and break things', which has also meant moving fast and breaking people.... You originally pitched Palo Alto as part history, part memoir, but in the writing of it, you ended up taking out most of the personal stories. What are some of the memoir pieces that you cut? One of my first jobs was working at Score!, a for-profit tutoring center in Palo Alto. It was so sad. The tutoring was automated through computers, based on a behaviorist system. The employees weren’t teaching anything. You’re acting as a reinforcer, not as a teacher: checking stuff off, making sure the students stayed sitting at their desks, controlling the reinforcement system, which was about points, and pieces of plastic. It was awful for the students and pretty miserable for the employees, and it paid minimum wage."
I took anger management classes. Here’s what they get wrong about the world – article by Olivia Wilson in The Guardian. "Anger management courses focus on a participant’s triggers, offering a standardized set of guidelines for coping with situations in which they feel the rage rising. Such an approach glosses over the sources of anger – particularly those that might spring from unfair or imbalanced social dynamics – and places responsibility for anger squarely on the shoulders of the angry individual, seeking to treat the symptoms rather than addressing the disease. As essential as such techniques may be, in particular for those prone to physical aggression, I can’t help but wonder, during the 10 weeks of the course, who else might be benefiting from the 'management' of all this anger. Without exception, everyone on the course is dealing with huge stressors – that is to say, they are angry for a reason. Marriages are collapsing, jobs are on the line, money is short. As we rattle through the introductions, it strikes me that it is stress – specifically the almost unbearable demands placed on us all – rather than anger that unites us.... Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boom in anger management courses dovetails neatly with the historical moment in the early 1980s in which a new economic model began to restructure lives at work and in the home. That model of neoliberalism – favored first by the west and today’s dominant global ideology – gave rise to a new social sphere in which government support shrank and inequality grew, and competition became the key tenet of the social order. Since then, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has soared, and the workplace has become king. And nowhere is maintaining control over anger more crucial than in the workplace.... In this context, anger management begins to look like something that doesn’t have the good of the individual at heart, but instead plays an important supporting role in molding acquiescent employees and submissive citizens. This focus on individual behavioral change, to the exclusion of a more socially focused understanding of an individual’s problem, is a key concern in Bessel van der Kolk’s pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, in which Van der Kolk repeatedly laments the use of therapeutic techniques and medication aimed at controlling a person’s behavior, rather than addressing the 'undeniable social causation of much psychological suffering'."
Three days that proved the radical right has a hold on the Tory party – First Edition daily newsletter by Archie Bland in The Guardian. "Terms like 'populism', 'far right', 'radical right', 'extreme right', and 'fascism' get thrown around so much as to be useless at best, and actively confusing at worst. But they aren’t the same, and knowing how they differ is helpful to understanding what’s going on. Many people associate populism with the far right, but [Cas] Mudde says while that can be true, it’s also too simple: he is renowned for his argument that populism is a 'thin' ideology. (Here’s a great 2019 long read setting out the history of debate over the term.) 'It has a narrow scope,' he said. 'It sees society as divided between two antagonistic groups: the pure people and the corrupt elite. But that can be combined with socialism, as in Venezuela, or nativism, as it is on the right.' Whether it’s populist or not, there are some consistent features across the far right: it tends to oppose immigration, fear threats to security and national identity from – among others – migrants and the left, believe in a hidden corrupt establishment, and worry that transnational bodies threaten national sovereignty. 'Within that, you have the extreme right – which is the opposite of populism, which believes in a small elite that is pure and is fundamentally opposed to democracy – and the radical right, which does believe people should elect their leaders, but has problems with aspects of liberal democracy and the rights of minorities.' When people call Tory MPs 'fascists', who would be categorised on the extreme right, that’s wrong: they do still believe in democracy. But there are many whose stated views place them firmly in the radical right category."
Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system – article by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, extracted from her book An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals. "Children know. They breathe it in early, for there’s no unknowing the difference between nannies, cleaners, below-stairs people and the family upstairs. Children are the go-betweens, one foot in each world, and yet they know very well from the earliest age where they belong, where their destiny lies or, to put it crudely, who pays whom. Tiny hands are steeped young in the essence of class and caste. In nursery school, in reception they see the Harry Potter sorting hat at work. They know. And all through school those fine gradations grow clearer, more precise, more consciously knowing, more shaming, more frightening.... Aged seven like me, Maureen ... lived in a pebble-dashed council house by the water tower..... One day we had a cart, an old orange box set on pram wheels. We took it in turns pulling along the rope harness and riding in the box, up and down the flat road outside her house, shouting, 'Giddy-up,' and waving a stick as a mock whip. It was my turn, I was in the box and Maureen was yoked in as my horse, she heaving me along making neighing and whinnying noises while I whooped and thrashed the air with my stick. Suddenly, there came a loud yell, a bark of command. 'Maureen! Get right back in the house, now! Right now!' Her mother was standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms. 'You, who do you think you are, your ladyship, getting my girl to pull you around! What makes you think she should pull you, eh? Off you go home and don’t you ever, never come back round here again!' Maureen dropped the rope and scuttled back home. I thought she’d explain we were taking turns, but she was scared of her mother. I jumped out of the cart and ran all the way back to my father’s house in tears of indignation. Not fair! But something else in me knew very well that there was another unfairness that wasn’t about taking turns, that couldn’t be explained away. Somewhere deep inside, I knew it meant Maureen would never have the turns I had. And Maureen’s family knew it well enough."
‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases – interview by John Harris in The Guardian. "As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images. The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed 'intelligence' is based on huge data sets that 'overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations'. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe. In response, senior managers at Google demanded that Gebru either withdraw the paper, or take her name and those of her colleagues off it. This triggered a run of events that led to her departure. Google says she resigned; Gebru insists that she was fired.... After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time.... Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard. 'That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,' she says. 'That means you can abdicate responsibility: "It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do." Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.'”
ChatGPT versus a human editor – blog post by Harriet Power on the blog of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP). "[1] How does ChatGPT fare with the CIEP’s proofreading test? This test is available here; it’s a 270-word piece of text with 20 ‘common’ errors. I pasted the text into ChatGPT with the prompt ‘Please point out the proofreading errors in this text’... ChatGPT caught 15 out of 17 errors. It did well at spotting spelling mistakes (such as ‘peaking’ rather than ‘peeking’) and repeated words (‘There had certainly had been one or two eccentric characters’). It spotted that Anne’s cup of tea had morphed into a cup of coffee three paragraphs later, which according to my programming boyfriend is an impressive catch to make. It missed a hyphen that should have been an en dash, and didn’t change ‘Jones’ geraniums’ to ‘Jones’s geraniums’, although that’s arguably just a style choice (as the test itself acknowledges). Another thing it didn’t do was query how Ann spells her name: it assumed ‘Anne’ was right (probably because it was spelled this way where it first occurs in the text).... [2] How about writing posts for the CIEP blog? ChatGPT is certainly much quicker at this than us slow and plodding humans, taking under a minute to write a post. The results are quite bland and generic, but are also pretty serviceable.... [3] I amused myself with writing some terrible fiction, then asked ChatGPT to improve it... I was impressed that ChatGPT could take my original text and rewrite it while still keeping the essential bits of the narrative, and present them in a coherent way. It’s an example of how powerful ChatGPT can potentially be when it comes to simplifying text. [4] I took a list of references, introduced a bunch of mistakes, and then asked ChatGPT to edit them so they were consistent. ChatGPT did pretty well. It made corrections like replacing ‘and’ with ‘&’, moving the year to the correct place, changing the volume and issue number from ‘18:2’ to ‘18(2)’, and deleting the word ‘pages’ before the page range. The thing that impressed me was when I gave it a reference where I’d deleted one of the author’s initials, and ChatGPT filled them in correctly. It managed to do that correctly a couple more times, so it didn’t feel like a fluke. (Though if ChatGPT is simply making educated guesses about how to fill in the blanks then this is far from infallible.) If ChatGPT could track changes (and my guess is that it will be able to do this in Microsoft’s Copilot) then I’d happily use it to help me edit references."
End Times by Peter Turchin: can we predict the collapse of societies? – review by Tim Adams in The Guardian. "In 2011 Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut and leader of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, established a project called Seshat [which] involves scores of expert collaborators – anthropologists, archaeologists, historians – in building the world’s largest collection of data on the prosperity and demise of societies from upper Egypt to lower Manhattan.... His model attempts to weight certain factors to predict this social meltdown. Key among them are rapidly growing inequality of wealth and wages, an overproduction of potential elites – children of wealthy dynasties, graduates with advanced degrees, frustrated social commentators – and an uncontrolled growth in public debt.... The driving forces of negative trends in all societies are broadly twin-engined, he argues. One is the presence of a perverse 'wealth pump' which, after years of more equitable wealth distribution, takes from the poor and gives to the rich.... The second major destabilising factor [is] what Turchin defines as the 'overproduction of elites', in which an ever greater number of people compete over a finite and increasingly corrupt structure of privilege and power. He offers four factions between which this competition for status is perennially played out: militaristic, financial, bureaucratic and ideological. As societies decline the balanced equation of these factions falls wildly out of balance. The forces of capital seek to destroy the voices of ideology – one 'elite' arms itself against another in a series of real wars or culture wars – and things fall apart.... If he trades in apocalypse, however, his hope is to identify the means by which some societies faced with these existential threats have managed to mitigate or dodge them. He examines the ways Britain escaped revolution with the 1832 Reform Act, and how the extreme indicators after the Great Depression led to 'a prosocial faction' within America’s ruling elite, giving away a large proportion of its wealth in taxes to prevent catastrophe.... 'Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well,' Turchin writes. 'We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.' Sadly, however, that particular algorithm is still under construction."
