You should click these links if you ...

1. ... remember the BBC Radiophonic workshop.

2. ... wonder whether researchers' findings about the differences between liberals and conservatives are wrong.

3. ... want to know what cyber-war would really look like. "Marines suddenly owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit lines they had never opened; sailors received death threats on their Twitter feeds; spouses and female service members had private pictures of themselves plastered across the Internet; older service members received notifications about cancerous conditions discovered in their latest physical. ... Obviously decision making will be hampered if important decision-makers have to spend time in a crisis convincing policemen that there is actually no hostage crisis in their house, finding a way to pay for lunch now that their credit cards don't work, or investigating the rape threats being sent to their teenage daughters' Instagram."

"It is trivially easy to find an American's address, ruin their credit score, steal their investments, use their social media or email accounts against them, and generally ruin someone's life through digital means. America's two greatest rivals (Russia and China) do not hesitate to harass, beat up, or intimidate American personnel. But stories of this type are very rare. Why is this? It isn't because they lack the capacity. They have it now. If they are not regularly harassing Americans today, it most likely because they do not want Americans to be better prepared for the conflict of tomorrow. "

4. ... read this sentence "I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by [Donald Trump's] skill as a strategist and tactician" and want to know more (seriously, it's in the FT).

5. ... are missing links to things written by Zadie Smith and want to read a good one (and not set in north-west London, either). (Quick review of Swing Time: really good in lots of details - not just the joke about the working-class girl and the Argos catalogue, but also her clean kitchen and tasty food - but we need more of a plot. Funnily enough, the short story linked to above gives me hope, albeit in a depressing way, that the life that people like Smith lead might start involving the kind of jeopardy from which good plots can emerge.)

6. ... wonder what happened to Toby Young after all that.

7. ... want to see the world's most perilous church (it's in Ethiopia).

8. ... remember 1988 - here's a reminder of what it looked like:


9. ... want to know what awful punishment I have redacted from the following passage: "A doctor has been [...] for carrying out euthanasia on a 74-year-old woman with dementia, despite her resistance. // The woman refused a cup of coffee containing a sedative and when she struggled, the doctor asked her husband and daughter to hold her down so she could insert a drip containing the lethal injection."

10. ... would like to read a classic libel law-avoiding tabloid article about President Macron.

11. ... or wonder why "Tunnels that were a mere 14 degrees Celsius in the 1900s can now have air temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius on parts of the tube network."

Great television

This is an interesting article considering the question of whether any of the wonderful TV series of recent years will endure. Here are a couple of thoughts from it:

"Take, for instance, The Wire. A relatively compact series at 60 episodes over five seasons, the show would take about two-and-a-half days to watch from start to finish, assuming one forgoes sleep. ... But what else could you have done with those 60 hours? ... I could finish War and Peace (21 hours and 15 minutes), Don Quixote (16 hours and 16 minutes), Moby-Dick (12 hours and 36 minutes), and still have plenty of time to squeeze in Crime and Punishment (7 hours and 3 minutes). Alternatively, I could read much of Kingsley Amis’s and Graham Greene’s fiction—the stuff worth reading, anyway—in roughly the same span of time.

What about movies? With 60 hours, you could watch the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre—and then watch it again to pick up on all the nuances you missed the first time around. You could watch the first 27 entries on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time (more, if you skipped some of the lengthier, plodding works like Gone with the Wind). You could watch the last quarter-century or so of films to win Best Picture at the Oscars. You could take a tour through world cinema, watching the best of Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and Michelangelo Antonioni.

You could undertake any of those horizon-expanding artistic adventures—or you could watch one program that ran for a few years on HBO."

"'A movie, no matter how perfect, is a compact, finite experience that begins and ends over the course of the same evening. Watch it again and again, and you may notice something new each time, but the story itself will not change, nor will the character arcs. Even the greatest of films is a one-night stand, where a TV series is a relationship—between the creators and the characters, and then between the characters and the audience—that can last years, with changes both subtle and inescapable along the way.'

