Musk and co should ask AI what defines intelligence. They may learn something – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "I fired up Claude, my favourite artificial conversationalist, and put the question to it. 'Large language model [LLM] machines like you are described as forms of artificial intelligence. What is the implicit definition of intelligence in this description?' In replying, Claude was engagingly candid.... 'The core assumption is that intelligence equals the ability to identify statistical patterns in data and generate likely next outputs.' LLMs, it continued, represent an implicit belief that intelligence is fundamentally about processing and manipulating symbolic information.... And in a nice touch, the machine admitted that 'the framework assumes intelligence can exist independently of physical experience, emotions, social context or embodied learning. It treats intelligence as pure computation that can happen in isolation from the messy realities of lived experience.' I couldn’t have put it better myself, but there was more. Claude listed key factors that the implicit conception of intelligence in LLMs ignored. They included: wisdom and judgment developed through experience; creative insight that transcends pattern recombination; emotional and social intelligence; intuitive understanding that can’t be verbalised; embodied knowledge learned through physical interaction; and self-awareness and metacognition. The bit I enjoyed most, though, was the punchline at the end. 'The irony', wrote Claude, 'is that by calling LLMs "artificial intelligence", we’re not just mischaracterising what these systems do; we’re also impoverishing our understanding of what human intelligence actually is. We’re essentially defining intelligence down to the narrow slice that current technology can simulate.' And down to what Musk and Altman think it is."
Attention is all you need – post by Kevin Nunger on his Never Met a Science blog, referenced in John Naughon’s Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my foundational theoretical commitments is that the technology of reading and writing is neither natural nor innocuous. Media theorists McLuhan, Postman, Ong and Flusser all agree on this point: the technology of writing is a necessary condition for the emerge of liberal/democratic/Enlightenment/rationalist culture; mass literacy and the proliferation of cheap books/newspapers is necessary for this culture to spread beyond the elite to the whole of society. This was an expensive project. Universal high school requires a significant investment, both to pay the teachers/build the schools and in terms of the opportunity cost to young people. Up until the end of the 20th century, the bargain was worth it for all parties involved. Young people might not have enjoyed learning to read, write 5-paragraph essays or identify the symbolism in Lord of the Flies, but it was broadly obvious that reading and writing were necessary to navigate society and to consume the overwhelming majority of media. And it’s equally obvious to today’s young people that this is no longer the case, that they will not need to spend all this time and effort learning to read long texts in order to communicate. They are, after all, communicating all the time, online, without essentially zero formal instruction on how to do so. Just as children learn to talk just by being around people talking, they learn to communicate online just by doing so. In this way, digital culture clearly resonates with Ong’s conception of ‘secondary orality,‘ as having far more in common with pre-literate ‘primary oral culture‘ than with the literary culture rapidly collapsing, faster with each new generation.…
[A] 2017 paper introducing Transformers [the “T” in ChatGPT] was called ‘Attention is All You Need.‘ The metaphorical resonance between machines and humans is hard to overstate. ‘Attention‘ here is means the amount of weight the model puts on each word in the context window. An essential advance for today’s extended, chat-based interactions with the models is their ability to ‘attend to‘ both the user’s inputs and their own previous outputs.… Analogically, we can understand the role of reading in human cognition. Paying attention to an extended narrative requires us to hold a lot in our head; tracing complicated historical accounts requires paying attion to many simultaneous forces. In contrast, scrolling a feed means shortening our context window. Short-form video like on TikTok, Reels or Shorts makes our attention less important. … It’s now cliche to say that LLMs are replacing our capacity for cognition; cliches often contain some truth, but we can benefit by drilling into the technical mechanism by which this cognition is being outsourced. By abandoning the technology of longform reading and writing, we are shortening our context windows and thus weakening our capacity for attention. … Attention is all we need — and the lesson of media ecology is that it doesn’t come easy.“
‘It gives me no pleasure, but I am going to have to beat you’: was I the last boy to be flogged at Eton? – article by Sebastian Doggart in The Guardian. "I am the last boy to have been beaten at Eton. I confirmed this in a conversation with Tony Little, the then headmaster of that venerable school, during his 2002-15 tenure. 'Our archivist has checked the files,' he said, 'and can find no record of any beating since summer 1980.'... My emotional Waterloo happened in January 1984. I was 13, in my first year at Eton. I was in a house – one of 25 buildings where Etonians live – where there was much illicit drinking. One Saturday afternoon, I went to Windsor with an older boy, bought a bottle of Bacardi from a supermarket, and got wasted. I was found vomiting in my room by the dame, who looked after the food and administration for the house.... The police interview was a relative breeze. The older boy had also been busted, so he was there, too. We told the truth, and the police prosecuted the supermarket. It was my appointment with the lower master that would end up being a seminal moment in my life. His name was John Anderson, but all the boys called him Jack. Just that word 'Jack' inspired Voldemortian terror. Some called him Jack the Ripper because, as a teacher, he had an enthusiastic tendency to punish substandard work with a 'rip', tearing the top page of the boy’s exercise book, and forcing him to present the shameful effort to his housemaster and tutor.... I had to wait in Jack’s dark, dusty entrance hall. A sixth form select official enforced silence between me and the other boys also on the bill. They might have been there for persistent lateness, and repeated appearances in the 'tardy book', or for the crime of 'impertinence'... That day, I was the last boy to be seen. My first sight of Jack was a silhouette at the top of the stairs. 'I will manage this now,' he said, dismissing the sixth form select boy. Jack and I were now alone...."