How Choose Your Own Adventures helped me win the Booker prize – article by Shehan Karunatilaka in The Guardian. "The Choose Your Own Adventure books appealed to nerdy kids in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I grew up in the 80s; they were read by kids around the world. First in school libraries and then bookshops, where you’d find them on the shelf next to the Enid Blytons our parents would recommend. The adventures had provocative titles, intriguing cover art and the promise that you could choose from up to 33 endings." "You, the reader, addressed in the second person, make choices every few pages, to find out who killed Harlowe Thrombey, to seek the lost jewels of Nabooti, uncover the secret of the pyramids, or escape being a prisoner of the Ant People. And while some endings can be deemed happy, in most scenarios you end up dead. You can get eaten by insects, rodents, goblins or intergalactic meatpackers. Stabbed by ghosts, lanced by knights, or executed by gangsters. You fall down mineshafts, off cliffs, into wormholes, and perish in every conceivable natural catastrophe.... The unnamed 'You' in each book was originally meant to be a gender-neutral figure that could be equipped with specialist skills – such as archery in The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, or computer wizardry in Supercomputer – but largely remained a blank slate for the reader to imbue with character traits. The illustrations depicted a young, predominantly male, somewhat androgynous hero, as successive publishers bowed to the age-old wisdom that girls may read stories with boy heroes but never vice versa.... The demise of the franchise was predictable. It had occupied a cultural sweet spot in the 80s, just before the rise of role-playing gamebooks such as Dungeons and Dragons, and before our hand-held game consoles became fully immersive and interactive narrative machines. But for this writer, there remains far more than nostalgia and gruesome deaths. When attempting my last book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I was confronted with the challenge of getting a dead man to narrate an entire novel in the second person. While some claimed it to be a fool’s errand, and asked why I’d draw inspiration from a franchise written in the second person, I boldly replied, 'Why ever not?'"
‘Social mobility is a fairytale’: Faiza Shaheen on fighting for Labour and hating Oxford – interview by Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. "Know Your Place [is] a powerful interrogation of social mobility or, as successive prime ministers on both sides have called it over the decades, trickle-down economics, meritocracy, levelling up. Using examples, statistics and her own experiences, Shaheen argues that the pervasive idea that 'anyone can make it with hard work' results in the precise opposite: everyone’s failure except the rich and powerful. She analyses factors including race, class, education, housing and income to reveal how Britain has become less mobile over generations. It is a damning indictment of our system and is guaranteed to enrage all but those at the very top, whom it will enrage for different reasons. As for the shining examples of the one black judge or the self-made millionaire routinely held up as proof of social mobility, these are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. 'Social mobility is a fairytale,' Shaheen concludes. 'In simple statistical terms, it is a lie.' She is, of course, one of these shining examples herself. She grew up in a working-class, low-income household. Her family moved often, and in one place she had to share a bed with her sister to keep warm in a room in which there were snail trails on the floor in the morning.... Shaheen got into Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), did a PhD in applied economics and became the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, a leftwing thinktank originating in the trade union movement.... On her experience of studying PPE at Oxford – the degree of prime ministers – she is unequivocal. 'I hated Oxford with a passion,' she says. 'I don’t think I was able to articulate that I was a socialist until I went there.' In her book, she writes: 'I can tell you that in my experience, many of the people who studied PPE are among the worst, most arrogant and entitled people around. I would go as far as saying that reading PPE at Oxford should be seen as a red flag.' What Oxford did give her was a class education. 'I heard what they think of us when they’re drunk,' she says. 'It was atrocious.' ... Know Your Place offers a bleak assessment of inequality, but Shaheen believes change is possible if we reconsider what we are valuing. 'I don’t think aspiration should be limited to this idea of going to Oxford and getting a high-paying job,' she replies. 'The whole idea needs flipping.' She wants to bin the idea of 'the top'. The final section of the book lists the ways in which she believes the system can be changed. These range from valuing collective social impact over economic wealth, and a solidarity tax to pay for the policies she will fight for if she wins in the next general election. 'The book is called Know Your Place,' she says, 'but what I want people to do with that knowledge is get angry and collectively say: "We are not going to be put in our place any more."’"
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