Cuttings January 2015

"Inside out" trailer - referenced in MindHacks blog. "The new trailer for upcoming Pixar movie Inside Out is very funny and has a remarkably accurate depiction of brain function."

Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman, and Juvenescence by Robert Pogue Harrison – review
by Josh Cohen in The Guardian. "Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? is a spirited philosophical defence of the aspiration to maturity. As she sagely observes, by clinging impotently to youth, we impoverish youth and maturity alike. The vindictive subtext of the message that youth is the pinnacle of life, after all, is that things will only get worse. What better recipe for splitting our lives between an infantilised first act and its increasingly embittered aftermath? In Juvenescence, a penetrating and impressively omnivorous 'cultural history of our age', Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the same malign ambivalence in the collective drive to make ourselves younger in 'looks, behaviour, mentality, lifestyles and, above all, desires'. Our age’s self-defeating ruse is to give the younger generations sovereignty over culture, all the while depriving them of the 'idleness, shelter and solitude' needed to cultivate an authentically creative life.... Both books address our era’s tendency to set youth and age in facile opposition to one another, a tendency that gives rise, Neiman argues, to the most pernicious distortions of political life. In a consumer society, adulthood is confused with the capacity to accumulate overpriced toys, while 'ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams'."

Life after a viral nightmare: from Ecce Homo to revenge porn - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "You don’t have to have done anything for the internet to claim your name. At 16, Alex Lee became a global heartthrob and, to some, a hate figure, when someone snapped a picture of him simply doing his job: filling bags at Target. Even where some criticism might be fair, the error rarely warrants the punishment. When [Justine] Sacco tweeted 'Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!' she was very obviously joking about racism rather than advocating it, but still, not obviously enough. And you’d expect a 'global head of communications' to know better. [Breanna] Mitchell, who was, let’s remember, a schoolgirl, might have considered the sensitivity of a selfie in Auschwitz more carefully, but her picture was nothing like as crass as it seemed. She had talked for years about visiting with her father and, after he died, she had finally managed it. She took her phone out to record the moment and – perhaps out of habit – happened to smile. The picture was online for a month before anyone noticed. 'I literally woke up one morning and had literally a thousand things on my phone, notifications,' Mitchell said at the time. 'I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people telling me I need to kill myself.' When the race to denounce a bigot begins, people forget about details like whether or not they were guilty. We don’t need to ask where these torrents of scorn come from because we create them ourselves with our clicks and shares. If we had the proper context we might not laugh, so we don’t want context, and don’t get it. Nor is it likely to ever stop."

Vinyl's difficult comeback - article by John Harris in The Guardian. "In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment. A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company."

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerald Russell - review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "In the spring of 2006, Gerard Russell was a bored British diplomat stewing in the heat of the Green Zone in Baghdad.... Then he received a call from the high priest of the Mandeans. The Mandeans, he knew, claimed descent from Seth, son of Adam, and believed themselves to be the last followers of John the Baptist. They were also said to be the last surviving remnant of the Gnostic sects that once proliferated across the Middle East in late antiquity. In addition, Arab scholars had long recognised them as 'the last Babylonians'. It was, writes Russell, 'rather like being summoned to meet one of the knights of the Round Table'. He arranged to meet the high priest and his entourage in Al-Rasheed hotel on the edge of the Green Zone. The encounter had, however, a sad conclusion. The high priest told Russell how the American invasion of Iraq had unleashed a firestorm on his people. The Mandeans had been protected by Saddam Hussein, ...but during the anarchy after his fall, and the US occupation that followed, life had become impossible. The high priest spoke of the long series of forced conversions, bombings, killings and kidnappings for ransom that had affected his flock since 2002. Now he wanted to transport the entire community to the west: 'There are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq,' said the high priest. 'And we want to leave. We want your country to give us asylum.'"

Testament of Youth: Vera Brittain and her remarkable life - article in The Guardian by Alexandra Harris, on the occasion of the release of the film of Testament of Youth. "There wasn’t much encouragement in Buxton for a girl who wanted to go to Oxford, but Vera Brittain ignored the disapproving looks, went to Extension lectures, studied and struggled, almost walked out of her entrance exams, and got herself a place at Somerville in 1914. That’s a 20th-century story in itself, but it turned out not to be the central story of Brittain’s life. By the start of term, there was a war on. Her brother, Edward, and Roland Leighton, the man she loved, were going into the army rather than to New College and Merton respectively.... Brittain could not join Roland at the front, but she could put herself at the service of men like him by joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse. For the next four years, during which she lost, one by one, the people she had ever cared about, she worked with astonishing toughness and skill at hospitals in London, Malta and at the purgatorial clearing station in Étaples in northern France. She had been brought up in a society that insisted on a chaperone being present for a tea date with a man; now she had responsibility for mutilated male bodies. Back in Buxton the Germans were hated, but, under corrugated iron in France, the hand of a dying German soldier felt very much like Roland’s hand. Passionately and clear-sightedly, Brittain tried to make sense of these extraordinary situations."