The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet, and left thousands of children unable to spell – article by Emma Loffhagen in The Guardian. "It was [the] inconsistency [of English spelling] that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers....His proposed solution ... was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet. The result was [the Initial Teaching Alphabet]: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards 'z', an 'n' with a 'g' inside, a backwards 't' conjoined with an 'h', a bloated 'w' with an 'o' in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case. By 1966, 140 of the 158 UK education authorities taught ITA in at least one of their schools. The new alphabet was not intended as a permanent replacement for the existing one: the aim was to teach children to read quickly, with the promise they would transition 'seamlessly' into the standard alphabet by the age of seven or eight. But often, that seamless transition never quite happened.... Prof Dominic Wyse, professor of early years education at University College London, says: 'ITA is regarded now as an experiment that just didn’t work. The transition to the standard alphabet was the problem. Children were having to almost relearn the real way the English language works. It doesn’t surprise me that it failed. Any teaching that is based on anything other than the reality of what has to be learned is a waste of time.' Prof Rhona Stainthorp, an expert in literacy development at the University of Reading, agrees. 'It was a bizarre thing to do,' she says. 'Pitman wasn’t an educationist, and ITA is a perfect example of someone thinking they’ve got a good idea and trying to simplify something, but having absolutely no idea about teaching.' [However, she also said that] there’s not enough evidence to prove ITA had a bad impact on spelling: 'People who learned with ITA might blame their bad spelling on it, but there are many people who are bad spellers who didn’t learn with ITA, and vice versa.'.. In fact, early reports of ITA’s effects were largely positive. Infant school teachers noted that reading ability among children taught with ITA outpaced those learning with the standard alphabet. But a 1966 study demonstrated that any initial superior reading fluency of ITA learners began to fade at around age eight....The biggest challenge to ITA’s success was always going to be the transition back to the standard alphabet. And because pupils did that at different ages, many teachers were left juggling both alphabets simultaneously within the same class."
These words of defiant unity followed the horror of the 7/7 bombings. Imagine what we would hear today instead – article by Hugh Muir in The Guardian. "Today, at 8.49am, the teeming mass coursing through King’s Cross station in London fell silent.... Moments earlier, a strangely quiet, sombre loudspeaker announcement marked the moment the 7/7 terrorist bombs exploded in that station and elsewhere in the capital in 2005, killing 52 people and injuring more than 770.... One thing I remember acutely is the reaction of the then London mayor, Ken Livingstone.... He gave an example of political leadership in the face of trauma and despair.... In a hastily called press conference, in a dark suit, in a steady voice, but with eyes slightly watering, Livingstone said: 'I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.... They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee [London had just secured the 2012 Olympics] that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.' Finally, he said: 'I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before, because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.' ... On that day, he took an approach that absolutely chimed with me and many others. It said, we are London, we are diverse, we are fiercely unapologetic about who we are and how we live. You, the attackers, don’t like it – and, by the way, we don’t really care; we reject you. London salutes its dead and wounded. London moves on. And it’s not just London: up and down the country, there are, for all the challenges and difficulties of doing so, communities seeking to live that way, preyed upon by extremists who, for their own ends – be they political, social, ideological or criminal – seek to achieve exactly the opposite. Twenty years on, reject them too."
Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji by Keith Houston – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "In 2016, Apple announced that its gun emoji, previously a realistic grey-and-black revolver, would henceforth be a green water pistol. Gradually the other big tech companies followed suit, and now what is technically defined as the 'pistol' emoji, supposed to represent a 'handgun or revolver', does not show either: instead you’ll get a water pistol or sci-fi raygun and be happy with it.... As Keith Houston’s fascinatingly geeky and witty history shows, emoji have always been political. Over the years, people have successfully lobbied the Unicode Consortium – the cabal of corporations that controls the character set, including Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple – to include different skin colours and same-sex couples. It was easy to agree to add the face with one eyebrow raised, the guide dog and the egg. But not every request is granted.... Contrary to popular belief, the word 'emoji' has nothing to do with emotions, but instead combines the Japanese terms for 'picture' and 'written character'. The origin of such sets of symbols has been determined by dogged tech researchers to stretch back much further than the first iPhone, or even the regular mobile phones and electronic PDAs that preceded them. A basic set of emoji could be found in the operating systems of some 1980s electronic typewriters and word processors from manufacturers such as Sharp and Toshiba... Before emoji proper there was a craze for smileys, or emoticons, made out of regular alphanumeric characters, such as the excellent shrug, still sometimes encountered in the wild: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯... Such considerations often lead the unwary to suppose that emoji might constitute a 'language', which they definitely don’t. To demonstrate why, Houston recalls the Emoji Dick stunt of 2009, whereby developer Fred Benenson had thousands of people contribute to a crowd-sourced 'translation' of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into emoji. If this were a bona fide language, it should be possible to translate Emoji Dick back into something close to the original with no knowledge of the source text. It isn’t."