This is true enough. But it’s only true in the moment. It’s only true while the show in question is a going concern, while we are watching in real time, while we are experiencing a program as a community, while we use it as a way to kill time with the coworkers in lieu of discussing the weather, while we hop online to hash out each and every moment from the preceding hour of programming to mine details from the text and speculate on what will happen next. As soon as a television series ends, it becomes a movie that’s dozens of hours long, almost always a piece of content too lengthy to think about consuming again, since there are so many other dozens of hours of new experiences out there."

I would add this. The comparison is often made between high-quality TV series and those Victorian novels that were originally published in serial form. But novels are a lot more dense than film or television: the best comparison I can imagine is between the book and the 1981 TV series of Brideshead Revisited, as faithful a transposition of book to film as could ever reasonably be hoped for: the book is about 320 pages in the Penguin paperback, while the series is 11 hours long.

The ground is clearly being laid for the future of vast leisure predicted by Keynes. All we need are the robots.

Tobacco

People in Britain used to smoke a lot. And even people who didn't smoke would inhale a lot of cigarette smoke too. That doesn't happen any more.

We all know how bad smoking is for your body. Sure enough, in line with the decrease in smoking, we get better health outcomes. E.g., "For males, lung cancer AS incidence rates in the UK decreased by 31% between 1993-1995 and 2013-2015", says Cancer Research UK.

But what about nicotine? "Nicotine is frequently used for its performance-enhancing effects on cognition, alertness, and focus. A meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory", says Wikipedia.

The UK population was widely exposed to a drug with life-shortening but cognition-enhancing effects. Just as we see the public health benefits of a decline in consumption of that drug, shouldn't we also see the public-cognition detriment?

Here's some evidence. "The IQ levels of young people have been steadily falling for the past few decades, according to new research. The decline is believed to have begun following the generation born in 1975, and indicates that the slow rise in intelligence observed over much of the 20th century has come to an end", says The Week, citing The Times. That "slow rise in intelligence" - in line with the slow increase in the prevalence of smoking, both active and passive?

We used to swim in a river of performance-enhancing drugs that has now slowed to a trickle. It's worth thinking about what that means. (and adding in changes in the amounts of alcohol and caffeine consumed as well). If you think that, say, political discourse has become more stupid, perhaps it's because people have become more stupid? Do you ever hanker after the days when sensible centrist policies came out of smoke-filled rooms? Perhaps the smoke in those rooms was doing an important job.

A miscellany of links

1. Soft power.

Why are Democrats so keen on Russia? (That is taken from here.) Good to see that we're not forgotten.

2. An interesting and depressing account of one (successful) man's student debt, combined with his family's debt. "Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realize it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf? (Sample passage, which assuredly blew my mind at the time: “We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts.”)" What price can you put on being able to translate the Dream of the Rood into the modern vernacular? ($200,000, it seems.)

3. The diversity con - a left-wing critique of "diversity". I'd frame a lot of the points made quite differently from the author, but it's well worth reading, and it also fits in nicely with the points I was making about the capitalism of modern feminism. Cui bono is not the only question to ask about politics, but it's not one to forget. 

4. Lovely pictures of Ivan Kupala Night celebrations. Nothing to do with politics. And yet politics so terribly saturates culture nowadays that, as I look at the photos, I can almost see them being used in an advertising campaign for the Belorussian equivalent of Brexit. 

5. Slavery and emancipation.

"Know how we gittee free? Cudjo tellee you dat. De boat I on, it in de Mobile. We all on dere to go in de Montgomery, but Cap’n Jim Meaher, he not on de boat dat day. It April 12, 1865. De Yankee soldiers dey come down to de boat and eatee de mulberries off de trees. Den dey see us and say, “Y’all can’t stay dere no mo’. You free, you doan b’long to nobody no mo.’ ”

Oh, Lor’! I so glad. We astee de soldiers where we goin’? Dey say dey doan know. Dey told us to go where we feel lak goin’, we ain’ no mo’ slave."