Magna Carta 800 years on - article by David Carpenter in The Guardian. "In 1215, John was ... placed beneath the law, but the Magna Carta of 1215 was very far from giving equal treatment to all the king’s subjects. Socially it was a divided and divisive document, often reflecting the interests of a baronial elite a few hundred strong in a population of several millions. Having asserted that taxation required the common consent of the kingdom, the assembly giving that consent was to be attended primarily by earls, barons, bishops and abbots.... In 1215 itself both John and his enemies would have been astonished had they known that the Charter would live on and be celebrated 800 years hence. Especially as within a few months of its promulgation, Magna Carta seemed a dead letter. John had got the pope to quash it.... The barons, likewise abandoning the Charter, deposed John and elected another king in his place, none other than Prince Louis, the eldest son of the king of France. The Charter only survived because, after John’s death in October 1216, the minority government of his son, the nine-year-old Henry III, accepted what John had rejected. In order to win the war against Louis, and, having won the war, consolidate the peace, they issued new versions of the Charter. Then, in 1225, in order to secure a great tax, they issued what became the final and definitive Magna Carta. It is chapters of Henry III’s Charter of 1225, not John’s of 1215, which remain on the Statute Book."

The People's Platform by Astra Taylor - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. 'From a certain angle,' writes Taylor, 'the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.' In fact, she concludes, 'Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.' "

Can these 36 questions make you fall in love with anyone? - short note in The Guardian. "A 36-point questionnaire, which promises to help you and a partner kickstart a relationship, is being shared widely on the web. Could our singleton guinea-pigs find love among the probing questions?"

Seeing the sort: quick-sort with Hungarian folk dance - video and article in Journal of the New Media Caucus, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Algo-Rythmics project pairs basic sorting algorithms from an introductory computer science course with folk dances in Romania (Transylvania).... In the video, each dancer embodies a number (which they are wearing) in an array (depicted via a projection on the curtain behind them).... A comparison between two values is indicated in the dance by downstage movement. The operands wear hats, and the first operand (in a quicksort, known as the pivot) wears a hat with a flower. If the comparison operator evaluates as false (the first operand is greater than the second one), one of the dancers executes a retrograde (reverse) phrase. However, a comparison that evaluates as true (the first operand is less than the second) produces an extensive round of boot slapping. Successfully sorted dancers turn to face the upstage curtain and mostly stop moving."

TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on - article by Robert Crawford in The Guardian. "Because Eliot was a trained philosopher – he wrote a Harvard PhD on philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the subject – he knew that the 'self' in self-consciousness was unstable. 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' maps an unstable self.... Prufrock, inhibitingly aware that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome, alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a sense of vulnerability and pain.... As it develops, up until 'The Waste Land' and beyond, Eliot’s poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on its earlier performances. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it."

Flicker: Your Brain on Movies by Jeffrey Zacks – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "First, Zacks sets out the wealth of experimental evidence which shows that a filmed version of events will likely override our knowledge of the facts. Not only because superstimuli are so compelling, but because we’re not very good at remembering the sources of information that inform our opinions. Was that in the local paper or did my friend tell me about it? Did I learn that from a history book or from watching Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth? Was I watching Osama bin Laden in the film Zero Dark Thirty or in a documentary? The political implications are huge, if not entirely unexpected: Hollywood can win hearts and minds at the expense of the truth. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Zacks argues that there need be no further controversy about whether violence on TV, in games, or on film makes those exposed to it more aggressive: it does.... The mechanisms? Observational learning, being primed to interpret ambiguous stimuli as aggressive, and desensitisation. A strong cocktail."

How economic theory can help stop sexual assault [or: Changing beliefs about what other people believe] - article by Michael Chwe on PBS Newshour website, referenced in Mindhacks blog. "A great deal of social behavior, even violent behavior, is socially regulated in the sense that whether a person does it depends on whether other people do it and condone it.... For example, regardless of how individual members of a college fraternity feel about sexual assault, a fraternity, as a collective, can be a physical and social environment in which a perpetrator has greater confidence, because of fraternal loyalties, that surrounding people will not report him.... Project Callisto, is a web-based system for sexual assault reporting....A survivor can upload and time-stamp evidence, including images, audio and testimony, without having to decide at the time whether to forward it to authorities. This way, evidence is preserved soon after the assault, even if action is not immediate.... Callisto allows a survivor to choose to have his or her evidence forwarded to authorities automatically once another person uploads evidence about the same assailant.... By combining information, Callisto serves as an 'information escrow'.... If people are reluctant to be the only accuser, or are reluctant to report inconclusive information, then we should design a system that ensures that a person will not be the sole accuser and that his or her information will be aggregated with the information of others."