Encounters with reality: On Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience – article by Regina Munch on The Point, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “[This book] evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as ’experiences’ for ease). Experiences are encounters with reality that lead us, as Rosen puts it, to become acquainted with the world as it is. The most fundamental of these—making friends, enjoying art, eating, having sex—characterize our way of being in the world and make us who we are. ‘Experiences,’ on the other hand, are false, controlled encounters with a pseudo-reality, which Rosen blames mostly on digital technology… Most of us would likely recognize Rosen’s description of what certain technologies do to our encounters with reality. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to condemn ’mediating technologies’ as destroyers and distorters of experience, or so willing to limit our understanding of ’experience’ to only those encounters that tech enables. First, we might ask ourselves: When can mediation be a good thing? Why have we taken to adopting certain technologies and conveniences in the first place? … There are many technological innovations Rosen has no quarrel with—cars, the printing press—that profoundly mediate our experience of the world, making our lives faster, easier and less onerous than they would otherwise be. ’Experiences’ surely existed long before the emergence of the technologies Rosen decries. Before there was [for example UberEats], we picked up the phone to order food—a convenience that certainly obscured some of the reality of what food preparation entails. (As does, for that matter, ordering it in a restaurant!) … I agree with [Rosen] that many of the particular mediating technologies we use aren’t improving our relationship with reality. But given that we live in a system that squeezes and monetizes our time, defending the kind of authentic experiences that give us access to reality means doing more than railing against technology: it requires recognizing the inherent goodness of that reality. Rosen takes for granted that it is good to encounter reality as it is—to have experiences of it—and assumes the reader will agree with her…. As it happens, I do think that reality is fundamentally good… [Perhaps] it is a privilege to be able to say that; pretty much all my needs are met, and lots of people’s aren’t. Still, there are lots of reasons for thinking that reality is fundamentally good.…”
‘Hey man, I’m so sorry for your loss’: should you use AI to text? – article by Adrienne Matei in The Guardian. "Since late 2022, AI adoption has exploded in professional contexts, where it’s used as a productivity-boosting tool, and among students, who increasingly use chatbots to cheat. Yet AI is becoming the invisible infrastructure of personal communications, too – punching up text messages, birthday cards and obituaries, even though we associate such compositions with 'from the heart' authenticity. Disclosing the role of AI could defeat the purpose of these writings, which is to build trust and express care. Nonetheless, one person anonymously told me that he used ChatGPT while writing his father of the bride speech; another wished OpenAI had been around when he had written his vows because it would have 'saved [him] a lot of time'. Online, a Redditor shared that they used ChatGPT to write their mom’s birthday card: 'She not only cried, she keeps it on her side table and reads [it] over and over, every day since I gave it to her,' they wrote. 'I can never tell her.'... In one 2023 study, 208 adults received a 'thoughtful' note from a friend; those who were told the note was written with AI felt less satisfied and 'more uncertain about where they stand' with the friend, according to Bingjie Liu, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.... AI-assisted personal messages can convey that the sender didn’t want to bother with sincerity, says Dr Vanessa Urch Druskat, a social and organizational psychologist and professor specializing in emotional intelligence.... But not everyone draws the same line when it comes to how much AI involvement is tolerable or what constitutes deceit by omission. Curious, I conducted an informal social media poll among my friends: if I used AI to write their whole birthday card, how would they feel? About two-thirds said they would be 'upset'; the rest said it would be fine. But if I had used AI only in a supplementary role – say, some editing to hit the right tone – the results were closer to 50-50."
Thames Water refuses to claw back bonuses paid using £3bn emergency loan – article by Helena Horton and Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. "Thames Water paid almost £2.5m to senior managers from an emergency loan that was meant to be used to keep the failing utilities company afloat – and has refused to claw back the payments, newly released documents reveal. The struggling water supplier paid bonuses totalling £2.46m to 21 managers on 30 April. The managers are due to receive the same amount again in December, and a further £10.8m collectively next June, the chair of Thames Water, Sir Adrian Montague, said in a letter to the environment select committee. The company paused its management retention plan (MRP) in May after the Guardian revealed Montague wrongly told MPs that creditors had 'insisted' on the payments. The environment secretary, Steve Reed, had been asked to claw back the payments. However, Montague said the board did not intend to recover the money, and suggested the two further tranches of bonuses could still be paid. In a letter to the committee’s chair, Alistair Carmichael, sent in June and published on Wednesday, Montague wrote: 'The MRP was and remains paused. The board has not taken further decisions on the MRP at this stage.'”