This fascinating account, from one of the last slaves smuggled into the US, had difficulty in finding a publisher because it was written as it was spoken (as you can see). But it's so vivid this way: you can almost hear the voice of the man, watching the Yankees eating their mulberries, and being told he was now free.

6. Signs of the times: Build-A-Bear causes havoc with discount deal. "Build-A-Bear Workshop was offering UK customers a chance to buy any bear, which can cost up to £52, for the price of their child's age.// At Leeds' White Rose Shopping Centre police were called when queues of "about a mile long" formed." From my limited familiarity with Build-A-Bear, I do not find this surprising.

7. A brilliant list of things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union, including "waiting years to receive a car you ordered, to find that it's of poor workmanship and quality", "promises of colonizing the solar system while you toil in drudgery day in, day out" and "Henry Kissinger visits sometimes for some reason".

8. Sam Leith on Lee Child. Worth it for the two sentences he quotes from Child. 

Lawyers for the modern world

Some people think that lawyers are a fusty lot, a bunch of old-fashioned so and sos who use obsolete words like 'fusty' long after everyone else.

Think again! The Law Society is addressing a very current concern by releasing this best practice video showing how to navigate issues of consent in today's hook-up culture.

Five interesting links

1. Chinese business entertainment. Every bit as bad as you suspect. E.g., "one of my sources was unsympathetic after an American friend, working with a sole colleague, was on the brink of hospitalization following a banquet with Hunanese officials. “What an idiot,” she said, “Bringing only one other person to drink with the government!”" and "“Sometimes everyone strips off and you lie around naked together in comfortable rooms. The lower ranking members of the group then serve the other ones food and drink. On other occasions, we got high together, took off our shirts, and danced around in a circle holding hands,” one Western observer commentated, preferring anonymity." There is worse stuff at the link.

2. The Spanish Inquisition? Lovely people. "Well, for a start, the jails of the Inquisition were universally known to be hygienic and well maintained. They were neither built nor run as places of punishment. The standard of care that inmates received was high enough that prisoners held by the Crown would often petition to be moved to Inquisition jails. There are recorded cases of criminals committing public heresy with the express purpose of being held and tried by the Inquisition, rather than the secular courts."

3. Do you remember Obama's Kill List? It's still going strong. Here is an account of a court case by a US citizen who thinks that the United States government has tried to kill him five times. He'd like it to stop.

4. Labour is no longer the party of the working class. You knew that, but here are some background statistics you might not have known: the "2017 Labour Party rule book, a 91-page document, contains 26 mentions of “gender”, 41 of “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic), 43 of “ethnic”, 11 of “race”, two of “black” and “Asian” respectively, but only two of “class”"; "The proportion of working-age men without qualifications who were not active in the labour force increased from 4% in the mid-1990s to 30% today. Poor white British children do worse in school than any other ethnic group. In 2016, 75% of the suicides reported in the United Kingdom were men. The suicide risk for low-skilled men, particularly those working in the construction industry, is three times higher than the male average.". This is from the Economist, which adds some unusually forthright comment: "The public-sector middle class is huge despite decades of wolf-crying about the destruction of the middle class. ... The universities have dangerously over-expanded (while also perfecting the art of teaching their students that the West is based on exploitation, patriarchy and other injustices). ... Whatever the problems with British productivity in general the country is doing a brilliant job of mass-producing an alienated “intelligentsia” that will provide a Corbyn-style Labour Party with the votes that it needs to win the next election."

5. Are you a bit unsure about Bayesian probability? This is the clearest explanation I have seen. Take this on statistical significance: "If a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in twenty if geography didn’t matter to hospital waiting times, then I’ll become a firm believer in the “postcode lottery”, because the idea was reasonably plausible to start with. But if a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in a 1,000 if the position of Jupiter were irrelevant to British election results, I’ll respond that this leaves the idea of a Jovian influence on the British voter only slightly less crazy than it always was."