The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth, jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration,  Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."

The difference between plan and reality - cartoon by Anne-Marie Gainsford, on "the difference between what you think doing a degree will be and the reality of doing it".

The £8.8m typo: how one mistake killed a family business - Pass Notes in The Guardian. "[The] government agency that acts as the registrar for all companies in the UK... recorded information stating that Taylor & Sons Ltd – a 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm employing more than 250 people – had been wound up....The problem was Companies House hadn’t meant to report that Taylor & Sons Ltd had gone into liquidation. They had meant to say Taylor & Son Ltd....Companies House corrected their error three days later, but by then the damage was done: the information had cascaded uncontrollably across the internet.... A judge ruled that Companies House was legally responsible for the firm’s unhappy fate. Damages have yet to be awarded, but lawyers acting for Davison-Sebry have valued the company’s claim at £8.8m. Nine million quid for an ’S’? That’s like the most high-stakes game of Scrabble ever."

'A golden shining moment': the true story behind Atari's ET, the worst video game ever - article by Alex Godfrey in The Guardian. "On 22 September1983, in the dead of night, 13 trucks were driven to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and their contents emptied. Everything was buried and concreted. And that should have been that. But it wasn’t. A few days later, scavengers arrived and found some Atari ET video games. Word got out. The tie-in product had been released to much fanfare the previous December, but had gained a reputation as a stinker. Now, here in New Mexico, as legend began to have it, were millions of them, unloved, unsold, underground. The game, many believed, was responsible for Atari’s sudden downfall, and the company had physically buried its shame. Years later, the internet decreed ET to be the worst video game of all time. Over and over again. In April 2014, a documentary crew turned up to excavate the site and dig up the truth.... 'Why do people want to believe this specific version of this story?' [says Zak Pen, director of the documentary] Why did it need to be that the game was buried? Is it that we naturally are storytellers, and it sounds better that it was because it destroyed the video game industry?”'

Seen and heard: January 2015

New Year’s Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein, live on BBC – this year, with a technology theme. Extraordinary: I never realised before that you could use the titles of Strauss dances to map the conversational topics of the smart people in Vienna, like trends in social media: for example, the Explosions-Polka of 1847, following the discovery of guncotton.

Last Tango in Halifax - third series on BBC TV. Another dense dose of family conflict and personal trategy, but the critics (such as Rebecca Nicholson) are right in pointing to the quality of Sally Wainwright's writing and the superb cast's acting in carrying us along, so that it somehow never seems unrealistic. I'm inclined to agree with the Guardian TV critic who said of Derek Jacobi's character: "I hope I'm like that at his age."


Boxers and Saints - linked pair of graphic novels by Chinese American Gene Luen Yang, set in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion. In one, a village boy whose region is being oppressed and humiliated by European foreigners and their Christian priests, learns martial arts and joins the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists; in the other, a village girl, whose personality and birth order (fourth) means she's seen as unlucky, joins a Christian community to escape her oppressive family life. Their stories intertwine, of course, and follow a tragic trajectory as the Boxers come to take on not only the foreign devils but the secondary devils of Chinese christians. Expertly and movingly executed.

Scheherezade, by Rimsky-Korsakov - recording by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. I first heard a track from this on ClassicFM, played by John Suchet at the special request of his (Turkish) dry cleaner, who had enjoyed it on a previous playing. It's a wonderful piece of music anyway, but I think this must be the definitive recording of it: this orchestra, under conductor Sascha Goetzel, is specialising in European-oriental crossover music, and so they're perfectly placed to bring out the orientalisms of the score. They do some instrument substitutions too, so for example the violin theme as Scheherezade begins each story is accompanied by a kanun, which gives it a magical other-worldly quality.

Broken Age - fabulous adventure game (or rather, the first half of one) from Tim Schafer (ex-LucasArts, Grim Fandango etc), beautifully realised for iPad. There are two parallel stories: in one, a boy lives alone on a spaceship in a kiddy environment maintained by an overprotective maternal computer and is striving to break out of the system's limitations and escape childhood; in the other, a girl is chosen to be one of the village maidens sacrificed to a monster (it's considered an honour, and the maidens dress up as cup-cakes to boost their monster-attractiveness) but she breaks with tradition by asking "why don't we kill the monster instead?" Obviously the two of them have to meet - but for what happens after they do so we'll have to wait for the second act, due out this year. Beautiful graphics, great writing (every dialogue choice delivers something worth hearing), top quality voice acting (including Elijah Wood as the boy), and excellent music; definitely one of my all-time favourites.