My father, the fake: was anything he told me actually true? – article by Anita Chaudhuri in The Guardian. "Growing up in the 1960s, Joanne Briggs knew her father, Michael, wasn’t like other dads. Once a Nasa scientist, now a big pharma research director, he would regale her and her brother with the extraordinary highlights of his working life. If he was to be believed, he had advised Stanley Kubrick on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, smuggled a gun and a microfiche over the Berlin Wall and, most amazingly, conducted an experiment on Mars that led to the discovery of an alien life form. This was in addition to earning a PhD from Cornell University in the US and a prestigious doctor of science award from the University of New Zealand. Quite a leap for the son of a typewriter repair man who grew up in Chadderton, a mill town on the road from Manchester to Oldham, before getting his first degree from the University of Liverpool. But when Joanne was seven, her father abruptly walked out on the family.... Joanne got on with her life, had a son and became a barrister. But [in 2020,] now involved with the legal side of the detention and discharge of psychiatric patients, Joanne started reading the [Cumberlege report] for her job. 'I read about this ... drug, Primodos, a hormone-based pregnancy test....It kept popping up,... and to my astonishment so did my father’s name.'... She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University... 'Rossiter ... accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he’s at it, he states that he doesn’t believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' ... Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn’t There documents her father’s extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I’d previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it’s a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.'”
This column does not express support for Palestine Action; here’s why – article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "This piece must be carefully written to avoid my being imprisoned for up to 14 years. ... Since the government voted to proscribe the direct action protest group Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, any statement seen as expressing support could lead to arrest and prosecution.... Last week, our home secretary joined other female Labour MPs in a photoshoot celebrating the suffragettes, who planted bombs, burned down private homes and smashed up art galleries. They then voted to classify a movement which positions itself as opposing violence against people as a terrorist organisation. And this weekend, an 83-year-old retired priest, Sue Parfitt, was arrested after holding a placard that read: 'I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.' Twenty-eight others were also arrested on those grounds. Questioned about her detention, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark Rowley, responded: 'It is not about protest. This is about an organisation committing serious criminality.' Note how even Britain’s top police officer could not bring himself to claim Palestine Action was 'an organisation committing terrorism', which is what the law proclaims. I suspect he knows that, in doing so, he would have exposed the grotesque absurdity of this legislation. Yes, those who have helped drown Gaza in blood have turned the world upside down – treating the opponents of this mass extermination as dangerous, hateful extremists – but words have still not been entirely emptied of their meaning. Do not expect that to last. An injury to democracy, once inflicted, cannot be contained. It becomes immediately infected, and the sickness spreads."
How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, 'Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?' The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right. The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would 'just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.' The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, 'Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.'... Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of 'strategic mainstreaming'. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism. A study of German Telegram channels found that far-right content presented seriously achieved limited reach, as did non-political humour. But when far-right extremism was presented humorously, it took off. Humour offers deniability.... When people become desensitised by ironic calls for violence, the difference between a humorous position and an ideological conviction can begin to break down. They are said by some researchers to suffer from 'irony poisoning'. If, for example, people are repeatedly exposed to racial stereotypes in 'humorous' form, they are likely to lose perspective, and start to absorb and affirm them. The results are anything but amusing."
‘I had a home, apartment, career’ … the Guardian’s Gaza diarist on the life he lost – and his journey into exile – article by Ruaridh Nicoll in The Guardian, relating to the anonymous publication of the diaries in book form Who Will Tell My Story?. "On the morning of 7 October 2023, the author of the Guardian’s Gaza diary woke up planning to play tennis.... Instead, with the news full of how Hamas had broken out of the territory, killing 1,200 people, he found himself scrambling desperately for the documents showing he owned his apartment in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. 'If our building gets bombed, I need evidence that this apartment belongs to me,' he wrote.... On 13 October, Gaza City’s residents were told to evacuate and head south. 'It feels like 1948,' the diarist wrote, a reference to the Nakba ('catastrophe'), when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from a newly independent Israel.... His diaries were full of questions. 'Is the abnormal going to become the normal? Is two weeks of misery all it takes?' A gentle man, he looks back at what he wrote at that time and says: 'I see all these questions I was asking. I had no answers back then. Now I’ve seen how it turned out. And it was horrible.'... The diarist and I first met because I try to help young journalists in authoritarian states and war zones to get published in English language media. He was the perfect candidate, wanting to tell the stories we normally don’t hear from Gaza – of musicians, sportspeople, even the trouble Palestinian men have with crying. He says of his life then: 'I had a home, an apartment, a career, friends, normal things that no one thinks about, like the pharmacist in my street handing me my medicine, knowing I’d pay on my next visit.' ... As the IDF began its assault, first in retribution, then in annihilation, he sent me news of his new life between falling bombs. At the time, I was struck by how his diary entries arrived devoid of the sectarian fury that sticks like phosphorus to all opinions on Israel/Palestine. What emerged were descriptions of the reality of the people around him, innocent people, told in his simple poetic style. Now, he talks of how important it was for him to portray Palestinians in Gaza as normal – particularly the men, who are often seen as monsters. 'The men are nice people, they have feelings. They are not some kind of a different species.'... Early in the diaries, he revisited a subject, reporting that Gazan men do cry: 'I saw one collapsed building with three men standing opposite, looking at it, and heavy tears were falling from their eyes.' Then came the day the diaries stopped. The diarist, his sister and the cats had crossed Gaza’s southern border, to become exiles. I asked him to keep writing, and he has, but he no longer wanted to publish. He said he was too identifiable, that the danger was far from over. 'And what about when I return?' he asked."
A Palestinian chef’s quest to preserve his heritage, one dish at a time: ‘This is a political act’ – article by Nina Lakhani in The Guardian. "Food is both deeply personal and political for Sami Tamimi, the Palestinian chef and food writer, whose first solo cookbook is an emotional culinary ride down memory lane through the bountiful seasons of his homeland – and an effort to preserve the ingredients, techniques and traditions which have long been targeted by the Israeli occupation. Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine is a masterclass on how less is so often more when it comes to creating food that connects with people and how the joy derived from cooking and sharing food can, in itself, be an act of resistance. 'As a chef and writer this is a political act, a way to show young Palestinians who weren’t born there the deep emotional connection we have to the land, to the food of our land, and how Palestine used to be,' Tamimi said. 'This is me being resilient as a Palestinian but also recognizing that I am privileged to have a voice and talking about our food is a way of keeping it alive.' Each recipe – from tahini, halva and coffee brownies to green kishk (fermented yoghurt and bulgar) and Gazan dukkah (a spice mix for dipping) – speaks to how much Palestinians love to forage, cook, preserve and eat food. It’s a core part of the culture and heritage that Tamimi hopes will help broaden the world’s understanding of what it means to be Palestinian. 'Our dishes are being claimed by some Israeli chefs and so many native ingredients – lentils and sesame and greens – that I remember foraging for with my family are starting to disappear as access to our land shrinks. But this is our food, this is our history, our culture. You can’t take my memories away from me. You can’t tell me that this is not my land,' said Tamimi."
Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication – article by Alice Speri in The Guardian. "In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to 'education and Palestine'. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.... On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited 'a number of complex issues', shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programs home to scholarship about Palestine. But the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech."
Poor Clare: sassy spin on a medieval saint asks pithy questions – review by Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. "Chiara Atik’s play about Saint Clare of Assisi and her friendship with the often more celebrated Saint Francis takes its lead from the Netflix school of sassy history. The cast have American accents and could be high-schoolers clicking their fingers, despite the period dress. The drama archly positions club-land beats and contemporary phraseology ('cool', 'totally' 'my social anxiety …') alongside choral sounds and medieval monasticism. It is light on historical detail, heavy on humour and attitude.... Atik’s play, which won multiple awards in America, dramatises the conversion of Clare, an Italian noblewoman inspired by her friendship with Francis of Assisi to found an order following a rule of strict poverty.... Beneath the surface glibness there is lean, clever writing with short, sharp scenes and clean direction by Blanche McIntyre as the play travels towards its serious preoccupations with wealth, poverty and inequality.... 'Can you spare any change, please?' says a beggar who Clare and Beatrice mistake for a heap of rubbish. This hammers home the fact that this is both about 13th-century poverty and our own. But there is potency in the heavy-handedness: the play is not trying to hide the fact that inequality then is recognisable, and unchanged, today."
How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke – article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, 'Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?' The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right. The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would 'just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.' The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, 'Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.'... Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of 'strategic mainstreaming'. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism. A study of German Telegram channels found that far-right content presented seriously achieved limited reach, as did non-political humour. But when far-right extremism was presented humorously, it took off. Humour offers deniability.... When people become desensitised by ironic calls for violence, the difference between a humorous position and an ideological conviction can begin to break down. They are said by some researchers to suffer from 'irony poisoning'. If, for example, people are repeatedly exposed to racial stereotypes in 'humorous' form, they are likely to lose perspective, and start to absorb and affirm them. The results are anything but amusing."
‘I had a home, apartment, career’ … the Guardian’s Gaza diarist on the life he lost – and his journey into exile – article by Ruaridh Nicoll in The Guardian, relating to the anonymous publication of the diaries in book form Who Will Tell My Story?. "On the morning of 7 October 2023, the author of the Guardian’s Gaza diary woke up planning to play tennis.... Instead, with the news full of how Hamas had broken out of the territory, killing 1,200 people, he found himself scrambling desperately for the documents showing he owned his apartment in Gaza City, in the north of the strip. 'If our building gets bombed, I need evidence that this apartment belongs to me,' he wrote.... On 13 October, Gaza City’s residents were told to evacuate and head south. 'It feels like 1948,' the diarist wrote, a reference to the Nakba ('catastrophe'), when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from a newly independent Israel.... His diaries were full of questions. 'Is the abnormal going to become the normal? Is two weeks of misery all it takes?' A gentle man, he looks back at what he wrote at that time and says: 'I see all these questions I was asking. I had no answers back then. Now I’ve seen how it turned out. And it was horrible.'... The diarist and I first met because I try to help young journalists in authoritarian states and war zones to get published in English language media. He was the perfect candidate, wanting to tell the stories we normally don’t hear from Gaza – of musicians, sportspeople, even the trouble Palestinian men have with crying. He says of his life then: 'I had a home, an apartment, a career, friends, normal things that no one thinks about, like the pharmacist in my street handing me my medicine, knowing I’d pay on my next visit.' ... As the IDF began its assault, first in retribution, then in annihilation, he sent me news of his new life between falling bombs. At the time, I was struck by how his diary entries arrived devoid of the sectarian fury that sticks like phosphorus to all opinions on Israel/Palestine. What emerged were descriptions of the reality of the people around him, innocent people, told in his simple poetic style. Now, he talks of how important it was for him to portray Palestinians in Gaza as normal – particularly the men, who are often seen as monsters. 'The men are nice people, they have feelings. They are not some kind of a different species.'... Early in the diaries, he revisited a subject, reporting that Gazan men do cry: 'I saw one collapsed building with three men standing opposite, looking at it, and heavy tears were falling from their eyes.' Then came the day the diaries stopped. The diarist, his sister and the cats had crossed Gaza’s southern border, to become exiles. I asked him to keep writing, and he has, but he no longer wanted to publish. He said he was too identifiable, that the danger was far from over. 'And what about when I return?' he asked."
A Palestinian chef’s quest to preserve his heritage, one dish at a time: ‘This is a political act’ – article by Nina Lakhani in The Guardian. "Food is both deeply personal and political for Sami Tamimi, the Palestinian chef and food writer, whose first solo cookbook is an emotional culinary ride down memory lane through the bountiful seasons of his homeland – and an effort to preserve the ingredients, techniques and traditions which have long been targeted by the Israeli occupation. Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine is a masterclass on how less is so often more when it comes to creating food that connects with people and how the joy derived from cooking and sharing food can, in itself, be an act of resistance. 'As a chef and writer this is a political act, a way to show young Palestinians who weren’t born there the deep emotional connection we have to the land, to the food of our land, and how Palestine used to be,' Tamimi said. 'This is me being resilient as a Palestinian but also recognizing that I am privileged to have a voice and talking about our food is a way of keeping it alive.' Each recipe – from tahini, halva and coffee brownies to green kishk (fermented yoghurt and bulgar) and Gazan dukkah (a spice mix for dipping) – speaks to how much Palestinians love to forage, cook, preserve and eat food. It’s a core part of the culture and heritage that Tamimi hopes will help broaden the world’s understanding of what it means to be Palestinian. 'Our dishes are being claimed by some Israeli chefs and so many native ingredients – lentils and sesame and greens – that I remember foraging for with my family are starting to disappear as access to our land shrinks. But this is our food, this is our history, our culture. You can’t take my memories away from me. You can’t tell me that this is not my land,' said Tamimi."
Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication – article by Alice Speri in The Guardian. "In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed. Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to 'education and Palestine'. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.... On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited 'a number of complex issues', shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. US universities have come under intensifying attacks from the Trump administration over accusations of tolerating antisemitism on campuses. Many have responded by restricting protest, punishing students and faculty outspoken about Palestinian rights, and scrutinizing academic programs home to scholarship about Palestine. But the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech."
Poor Clare: sassy spin on a medieval saint asks pithy questions – review by Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. "Chiara Atik’s play about Saint Clare of Assisi and her friendship with the often more celebrated Saint Francis takes its lead from the Netflix school of sassy history. The cast have American accents and could be high-schoolers clicking their fingers, despite the period dress. The drama archly positions club-land beats and contemporary phraseology ('cool', 'totally' 'my social anxiety …') alongside choral sounds and medieval monasticism. It is light on historical detail, heavy on humour and attitude.... Atik’s play, which won multiple awards in America, dramatises the conversion of Clare, an Italian noblewoman inspired by her friendship with Francis of Assisi to found an order following a rule of strict poverty.... Beneath the surface glibness there is lean, clever writing with short, sharp scenes and clean direction by Blanche McIntyre as the play travels towards its serious preoccupations with wealth, poverty and inequality.... 'Can you spare any change, please?' says a beggar who Clare and Beatrice mistake for a heap of rubbish. This hammers home the fact that this is both about 13th-century poverty and our own. But there is potency in the heavy-handedness: the play is not trying to hide the fact that inequality then is recognisable, and unchanged, today."
Should we ban opinion polls? – article by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "If polls were simply useless that would be no reason to ban them... A better reason is that they are actively harmful: a species of misinformation that pollutes the public sphere.... One fundamental problem, recognised long ago, is that there is no such thing as 'the public', thought of as a hive mind with a single homogeneous view. ... There is [similarly] no such thing as 'the will of the British people', a spectre conjured into being only when something very dubious is being proposed.... A deeper question is whether polls actually create, in whole or in part, what they purport to be revealing. Does everyone go around with settled, reasoned views on every hot-button issue of the day, just waiting to be revealed by a questioning pollster?... The act of asking a question, though, heightens the importance of the subject in the mind of the questionee, creating an urge to have one’s say where there might previously have been neither urge nor say at all. ... In 1980 a third of American respondents helpfully offered their view on whether the '1975 Public Affairs Act' should be repealed, even though that legislation did not actually exist. The way you ask the question, moreover, can profoundly influence the outcome. A 1989 study by the American social scientist Kenneth A Rasinski found that varying verbal framings of political issues changed the outcome: 'More support was found for halting crime than for law enforcement, for dealing with drug addiction than for drug rehabilitation, and for assistance to the poor than for welfare.' Other such experiments have shown that the order of questioning also matters, that Americans express more support for government surveillance if terrorism is mentioned in the question, and that nearly twice as many people think that the government 'should not forbid speeches against democracy' than it 'should allow speeches against democracy', though the options are exactly equivalent. Modern opinion polls, then, are part of the machinery behind the 'manufacture of consent', a phrase originally coined by Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press."
18 months. 12,000 questions. A whole lot of anxiety. What I learned from reading students’ ChatGPT logs – article by Jeremy Ettinghausen in The Guardian. "Fortunately, for an AI-enabled generation of students, help with the complexities of campus life is just a prompt away. If you are really stuck on an essay or can’t decide between management consulting or a legal career, or need suggestions on what you can cook with tomatoes, mushrooms, beetroot, mozzarella, olive oil and rice, then ChatGPT is there.... I know this because three undergraduates have given me permission to eavesdrop on every conversation they have had with ChatGPT over the past 18 months. Every eye-opening prompt, every revealing answer.... I thought their chat log would contain a lot of academic research and bits and pieces of more random searches and queries. I didn’t expect to find nearly 12,000 prompts and responses over an 18-month period, covering everything from the planning, structuring and sometimes writing of academic essays, to career counselling, mental health advice, fancy dress inspiration and an instruction to write a letter from Santa. There’s nothing the boys won’t hand over to ChatGPT.... Around half of all the conversations with 'Chat' related to academic research, back and forths on individual essays often going on for a dozen or more tightly packed pages of text....I did sometimes wonder if it might have been more straightforward for the students to, you know, actually read the sources and write the essays themselves.... Throughout the operation, Joshua flips tones between prompts, switching from the politely directional ('Shorter and clearer, please') to informal complicity ('Yeah, can you weave it into my paragraph, but I’m over the word count already so just do a bit') to curt brevity ('Try again') to approval-seeking neediness ('Is this a good conclusion?'; 'What do you think of it?'). ChatGPT’s answer to this last question is instructive. 'Your essay is excellent: rich in insight, theoretically sophisticated, and structurally clear. You demonstrate critical finesse by engaging deeply with form, context, and theory. ... Would you like help line-editing the full essay next, or do you want to develop the footnotes and bibliography section?' When AI assistants eulogise their work in this fashion, it is no wonder that students find it hard to eschew their support, even when, deep down, they must know that this amounts to cheating. AI will never tell you that your work is subpar, your thinking shoddy, your analysis naive. Instead, it will suggest 'a polish', a deeper edit, a sense check for grammar and accuracy. It will offer more ways to get involved and help – as with social media platforms, it wants users hooked and jonesing for their next fix. Like The Terminator, it won’t stop until you’ve killed it, or shut your laptop.... Long NHS waiting lists for mental health treatment and the high cost of private care have created a demand for therapy, and, while Nathaniel is the only one of the three students using ChatGPT in this way, he is far from unique in asking an AI assistant for therapy.... There are a number of reasons to worry about this. Just as when ChatGPT helps students with their studies, it seems as if the conversations are engineered for longevity. An AI therapist will never tell you that your hour is up, and it will only respond to your prompts. According to accredited therapists, this not only validates existing preoccupations, but encourages self‑absorption. As well as listening to you, a qualified human therapist will ask you questions and tell you what they hear and see, rather than simply holding a mirror up to your own self-image.... [These three students] are not friendless loners, typing into the void with only an algorithm to keep them company. They are funny, intelligent and popular young men, with girlfriends, hobbies and active social lives. But they – along with a fast-growing number of students and non-students alike – are increasingly turning to computers to answer the questions that they would once have asked another person. ChatGPT may get things wrong, it may be telling us what we want to hear and it may be glazing us, but it never judges, is always approachable and seems to know everything. We’ve stepped into a hall of mirrors, and apparently we like what we see."
Yoann Bourgeois on his mindblowing viral stair climbing act: ‘I want to return to the spirit of childhood’ – "You may have seen a certain video online of a man climbing some stairs. Actually, he’s repeatedly falling from them but then magically bounces back up, weightless as a moon-walker. Out of sight is a trampoline, which gently catapults his looping, twisting body up the staircase each time he falls, turning a would-be simple journey into an epic, poetic odyssey that has caught the internet’s imagination.... The act is the work of French choreographer-director Yoann Bourgeois, 43, whose live performances have been touring festivals for years. But the popularity of his videos online has propelled him into new realms... What Bourgeois plays with are the invisible physical forces that surround us – gravity, tension, suspension – and the interaction between those forces, the performers’ bodies and symbolic ideas. For example in Ellipse, the dancers are in costumes like lifesize Weebles with semi-circular bases, rocking and spinning, but never falling. A man and woman 'dance' together, swaying past each other but never quite managing to connect.... In Celui Qui Tombe (He Who Falls), the performers stand on a wooden platform that rotates, at some speed, then tilts, forcing their bodies to lean at precarious angles to keep their balance, and the group have to navigate this peril together. The short piece Bourgeois is bringing to London is called Passage, and features a revolving mirrored door and pole dancer Yvonne Smink hanging, swinging, balancing and turning the simple act of crossing a threshold into something of infinite possibilities. Much like the way sculptor Antony Gormley hit upon a universal idea in his use of the body, Bourgeois works with the same kind of directness: a seemingly simple setup or visual idea that represents something huge – life, death, time, mortality, struggle, hope – in a way that’s easily readable but can feel profound."
The key to understanding Trump? It’s not what you think – article by Arjun Appadurai in The Guardian. "Trump’s incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker cast light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump’s image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point. Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out. In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure. Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts. Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. ... Deals, successful or not, are Trump’s magic means to amass money and feed his avarice."
YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds – article by Michael Savage in The Guardian. "YouTube is the most popular first TV destination for generation Alpha, according to a comprehensive survey of the UK’s viewing habits by Ofcom, the communications regulator. One in five young TV viewers aged from four to 15 turned straight to the platform last year. The survey showed Netflix close behind. While BBC One was in the top five first destinations, children were just as likely to choose BBC iPlayer. YouTube’s increasing presence on televisions is not just down to the very young. In a gradual cultural shift, viewers aged 55 and over watched almost twice as much YouTube content last year as they did in 2023, up from six minutes a day to 11 minutes a day. An increasing proportion of that – 42% – is viewed through a TV set."
Yoann Bourgeois on his mindblowing viral stair climbing act: ‘I want to return to the spirit of childhood’ – "You may have seen a certain video online of a man climbing some stairs. Actually, he’s repeatedly falling from them but then magically bounces back up, weightless as a moon-walker. Out of sight is a trampoline, which gently catapults his looping, twisting body up the staircase each time he falls, turning a would-be simple journey into an epic, poetic odyssey that has caught the internet’s imagination.... The act is the work of French choreographer-director Yoann Bourgeois, 43, whose live performances have been touring festivals for years. But the popularity of his videos online has propelled him into new realms... What Bourgeois plays with are the invisible physical forces that surround us – gravity, tension, suspension – and the interaction between those forces, the performers’ bodies and symbolic ideas. For example in Ellipse, the dancers are in costumes like lifesize Weebles with semi-circular bases, rocking and spinning, but never falling. A man and woman 'dance' together, swaying past each other but never quite managing to connect.... In Celui Qui Tombe (He Who Falls), the performers stand on a wooden platform that rotates, at some speed, then tilts, forcing their bodies to lean at precarious angles to keep their balance, and the group have to navigate this peril together. The short piece Bourgeois is bringing to London is called Passage, and features a revolving mirrored door and pole dancer Yvonne Smink hanging, swinging, balancing and turning the simple act of crossing a threshold into something of infinite possibilities. Much like the way sculptor Antony Gormley hit upon a universal idea in his use of the body, Bourgeois works with the same kind of directness: a seemingly simple setup or visual idea that represents something huge – life, death, time, mortality, struggle, hope – in a way that’s easily readable but can feel profound."
The key to understanding Trump? It’s not what you think – article by Arjun Appadurai in The Guardian. "Trump’s incessant boasts about being an apex dealmaker cast light on almost every aspect of his approach to his presidential decision-making. Numerous observers have long cast doubt on Trump’s image as a consummate dealmaker, pointing to his many failures in his long real-estate career, his abortive political and diplomatic deals, his backsliding and reversals, and his overblown claims about deals in progress. But these criticisms miss the point. Deals, whether in finance, real estate, or in any other part of the economy, are just one step in the process of reaching full-fledged, binding agreements subject to the force of law. They are a stage in the negotiation process that has no force until it is finalized as a contract. It is, at best, an agreement to agree, which can turn out to be premature, poorly conceived or unacceptable to one or other party. Put another way, it is an engagement, not a wedding. A deal allows a negotiator like Trump to claim victory and blame the other party or some other contextual variable if things do not work out. In fact, in the hands of someone like Trump, deals are ways to evade, postpone or subvert the efficient work of markets. Trump does not like markets, precisely because they are impersonal and invisible. Their results – for corporations, entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders – are subject to clear measures of success and failure. Because deals are personal, adversarial and incomplete, they are perfect grist for Trump’s relentless publicity machine, and allow him to polish his brand, massage his ego and signal his prowess to opponents – without the regulations and measurable consequences of regular market risks. The downside risk for an aborted or interrupted deal is negligible, and the upside is guaranteed by the legal power of fully completed contracts. Trump has figured out to an exceptional degree that dealmaking does not need to be successful in order to massively increase his wealth. Whether or not true, his claims to successful deals are the key to his brand and profitmaking worldwide, either directly or through the business endeavors of his sons. ... Deals, successful or not, are Trump’s magic means to amass money and feed his avarice."
YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds – article by Michael Savage in The Guardian. "YouTube is the most popular first TV destination for generation Alpha, according to a comprehensive survey of the UK’s viewing habits by Ofcom, the communications regulator. One in five young TV viewers aged from four to 15 turned straight to the platform last year. The survey showed Netflix close behind. While BBC One was in the top five first destinations, children were just as likely to choose BBC iPlayer. YouTube’s increasing presence on televisions is not just down to the very young. In a gradual cultural shift, viewers aged 55 and over watched almost twice as much YouTube content last year as they did in 2023, up from six minutes a day to 11 minutes a day. An increasing proportion of that – 42% – is viewed through a TV set."
